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Racial Capitalism Decoupled: A Rejoinder and Reformulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2023

Loïc Wacquant
Loïc Wacquant*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley – Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, Paris [loic@berkeley.edu].
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Abstract

I respond to the reactions of Gurminder Bhambra, John Holmwood, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam to my dissection of the concept of “racial capitalism.” I reiterate my critique of the latter on grounds of semantics, logics, and heuristics. I warn that racial capitalism erases historical variations, interludes, and contingencies to replace them with monolithic depiction and mechanical necessity. We cannot assume that racial division, colonial or metropolitan, is functional to capitalism across all lands and epochs. We need to recognize and theorize the varieties of regimes of racial domination, anchored by the ideal-typical distinction between “genuine race-divided societies” and “societies with race,” much as comparative political economists have taught us to dig into the varieties of capitalism. Combining these two dimensions serves us well to decouple capitalism and race analytically so that their historical conjunction may be studied empirically.

Keywords

Racial CapitalismRaceColonialismEpistemologyHistoryIdeal Type
Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , August 2023 , pp. 183 - 193
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of European Journal of Sociology

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References

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