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More than 400 years have passed since the first white colonists arrived in North America to establish a settlement, and more than 160 years since slavery was abolished, yet structural racism is still alive and kicking in the U.S. In the interview that follows, two economists, Michele Holder and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, co-authors of a new book titled The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States, discuss how anti-Black racism developed and the role that it continues to play in the contemporary United States. Michelle Holder is professor of economics at the City University of New York’s John Jay College, and Jeannette Wicks-Lim is research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

C. J. Polychroniou: Systemic racism has shaped the history of the United States. That’s a well-documented fact despite current attempts by President Donald Trump and his political acolytes to whitewash U.S. history. In that context, the publication of your new co-authored book The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States could not have come at a better time. It examines how anti-Black racism in particular developed and sheds light on how it works to promote the interests of a politically dominant social group. May I start by asking one of you to discuss the construction of race in the United States? Also, does it differ from other case studies of racism?

Jeannette Wicks-Lim: I really appreciate this question because it gets at a key takeaway of our book: that race is a social construction. What we mean by this is that race is only loosely — and inconsistently — related to superficial biological markers such as skin tone and hair color, and that its real meaning comes from how society uses it to put people into different social groups. Really, the entirety of the book is our effort to explain the political and economic rationale for why the nation we live in — the U.S. — chose, and continues to choose, to organize itself around this social concept, “race,” and anti-Black racism, in particular.

That’s why we dive right away, in Chapter 2, into tracing how the concept of race developed out of political and economic choices made by English colonists of the “New World,” starting in the 17th century. In particular, they made the choice to enslave people from Africa. We document how these colonists turned to enslaving people because they couldn’t get free workers or indentured servants to do the type of grueling labor that the colonists wanted for their commercial enterprises. And, to maintain their practice of enslaving people, the colonists withheld virtually any legal rights from the primary supply of people colonists had access to enslave: people from Africa. Colonists also supported this practice by imbuing profound meaning to superficial physical differences between African and English people, and attached this meaning to the concept, “race.” In other words, race developed into a crucial social marker for the legal status of slave — a legal status that this society maintained for more than 200 years.

In terms of your second question — I want to steer it in a somewhat different direction because my knowledge of how racism operates outside the U.S. is thin. Instead, I want to talk about different types of racism within the U.S. Take, for example, racism and Asian Americans — a topic I’m exploring in current research. The premise of my research is that while racism may operate for, or against, different groups in different ways, it serves the same purpose: it’s a political device that socially defined groups use to influence how economic, political, and social advantages and disadvantages in a society are created and doled out. I would expect this basic feature of racism to be the same in case studies of other countries. How racial groups are defined, characterized, and positioned in a country’s social hierarchy, on the other hand, are ways I would expect racism to differ across countries.

Black Disenfranchisement Has Not Been This Intense Since Jim Crow

My thinking reflects the basic tenets of stratification economics — a relatively new approach in economics. In a nutshell, stratification economics examines how social groups compete with each other in order to gain greater access to social, political, and especially, economic resources — that is, to achieve favored positions in a social hierarchy.

Do you understand the particular brand........

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