Over 160 Years After Abolition, Anti-Black Racism Still Structures U.S. Economy

In an interview with C.J. Polychroniou, PERI researcher Jeannette Wicks-Lim and coauthor Michele Holder discuss their new book The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States, which examines how anti-Black racism developed in the U.S. and sheds light on how it works to promote the interests of a politically dominant social group.

“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.”