page_title: Racial capitalism
hierarchical_section_title: Racial capitalism
caption_attribution_description: English: Slave Trade (1812)
context_page_description: Racial capitalism is a concept proposed by Cedric J. Robinson describing the process of deriving social and economic value from another person of a different racial identity, predominantly used to insinuate the derivation of value from those of a nonwhite identity; however, a person of any race might engage in racial capitalism, as might an institution dominated by one particular race. The elementary thesis of the concept is: Capitalism as an economic system subsists on the perpetual accumulation of capital and an increasing rate of said accumulation, and capital "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups." Therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value." And in both 17th-century and contemporary society, the predominant differentiator was and is skin color and ethnicity. In Robinson's own words: "the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions," and "it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism."
  The term was coined by Cedric J.
context_section_description: Racial capitalism is a concept proposed by Cedric J. Robinson describing the process of deriving social and economic value from another person of a different racial identity, predominantly used to insinuate the derivation of value from those of a nonwhite (person of color) identity; however, a person of any race might engage in racial capitalism, as might an institution dominated by one particular race. The elementary thesis of the concept is: Capitalism as an economic system subsists on the perpetual accumulation of capital and an increasing rate of said accumulation, and capital "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups." Therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value." And in both 17th-century and contemporary society, the predominant differentiator was and is skin color and ethnicity. In Robinson's own words: "the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions," and "it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism."
  
  The term was coined by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983. Robinson's articulations of racial capitalism were imperative in the emerging field of Black and diasporic African studies, wherein new lines were drawn between capitalism, racial identity, and the development of the disconnected social consciousness—the disjunction or discontinuity of interhuman relations—in the 20th-century. Building upon earlier examinations of racial discrimination in and inherent to various political ideologies and societal structures, Robinson challenged the Marxist notion of capitalism's negation of the basic discriminatory tenets of European feudalism, namely its rigid caste system and reliance upon multi-generational serfdom. Rather than considering capitalism as revolutionary and radically liberating, as, say, Michael Novak does, he argued for the inverse: capitalism did not liberate those in racially oppressive positions, nor did it reject feudal principles; in other words, capitalism bred a new world order, one that extended—not deconstructed—feudalism's ethical faults, and one that developed and became intertwined with various forms of racial oppression: "slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide." In 1983, Robinson writes: 
  What concerns us is that we understand that racialism and its permutations persisted, rooted not in a particular era but in the civilization itself. And though our era might seem a particularly fitting one for depositing the origins of racism, that judgment merely reflects how resistant the idea is to examination and how powerful and natural its specifications have become. Our confusions, however, are not unique. As an enduring principle of European social order, the effects of racialism were bound to appear in the social expression of every strata of every European society no matter the structures upon which they were formed. None was immune.
  Further, Robinson theorized that all capitalism was inherently racial capitalism, and racialism can be exhibited in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. And although racial capitalism is not limited to European territories or those previously under Europe's colonial or imperial rule, it was from western European's 17th-century dominion that the two, capitalism and racial exploitation, were first conflated. Thus, racial capitalism, according to Robinson, emanated from the "tendency of European civilization...not to homogenize [groups of peoples] but to differentiate"—differentiation that led to racial hierarchization and, as a result, exploitation, expropriation, and expatriation.
caption: Slave Trade by John Raphael Smith (1791)[1]
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