Globalization and racialization.

• Author: Marable, Manning
• Position: Black Struggles for Justice - Essay

In 1900, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that the "problem of the twentieth century" would be the "problem of the color line," the unequal relationship between the lighter vs. darker races of humankind. Although Du Bois was primarily focused on the racial contradiction of the United States, he was fully aware that the processes of what we call "racialization" today--the construction of racially unequal social hierarchies characterized by dominant and subordinate social relations between groups--was an international and global problem. Du Bois's color line included not just the racially segregated, Jim Crow South and the racial oppression of South Africa but also British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial domination in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean among indigenous populations.

Building on Du Bois's insights, we can therefore say that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of global apartheid: the racialized division and stratification of resources, wealth, and power that separates Europe, North America, and Japan from the billions of mostly black, brown, indigenous, undocumented immigrant and poor people across the planet.

Inside the United States, the processes of global apartheid are best represented by what I call the New Racial Domain. This New Racial Domain is different from other, earlier forms of racial domination, such as slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and ghettoization, or strict residential segregation, in several critical respects. These earlier racial formations or domains were grounded or based primarily, if not exclusively, in the political economy of US capitalism. Anti-racist or oppositional movements that blacks, other people of color and white anti-racists built were largely predicated upon the confines or realities of domestic markets and the policies of the US nation-state. Meaningful social reforms such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were debated almost entirely within the context of America's expanding domestic economy and a background of Keynesian, welfare state public policies.

The political economy of the "New Racial Domain," by contrast, is driven and largely determined by the forces of transnational capitalism and the public policies of state neoliberalism. From the vantage point of the most oppressed US populations, the New Racial Domain rests on an unholy trinity, or deadly triad, of structural barriers to a decent life. These oppressive structures are mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disfranchisement. Each factor directly feeds and accelerates the others, creating an ever-widening circle of social disadvantage, poverty, and civil death, touching the lives of tens of millions of US people.

The process begins at the point of production. For decades, US corporations have been outsourcing millions of better-paying jobs. With whole US urban neighborhoods losing virtually their entire economic, manufacturing and industrial employment, and with neoliberal social policies in place cutting job training programs, welfare, and public housing, millions of Americans now...