Social and environmental inequality is produced through racial capitalism’s compulsions of accumulation – focusing on inequality rather than underlying structures produces differences elsewhere

III Environmental racism and racial capitalism Failure on such a scale cannot be resolved by tinkering with policy. While geographers typically attribute such dynamics to neoliberalism (Faber, 2008; Holifield, 2007), this is only part of the story. For instance, what is the connection between court decisions that contract the definition of discrimination and neoliberalism? Pellow (2007) is one of the few to combine political economy and race in his analysis of transnational pollution, although Heynen (2015) has made some important moves in this direction. I build on Pellow’s work as well as research from critical ethnic studies to argue that environmental racism is part of racial capitalism. Ethnic Studies scholars have long grappled with the relationship between racism and capitalism (Barrera, 1979; Marable, 1983; Almaguer, 1994). Cedric Robinson coined the term racial capitalism in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. First published in 1983, he argued that racism was a structuring logic of capitalism. His work did not initially circulate beyond a small circle of scholars (e.g. Kelley, 1990; Gilmore, 2007), but the rise of critical ethnic studies (Ma´rquez and Rana, 2015) has introduced a new generation to it. While this is new to some (Bonds and Inwood, forthcoming; Driscoll Derickson, 2014; Ruiz, 2015), there is, in fact, older geographic scholarship that sees capitalism as deeply racial (Wilson, 1992; Blaut, 1993; Woods, 1998; Gilmore, 2002). Thus, the ideas are not necessarily new. What is new is the term, the intellectual moment, and the political urgency. The time is ripe for a deep engagement with racial capitalism. A focus on racial capitalism requires greater attention to the essential processes that shaped the modern world, such as colonization, primitive 526 Progress in Human Geography 41(4) accumulation, slavery, and imperialism. As McKittrick notes, ‘the geographic management of blackness, race, and racial difference (and thus nonblackness) hinges on a longstanding but unacknowledged plantation past’ (2011: 953). By insisting that we are still living with the legacy of these processes, racial capitalism requires that we place contemporary forms of racial inequality in a materialist, ideological and historical framework. Dominant historical narratives of racism locate its origins in European colonization. Robinson (2000) challenges this notion by documenting its prior roots in Europe. This is key, because although he and others, such as Melamed (2015: 77), insist that, ‘capitalism is racial capitalism’, this historicization suggests that racism predates capitalism and therefore can be used by diverse economic systems, including colonization and slavery. Indeed, to treat colonization, for example, as solely an economic process is not to fully grasp its human impact, logic, or legacy (Said, 1979; Blaut, 1993; Fanon, 1965; Galeano, 1973; Blackhawk, 2008). We can never overlook the fact that racial ideology (along with guns) enabled colonization. Though conquest and domination were not always the sole motives, the elaborate ideology that constructed indigenous people as less than fully human was entirely necessary for the colonial project. Indeed, Smith (2012) has suggested the genocide is the core logic driving colonization. In the case of the US and other settler societies, colonization led to massive land theft, which was not only a form of primitive accumulation, but also became the basis of those countries’ national territories at the cost of native nations (Hixson, 2013). Earlier debates sought to reconcile racism and capitalism (Wilson, 1992; Barrera, 1979; Almaguer, 1994), but critical ethnic studies and its precursors insist that race cannot always be contained by capitalism (Omi and Winant, 1986; HoSang et al., 2012; Roediger, 2008; Lipsitz, 2006. Though racism has been and is deployed to facilitate maximum accumulation, racism can also exceed the desires of various fractions of capital. Consider the overt racism of the contemporary US Republican Party, which is arguably counter to the desires of much of multicultural corporate America (Melamed, 2011). Given the variability of racism to capitalism, I consider the production of difference and value as the most fundamental point of connection. Accordingly, this should be the starting point for EJ analyses. 1 Producing difference and value The centrality of value to capitalist production is well-known. But there are multiple ways of conceptualizing value, and by extension, differential value. Differential value refers to the production of recognized differences that result in distinct kinds of values. These differences in value become critical in the accumulation of surplus – both profits and power (Cacho, 2011; see also Gilmore, 2002). Just as uneven space is essential to the unfolding of capitalism (Harvey, 2001), human difference is essential to the production of differential value. Relationality is key to the production of differential value (Cacho, 2012: 13). For example, whiteness derives its meanings and value from various forms of nonwhiteness, which Cacho and Barrett call a kind of negativity. Negativity is important because it ‘forms the ground of possibilities for value’ (Barrett in Cacho, 2012: 13). While this is familiar terrain for critical human geographers (Anderson, 1987; Kobayashi and Peake, 1994), it is rarely reflected in empirical geographic work. Instead, most of us examine racial outcomes without considering racial production. Analyzing racial production is not merely a theoretical exercise however. Rather, it informs how a problem is conceptualized, and thus shapes political strategy. Indeed, focusing on a particular racial/ethnic group, rather than racial capitalism, per se, may lead to improved conditions for some, Pulido 527 while overlooking capitalism’s incessant need to actively produce difference somewhere. Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups – capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed. These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires. (Melamed, 2015: 77) By theorizing the racialized production of differential value, racial capitalism illuminates not only the inevitability of environmental injustice, but the structural challenges facing activists. 2 Operationalizing nonwhite devaluation Theories of racial capitalism highlight how racial difference is produced and how that relative valuation gets operationalized. This means not only how ideas and practices of devaluation circulate, but how they become institutionalized, and the implications for the racially subordinate and dominant. There are many ways racism can be harnessed by economic processes. I will mention two that are widelyacknowledged as manifestations of racial capitalism: land and labor. Land is thoroughly saturated with racism. There are at least two primary land processes to consider: appropriation and access. Appropriation refers to the diverse ways that land was taken from native people, as previously mentioned. Once land was severed from native peoples and commodified, the question of access arose, which is deeply racialized. Numerous laws and practices reserved land ownership for whites. Indeed some groups, such as Asians, actually lost land they once owned (Ruiz, 2015; Curry, 1921). Differential value is also produced and extracted via racialized labor systems – black chattel slavery being one of the most profound examples. Smith (2012) asserts that slavery is one of the key logics of white supremacy: the ability to commodify human beings. Understanding slavery’s history and ballast enables us to appreciate the extent to which devalued black bodies, to paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, have financed both whiteness and the American Dream (2015: 132), and I would add global white supremacy (da Silva, 2007). Recent research reveals the economic contributions of slavery to the US economy and infrastructure, as well as the extreme violence necessary to maintain such a system (Baptist, 2014; Johnson, 2013; Wilder, 2013; for a critique, see Hudson, 2016). Upon slavery’s conclusion, numerous legal and de jure forms of labor discrimination and exploitation limited the life chances of nonwhite workers while boosting the opportunities and status of white ones (Roediger, 1991). Dualwage systems, racially-exclusive labor unions, racialized divisions of labor, share-cropping, and related practices ensured a vulnerable supply of low-wage workers (Barrera, 1979; Saxton, 1995; Almaguer, 1994; Kelley, 1990; Woods, 1998). Racialized economic policy has amplified these effects, as seen in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act’s limited protections for occupations dominated by African American, Mexican, and Asian workers. More recently, Gilmore (2007) has shown how the problem of surplus labor, which is disproportionately nonwhite, has been ‘solved’ by the rise of the prison industrial complex. Just as labor arrangements and economic and social policy are constituitive of economic formations, so too are ecologies of resource extraction, processing, and disposal. Many EJ policies and scholarship conceptualize both racism and waste practices as externalities, rather than as fundamental to the very fabric of racial capitalism. Yet if racism is continually creating differential value, it is only logical that capital (and 528 Progress in Human Geography 41(4) other nondemocratic economic systems) would incorporate this uneven geography of value into its calculus. As Pellow has noted, the production of social inequalities by race, class, gender, and nation is not an aberration or the result of market failures. Rather, it is evidence of the normal, routine, functioning of capitalist economies. Modern market economies are supposed to produce social inequalities and environmental inequalities. (2007: 17) Industry and manufacturing require sinks – places where pollution can be deposited. Sinks typically are land, air, or water, but racially devalued bodies can also function as ‘sinks’. Taking this a step further, Moore (2015) has argued that capitalism is a way of organizing nature. Specifically, capitalism functions by restructuring nature. And since humans are nature, we must recognize that capitalism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level. This has nothing to do with malicious intent (Pulido, 2000) and other liberal conceptions of racism. Rather, this is capital acting upon a larger differential valuation (Pellow, 2007), or, in the recent case of leadcontaminated water in Flint, Michigan, the neoliberal state, both of which are part of the ‘ecology of capitalism’ (Moore, 2015).