Chapter 9: Racism and Capitalism

Elizabeth Kennedy

Capitalism requires inequality. And racism enshrines it.

–Ruth Wilson Gilmore1

INTRODUCTION

No single data point conveys the scale of American racial inequality. Black Americans own one-
tenth the wealth of White Americans; at the current rate, it would take Black households 228
years to accumulate the wealth held by White families today.2 This disparity is mirrored across
every metric of lived experience, including health, housing, education, environment, and liberty.3
The rate of Black infant mortality is twice as high as that for White babies, a wider disparity than
in 1850.4 Black children are food insecure at three times the rate of White children.5 Black
Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of White Americans and for significantly longer
sentences.6 This caste system contradicts the premise of American opportunity and forces us to
interrogate the relationship between racism and capitalism. As Malcolm X claimed, is it
impossible to have capitalism without racism? Are racism and capitalism, in the words of Ibram
X. Kendi, “conjoined twins,” each necessary for the other’s existence? Or is another capitalism
possible, one that is anti-racist, sustainable, and just?
Academics across disciplines—history, economics, law, political science, geography—
have debated these questions, and activists across generations have challenged them. This
chapter examines the history of slavery as a racialized institution that precedes and evolves
alongside capitalism. It then considers the laws, institutions, and policies that reinforced racial
oppression long after emancipation. This critical legal lens helps us identify the historical roots
of structural barriers to equity and justice. At every point in capitalism’s development, Black,
Indigenous, and other peoples of color have resisted the economic, social, and political systems
that sought to exploit and extinguish their existence. While a comprehensive discussion of the
relationship between race and capitalism must include all people of color along intersectional
axes of oppression, this chapter focuses on the Black wealth gap. It proposes a system of
reparations and the Black radical tradition of collective resistance and cooperative economics as
a viable and sustainable path forward.

I. SLAVERY AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM

To understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to

start on the plantation.
–Matthew Desmond7

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We cannot understand the relationship between racism and capitalism without fully accounting
for the role slavery played in the growth of the global economy. Capitalism emerged as Medieval
European feudalism—an economic, social, and political system by which those who controlled
arable land (lords) demanded rent and labor from those who made that land productive (peasants
or serfs)—had begun to wane.8 Military resources required to maintain feudal inequality were
increasingly expensive, particularly following the Black Death. Long before the African slave
trade or colonial expansion to the Americas, displaced and enslaved European peoples, such as
the Irish, Jews, Roma, or Slavs, were viewed in racialized terms. The Germans used the racial
doctrine of herrenvolk to justify enslaving eastern European peoples; religion and regionalism
rationalized the indentured servitude forced by the British upon the conquered Irish.9 European
conquest created classes of “unfree” populations, whose displacement and precarity made them
willing to work for meager wages. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, this economic system
in which labor is treated as a commodity—capitalism—began to take shape. Yet, even before the
start of the transatlantic slave trade, the use of race and racism to classify—and economically
devalue—the labor of different ethnic groups of Europeans was firmly established.
The transatlantic slave trade shackled over twelve million African men, women, and
children on a harrowing overseas voyage across the Atlantic known as the “Middle Passage.”
Nearly one in five died before reaching shore.10 Those who survived were forced to work in
brutal conditions in Caribbean sugarcane fields and Virginia tobacco plantations, generating
profits for British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Danish investors and stoking the engines of
finance, insurance, shipping, manufacturing, construction, and education. As Manning Marable
observes, the labor power of enslaved workers powered modern capitalist world accumulation.11
Other unfree Europeans compelled or volunteered to the Americas under various forms of
servitude and debt bondage were also exploited, traded, and forced to work for little or no wages.
Yet, in stark contrast to the experiences of Africans, fear of White rebellion led the British to
terminate many indentured contracts and extend land grants to White laborers.12 This created a
new class of White settlers whose economic and political fortunes were aligned with the ruling
regime.
The nascent capitalism of 1619 developed into a highly efficient system by 1860. Grown
on Indigenous lands seized through genocide, cotton fueled the engine of global industry and
America’s fragile democracy. By 1860, cotton comprised 59 percent of U.S. exports; it was, as
the saying went, “King.” Land resources were plenty, but harvesting cotton was labor intensive,
driving demand for enslaved workers. At that moment, most people in South Carolina and
Mississippi, almost half of those in Georgia, and roughly one-third of all Southerners were
enslaved. While enslaved agricultural labor may have been performed predominately in the
South, the northern Industrial Revolution was inextricably dependent upon it. The number of
cotton spindles in northern textile mills exploded from eighty-seven thousand in 1810 to about
five million in 1860.13 Countries with climates and soil far more conducive to cotton cultivation
than the United States could not compete with a nation that codified a caste of workers as
nonhuman and legalized violence as a management technique. As Mathew Desmond observes,
“Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and
cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.”14 This new American

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economy's “beating heart”—pumping wealth to Southern planters, raw materials to northern and
British industrialists, and capital to European bankers—was human bondage.15
American business history largely ignores what Marx described as the “undisguised
looting, enslavement, and murder” that powered the global economy.16 Yet as historian Walter
Johnson notes, “there was no such thing as capitalism without slavery.”17 Likewise, Caitlin
Rosenthal traces the origins of quantitative management practices, recordkeeping, and
accounting methods to the plantation.18 These included scientific production quotas and violence
used to accelerate their pace, elegant data dashboards, mark-to-market accounting, depreciation
algorithms, and sophisticated credit instruments.19 Commercial journals and accounting ledgers
were created to help planters “accelerate the pace of daily labor through calculation and
comparison, bonuses and incentives, and, of course, punishment,” a sophisticated human
resource management system developed long before that of Frederick Taylor.20 Though slavery
predates capitalism, and capitalism persists without slavery, it is hard to imagine a system of
capitalism developing at that scale and pace in its absence.
Wealth is accumulated under capitalism by extracting the earth’s resources and workers’
labor. In the case of slavery, extraction refers to the work of enslaved people necessary to
transform raw materials, such as cotton, into marketable commodities. But extraction also refers
to the wealth accumulated from treating enslaved people as commodities. Not only were Black
bodies appraised, valued, sold, and resold, but they were also used as collateral for capital
investment by financial institutions like J.P. Morgan. By 1860, enslaved people were the single
largest asset in the American economy, with a combined value exceeding the nation’s railroads
and factories.21 The sale of those people—“in whose bodies that money congealed”—triggered
the creation of new financial products, such as policies insuring the property value of enslaved
people, taxes on their sale, and notary fees for the transactions.22 Unlike other chattel property
like farm machinery or railroad cars, enslaved men and women could reproduce and, through
systemic rape and forced childbearing, be compelled to produce. Children born to enslaved
women were sold and separated from their families, which Ta-Nehisi Coates describes as “the
for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family.”23 The
profits extracted from the bodies of enslaved people would be woven everywhere into the
American capitalist system.

II. LAW’S ROLE IN SHAPING POST-CIVIL WAR CAPITALISM

The history of racial capitalism, it must be emphasized, is a history of

wages as well as whips, of factories as well as plantations, of whiteness as
well as blackness, of “freedom” as well as slavery.
–Walter Johnson24

On December 6, 1865, Georgia ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery and
servitude, “except as a punishment for crime.”25 Abolishing slavery was an opportunity to
acknowledge America’s “original sin” and repair its harms. If capitalism did not depend on racial
subjugation, we would expect to see a reorganization of American society and the era of slavery
regarded as a holocaust, never to be repeated. We would anticipate the deployment of federal

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power to create an equitable economy supported by a just system of law. We would presume
reparations would be made to the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Instead, what
proceeded in the years after the Civil War was merely an extension of the economic, social,
physical, and emotional harms that slavery had wrought. Racial terror, disenfranchisement, and
exclusion continued to ensure that American capitalism, which had critically depended on the
labor of enslaved people, would survive their emancipation.
While Emancipation meant a financial loss to Southern enslavers of their chattel
property, that amount was small compared with the potential impact on the global economy if
Southern agricultural fields were to remain fallow. Federal oversight of what was intended to be
a period of economic “reconstruction” fell to Andrew Johnson, former Tennessee enslaver and
proponent of states’ rights, who was elevated to the role after President Lincoln’s assassination
eight months prior. In sharp contrast to promises of “four acres and a mule,” Johnson granted
amnesty to most former Confederates and allowed Southern states to elect new governments.26
Their first order of business was criminalizing the autonomy of newly freed people by enacting
“Black Codes,” which made refusal to work a crime of “vagrancy.” Conviction under these
codes resulted in fines that few could pay; failing to pay the fines resulted in imprisonment and,
as discussed below, being forced to work without wages for former enslavers.27
Even without the fear of criminal prosecution, Black men and women had few
alternatives to low-wage agricultural work. Denied financial compensation for 246 years of
slavery, they had as capital only their labor. Coercive “sharecropping” contracts with former
enslavers required workers to pay for the use of land, tools, and seeds in exchange for a share of
harvest proceeds. These contracts arguably created economic opportunities for the formerly
enslaved. However, if Black farmers could not repay the contract debt, they had two choices:
continue working in debt peonage or risk conviction for vagrancy. When Black people
accumulated even a meager amount of capital—tools, animals, land—local governments
engaged in tactics that ranged from “legal chicanery to terrorism” that resulted in seizure or
foreclosure.28 For example, while the federal government established the Freedman’s Bank to
deposit the wages of Black soldiers, it prohibited any extension of credit to Black depositors, and
its lack of oversight and undercapitalization caused a massive bank failure.29 Reflecting on the
impact of this mismanagement and bankruptcy on Black communities' ability to build capital, Du
Bois suggested, “Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the
thrift of the freedmen.”30
Racial capitalism’s ingenuity is evidenced by the public-private partnerships that devised
“convict leasing” systems to ensure that cotton would still be picked, textile looms would keep
humming, and returns on capital investment would continue to flow. African Americans
incarcerated for violating the Black Codes or breaching shareholder contracts were “leased” to
planters, railroads, and mining companies under agreements that ranged from ten to thirty years.
If the number of convicts was insufficient to meet labor demands, criminal laws could be
expanded, and sentences made more extensive. Indeed, this “slavery by another name” fueled an
explosion of Southern prison populations during Reconstruction. Convict laborers were tortured,
raped, and starved to death in a system described by the historian Fletcher M. Green in 1949 as
akin to “the persecutions of the Middle Ages or in the prison camps of Nazi Germany.”31

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 Lynching and other racialized violence pushed Black men, women, and children out of
the Deep South to perceived safer cities in the North. As under slavery, violence—actual and
threatened—was omnipresent. Law enforcement often sanctioned, enabled, and participated in
this violence, including lynching. Considered “a fate worse than death,” lynching took grotesque
and brutal forms, including burning, castration, crude cesarean sections, and amputation. The Ku
Klux Klan, whose members included government officials, gave lynching the imprimatur of state
authority. The White backlash was organized, violent, and devastating in communities where
African Americans built a modicum of wealth. During the “Red Summer of 1919,” racial
pogroms destroyed dozens of cities and neighborhoods from Texas to Chicago to D.C. and
Florida.32 Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, known as “Black Wall Street,” experienced a
massacre. Over three hundred residents were murdered, and businesses, civil, and cultural
institutions were leveled.33 Nearly half a million Black people fled North between 1919 and
1920; seven hundred and fifty thousand did so between 1920 and 1930, and over one and a half
million between 1940 and 1950. Northern cities partitioned public spaces by passing Jim Crow
laws that excluded African Americans from parks, restrooms, schools, restaurants, hospitals,
nursing homes, public pools, transportation, and even cemeteries.
New Deal era laws and programs designed to reduce poverty institutionalized, at a federal
level, the racial discrimination of these state and local Jim Crow laws. Federal workplace
protections excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which meant that 65 percent of African
Americans could not accumulate retirement savings, bargain collectively for higher wages, or
receive compensation for workplace injuries. These programs were a critical safety net for White
working-class Americans yet likened by the NAACP to “a sieve with holes just big enough for
the majority of Negroes to fall through.”34 Other exclusionary opportunities for building wealth
included the G.I. Bill and the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) home mortgage program.
While race-neutral in theory, the G.I. Bill did not require universities to admit non-White
students, so few African Americans were able to take advantage of subsidized higher education.
Likewise, the FHA developed a system that Richard Rothstein describes as “state-sponsored
segregation.”35 The FHA relied on color-coded risk maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan
Corporation (HOLC) to determine which loans it would guarantee and thus make affordable to
working-class Americans. A red line encircled neighborhoods with high concentrations of
African Americans, making them ineligible for federally subsidized mortgages. Segregation laws
and discrimination had already shaped neighborhood demographics; “redlining” cemented them
as structural barriers.
Use of HOLC maps spread beyond the FHA into a private market rife with racism. The
National Association of Real Estate Boards required realtors to steer Black home buyers away
from White neighborhoods. Banks created predatory financing schemes that targeted Black home
buyers and coerced them into contracts on which they would often default. Fledgling Black
banks attempted to meet the demand for mortgages. Still, in the absence of more affirmative
federal support, they could not survive while serving communities experiencing high rates of
poverty and depressed housing values. Federal prohibitions against racial discrimination by
lenders, builders, and realtors could have built a Black middle class. Instead, as a New York City
Housing Authority leader observed in 1955, the FHA “adopted a racial policy that could have
been culled from the Nuremberg Laws.”36 This partnership between public agencies and private

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industry depressed property values and fortified barriers to Black homeownership for decades to
come.

III. STRUCTURAL LEGACIES OF RACIAL CAPITALISM

American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of

American capitalism.
– Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman37

The United States was so adept at using racial codes and laws that differentiated—and
racialized—human values that Nazi Germany looked to the U.S. legal system for inspiration.38
Civil Rights Era legislation banned many legal forms of discrimination but did not affirmatively
reverse their impacts. For example, while the 1968 Fair Housing Act officially ended redlining,
the impact and legacy of this practice endure. Redlining prevented Black families from living in
racially integrated neighborhoods, attending high-quality schools, accessing clean air and green
space, and benefiting from public investments in infrastructure and the economic diversity that
generates employment opportunities.39 State-sponsored devaluation of homes in Black
neighborhoods trapped residents for generations. Rather than using homeownership to build
wealth and achieve social mobility, those who live in redlined areas have higher rates of
cancer,40 asthma,41 Covid-19 outcomes,42 lower educational outcomes,43 and greater climate
change precarity.44 Environmental pollution and climate hazards are often created and reinforced
by racist laws and policies.45 Social scientists have noted that the significance of the
neighborhood-level disparities that persist today—regardless of household income—make it
impossible to statistically compare the economic outcomes of Black and White children.
Moreover, these disparities are fed by modern algorithms and the rapidly expanding uses of
artificial intelligence, creating systems that Safiya Umoja Noble termed “technological
redlining.”46
In a stunning example of how historic discrimination creates contemporary opportunities
for exploitation, Wells Fargo engaged in the predatory marketing of subprime, high-risk
mortgages to communities of color under a banner of “building generational wealth.” As
revealed in a 2012 class action lawsuit, the program targeted Black religious leaders whose
influence the bank hoped would convince their congregants to take out risky mortgages.47
According to the New York Times, affidavits found that loan officers referred to their Black
customers as “mud people” and their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”48 In addition to this
damning evidence of explicit bias, we again see how seemingly “neutral” data-driven
algorithms—in this case, pointing loan officers to communities historically cut off from the
finance industry—reinforce and replicate racial discrimination.49 Wells Fargo would ultimately
pay $175 million, but the damage created by what Cathy O’Neil calls a “weapon of math
destruction” was complete.50 Half the properties whose owners had been granted loans by Wells
Fargo were vacant; 71 percent of these were in predominately Black neighborhoods. Fifty years
after Jim Crow, the incentives to extract profits by exploiting racial inequality remain. As Ta-
Nehisi Coates exhorts, “when we think of white supremacy, we picture colored-only signs, but
we should picture pirate flags.”51

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 Defenders of capitalism argue that racism is inefficient in a genuinely free market and
that slavery, segregation, and structural discrimination are political and social issues, not
economically driven problems. Adam Smith, the “father of economics,” argued in 1776 that the
advantages and disadvantages distributed among capital and labor could be fairly balanced “in a
society where…there was perfect liberty, and where every man was perfectly free both to chuse
[sic] what occupation he thought proper and to change it as often as he thought proper.”52 No
such conditions of social equality existed then—despite declarations by colonial enslavers that
“all men are created equal”—nor has it since. Writing nearly a century after Emancipation,
W.E.B. Du Bois argued that “the first and fundamental and inescapable problem of American
democracy is Justice to the American Negro.” Contemporary critical race theory helpfully
instructs that racism is not the only form of discrimination impacting marginalized individuals or
communities: sexism, classism, heteronormativity, and nativism (among others) combine,
overlap, or intersect to rationalize inequality. By the mid-twentieth century, Du Bois had
concluded that one could not struggle decisively against racism in the United States and remain a
proponent of capitalism.53

IV. COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE AND COOPERATIVE ECONOMICS

[T]he forces we face are not as strong as we think. They are held together by
guns, tanks, and fictions. They can be disassembled.
–Robin Kelley54

People have engaged in collective resistance at every point in the history of capitalism. As
Manning Marable explains, “In the proverbial bowels of the capitalist leviathan, the enslaved
people forged a new world culture that was in its origin African, but in its creative form,
something entirely new.”55 Understanding this resistance culture may be the key to advancing
equity and sustainability in contemporary capitalism. For some, resistance meant to escape,
engage in self-defense, or foment rebellion. For others, it took the shape of forging “maroon”
communities with Indigenous peoples,56 tending kitchen gardens to nourish their families,
pooling funds to purchase one another’s freedom, or organizing an underground railroad. Black
women were always at the forefront of these efforts to preserve the dignity and humanity of
Black people. Over time, this resistance assumed new forms, integrating Black Christianity,57
Creole language and culture,58 the labor union and civil rights movements, and mutual aid
societies.59 As the legal supports for capitalism shape-shifted from enslavement to de jure
segregation to de facto discrimination and capital markets exclusion, Black resistance took the
form of establishing Black banks, worker-owned cooperatives, and credit unions. Activists
organized Black Power breakfast and educational programs,60 environmental justice protests,61
Black labor caucuses, and a Black Lives Matter movement against police violence and
intersectional oppression.62 The contemporary cooperative movement, which includes worker-
owned cooperatives, investor cooperatives, producer cooperatives, credit unions, and consumer
cooperatives, has roots in this Black radical tradition of cooperative economics. A cooperative
governance model could serve as a model for a more sustainable and anti-racist form of
capitalism.

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 Critics of capitalism contend that capital accumulates only when it moves through
relations of severe inequality.63 They argue that wealth in a capitalist society can only be
generated—or extracted—by creating and maintaining this inequality. We can understand this in
the context of a factory owner who accumulates capital through the labor his workers sell him for
wages. If those wages were commensurate with the actual economic value that labor produced,
what profit would remain for the factory owner? In this sense, capitalism requires inequality. But
does it require extreme inequality? Does it require racialized inequality? Wages are lowest when
workers have no other means of subsistence, though arguably, if they are too low, consumer
demand and worker retention will fall, reducing the profit margin. Proponents of capitalism
argue that these are some of the invisible market forces that serve as a check against exploitation.
Capital also flows through inequality in other dimensions of a capitalist economy, such as rent
from tenants to landlords and debt payments from borrowers to creditors. Yet, as we’ve seen
throughout this chapter, systemic racism has metered those flows in various and disparate ways.
What, then, might an economic system of production resemble in the absence of racism?
As Jacqui Patterson, Senior Director of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice
Program, explains, it would involve “moving away from a society functioning on extraction to
one deeply rooted in deep democracy and integrating regenerative processes, cooperation, and
acknowledgment of interdependence.” Moving toward a more sustainable and anti-racist
economy will require acknowledging that American capitalism was built upon racial violence,
enslavement, and exploitation. From that acknowledgment must follow federal and state
reparations for those past and ongoing harms.64 Reparations fall squarely within the legal norms
of our democratic, capitalist system: when someone is harmed, the law seeks to make that person
whole. Reparations—repairing what has been harmed—are a fundamental purpose of our
domestic civil justice system and are used internationally to compensate victims of human rights
violations.65 Yet, in the context of repairing historic and ongoing harms suffered by Black and
Indigenous people, they are treated as morally questionable or practically unfeasible.66 Until we
recognize and restore the victims of racial capitalism, a system of nonracial capitalism will not
be possible. These reparations cannot be achieved simply through “acknowledgment or an
apology” or by “investment in underprivileged communities” and instead require, at minimum,
the following preconditions established by the United Nations: cessation, assurances, and
guarantees of non-repetition; restitution and repatriation; compensation; satisfaction; and
rehabilitation.67
Du Bois predicted that America would eventually have to choose, explains Manning
Marable, moving toward “worker self-management, antiracism, and a new democratic state
apparatus” or “lapse into authoritarianism, racial barbarism, and militarization of the
workforce.”68 We have reached that choice point. Widespread racial and environmental injustice
protests have amplified critiques of extractive capitalism and its relationship to inequality and
climate change. Yet corporate and public policies that promote sustainability often fail to
address—let alone redress—capitalism’s history of slavery, racism, and structural inequality.
Scholars of racial capitalism have made critical contributions to our understanding of the
relationship between capitalism, racism, and law. Their work can serve as a roadmap toward a
new economic and political system that is equitable, sustainable, and just. The “triple pandemic”
of coronavirus, climate crisis, and racial injustice has called more recent attention to the

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devastating ways systemic racism and intersectional oppression maintain racial and gender
inequity. Let us presume that another version of capitalism is possible, one that does not depend
on racial inequality: we cannot meaningfully construct that version before we fully repair the
harms caused by its predecessor. Only then can we move toward an equitable and cooperative
future.

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1
Antipode Foundation, The Geographies of Racial Capitalism, 01:36.
2
Asante-Muhammed et al., The Ever-Growing Gap, 5.
3
Tabuchi and Popovich, People of Color Breathe More Hazardous Air. The Sources Are Everywhere; Mervosh,
“How Much Wealthier Are White School Districts than Nonwhite Ones? $23 Billion, Report Says”;
4
Villarosa, “America’s Black Mothers.”
5
Silva, “Food Insecurity.”
6
The Sentencing Project, Racial Disparities; Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” 77. Jodi Melamed notes that while we
use the term “racial cruelty” to describe “extreme or surplus violence” against people of color, we accept racialized
state violence when it takes the form of criminal justice. Racial profiling tactics and sentencing disparities codified by
a succession of federal crime bills fueled a profitable and destructive “prison industrial complex.” Those who benefit,
and even profit from, the construction and operation of prisons rely on a national narrative of Black criminality to
ensure public support, justify stark racial disparities, and deflect criticism.
7
Desmond, “To Understand the Brutality,” 30.
8
Robinson, Black Marxism, 10–25.
9
Robinson, 25–28.
10
Baptist, The Half, 57.
11
Marable, Capitalism Underdeveloped, 24.
12
Alexander, Jim Crow, 24.
13
Desmond, “To Understand the Brutality,” 34.
14
Desmond, 32.
15
Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, 33.
16
Marx, Capital, 535.
17
Johnson, “To Remake the World.”
18
Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery, 51, 127.
19
Rosenthal, 127, 134.
20
Rosenthal, 90-92, 6.
21
Desmond, “To Understand the Brutality.”
22
Coates, “The Case for Reparations”, quoting Walter Johnson.
23
Coates.
24
Johnson, “To Remake the World.”

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25
U.S. Const. amend. XIII, § 1 (“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.”)
26
Quigley, “The Continuing Significance of Race,” 10–13.
27
Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 109–15.
28
Coates, “The Case for Reparations.”
29
U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Freedman’s Bank Demise.”
30
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 30.
31
Marable, Capitalism Underdeveloped, 112.
32
Glenza, “Rosewood Massacre.”
33
Parshina-Kottis et al., “What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed.”
34
Baradaran, The Color of Money, 102.
35
Rothstein, The Color of Law, 21.
36
Wiese, Places of Their Own, 101.
37
Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, 3.
38
Wilkerson, Caste, 79.
39
Loh, “Separate and Unequal.”
40
See, e.g., Collins et al., “Neighborhood-Level Redlining.”
41
See, e.g., Nardone et al., “emergency department visits.”
42
Godoy, “Formerly Redlined Communities.”
43
Lukes and Cleveland, “The Lingering Legacy,” 1–12.
44
Anderson, “Racist Housing.”
45
Pulido, “Flint,” 1–16.
46
Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, 1, 167.
47
See U.S. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Reaches Settlement.”
48
Powell, “Bank Accused.”
49
O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction, 40.
50
O’Neil, 3–11.
51
Coates, “The Case for Reparations.”
52
Smith, Wealth of Nations, Chapter X.
53
Du Bois. Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism, 91. Du Bois observed that “The United States, with its existing
social structure, cannot today abolish the color line despite its promises. It cannot stop injustice in the courts based
on color and race. Above all, it cannot stop the exploitation of black workers by white capital, especially in the
newest South. White North America beyond the urge of sound economics is persistently driving black folk toward
socialism.”
54
Kelley, “Why Black Marxism.”
55
Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 24.

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56
Sweeney, “Gendering Racial Capitalism,” 66–68. “Marronage” can refer to very specific settlements formed by
those who escaped slavery, either immediately after arriving in the Americas or at some later point. Examples of such
communities, often forged with Indigenous people, can be found throughout the Caribbean, Central America, South
America, and North America, including Black Seminole communities in Florida and Creole communities in New
Orleans. It can also refer to various ways in which “less permanent, more flexible forms of marronage [that] enabled
enslaved women to carve out semiautonomous space within slavery” and engage in systems of mutual aid with other
enslaved people.
57
Moore, “The Black Church.”
58
Robinson, Black Marxism, 311.
59
See, e.g., Thomas, “Black Radical Tradition.” See also Elnaiem, “Black Conquistadors”; Laura Flanders, “Solidarity
Economics.”
60
Robertson, “The Black Panther Party.”
61
Pulido and de Lara, “Reimagining ‘justice’ in environmental justice,” 2.
62
Fisher, “Black Liberation Theology.”
63
Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” 77.
64
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Reparations Now Toolkit, 25. The National Coalition of Blacks for
Reparations in America (N’COBRA) defines reparations as “A process of repairing, healing and restoring a people
injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights by governments,
corporations, institutions, and families. Those groups that have been injured have the right to obtain from the
government, corporation, institution, or family responsible for the injuries that they need to repair and heal themselves.
In addition to being a demand for justice, it is a principle of international human rights law.”
65
Buxbaum, “International Reparations,” 314–17.
66
Feagin, “Documenting the Costs,” 9–11.
67
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Reparations Now Toolkit, 26. To elaborate, “cessation…” refers to the
requirement that under “international law, a state responsible for wrongfully injuring a people” is under an obligation
to a) “cease the act if it is continuing, and b) offer appropriate assurances and guarantees of non-repetition….”
Restitution means “re-establish the situation which existed before the wrongful act was committed.” Changes traced
to the wrongful act are reversed through the restoration of freedom, recognition of humanity, identity, culture,
repatriation, livelihood, citizenship, legal standing, and wealth to the extent they can be, and if they cannot, restitution
is completed by compensation. Concerning compensation, “The injuring state, institution or individual is obligated to
compensate for the damage if the damage is not made good by restitution. Compensation is required for “any
financially accessible damage suffered…” to the extent “appropriate and proportional to the gravity of the violation
and circumstances.” “Satisfaction” is “part of full reparations under international law for moral damage, such as
“emotional injury, mental suffering, and injury to reputation.” In some instances where cessation, restitution, and
compensation do not bring full repair, satisfaction is also needed. Apology falls under the reparative category of
satisfaction.” Lastly, “[r]ehabilitation shall be provided to include legal, medical, psychological, and other care and
services.”
68
Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 18.

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