The Political Economy of Racial Capitalism in the United States

This article summarizes recent scholarship on racial capitalism with an eye toward highlighting the opportunities the lens poses for the field of American political economy. It reviews the origins and evolution of the construct as well as its contemporary developments and critiques. It highlights three areas of generative dialogue between scholarship working at the intersection of racial capitalism and American political economy: first, surrounding the value of studying the political economy through a relational lens; second, involving how mid-range theoretical tools can generate more insights into specific institutional constraints and questions of agency, contingency, and change; and third, how deeper engagement between the two can productively reorient assessments of inequality in American democracy.