Driving force
Racial Capitalism (Profit)
The pursuit of profit as the engine of slavery, sharecropping, and prison labor.
On the timeline
Resources
A landmark essay connecting slavery, redlining, and the wealth gap.
Slavery and the making of American capitalism.
How plantation accounting shaped modern American capitalism.
How Louisiana sugar slavery connects to the modern American diet.
Debt-collection judgments concentrate in Black neighborhoods even at the same income.
How federal policy stripped a million Black families of millions of acres.
How race is woven through the U.S. tax system.
Heirs' property — the legal mechanism behind a staggering loss of Black-owned land.
Mass-grave searches and the present-day reparations fight over the 1921 massacre.
California's pivot from cash reparations to Black landownership and climate justice.
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations — the links rarely drawn together.
- profited from·ThreadConvict Leasing & Debt Peonage
After emancipation, the same profit motive re-enslaved Black men through the courts.
- enabled (incoming)·ThreadThe Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Atlantic trade financed the merchants, banks, insurers, and ports of a rising capitalist economy on both sides of the ocean.
- connects to (incoming)·ThreadGreed — The Root
Racial capitalism is greed institutionalized — an economy that assigns value, and extracts it, by race.
- enabled·ThreadChattel Slavery
Slavery was, above all, an engine of profit.
- documented by (incoming)·ArticleThe Tulsa Race Massacre
Greenwood's destruction shows how Black wealth was violently targeted.