What Is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?

Robin D. G. Kelley discusses the genesis of the concept of racial capitalism and the important contributions that scholar Cedric Robinson made to understanding race and the making of the global capitalist order over the course of the last 700 years. Kelley then turns to a meditation on fascism, not as an aberration but as a direct outgrowth of modern racial capitalism, and reflects on what all of this means now.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012), Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009), and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002). His research has explored the history of social movements in the US, the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music; visual culture; contemporary urban studies; historiography and historical theory; poverty studies and ethnography; colonialism/imperialism; organized labor; constructions of race; Surrealism, Marxism, nationalism, among other things.

This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities is part of “Capitalism and Comparative Racialization,” a 2017-2018 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sponsored by the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality & Race (WISIR), Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.