Introduction: Special Issue on Racial Capitalism and Law

Racial capitalism is a conceptual framework that illuminates the relationship between race and class in the global economy. The concept of racial capitalism has spawned a vast interdisciplinary literature reflecting multiple theoretical perspectives on the various ways that race and class (along with gender, disability, and other markers of identity) are structurally imbricated and consign humans to different roles in the capitalist world economy in order to generate wealth and profit for a transnational capitalist class dominated by Euro-descendent elites. This article introduces a special issue on racial capitalism and the law published in the Journal of Law and Political Economy. Our goal as editors and contributors is to participate in the ongoing development of the theory of racial capitalism (including intersectional approaches that address gender inequality) and to highlight, with concrete examples, the ways that law and legal institutions shape, justify, and naturalize the injustices that racial capitalism creates. This introduction briefly describes the papers in this special issue and the contributions they make to our understanding of racial capitalism and the law, including property, real estate, labor, immigration, housing, antitrust, trade, investment, environmental, antidiscrimination, criminal, and corporate law – as well as foundational principles of international law (such as sovereignty).  We believe that the concept of racial capitalism is a promising area for legal scholarship, and we hope that this special issue will inspire more legal scholars to engage with the interdisciplinary literature on this topic.