Racial Capitalism and an Arizona Mining Company

The past several months, I’ve been thinking a lot about racial capitalism. Invented by Cedric Robinson, the phrase “racial capitalism” refers to the wedding of economic and racialization practices throughout capitalism’s entire history.

While reviewing my notes for my book on critical race theory, I came across a strikingly explicit discussion of racial capitalism in an 1863 text by Arizona mine owner Sylvester Mowry. He writes:

The question of labor is one which commends itself to the attention of the capitalist: cheap, and under proper management, efficient and permanent. My own experience has taught me that the lower class of Mexicans, with the Opata and Yaqui Indians, are docile, faithful, good servants, capable of strong attachments when firmly and kindly treated. They have been “peons” [servants] for generations. They will always remain so, as it is their natural condition.

The U.S. seized annexed Arizona in 1848 through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Fifteen years later, self-identified Anglos such as Mowry are eager to share with other Anglos about how they are maximizing their profits through close attention to which non-white workers—in this case, Mexican or Indigenous—are cheapest and most efficient.

Do you see the linking of whiteness with economic power and non-whiteness with servitude? Do you see the racist use of “benevolence” for white economic self-interest? How about the attention to the efficiency that comes with white management? Does this remind you of antebellum discussions of racialized chattel slavery? Do you see how this passage, like those swapped between antebellum slaveholders, is an effort to build white solidarity?

We can’t understand historic racialized wealth gaps if we don’t understand the racial capitalist value-gap that undergirds them.