August 3, 1999

Racism Explained

Racism is a function and entailment of dominative modes of economic production, but it could not come into its own until the economy required the expansion of markets. Markets must expand into other geographical regions, of course, and evolution has seen to it that people adapt phenotypically to their different environments, resulting in people looking different from one another. What was simply the dismissal as inferior, combined with fear of conquest by those “inferiors” or “barbarians” in the ancient world, was now the definitely measurable technological superiority, technological superiority being shorthand for killpower. Killpower conquered the world under the sign of capital, and because of previously indifferent evolutionary developments, the subordination of the different geographical regions took on the aspect of a color thing. Geography—vast expanses and natural barriers—is, after all, what initially allowed ignorance of people who look different precisely because of that geography. It is obvious that slavery in the Americas was primarily an economic condition—what is slavery but a purely economic relationship?—, but, then again, what was it which allowed American slavery so quickly to take on a racism component? Just the geographical origin, and therefore the phenotypic variation of the enslaved from the enslavers. This is how what we call race, almost purely a function of geography, becomes a proxy—albeit one-way, toward exploitation, and hardly ever toward liberation—for the economic oppressions under which humans live.

racism