How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America

Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society

Manning Marable

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781608465118
• eBook ISBN: 9781608465125
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

" How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is one of those paradigm-shifting, life-changing texts that has not lost its currency or relevance—even after three decades. Its provocative treatise on the ravages of late capitalism, state violence, incarceration, and patriarchy on the life chances and struggles of black working-class men and women shaped an entire generation, directing our energies to the terrain of the prison-industrial complex, anti-racist work, labor organizing, alternatives to racial capitalism, and challenging patriarchy—personally and politically."—Robin D. G. Kelley

"In this new edition of his classic text... Marable can challenge a new generation to find solutions to the problems that constrain the present but not our potential to seek and define a better future."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"[A] prescient analysis."—Michael Eric Dyson

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is a classic study of the intersection of racism and class in the United States. It has become a standard text for courses in American politics and history, and has been central to the education of thousands of political activists since the 1980s. This edition is prsented with a new foreword by Leith Mullings.

Endnotes

Foreword: How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and Beyond

1. Justin Wolfers with David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, “1.5 Million Missing Black Men,” New York Times, April 20, 2015.

2. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1972).

3. Eric E.Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

4. Lawrence D. Bobo, “Somewhere between Jim Crow and Post-Racialism: Reflections of the Racial Divide in America Today,” Daedalus 140, no. 2 (2011): 14. See also Carmen DeNavas-Walt and Bernadette D. Proctor, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2014), 60–249.

5. Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (2011): 215–18.

6. Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al. 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013).

7. Chris Cillizza, “How Citizens United Changed Politics, in 7 Charts,” Washington Post, January 22, 2014; Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 588 U.S. 50 (2010).

8. Khalilah Brown-Dean, with Zoltan Hajnal, Christina Rivers and Ismail White, 50 Years of the Voting Rights Act: The State of Race in Politics (Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2015).

9. Bobo, “Somewhere between Jim Crow,” 11.

10. U.S. Census Bureau, “A Half Century of Learning: Historical Census Statistics on Educational Attainment in the United States, 1940 to 2000,” Table 11 and Table 12, 2000, http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/census/half-century/tables.html (accessed June 2, 2015).

11. DeNavas-Walt and Proctor, Income and Poverty.

12. U.S. Census Bureau 2013 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Table 1: Median Value Assets for Households. (accessed July 2, 2015).

13. Thomas Gage, “Poverty in the United States: 2013,” States Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, CRS Report RL33069 (Washington, DC: Office of Congressional Information and Publishing, September 25, 2014).

14. DeNavas-Walt and Proctor, Income and Poverty.

15. Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry, Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines since End of Great Recession (Pew Research Center, December 12, 2014).

16. Hall, Matthew, Kyle Crowder and Amy Spring, “Neighborhood Foreclosures, Racial/Ethnic Transitions, and Residential Segregation,” American Sociological Review 80, no. 3 (2015): 526–49.

17. The Sentencing Project, “Facts About Prisons and People in Prison,” The Sentencing Project, January 2014, http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Facts%20About%20Prisons.pdf (accessed June 3, 2015).

18. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

19. Marc Mauer and Nazgol Ghandnoosh, “Incorporating Racial Equity into Criminal Justice Reform,” The Sentencing Project, October 2014.

20. Ann E. Carson, “Prisoners in 2013,” US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, September 30, 2014.

21. Drug Policy Alliance, The Drug War, Mass Incarceration and Race, June 2015.

22. United States Sentencing Commission, “Report on the Continuing Impact of United States v. Booker on Federal Sentencing,” December 2012.

23. Vera Institute of Justice, A Prosecutor’s Guide for Advancing Racial Equity (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2014), 17.

24. Andrea Morrell, “Municipal Welfare or Carceral Reindustrialization: Thinking Through the 1980’s Rust Belt Prison Boom,” Paper presented at the Meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of North America, John Jay College CUNY, April 2015.

25. Leith Mullings, “Losing Ground: Harlem, the ‘War on Drugs’ and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 5, no. 2 (2002): 22–41. 2005

26. United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, March 4, 2015.

27. Human Rights Watch, Profiting from Probation: America’s “Offender-Funded” Probation Industry, February 2, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/05/profiting-probation/americas-offender-funded-probation-industry.

28. Brent Staples, “The Ferguson Nightmare,” New York Times, March 5, 2015.

29. Heidi Beirich, “Anti-Black Hate Crimes Rise, Data Remains Flawed,” Southern Poverty Law Center, November 24, 2009.

30. Kevin Johnson, “Police Killings Highest in Two Decades,” USA Today, November 11, 2014.

31. Kimberly Kindy, Julies Tate, Jennifer Jenkins, Steven Rich, Keith L. Alexander and Wesley Lowery, “Fatal Police Shootings in 2015 Approaching 400 Nationwide,” Washington Post, May 30, 2015.

32. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Why We Won’t Wait: Resisting the War Against the Black and Brown Underclass,” CounterPunch, November 25, 2014.

33. Protests have had some results. Dunn was sentenced to life in prison and Wafer was sentenced to prison for second-degree murder and manslaughter.

34. Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), 3–10; William Patterson, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People (New York: International Publishers, 1970).

35. Human Rights Council, “Draft Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: United States of America,” Twenty-second session, Geneva, May 4, 2015.

36. Marx, Karl [1886] “Theses on Feuerbach,” Appendix in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Marx-Engels Internet Archive, 1994, 65, https://www.marxists
.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ (accessed July 3, 2015).

37. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., [2000] Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, an African-American Anthology, 2nd rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 59.

38. Cited in ibid., 595­–99.

39. Salih Booker and William Minter, “Global Apartheid: The Concept Captures Fundamental Characteristics of Today’s World Order,” Nation, June 21, 2001.

40. Manning Marable, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come . . . Whites Have an Obligation to Recognize Slavery’s Legacy,” Newsweek, August 27, 2001.

41. Zaheer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Foreword by Leith Mullings
• How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: A Critical Reassessment
• Preface
• Introduction to the First Edition
• SECTION ONE. THE BLACK MAJORITY: THE DOMESTIC PERIPHERY
• SECTION TWO. THE BLACK ELITE: THE DOMESTIC CORE
• SECTION THREE. A QUESTION OF GENOCIDE
• Endnotes
• Tables
• About the Author