Race or Class? Sociological Theory and Racial Capitalism

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Five: Racial Experiences and Perspectives of Black People and African Americans

Abstract

Sociologists do not need to look far to find Southern Theory. This paper examines the critique of the term ‘racial capitalism,’ used increasingly in scholarship and activism in recent years, finding that critics fail to understand the race concept. Marginalized theories from the coloniality of power or Latin American Subaltern Studies, Black feminist intersectionality, Du Boisian sociology and structural racism, and Indigenous studies of settler colonialism provide understanding and analytics to apprehend the colonial modern world. Sociology’s Southern Theory is then applied to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to show how understanding racial capitalism changes how we read a classic. Racial capitalism can function as a heuristic device to understand today’s global White supremacy, national structural racism, and what have been called ‘culture wars,’ illuminating and exposing the connections between race, gender, and capitalism as systems of domination and subordination co-constituted through the coloniality of power.

Author

• Camille Petersen, The University of Tennessee