Colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in the global economy: a review article

This article reviews two recent books on persistent inequalities in the global economy and the role of colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in explaining them. Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020) draw on the Black Radical Tradition and stratification economics respectively to challenge mainstream understandings of racial hierarchies. After first outlining the strengths and key insights of each book, the author discusses how they could be expanded in a more radical manner, along the lines of anti-colonial, decolonial and black Marxism. She argues that in order to understand how racial hierarchies are connected to the development of capitalism, further engagement with radical scholarship that sees race and class as co-constituted would be required.

Seeing Covid-19 Through a Subprime Crisis lens: How Structural and Institutional Racism Have Shaped 21st-Century Crises in the U.K. and the U.S.

This special issue aims to use historical examples to gain insight into the socio-economic impact of, and possibilities of recovery from, the Covid-19 pandemic for Black communities. We approach this question by comparing the impact of the pandemic on Black Britons in the United Kingdom with that of the 2008 subprime crisis on Black Americans. We find that, in both cases, a pattern of racially asymmetric losses and race-neutral policy responses that have systematically ignored the disparate losses borne by Black and racial/ethnic minority communities. Both patterns are manifestations of these countries’ institutional racism. Relying on insights from stratification economics and using the concept of “racial formation” introduced by Harold Baron in 1985, we show how these nations’ historical relationships to slavery and imperialism have led to different structures of racial control. Our review of U.K. government policy includes a critique of the March 2021 report of the U.K. Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.