Racial capitalism

Racial capitalism is a concept proposed by Cedric J. Robinson, which describes the process of extracting social and economic value from a person of a different racial identity, referring, predominantly, to the extraction of value from those of a nonwhite (person of color) identity. That said, 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." 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—that is, 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 on multi-generational serfdom. Therefore, rather than considering capitalism as revolutionary and radically liberating, as, say, Michael Novak does, Robinson argued for the inverse: capitalism did "not" liberate those in racially oppressive positions, nor did it reject feudal principles; instead, 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.Furthermore, Robinson theorized that "all" capitalism was inherently racial capitalism, and racialism was present 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) 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.
History.
1600s.
The fusion of race and capitalism first materialized with the advent of the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th-century. Though slavery existed for thousands of years prior to the conquest of the Americas and the commodification of Africans (e.g. classical Greek and Roman supply chains were heavily reliant upon slave labor), racism and its convergence with capital, as it is understood today, emerged concurrently with the 1600s' oceanic trade routes. The transatlantic voyage of Northern European explorers to the New World, unlike the conquests of the Spanish conquistadors, which yielded significant deposits of gold, silver, and other valuable metals, was subsidized primarily through agricultural plantations. From its inception, cash crop agriculture in European colonies was serviced chiefly by white indentured servants; and it was not until the sixteen-sixties and seventies that servitude was formally institutionalized into slavery. These indentured servants, mostly indebted or imprisoned European immigrants, worked under a plantation owner for a set period of time, usually for four to seven years, before they obtained 'free man' status. As plantations expanded and workloads surged, and as indentured servitude terms expired, white American colonists demanded and thus searched for more sustainable means of economical, unrestricted employment to meet growing demand and ever-increasing profit quotas. 
In 1661 the Barbados Slave Code was signed into law, serving as a basis for the Caribbean (Barbados, specifically) slave trade. On paper the legislation protected both the slave and the slave master from heinous cruelty; however, in effect, only the latter party received lawful security. Owners were provided with various methods to keep slaves in-line, and by law were proffered legal intervention if slaves pursued retaliation or a collective insurrection, whereas the latter was excluded from pursuing legal recourse in the case of cruelty or maltreatment.
It's important to note: During this time, citizens of color lived amongst the colonies, some of which even enjoyed state-protected freedom. On one account the Chesapeake Bay, in the early to mid 1600s, was described as having a multiracial character:There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of plantation work. On many plantations Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together.
20th century.
Charisse Burden-Stelly, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues in a recent article for the socialist Monthly Review that ""modern U.S. racial capitalism" [emphasis in the original] [is] a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation ... [it] is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism. Anti-Blackness describes the reduction of Blackness to a category of abjection and subjection through narrations of absolute biological or cultural difference; ruling-class monopolization of political power; negative and derogatory mass media propaganda; the ascent of discriminatory legislation that maintains and reinscribes inequality, not least various modes of segregation; and social relations in which distrust and antipathy toward those racialized as Black is normalized and in which 'interracial mass behavior involving violence assumes a continuously potential danger' ... Antiradicalism can be understood as the physical and discursive repression and condemnation of anticapitalist and/or left-leaning ideas, politics, practices, and modes of organizing that are construed as subversive, seditious, and otherwise threatening to capitalist society. These include, but are not limited to, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, peace activism, and antisexism." Burden-Stelly uses the work of Trinidadian-born sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox to argue that "[m]odern US racial capitalism arose in the context of the First World War, when, as Cox explains, the United States took advantage of the conflict to capture the markets of South America, Asia, and Africa for its 'over-expanded capacity.'" Burden-Stelly notes that (in the context of the First Red Scare) a 1919 US Justice Department report, "Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes, As Reflected in Their Publications", condemned Blacks' "'ill-governed reaction toward race rioting,' 'threat of retaliatory measures in connection with lynching,' open demand for social equality, identification with the Industrial Workers of the World, and 'outspoken advocacy of the Bolshevik or Soviet doctrine.'" Burden-Stelly situates the critique of racial capitalism as developed by Cedric Robinson within an early- and mid-20th-century tradition of Black radical critique whose major practitioners included, among others, "W. E. B. Du Bois, James W. Ford, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, Esther Cooper Jackson, Walter Rodney, and James Boggs."