Transcending Racial Capitalism—A Conversation with Steve Dubb, Rithika Ramamurthy, and Saqib Bhatti

Editors’ note: This piece is from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s summer 2024 issue, “Escaping Corporate Capture.”

In this conversation, Steve Dubb, senior economic justice editor at NPQ, Rithika Ramamurthy, former economic justice editor at NPQ and now communications director at the Climate and Community Project, and Saqib Bhatti, cofounder and coexecutive director of Action Center on Race and the Economy, explore how to move toward an economy that is both racially just and free from corporate capture. 

Rithika Ramamurthy: What is your definition of racial capitalism? And what does the concept mean to—and in what ways does it motivate—the movement activists with whom you collaborate?

Saqib Bhatti: Capitalism requires endless growth and profit for the capitalists, and it requires extraction in order to produce that endless growth and profit. In our society, this is inherently racialized: people of color, particularly Black folks, Indigenous folks, and immigrants, more often than not bear the brunt of the extraction. The system requires structural racism, in short. We know that this has been true especially within the history of this country, going back to the transatlantic slave trade and the colonization and genocide of Indigenous folks living here, and also in Europe, where this has always been a core part of how their capitalist system functions.

“We know that the only way we can address any issue we’re facing in our communities is by looking at the role that structural racism and White supremacy have played in providing the framework for the extraction, and looking at how corporate actors, elected officials, have used race in order to actually extract that wealth and deliver that harm.”

Those who work closely with community organizations, labor unions, and advocacy groups that work on such issues as housing, policing and surveillance, education, healthcare, and so on know, because of the way that our economy functions, that the harms in the system across each and every one of those fields fall most heavily on communities of color. And they do so by design.

When it comes to housing, historically there was, of course, redlining and denying of credit to, particularly, Black families who lived in certain neighborhoods. But we also see, now, the systematic displacement of Black and Latine communities from the neighborhoods in which they live, as private equity firms buy up housing stock en masse. When it comes to policing and surveillance, we see a development of technologies that are supposed to keep us safe, like ShotSpotter, that instead are actually doing racial profiling—these are massive racial-profiling machines that, essentially, are a provider surveilling BIPOC folks, assuming that they’re inherently guilty. And those machines are being sold to city governments for millions of dollars, even though their accuracy rate is less than 10 percent.¹ As concerns education, we’ve seen over and over again that school districts systematically defund education in BIPOC communities. When Chicago closed dozens of schools, 90 percent of the impacted students were Black.² We’ve seen this over and over again. And we also see it with privatization. Where do charter schools come in? They come into BIPOC neighborhoods the most, right? That’s where you see these attempts at profit making and extraction. So for ACRE [Action Center on Race and the Economy] and the partners that we work with, what it means to have an analysis of racial capitalism in our campaigns is that we don’t pretend that race is separate from these issues or that we can actually fight these issues in a race-blind way. We know that the only way we can address any issue we’re facing in our communities is by looking at the role that structural racism and White supremacy have played in providing the framework for the extraction, and looking at how corporate actors, elected officials, have used race in order to actually extract that wealth and deliver that harm.

Steve Dubb: What led you and Maurice BP-Weeks in 2017 to cofound ACRE? And what was your vision for the organization?

SB: Maurice and I had both worked for a long time—separately—at organizations that traditionally had been doing economic justice work. And we worked often in partnership as allies from our different perches: although I was working with labor unions, such as SEIU [Service Employees International Union], and Maurice was working with community organizations, such as ACCE [Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment], the work we do is primarily with BIPOC members. And we had kind of presumed that the fact that we were doing economic justice work with BIPOC communities meant that we were doing racial justice work. And that just wasn’t the case.

“[O]ne of the things that we see in racialized capitalism is that if you target the harm to disproportionately fall on BIPOC communities, you can get away with harming a lot of people, even if who you’re mostly harming is White folks.”

So Maurice organized a retreat in fall 2016 that brought together economic justice and racial justice activists to strategize about how we can bridge the gap between those two sectors of organizing. And what we very quickly came to realize was that we needed to have a broad intersectional analysis of how these things sort of layer on top of each other. It’s not enough for us to say that bad things happen and they disparately impact BIPOC communities; we need to name why. It’s by design. A lot of it is the legacy of structural racism, slavery; but it also has to do with the fact that, because of racialized capitalism, it’s easier to make bad things happen if you can show that the impact is going to be disparately on BIPOC communities.

For example, when we think about the foreclosure crisis (which Maurice and I both did a lot of work around), the way that it’s painted in the broader narrative of the history of the United States is that it was a bunch of irresponsible BIPOC families who got in over their heads with the reckless loans, and that the foreclosure crisis was a crisis of BIPOC families. About two-thirds of home foreclosures took place in predominantly White communities, though.³ It’s true that the foreclosure crisis disparately impacted BIPOC folks, but most of the people who were impacted were White, because there are a lot more White people than there are BIPOC folks in the country. But the fact that the banks, their lobbyists, and their champions were able to operationalize this—were able to racialize the issue in the minds of people—meant that it was easier for them to block meaningful relief. Meaningful relief would have meant loan modifications with principal reduction, forcing banks to eat the losses on those loans—with which they had primarily targeted BIPOC folks, by the way, knowing that those loans could not be paid back in most cases. But instead of being made to pay the consequences of their predatory lending, by framing this as an issue of irresponsible BIPOC folks, they [the banks, their lobbyists, and their champions] were able to essentially tap into racist tropes of irresponsible BIPOC folks who get in over their heads. And that, in the end, was extremely harmful to all of the families who lost their homes as a result of the foreclosure crisis, the majority of whom, by far, were White families.

So one of the things that we see in racialized capitalism is that if you target the harm to disproportionately fall on BIPOC communities, you can get away with harming a lot of people, even if who you’re mostly harming is White folks, right? So in 2016, we had a lot of people asking why poor White people vote against their interests. The reason is, if you can convince them that their racial interest is more important than their economic interest, then you can get people to vote that way. We shouldn’t presume that economic interest is paramount—for some folks, it’s racial interest.

We understood—going back to the retreat—that doing economic justice work with communities of color in itself is not racial justice work unless we’re directly addressing racial capitalism and the ways in which race is part and parcel of how bad things are allowed to happen, why they keep on happening, and the impact that has on everyone else. And that became the starting point for ACRE. Coming off that retreat, we decided that one of the key next steps was to start an organization focused on achieving economic justice by taking on the financial sector and doing so with an explicit racial lens.

RR: Over the past seven years at ACRE, what, if anything, do you see as having evolved and changed in your strategy to combat racism in the economy?

SB: The biggest change that we’ve seen is when we first started. We were focused exclusively on corporations in the financial sector. We were looking at banks, private equity firms, hedge funds—looking at the ways in which Wall Street, the financial sector, was driving harm in communities of color, because that’s who controls capital. If we look at the financialization of the economy over the past 50 years, what we’ve seen since the mid-seventies is just the financial sector becoming larger and larger and getting power beyond its size—coming to control aspects of not just our economic system but also our political system, and informing decisions about where people live, when they have families, what kinds of jobs they take. All those things being informed ultimately by their finances and the debt that they’ve taken on.

And then we were seeing not only the financial sector emerging as one of the largest campaign contributors and biggest lobbyists, but also, over the last decade or so, the trend of financial executives themselves running for office. For example, from 2015 to 2019, the governor of Illinois (where I live), Bruce Rauner, was a private equity manager.⁴ And so that was all a big part of what was driving our analysis initially. What shifted is that there has been a change in our economy since the financial crisis, in which tech generally and big tech firms have risen up to become another major pool of capital, and have also become extremely powerful, and powerful beyond their size. And their size is mammoth, right? So we’re talking about Amazon, Facebook, Google. (And also the billionaires who’ve made their money in any which way.) So we’ve expanded beyond Wall Street to focus on all the major actors that control capital and ultimately inform the decision-making in our societies.

We work closely with the community organizations and labor unions; we work at the state and local level. So at the level of any given city or state, we want to understand who the corporations are that actually, ultimately, control the most levers of power. We want to know how those corporations and their executives wield power against communities of color. And we want to figure out the intervention points based on that.

SD: It can be difficult to imagine an economy that’s beyond the one we have today. What does an economy that transcends racial capitalism look like for you? And what do you see as comprising some of the key elements of what we might call a “postracial-capitalism” economy?

SB: I think for me it’s a society in which people’s needs are met. It’s where communities can make their own decisions about the allocation of human capital and resources—are in charge of making the decisions that impact their lives. And that they can do so not from a culture of scarcity but a culture of abundance, and with an eye toward repairing past harms—past racialized harms, in particular. When I think about the world we’re trying to build, it’s one where communities have what they need to thrive. They’re the ones in charge of deciding which things get funding, what services they need, what kind of educational programming they need. It’s one where people feel like their kids can play out in the street and be perfectly safe. It’s a world in which we don’t have climate disasters wreaking havoc on us multiple times a year, especially in BIPOC communities. It’s a world in which we don’t have borders, and in which we have shared prosperity.

“If someone is worried about the consequences of dismantling racial capitalism, worried that it will undermine progress and productivity, there’s the question of who’s benefiting from that productivity and progress and who’s being left out. And the truth is, the majority of people are left out.”

And in order to build that world, we need to help build a collective understanding of what it means for our societies to thrive, right? And we should build that across racial lines. We need to build that across all sorts of lines. And I think as part of that, we need people—and particularly White folks, folks who enjoy or have enjoyed privilege in the past—to see why equity is in their interest. Why it’s in their interest to repair past harms. Because that’s the only way we can build a society in which we don’t have to have a scarcity mindset and understand that having an abundance mindset frees us all. And if we have an abundance mindset, you understand that me gaining something isn’t you losing it, and vice versa. That way, we can repair past harm while also providing everyone with the resources they need to thrive.

RR: Very few readers of NPQ would argue that our present economic system is fair. But some might argue that our present economic system is productive, and be fearful that it would be difficult to transcend the problems of racial capitalism without undermining production. What would you say to such skeptics, and how do you envision creating an economy that’s productive, sustainable, and just?

SB: I struggle with that question because I reject the frame that production is what we should be after. I think we’ve convinced ourselves that productivity, defined only a certain narrow way, is what should be the hallmark of success, when perhaps instead it should be sustainability. Perhaps we can have both. But we can’t have endless production of things in a sustainable way. By definition, those things are contradictory. I think ordinary people actually understand this concept in a way that perhaps economists could learn from—that there’s more to the economy than growing profits or the production of goods. That actually, there are other things that have value as well. Racial equity has value—is a value. And not everything that should be valued is monetary.

SD: There are eight billion people on the planet. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. Putting aside cell phones and automobiles—and the commodity fetishizing of consumerism overall—there are basic needs: food, clothing, shelter. How do you assuage concerns that there’s going to be starvation if we don’t maintain our present economic system?

SB: I think the level of progress we have right now and the innovation in production has led to a vastly unequal society, both within the US and globally. And the benefits of it right now fall to many people, including anyone who is middle class and above, in the US, right? But who’s left out? If someone is worried about the consequences of dismantling racial capitalism, worried that it will undermine progress and productivity, there’s the question of who’s benefiting from that productivity and progress and who’s being left out. And the truth is, the majority of people are left out. So we need to figure out how to take a view of having a system that values and improves the lives of everyone in the world. Or at the very least, the majority. And if that means that I have to hold on to my iPhone 13 for another 10 years—well, maybe that’s something that I should do, right?

RR: Because the phone companies build your phone to break early, right? They don’t use sustainable materials. We don’t have to have phones that break every two years.

“I think a key component of racialized capitalism is that corporations figure out what all the things are that people need and find ways to extract profit from those needs, and people who have the least money, of course, are least able to afford those things they need.”

SB: And if we have to go slower to benefit more people, that’s ultimately also better for the planet—and it makes for more sustainable progress. That also gets us closer to that vision of an abundance mindset—that in the long term we will have what we need to thrive. Because it’s not enough for us to keep raising the ceiling if the floor is bottomed out. We need to figure out how to raise the floor as well.

SD: Are there specific areas where you see postracial-capitalist practices emerging? And if so, are there any examples that you’d like to highlight that show glimpses of a more just and sustainable economy?

SB: I think one of the key things is having more things that are provided by the state. Having more social housing, for example—more public housing, but also within the public housing having the communities who live in those houses determining the kinds of services they need and providing them. We’ve modeled this around schools—there’s been a big push in many cities in the US, and there are pilots in places like Chicago and LA, to provide wraparound services:⁵ on-site healthcare, ELL classes and job-training programs for parents, and so forth—so, looking at schools as a hub of activity in a neighborhood. So I think that broadening the public sector and having direct community control are some great examples. Another example is the movement for public banks. And I think this is a really important one, because if we’re saying that one of the key problems in our economy right now is the financialization of the economy and the outsized role the financial sector plays, then one of the most effective ways to combat that is by having basic financial services provided directly by the government. That way, we aren’t leaving people at the mercy of predatory banks for having their basic financial needs met. A third example is free broadband for all communities, rural and urban. We have to sidestep the grasp of big tech.

I think a key component of racialized capitalism is that corporations figure out what all the things are that people need and find ways to extract profit from those needs, and people who have the least money, of course, are least able to afford those things they need. Some of the experiments we’re seeing are part of the fight against that—so that we can produce the things that we need without profiting corporations. I think these experiments help us to think about what a global post-racialized capitalism could look like. Of course, the challenge is that capitalists are great at figuring out how to make money off of the public provision of goods, as well. So we need to figure out how to stay one step ahead and with an eye toward a broader horizon, instead of always playing catch-up.

RR: You’ve worked on local campaigns in many places, but most notably in Chicago, and I know that you had a big victory with the ShotSpotter contract recently.⁶ What does a positive agenda for transcending racial capitalism look like at the community level?

SB: If we want to think about what it takes for communities to really be free and to really thrive, then real public safety is incredibly important—especially in this moment, when across the country, crime panic is being used to drive backlash—the backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, for a key example. We’re seeing the crime panic being used to drive surveillance—like ShotSpotter. We need to figure out what it actually looks like for communities to be safe. Where does real safety come from? Why are areas that are considered “high crime” in that state of being? What are the underlying causes? And when we look at that, we see over and over again that it’s underinvestment. Underinvestment is the reason why we have areas that are experiencing high poverty and all that goes along with that. We need to invest in those communities, not police them. Policing and surveillance don’t curb crime in a substantive way, because they don’t address the underlying causes.

Public safety isn’t about, for example, punishing the person who stole someone’s package. Public safety is addressing the underlying conditions that drove that person to steal that package in the first place. Policing doesn’t actually serve to make us safe—it doesn’t prevent crime, at least not in a societally healthy way. It provides some punishment for crime, in some cases. But if we really want to be safe, what we actually need to be doing is investing in communities.

It’s exciting that, after a yearlong campaign, the city of Chicago is finally going to cancel their ShotSpotter contract.⁷ We’re also glad to hear that Mayor [Brandon] Johnson is not planning on replacing ShotSpotter with an alternative gunshot-detection technology. What we need now is for the money that’s been going into the ShotSpotter contract, and money that goes toward holding up a very brutal and overreaching police department—policing in Chicago is roughly 40 percent of the city’s budget—to go toward investing in communities that have been left languishing for a really long time. We need to see investments in after-school programs and mental health clinics. We need to see investments in programs like Peace Book, which is a very effective violence prevention strategy, in Chicago.⁸ We need to see yearlong youth jobs programs. We need to make sure that libraries are open into the evenings, on the weekends, around the clock. Those are the types of things that actually help curb crime and help make communities truly safe. If we invest in these things, we address the underlying causes of crime, and then communities can really be safe instead of having to rely on policing and surveillance technologies like ShotSpotter that, ultimately, help put people behind bars but don’t actually make our communities safer.

SD: You mentioned Mayor Johnson. What difference does Johnson becoming mayor of Chicago make at the local level in terms of the longer-term progressive agenda of transcending racial capitalism for which you are advocating here?

SB: Mayor Johnson has been in office for less than a year, and we’ve already seen a number of important victories around priorities that for years progressives have been fighting for. There’s the victory around the ShotSpotter contract, as mentioned. There’s Bring Chicago Home, an initiative to increase the tax on properties worth over a million dollars, which will be used to fund homeless-prevention services.⁹ It was on the ballot earlier this year because Mayor Johnson got that over the line at the city council. Unfortunately, it failed at the ballot, but Bring Chicago Home remains resolved.¹⁰ We have movement to get cops out of CPS [Chicago Public Schools]. Finally, that’s going to happen.¹¹ Mayor Johnson cast the tie-breaking vote calling for a ceasefire resolution in Gaza.¹² Treatment Not Trauma, which basically redirects some of the police departments to have non-emergency responders for mental health crises, is going forward.¹³ We’re rolling back school vouchers.¹⁴ So yes, there’s been a bunch of different priorities that progressives had fought for for a long time in Chicago that we’re seeing come to fruition under the Johnson administration. That’s really exciting, and I think bodes well for helping set us up to push back against this system that we currently have.

SD: You and Bree Carlson wrote an article for NPQ last year in which you called for “a broader national conversation about the allocation of power and resources in our economy.”¹⁵ Now, in 2024, what does that conversation look like to you?

SB: It starts by acknowledging who actually has wealth and power in our communities and in our country right now—which, as we know, is major corporations. That our government is controlled by the wealthy, and not by people who are elected officials who are supposed to represent their constituents. Really looking at the various ways that those who are actually in charge get their way—not just through legislative power but also economic power. That corporations, major transnational corporations, particularly in the finance and tech sectors, control every aspect of our society.

And if we want to ever get past that, we need to both chip away at their power and build power—build the power of ordinary people by organizing people one-on-one, through one-on-one conversations. Organizing people, moving people into action, and trying to assert control over what’s supposed to be our democracy. The truth is that we don’t have a democratic system; we have a plutocracy. We have a plutocracy dressed up as democracy. Even if people elect who they want to elect, they still end up having a very hard time getting their interests represented in the halls of Congress and in city halls and state houses. We’ve seen over and over again that the overwhelming majority of the country wants a ceasefire in Gaza. We’re not seeing that translate into policy. The overwhelming majority of the country wants common-sense gun regulations. We’re not seeing that translate into policy. The majority of the country is pro-choice. We’re not seeing that translate into policy. Why is that? Because our government is held captive by powerful corporate interests. And we need to figure out how we call that out and reverse it.

Notes

1. Matt Masterson and Amanda Vinicky, “ShotSpotter Alerts ‘Rarely’ Lead to Evidence of Gun Crime: City Watchdog,” WTTW, August 24, 2021, wttw.com/2021/08/24/shotspotter-alerts-rarely-lead-evidence-gun-crime-city-watchdog. And see Jay Stanley, “Four Problems with the ShotSpotter Gunshot Detection System,” ACLU, August 24, 2021, www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system.
2. Eve Ewing, “What led Chicago to shutter dozens of majority-black schools? Racism,” The Guardian, December 6, 2018, theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/06/chicago-public-schools-closures-racism-ghosts-in-the-schoolyard-extract; and Molly F. Gordon et al., School Closings in Chicago: Staff and Student Experiences and Academic Outcomes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, 2018), 2.
3. Sarah Mikhitarian, “How the Housing Bust Widened the Wealth Gap for Communities of Color,” Zillow, April 25, 2019, zillow.com/research/housing-bust-wealth-gap-race-23992/.
4. See Gary Rivlin, “The Private Equity Governor,” Type Investigations, October 22, 2018, www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2018/10/22/the-private-equity-governor/; and Paris Schutz, “J.B. Pritzker Defeats Bruce Rauner in Race for Illinois Governor,” WTTW, November 6, 2018, news.wttw.com/2018/11/06/jb-pritzker-defeats-gov-bruce-rauner-race-illinois-governor.
5. How Community Schools are Transforming Public Education (Oakland, CA: In the Public Interest, the Network for Public Education, and the Partnership for the Future of Learning, May 2024).
6. Saqib Bhatti and Bree Carlson, “What Does It Mean to Dismantle Racial Capitalism Anyway?,” Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine 30, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 34–40; and Tahman Bradley, Marisa Rodriguez, and Eli Ong, “Chicago will not renew ShotSpotter contract, Mayor Johnson says,” The Hill, February 14, 2024, thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4467714-chicago-will-not-renew-shotspotter-contract-mayor-johnson-says/.
7. Bradley, Rodriguez, and Ong, “Chicago will not renew ShotSpotter contract, Mayor Johnson ”
8. GoodKids MadCity, “The Chicago City Council must pass the Peace Book Ordinance,” The Triibe, October 31, 2023, thetriibe.com/2023/10/opinion-the-chicago-city-council-must-pass-the-peace-book-ordinance/.
9. See “The work for housing justice Together we can make housing a human right,” Bring Chicago Home, accessed June 13, 2024, www.bringchicagohome.org.
10. Ariel Parrella-Aureli, “Bring Chicago Home Referendum Appears To Fail As Final Votes Come In,” Block Club Chicago, March 19, 2024, org/2024/03/19/bring-chicago-home-referendum-trailing-in-early-results/. And see “Bring Chicago Home remains on the ballot despite judge’s rule in favor of real estate industry lawsuit,” Bring Chicago Home, accessed June 13, 2024, www.bringchicagohome.org/statement-judgeruling.
11. Caitlyn Rosen, “Chicago Board of Education votes to remove cops from Chicago schools,” Courthouse News Service, February 22, 2024, courthousenews.com/chicago-board-of-education-votes-to-remove-cops-from-chicago-schools/.
12. Mariah Woelfel and Tessa Weinberg, “Chicago mayor casts the tie-breaking vote to pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza,” WBEZ Chicago, January 31, 2024, wbez.org/politics/2024/01/31/chicago-mayor-breaks-tie-to-call-for-ceasefire-in-gaza.
13. The People’s Vision for Mental and Behavioral Health: Mental Health System Expansion Working Group Report (Chicago, IL: City of Chicago, May 2024).
14. Reema Amin, “Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pushes education agenda with ‘urgency’ during first year in office,” Chalkbeat Chicago, May 14, 2024, chalkbeat.org/chicago/2024/05/14/mayor-brandon-johnson-focuses-on-neighborhood-schools-during-first-year-in-office; and Peter Greene, “Illinois Becomes First State To Roll Back School Voucher Program,” Forbes, November 10, 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2023/11/10/illinois-becomes-first-state-to-roll-back-school-voucher-program/.
15. Bhatti and Carlson, “What Does It Mean to Dismantle Racial Capitalism Anyway?”