Causal Mechanisms in a Racialized Political Economy

• In Event: Racial Capitalism and Urban Politics

Abstract

Despite a surge in scholarly attention to the concept of racial capitalism (Robinson 1981; Jenkins and Leroy 2021), political scientists have been relatively slow to engage directly with this literature and its core premises (though see Fortner 2023). Other social scientists have skeptically engaged the concept of racial capitalism through highlighting issues of conceptual clarity, measurement, and mechanisms (Go 2020; Ralph and Singal 2019; Wacquant 2023). In this paper we extend extant work on causal mechanisms (including policy feedback and increasing returns) to the study of material racial inequality and racialized resource extraction. We argue that integration of such mechanisms into our analysis of these topics can help us to better identify political configurations and policy features contributing to variation and change. We then apply this mechanistic approach to examining the historical development of spatial inequality, a site where historical processes of racialization and marketization have concretely converged.

Authors

• Chloe Thurston, Northwestern University

• Molly Schiffer, Northwestern University