How did anti-Black racism build this country, and how does it still organize it? This theme draws on the Black radical tradition, the long history of racial slavery and its afterlives, the invention of whiteness against Black people, and contemporary work on how race distributes life chances. It treats race not as separate from class but as one of the ways capitalism has always worked. Its mechanism is property and labor: a color line drawn to justify owning people, then maintained through convict leasing, redlining, and the prison. It builds on How Capitalism Works and on the racial division of labor opened in Labor, Work, and Organizing.
Race in the United States was not made by one machine. This theme is one of a pair, and it is deliberately not the whole story. Its companion, Immigration and the Making of Race, follows the other mechanism: the border and naturalization law deciding who is allowed to become American, letting whiteness expand to absorb the Irish, Jews, and Italians while fixing Asians and Latinos as permanently foreign. The two are relational, not separate systems. The model minority was manufactured as a weapon against Black claims; the racial scripts written for Black people were lifted and reapplied to everyone who came after. Read either theme alone and you will get the mechanism right and the country wrong.
How to use this theme
This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.
- Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
- Historical: How did this come to be?
- Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
- Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
- Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?
A session does not need to use all five lenses. A study circle may move across them. Use what serves the room.
Anchor questions
These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script. Take the ones that fit the room and leave the rest.
- When you first learned you had a race, how did you learn it, and what did it mean?
- Who in your world does the hardest and worst-paid work? Does it break down by race, and how did that come to be?
- What do you know about where your family’s opportunities, or lack of them, came from? Was race part of that story?
- When people say race is “natural,” what would it mean to say it was made? Who made it, and what for?
- Have you seen race used to divide people who otherwise share the same interests? How did it work?
- What has your community survived, and how? Who led?
- What would justice actually require, not just less racism, but what?
Recommended sequences
Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document). This theme surfaces painful material; give the experiential work real time and hold the room with care.
Single-session entry point (2 hours). Start experiential: when and how did people first learn their own race, and where have they felt it shape how they were treated. Watch a short explainer together (act.tv’s four-minute Systemic Racism Explained). Read a few pages of Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors or the Combahee River Collective Statement aloud. Close by returning to the opening question with what has shifted. See the single-session template.
Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential and framing (what do we already know about race in our own lives; what are we studying and why). Week 2 historical: how race and whiteness were made, using Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and the invention-of-whiteness readings, with Slavery by Another Name. Weeks 3 to 4 theoretical: racial capitalism, the wages of whiteness, and racecraft, reading Robinson and Roediger with the Seeing White podcast as companion. Week 5 practical: racial capitalism today, using 13th, the abolitionist toolkits, and the racial wealth gap material. Week 6 liberatory: what liberation requires, staging the debates over nationalism versus coalition and over reparations. See the six-week template.
Weekend intensive. Compress the arc above into a Friday-evening-through-Sunday structure, with the historical and theoretical work on Saturday and the practical and liberatory work on Sunday. A screening of 13th or I Am Not Your Negro works well as a Saturday-evening anchor. See the weekend-intensive template.
Related themes
This theme connects closely to several others:
- How Capitalism Works establishes the slavery and capitalism link that this theme develops into a full analysis of racial capitalism.
- Labor, Work, and Organizing shares the analysis of how the working class was divided by race, from the wages of whiteness to interracial unionism.
- Gender, Reproduction, and the Household meets this theme in Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective’s account of interlocking oppressions.
- Imperialism and the Global System extends the analysis outward through Fanon, anticolonial revolution, and the global color line.
- The State, Strategy, and Power takes up the police, the prison, and the carceral state that the abolition strand confronts.
- Socialism and National Liberation carries Fanon, Rodney, Cabral, and the Pan-African tradition into the building of postcolonial states.
Status
First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.