We Can't Undo Racism without Undoing Capitalism

Rev. KP Hong, Beloved Community Staff Team

​In the summer of 2020, the largest protest movement in U.S. history surged across the nation and reverberated in global demonstrations of solidarity. Voices in the streets demanded the dismantling of prisons, borders, and police, calling not for reform but for abolition, redistribution, and radical transformation. Protesters understood racism as a structural force, asking not for infrastructures of violence to be softened through better officer training or diversity workshops, but for the defunding and dismantling of policing, carceral systems, and border regimes themselves. And for a moment, it seemed as if a true racial reckoning might be underway. 

Yet the revolutionary clarity of those demands was swiftly absorbed and deflected as Amazon, Walmart, and other corporate giants declared that Black Lives Matter, branded themselves as allies, poured resources into diversity trainings, and rescripted the cry for abolition as calls for representation and more “Black faces in high places.” This is the hallmark of liberal antiracism, a politics of inclusion and interpersonal bias correction that leaves intact and untouched the machinery of racial capitalism. In contrast, the Black tradition of radical antiracism — carried forward by luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Kwame Nkrumah, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jamil al-Amin, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor insists that racism is inseparable from capitalism itself, and that justice requires dismantling the structures of policing, prisons, borders, and militarism that sustain the extraction, expropriation, and exploitation of an underlying racial capitalism.

When Larry Fink, billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the largest multinational investment management company in the world, wrote a letter in 2020 to colleagues of racism as a “deep and longstanding problem in our society and must be addressed on both a personal and systemic level,” did he mean canceling his donations and corporate influence on the New York City Police Foundation?1 Terminating BlackRock’s investments in arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, and the military-industrial complex supplying weapons for the wars in the Middle East? Redistributing the vast wealth he manages to confront the grotesque scale of global inequality? No, his response to “systemic” racism was not to focus on systems at all, but to “talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships... and [build] a more diverse and inclusive firm.”2 In other words, the solution to structural racism was to double down on interpersonal bias work and liberal antiracism’s familiar script of diversity and inclusion.

Interpersonal remedies matter, but they are painfully inadequate for structural injustices. Antiracist work “within” and “among” remain necessary, but it must not be confused or substituted for the work “beyond.” The racially differentiated effect of Covid was not rooted in individual prejudice, poor health habits, lack of education, or other narratives that gaslight communities of color. Such factors may always be present, but the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on nonwhite people was structurally rooted in the political economy of racial capitalism: the exploitation of “essential” labor, precarity of housing, unequal access to healthcare, policing of lockdowns and health mandates, unchecked outbreaks within prisons and detention centers, and the scapegoating and intensification of racial discrimination. It is the structural which frames the interpersonal, as racial capitalism organizes our reality through educational apartheid, mass incarceration, segregated neighborhoods, redlining and bluelining, segmented labor markets confining workers to unequal tiers, persistent wage gaps and job insecurity, and militarized borders that inscribe violence on collective life. From the slave patrols of the plantation to the strike breaking squads of the factory, policing has always functioned to guard property and control labor. Border regimes allow capital and goods to freely move across borders, while migrant labor remains violently restricted. The vilification of migrants as terrorists, criminals, drug dealers, “illegals who are taking our jobs” and “bogus asylum seekers” rehearses the old script of colonial racial capitalism. Most forcefully, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, renowned public scholar-activist, punctuates how racism and capitalism have always been structured together:

Capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it. Racial capitalism, which is to say all capitalism, is not a thing but a relation. If we look back through the history of capitalism as it developed, we see that the ways those who owned the means of production understood their differences from those whose labor they exploited were practices we recognize today as racial practice. So, all capitalism is racial from its beginning. The capitalism we have inherited, constantly producing and reproducing itself, will continue to depend on racial practice and racial hierarchy, no matter what. This is another way of saying we can't undo racism without undoing capitalism.

Detention and deportation are not aberrations at the edges of racial capitalism but border violence designed to preserve a global racial division of labor. 

The violence persists not because officers or capitalists fail to examine their biases, but because the system itself requires racialized control to sustain exploitation. Racism has never been incidental to capitalism; it is one of its core operating principles. To be an antiracist, then, is not merely to change minds or diversify institutions, but to collectively expose structures that require diseased imaginations to rationalize inequality. Antiracism means dismantling the infrastructures of racial capitalism hiding in abstract financialized economies, systems of land ownership, and global trade agreements that codify and normalize extraction. Antiracism means committing to the redistribution of wealth, repairing deep inequalities inscribed upon our world for centuries, and prophetically reimagining beyond the strictures of racial capitalism where political economies serve life rather than devour it. 

1 Morris Pearl, “Dear Larry Fink: it's time to stop lavishing your wealth on the police,” Guardian, August 1, 2020.
2 Alexandra Sternlicht, “We Must Do More—What CEOs Like Tim Cook, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink Say About Racial Inequality Protests,” Forbes, June 1, 2020.