Reading Thoughts and Notes
Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus Pandemic Inequities in the United States

• Fundamental cause of inequity – racial capitalism The Ghosts of Colonialism Are Haunting The World’s Response To The Pandemic, NPR
  • ” It’s remarkable what people will say and do when you’re part of the background.”

Summary
Parasitism is not the exceptional Compelling Points

• Parasitism of ideas, broad concepts, ideologies, compels us to conform
• Can sometimes kill the host

Implications
Can capitalism exist without a racial component? As pointed out in the readings, when one mechanism is destroyed, another takes its place. When slavery was destroyed, Jim Crow took its place. When civil rights triumphed, mass incarceration and the War on Drugs commenced. As marijuana is legalized and there are attempts to deracialize policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, perhaps healthcare inequities and gentrification will rise to the occasion of the systemic maintenance of a more stable hierarchy of power in the United States. There is a reason why Ayn Rand’s brand of pure libertarianism never rose to power. What we have instead is a conservatism rife with internal contradictions, corrupted principles that would make Rand flee to Russia in search of individual liberty. How did we get the military industrial complex, global policing, tariffs, closed borders, and simultaneously the faint call for a “smaller” government out of Rand’s ideas of ultimate distribution of governance? It is because libertarianism is fundamentally weak. If such principles were truly realized, they would destabilize the existing powers. If every individual worked solely for themselves in some decoupled, imaginary, solitary and disjoint society of selves, the hierarchy of power becomes completely merit-based as Rand envisions, and it would fluctuate wildly through a single generation. We do not observe this in our ‘capitalist’ system. Existing powers did not get to a position of power through enabling other powers to usurp them freely. So although race may not always compose a dividing line of the hierarchy of power, as long as it is convenient and necessary to the mechanisms of stabilizing existing power, it will remain a line along which society is divided. Assuming capitalism continues to reproduce itself.