HISTORIES OF RACIAL CAPITALISM COLUMBIA STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF U.S. CAPITALISM COLUMBIA STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF U.S. CAPITALISM Series Editors: Devin Fergus, Louis Hyman, Bethany Moreton, and Julia Ott Capitalism has served as an engine of growth, a source of inequality, and a catalyst for conflict in American history. While remaking our material world, capitalism’s myriad forms have altered—and been shaped by—our most fundamental experiences of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and citizenship. This series takes the full measure of the complexity and significance of capitalism, placing it squarely back at the center of the American experience. By drawing insight and inspiration from a range of disciplines and alloying novel methods of social and cultural analysis with the traditions of labor and business history, our authors take history “from the bottom up” all the way to the top. Capital of Capital: Money, Banking, and Power in New York City, 1784–2012, by Steven H. Jaffe and Jessica Lautin From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs, by Joshua Clark Davis Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, by Josh Lauer American Capitalism: New Histories, edited by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement, by David K. Johnson City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York, edited by Joshua B. Freeman Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal, by Shennette Garrett-Scott Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods, by Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960, by Paige Glotzer Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy, by Alex Sayf Cummings HISTORIES OF RACIAL CAPITALISM EDITED BY DESTIN JENKINS AND JUSTIN LEROY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved E-ISBN 978-0-231-54910-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jenkins, Destin, editor. | Leroy, Justin, editor. Title: Histories of racial capitalism / edited by Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] | Series: Columbia studies in the history of U.S. capitalism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020024539 (print) | LCCN 2020024540 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231190749 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231190756 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231549103 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Economic conditions. | Capitalism— United States—History. | Racism—Economic aspects—United States. Classification: LCC HC103 .H58 2021 (print) | LCC HC103 (ebook) | DDC 330.9730089—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024539 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024540 A Columbia University Press E-book. CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup- [email protected]. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Watts Riot, 1966, Noah Purifoy. © 2020 Courtesy of Noah Purifoy Foundation Cover design: Lisa Hamm CONTENTS Foreword ANGELA P. HARRIS Introduction: The Old History of Capitalism DESTIN JENKINS AND JUSTIN LEROY 1. Race, Innovation, and Financial Growth: The Example of Foreclosure K-SUE PARK 2. Gendering Racial Capitalism and the Black Heretical Tradition SHAUNA J. SWEENEY 3. The Indebted Among the “Free”: Producing Indian Labor Through the Layers of Racial Capitalism MISHAL KHAN 4. Transpacific Migration, Racial Surplus, and Colonial Settlement ALLAN E. S. LUMBA 5. The Counterrevolution of Property Along the 32nd Parallel MANU KARUKA 6. Racial Capitalism and Black Philosophies of History JUSTIN LEROY 7. Ghosts of the Past: Debt, the New South, and the Propaganda of History DESTIN JENKINS 8. Dead Labor: On Racial Capital and Fossil Capital RYAN CECIL JOBSON 9. “They Speak Our Language … Business”: Latinx Businesspeople and the Pursuit of Wealth in New York City PEDRO A. REGALADO Contributors Acknowledgments Index FOREWORD Racial Capitalism and Law ANGELA P. HARRIS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA–DAVIS SCHOOL OF LAW s the editors of this volume note, neither the racial nor the capitalism part of the term racial capitalism ought to A be taken for granted. I admit: the term makes me nervous. I worry that using race as a keyword will increase the fraught divide between scholars of race and scholars of settler colonialism.1 I also worry that the rightful association of the term with the pathbreaking work of Cedric Robinson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eric Williams will solidify a masculinist canon. And I worry that the word capitalism will not only trigger for some scholars the everlasting debate about how to define that term but also foreclose the relevance of the project to noncapitalist and/or anticapitalist times and spaces. But in this essay, I won’t dwell on worries. Instead, I’ll argue that my discipline, law, is a key site for the development of new scholarship in racial capitalism, and that alliances among racial capitalism scholars in the humanities and social sciences and racial capitalism scholars in law have the potential to fruitfully disrupt some of the discourses that sustain neoliberal governance. As this volume illustrates, an important strand of the new racial capitalism literature traces the historical role of white supremacy in the processes of dispossession, extraction, accumulation, and exploitation that are central to today’s capitalism. The editors’ introduction articulates the bold premise of this work: Racial subjugation is not a special application of capitalist processes, but rather central to how capitalism operates. The implications of this literature for legal studies are intriguing. Legal scholarship and teaching circulate simultaneously in the university and in the larger networks of the profession. Within the university, law interacts with many other disciplines, including those in the humanities and the social sciences. For example, critical race theory (CRT) emerged in the 1980s as a university-facing flow, drawing on critical legal studies and on Third World studies.2 Over the next few decades, it moved into the social sciences and the humanities.3 Through some combination of these paths, critical race theory has now filtered into the world of progressive social movements and the nonprofit industrial complex that supports them.4 In mainstream professional discourse, however, where legal codes structure the institutions and actors of capitalist democracy, law’s most powerful disciplinary alliance has been with economics. The romance, moreover, is largely one-way. Enjoying remarkable prestige and power in both academia and governance, economics as a discipline takes little notice of any other non-“hard” discipline, save (in a limited way) cognitive psychology.5 The fiefdom-defending capacities of economics extend to its offshoot in the legal academy, “law-and-economics,” which continues to hold sway over research and teaching in all the fields that touch markets, from business associations to securities regulation to intellectual property to contracts to international trade. “Capitalism” doesn’t exist in these fields. There are only markets and economic analysis, abstract systems obeying rules that are elegant, timeless, and inherently disconnected from matters of “distribution.” Lately, though, there has been a series of disturbances in the force. The shock of the Great Recession of 2008, the slow creep of climate change, and most recently the cascading assaults of the COVID-19 pandemic have all undermined the neoliberal political- economic consensus, as has the post-postracial rush of xenophobic and nationalist authoritarianism around the globe.6 In the context of these shocks, the emergence of racial capitalism in the tiny world of the academic humanities might actually be big. Traveling through the fissures and networks of legal studies and social movements in the way CRT has, racial capitalism has the potential to amplify the shock waves from within and without. Part I of this essay argues that legal scholarship and teaching form an important bridge between academia and the doings of state and market governance. Part II imagines some moves that racial capitalism and legal studies, developing together, might make in these spaces and in progressive organizing for noncapitalist futures. I. The Law Is Everywhere Economists, I have claimed, pay little attention to other disciplines, but they really ignore race. Even Thomas Piketty’s 2014 surprise blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century—lauded for not only actually noticing economic inequality but conceptualizing it as the result of a struggle between capital and labor—proposed universal solutions that overlooked the central role that differentials of race and gender play in shaping capitalism as a system of production.7 More typical in economic analysis is either the assumption that issues involving racial inequality are a matter of “distribution” and thus not the business of economists at all,8 or else earnest assurances that since racism is economically inefficient, it is bound, like other immaterial distinctions, to vanish like dew on a summer’s day in the sunlight of free markets.9 Economists wishing to take white supremacy seriously have thus been pushed into awkward models