Is Racism Global?

I have only a short contribution to make. I offer praise to Dunaway and Clelland for taking on this important subject; especially for those of us in the United States who need to have a more comparative, more global and historical perspective on race and racism. But I am far from convinced by their argument.

The title question, "Is Racism Global?" answers itself. Speaking of historical perspect ives, it is important to grasp that the onset of modernity and the global European empires, the rise of capitalism, AKA the modern world system, was a centuries-long process. A good Wallersteinian would recognize this. The creation of the modern world system was also a racist project. Wallerstein's project avowedly builds on Marx, including Marx's analysis in Capital I of "primitive accumulation:"

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation (Marx 1967: 351).

For Marx, primitive accumulation via empire was as basic to the rise of capitalism as was the enclosure movement. Empire was racialized by every ruling power, every "mother" country. Empire was a gendered enterprise too (Federici 2004); this is an important matter that I cannot address now, but that will not come as news to engaged scholars.

We know a lot today about how empire and metropole, core and periphery, influenced each other (Cooper and Stoler 1997). Techniques for recruiting and exploiting labor, for managing settlement and displacement of natives and peasants, for augmenting the encroachment of capitalism in the hinterlands (see also Luxemburg, 2003 [1913])-these are also Wallerstein's themes. Just as metropolitan capitalism learned from peripheral capitalism to characterize the English (and French, and Portuguese, etc.) lower classes as "lazy" and hypersexualized, so too did it introduce racial ideology into the metropole. This was hardly difficult, since enslaved and colonized subjects flowed back to London, Lisbon, Paris, and elsewhere along with the primary commodities they produced. Since racial slavery was the primary source of imperial wealth, racial ideology too...