Introduction

Racial capitalism and student debt in the U.S.

“…The last several years have served up an extraordinary amount of scholarship on the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Prominent books such as Schermerhorn’s (2015) The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism , 1815 –1860 , Baptist’s (2014) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism ; and Rosenthal’s (2018) Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management have forcefully demonstrated that American capitalism was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and their descendants. This wealth of recent scholarship draws upon earlier pioneering works of Black historians such as Williams (1944: vii) whose book Capitalism and Slavery sought to “place in historical perspective the relationship between early capitalism.…”

The Crises of Racial Capitalism

“…In a recent work “Capital and Ideology,” Piketty (2020: 6) demonstrates how “political and property regimes have remained inextricably intertwined from premodern ternary and slave societies to modern postcolonial and hypercapitalist ones, including, along the way, the communist and social-democratic societies that arose in reaction to the crises of inequality and identity that ownership society provoked.” Gilmore’s (2021) book “Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition” lays out the process through which the carceral state prosecutes and imprisons millions of Black Americans in the services of racial capitalism. Similarly, a steady stream of recent books (Baptist, 2014; Beckert, 2014; Rosenthal, 2018; Rothstein, 2017; Schermerhorn, 2015; Taylor, 2019; Wilkerson, 2020) have used the framework of racial capitalism to trace the histories of slavery, colonialism, empire and enclosure as well as those of containment, incarceration, ghettoization, and underdevelopment, and their strong links with capitalist development.…”