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Protection rent is a helpful concept for understanding the role of violence in the racialized stratification of wealth accumulation. In the USA, persons institutionally classified as white have faced lower prices for protection from violence than have persons classified as non-white. Thus, whites have received protection rents that have systematically increased their accumulated wealth. Historian of medieval Venice, Frederic Lane created the concept of protection rent to describe the economic advantage that some economic actors enjoyed over others as a result of paying a lower price for protection from the purveyor of force with which they were aligned. This article applies Lane’s concept of protection rent to the variable cost of protection faced by economic actors in the USA, where racialization is associated with significant differences in wealth accumulation.