Research Initiative at UC Davis Asks ‘Can there be capitalism without racism?’
“one of the most enduring and controversial debates”
Is this just another academic project designed to steer people towards socialism?
Campus Reform reports:
Researchers ask: ‘Can there be capitalism without racism?’
The University of California-Davis Humanities Institute is running a multi-year research initiative regarding “Racial Capitalism,” but has yet to actually define the term.
The program is one of four ongoing “Mellon Research Initiatives” at UC-Davis sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, each of which receives “a generous multi-year funding package that supports a two-year postdoctoral fellow, three years of event programming, and recruitment and research awards for graduate students,” according to the university.
The initiative was originally launched in Fall of 2017, but the UC-Davis Humanities Institute has highlighted it as a main focus of research this year.
“The historical relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial debates in U.S. historiography,” according to the initiative’s website.
“Sometimes explicitly, often only implicitly acknowledged, it shapes fundamental questions about inequality, value, life, bondage, and freedom, among others, across the disciplines of race and ethnic studies, history, literary studies, law, economics, sociology, and anthropology,” the description continues.
The initiative’s launch event last year sought to define the term “racial capitalism,” posing questions such as “Can there be capitalism without racism?” “Which came first, capitalism or racism?” “Is capitalism always racial?” and “Why is thinking about race and capitalism together important today?”
Other events hosted or scheduled by the initiative so far focus on topics such as “Asian Socialism, Magical Realism,” “Anthropology of Marxism,” “Dispossession by Administration: The Open Secret of Racial Capitalist Violence,” and “Racial Capitalism and U.S. Empire.”
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Comments
Can there be socialism without tyranny? (Hint: No)
Demonstrating that an increase in “education” can at least in some cases be accompanied by a corresponding decrease in intelligence.
If there is a lesson here it is that money is entirely fungible; thus, money a business earns by supplying goods and services to racial minorities works and spends exactly as well as any other money.
It’s true that if one posits a very deeply racist society than sales to racial minorities might negatively impact sales to the majority. But, do these geniuses have any evidence at all that this applies to any contemporary business?