The anti-Blackness of global capital

Abstract

This paper seeks to offer a new perspective on the interrelated questions of globalized capitalism and anti-Blackness. We engage with current geographical work on the question of Blackness, highlighting the ways in which prevailing forms of global capital accumulation—which take shape in numerous spatial and political practices around the world—coincide with acts of anti-Blackness. In recognizing the connections between capitalism and anti-Black violence, however, we choose not to frame anti-Blackness as an effect of capitalist relations. Rather, we insist that anti-Blackness remains a necessary precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism, as the perpetual expansion of capitalist practices requires “empty” spaces open for appropriation—a condition made possible through the modern assumption of Black a-spatiality. Drawing on theoretical discussions of both global capital and anti-Blackness, empirical examples of shifting global spatial-racial regimes, and the discursive and material practices of Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and the Afro-Brazilian community Ilha de Maré, this paper attempts to forge new geographical conversations regarding current capitalist practices and the matter of Black lives.

Cumulative Dehumanization in Everyday Policing: The Psychological, Affective, and Material Consequences of Discretionary Arrests

“…Yet, as he noted, more money has instead been funneled into police surveillance and an increase in patrol officers who further criminalize community members. And as low‐income communities of color are continuously perceived as both in need of surveillance and open to occupation, anti‐blackness and the criminalization of poverty move and regulate populations (Ashley & Billies, ) to fuel new forms of capital accumulation (Bledsoe & Wright, ).…”

“…Furthermore, racialized, affective bodies become material rhetoric with economic and political power (Ahmed, ); as people of color are perceived in space, they are not only seen, but also “felt” (Puar, ). These feelings—inherited from the racial logics of slavery and informed by persistent hierarchical racial conceptions of humanity—can then incite dehumanizing processes, as the (feared) racialized body materializes as an economic force regulated by state policing (Bledsoe & Wright, ; Puar, ). As dehumanization is enacted, the everyday surveillance and policing of bodies then reveal how interwoven forms of material dispossession accumulate throughout an individual life and across many lives within low‐income communities of color.…”

Rethinking geographies of race and austerity urbanism

“…Similarly, Bledsoe and Wright () go further in their work on racial capitalism to illuminate how anti‐Blackness in fact conditions the realization of capitalist reproduction. They suggest that capitalism's recent round of accumulation requires “spaces that were once marginal or peripheral to the perpetuation of capital accumulation becomes sites of appropriation precisely because the (Black) populations occupying them receive no recognition as viable spatial actors” (p. 13).…”

“…Looking at the financialization of racial property regimes, Bonds (2019) Austerity urbanism, then, needs to be understood as a governance strategy used to facilitate such practices that rely on the ever-present logics of anti-Blackness. To understand race working as a process, both Bonds (2019) and Bledsoe and Wright (2019) show the ways in which anti-Blackness works as a precondition for capitalism allowing it to constantly renew itself by associating spaces with Back populations as open for dispossession, occupation, and appropriation.…”

Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland,CA

“…As Lisa Marie Cacho (), along with Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva (2013) argue, race is the sine qua non of rightlessness and dispossession in the spatial politics of US cities—including, we would add, those forms commonly categorised as “gentrification”. Under US racial capitalism, then, racialisation is the prerequisite, as well as the result, of profit‐driven modes of urban “renewal” and removal (Bledsoe and Wright ).…”