Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural problems affecting nonwhite racialized workers in the core and periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, are race neutral or willfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global inequalities. This piece seeks to understand how the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other nonwhite racialized labor in the core and the periphery persisted throughout the COVID-19 crisis through the lens of Black radical scholarship on racism and capitalism. It historicizes the pandemic within the long arc of racist capitalist labor super-exploitation at the birth of capitalism and in its subsequent unfolding. It also shows the mechanisms by which COVID-19 has exacerbated the already existing, structural racial and colonial inequalities that undergird the global economy. White capital and European and North American states have deemed Black and other nonwhite racialized labor 'essential' to maintaining profits and called upon these workers both within North America and Europe and in the global periphery to ensure continued production and profits in almost every realm. These workers were seen as essential but expendable; compelling them to continue laboring during the deadly pandemic increased the precarity and danger they faced and exacerbated racial and economic inequalities both within and between countries. At the same time, neoliberal racist states are further marginalizing these very workers by excluding them from much needed social protections to cope with the impacts of COVID-19 on their health, income, and overall well-being. The piece also illuminates why, despite the dire social and economic conditions threatening the lives and livelihoods of workers writ large, white workers continue to refuse to join a multiracial antiracist movement for liberation from imperial and racial capitalist exploitation. The author ends by reflecting on what it means to 'return to normal' within the architecture of racial capitalism and the pursuit of a different path to justice and freedom.

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9781990263316

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Zophia Edwards is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at Providence College. Her areas of research and teaching include postcolonial sociology, colonialism, labor movements, race and racism, international development, and political sociology. David Austin, author: Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Society in Sixties Montreal; Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution. David Austin, author: Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Society in Sixties Montreal; Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution.

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