Capitalism vs. Racism: Is Racism Inevitable in a Capitalist System?

Introduction
Racism is a human condition—not an economic one, even though it is often demonstrated in economic terms. For instance, in the US, the percentage of the population that lives in poverty is skewed heavily towards minorities (KFF, 2019). And because the US has a capitalist economic system, people are quick to argue that capitalism itself is racist. However, this would be a very superficial analysis of the actual situation. Many of the policies implemented in the US at the governmental level are responsible for the impoverishment of minorities; it actually has nothing to do with capitalism (Prins, 2020). In fact, in other parts of the world, such as China—which is decidedly not a capitalistic country but rather a Communist one—racism is also a problem, what with the Muslim Uyghurs being incarcerated in re-education camps en masse (Klett, 2019). In the US, black activists like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. King have all advocated for black entrepreneurship—which would not be possible were it not for a capitalistic economic system (Clay Jr & Jones, 2008). It is not capitalism that causes racism; instead, it is racist ideology that those who influence systems often hold that leads to racism. This paper will show how it is not capitalism that is to blame for racism, but harmful ideologies and thoughtless/racist policymakers that perpetuate racism.
The Argument that Capitalism is Racist
The argument that capitalism is racist typically begins with the arrival of slavery in the New World. It is argued that slave owners were capitalists who wanted to exploit the labor of the enslaved. Thus, capitalism is racist. The argument goes on to claim that even after slavery was abolished, racist laws continued, such as segregation and the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. It shows that until the Civil Rights Movement, blacks still had no equality in the capitalist system.
The argument is further advanced by activists like Angela Davis, who has pointed to the prison industrial complex and the disproportionate amount of blacks who are incarcerated and put to work for pennies on the dollar for American corporations for what essentially is a new modern-day plantation system (Davis & Shaylor, 2020). The problem is not capitalism, per se, however. The problem is people who want to exploit others. And that happens in other economic systems as well.
Capitalism is Not Really Racist
To some degree it is not even fair to say that America truly has a capitalist system any longer. A capitalist system is one in which capital is put to use in a free market. Today’s world of finance capitalism is much different, and the market is hardly free (how can it be called free when much of it is permitted to be locked down by government in the face of a flu?). Today’s economic system in the US is very mixed and resembles more and more a command economy like that seen in the Soviet era, where central planners essentially set prices for commodities (this is certainly the case for oil) and regularly intervene in the markets to keep them from crashing (and this is certainly the case with the Federal Reserve, which is still intervening to the tune of billions of dollars every day to prop up markets) (New York Fed, 2020).
Racism exists in the Communist system of China, too, which should be seen as further evidence that racism can be found in any economic system where the leaders of that system have a racist inclination towards another population. This is certainly the case in China where the Chinese rulers have enacted genocidal policies towards the Muslim Uyghur population (Klett, 2019). Communism is supposed to be about sharing all property and engendering equality—but the Muslim Uyghur population in China is treated as though they were an enemy population. It is really no different from what was seen in the Soviet economic system in Russia under Stalin: any person who criticized the State was sent to the Gulag, Russia’s prison camp system that incarcerated millions for thought-crimes (Solzehnitsyn, 2018). The same is found in other parts of the world, such as South Africa, where revolutions prompted racist atrocities of one population against another. In Zimbabwe, this was the case as white landowners were thrown off their land by revolutionary black Communists—even though the white landowners had treated blacks in their community with great charity by giving them schools and economic opportunities that the Communist government that took over would always promise but never deliver (Mike Campbell Foundation, 2012). If anything, Communist dictators have shown themselves to be just as inherently racist as dictators and tyrants trying to push their weight around in capitalist societies.
It is not capitalism that is racist—it is people who are racist. Capitalism attracts people because it affords them the opportunity to put their skills and talents to work in the free market; it gives them the chance to make something of themselves. Problems have arisen in the past in the US when minorities have attempted to do just that and the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) Establishment has taken issue with it. Indeed, the WASP Establishment in the US has always taken issue with minorities and ethnicities outside its own group (Jones, 2000). The idea of “Manifest Destiny” was central to the vision and ideology of the WASP Establishment that pushed for more land and more control over various populations—from the Native Americans who were kicked off their land in the East to the Mexicans who had their land taken from them in the Southwest (D’Emilio, 2017).
When left alone, i.e., when not controlled by racist WASP elitists, the capitalist system actually encouraged and promoted minority development and economic opportunity for various ethnicities. Booker T. Washington and Du Bois both saw it as an opportunity for blacks who had been freed from slavery (Clay Jr & Jones, 2008). The problem they saw was that the racist elitists controlling the system tried to enact laws that would continue to prevent blacks from accessing the capitalist markets. It was not the system itself that was racist—it was the elitists who saw minorities as a threat to their power.
It was the same with ethnic Europeans, such as Catholic immigrants. The WASP Establishment saw them as a great threat to their political and economic power, and the whole of the 19th and 20th centuries is something of a struggle between the WASP elites and the various ethnic groups rising up in the US because of their accomplishments within the capitalist system. When capitalist is not hijacked by racist elites, it presents others with opportunities. Yet when it is hijacked—as it certainly was in 2020—people blame the capitalist system instead of the hijackers. It is much like the way people blame guns for violence when it is the people who use the guns who are to blame. After all, consider how many gun owners there are in America compared to the small percentage of those who use guns illegally. Most violent gun crime is attributed to gang members who do not even purchase their guns legally. It is the people who are to blame whenever there is a moral question because morality is concerned with human behavior—not systems. Ethics is concerned with systems, and ethically speaking there is nothing innately unethical about capitalism—other than that it tends to promote materialism—but it is not atheistic the way communism is.
Conclusion
Blaming capitalism for racism is an easy scapegoat for some who do not want to actually engage in any critical thinking. Critical thinking involves gathering all the relevant information and using it to come to an informed conclusion. It requires effort, hard work and research. People tend to prefer to engage in labeling, because it allows them to bypass thought. If they can slap a label on something they can avoid having to think about it because they have already made up in their own mind that the label means this or that. This is what they do when they slap the racist label on capitalism. They don’t actually stop to think about what they are saying when they make these declarations. If they did, they would see the absurdity of it. A system might be unethical, but it is people who are immoral. Racism is immoral. People are racist. Capitalism is simply an economic system that allows people to access the free market so that they can apply their own talents, trade, and skills and capital to compete for business among others. If the community in which they are trying to do this is full of racist community leaders who do not want to allow certain groups access to the free market, that would be racism—but it has nothing to do with capitalism. Thus, one can see that even though this behavior has occurred in America, it has also occurred in China, in Russia, in Africa, and in any other country where one group in power has sought to keep another group from having access to the markets. It is simple as that.
References
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