What do you Think of this image?
Share your thought.
Negus Rudison-Imhotep, Ph.D.’s thoughts:
Capital Accumulation Through Racialized Exploitation:
Racial capitalism has historically relied on the exploitation of racialized populations to generate profit—e.g., the transatlantic slave trade, colonial labor systems, sharecropping, and prison labor.
In modern times, this includes low-wage labor markets dominated by immigrants and communities of color, often under unsafe or exploitative conditions.
Structural Inequality and Wealth Gaps:
Racial capitalism sustains deep disparities in wealth and access to resources. In the U.S., for example, the racial wealth gap between Black and white families persists due to centuries of systemic dispossession, from slavery and redlining to exclusion from New Deal programs and beyond.
Similar patterns are seen globally in the Global North vs. Global South divide, where resources are extracted from formerly colonized nations and wealth is concentrated in Western industrialized powers.
Racialized Surveillance and Policing:
Capitalist economies have always used racialized systems of control—from slave patrols to colonial military occupations to modern policing and mass incarceration—to regulate labor, movement, and resistance.
The prison-industrial complex exemplifies how racialized bodies become commodified within a profit-generating system of punishment and surveillance.
Dispossession and Land Theft:
Colonial and settler-colonial regimes dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their land through violence and legal manipulation, facilitating capitalist agriculture, mining, and development.
Land grabs in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia continue under the guise of development or "green capitalism," often displacing communities for resource extraction or monoculture farming.
Cultural Commodification:
Racial capitalism also operates in the cultural sphere, commodifying Black and Indigenous cultures for mass consumption while stripping them of political context and reinforcing stereotypes.
From music and fashion to language and labor, cultural appropriation often accompanies systemic exploitation.
Environmental Racism:
Communities of color disproportionately bear the burden of environmental degradation, toxic waste, and climate change—a reality tied to the capitalist logic of externalizing environmental costs to the most politically and economically marginalized. Extraction industries in Africa, South America, and Indigenous lands globally degrade ecosystems while enriching global corporations.
Resistance and Alternative Visions:
Despite its pervasiveness, racial capitalism has always been met with resistance—from maroon societies and anti-colonial movements to labor unions, civil rights struggles, and Afro-diasporic radical traditions.
Many scholars and activists argue that abolishing racial capitalism is necessary to achieve true liberation, requiring both anti-racist and anti-capitalist praxis.
