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Capitalism Relies on Racism
To build a new future, we have to undo the foundation
An idea that seems to have finally breached the mainstream discourse this year is the insight that racism is systemic and structural. (Of course, anti-police and anti-prison activists, along with health care advocates, have been asserting this for years.) So this is “absolutely the moment to engage in the kind of educational activism that might help to encourage all of us,” as activist and scholar Angela Davis writes in LEVEL.
Davis writes:
Both policing and punishment are firmly rooted in racism — attempts to control indigenous, Black, and Latino populations following colonization and slavery as well as Asian populations after the Chinese Exclusion Act and the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Attempting to undo the harm of policing and prisons without attending to these immense embodiments of systemic racism is doomed to failure. The 20th-century militarization of the police has been further intensified by Islamophobia. More generally, the evolution and expansion of the police and the prisons are constant reminders that capitalism has always fundamentally relied on racism to sustain itself.
Read her entire essay — and more from the ongoing series “Abolition for the People”— here:
