The Colonialist Racial Contract: Carceral Expansion, the Regulation of Humanity, and the Capitalist Consumption of Sovereignty

• In Event: 41020 - Section on Political Economy of the World-System Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: State

Abstract

The Colonialist Racial Contract (CRC) operates under the frameworks of racial capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism to regulate humanity and enable the capitalist consumption of sovereignty by expanding the carceral state. Such application occurs because the CRC extenuates the process of racialization (Omi and Winant 1994) by incorporating borders and rules (Walia 2021) as a secondary component in the process of creating a “racial other” (Grosfoguel 2011; Rana 2011; Said 2003; Walia 2013). More specifically, the formation of the racial other is a continuous process of colonization in which groups of people who are positioned as part of the collective Black or Indigenous are deemed unworthy of human rights or sovereignty under capitalism within the social and political apparatus, and the land in which they occupy. Such an approach ensures that CRC operates in the duality of racialization (Omi and Winant 1994) and borders and rules (Walia 2021), in which the body becomes the physical structure that is controlled and destroyed under oppressive governing ideologies. Lastly, CRC’s reach extends beyond the control and destruction of Black and Indigenous bodies; it facilitates the ingestion of Blackness and Indigeneity themselves for capitalist consumption.

Authors

• Zaina Shams, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

• Christopher Rogers, California State University-Sacramento