Hello everyone, I wanted to start a discussion about a problem that I have noticed in university programs that have tried to employ the concept of “decolonizing the curriculum” (after Walter Mignolo). I have often noticed that these programs critique problems within the system through the concept of “racial capitalism,” making racial distinctions a more central point of the discussion. That is not to say that understanding and tackling racial discrimination isn’t important. The issue is that the same people seemingly fail to highlight within that discussion that capitalism itself has played a role in defining race and producing racial hierarchies. At least, this is how I learned it. Most of these people also seem to fail to understand that not all current European people were historically considered “European” or “white” in the same way, and that some European populations were themselves subjected to forms of scientific racism, racialization, or internal colonialism (e.g., Southern Italians and Eastern Europeans). I also feel that some forms of contemporary decolonial discourse within universities can be rather reactionary. There are also many sources discussing and documenting this:
Lewis, A., Lall, M. From decolonisation to authoritarianism: the co-option of the decolonial agenda in higher education by right-wing nationalist elites in Russia and India. High Educ 87, 1471–1488 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01074-0
Zembylas, M. (2025). Decolonial pathways in education: Walter Mignolo, epistemic delinking, and the risks of ethno-essentialism. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2025.2459110
Decolonial Social Theory: Co-optation and the Problem With the Epistemic Turn https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403993834_Decolonial_Social_Theory_Co-optation_and_the_Problem_With_the_Epistemic_Turn
Anyhow, how do we tackle this issue? What do you guys think about this conflation? How did u guys learn about the relationship between race and capitalism? What do you think about western universities and their programs about decolonising the curriculum?
N.B: This is not to shame any real political movements of decoloniality. They are valid. It’s more about the bullshit western elites, and compradors do at universities. Free Palestine
It is important to highlight that race as it is understood today was simply a substitution for “Christian or non-Christian (enslavable by law)”. This was done because the English realised that the conversion loophole would make their empire of capital fall apart, because it relied on slave labour. This supports the fact that “race” came into being to serve the purpose of capital accumulation, ie. to create an easily-identifiable (here by skin colour) class of people that could be exploited & oppressed with impunity, by justifying that slavery on the basis of a warped interpretation of one Bible story. The Mormons ran with it explicitly (ie. not merely as a convenient meme to socially reproduce among slavers) & Mormonism is foundationally based on black people being accused of the “Curse of Ham” which was the old rationalisation.
All of this shows how material conditions (a capitalist empire needing a massive labour force for resource theft) led to a need to create a new law that severed black people from other people in a way that was easy to rationalise for religious bourgeois slavers. The old law that privileged the converts had to go. Then, after some time, more rationalisations were layered on in order to further dehumanise the black labourers and slaves, ignoring the reality of enslavement at gunpoint & trying to inculcate in the entire population (black and otherwise) a belief that slavery is the natural state of some people, because those people are overwhelmingly without rights in that empire. So blackness serves two functions, I think, to capital:
It’s very important to note that slavery was not abolished but merely saddled with a minor legal procedure of needing to incarcerate the victims first. The amendment itself is damning. And this can be linked with strong support to the prison-industrial-complex. The rationalisation for slavery is “some people are naturally criminals (to funnel people into prison labour for capital)”. Take note of capital accumulation by for-profit prisons, their owners, those with stakes in their success, & other things like that. As always, focusing on who gains & who loses makes it harder for people to distract with liberal identitarianism.
Using this, it should be very difficult for the professor to perpetuate liberal “racialisation enforcement” in that class. I recommend the Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne as a potent theoretical weapon against racist, imperialist talking points that try to launder capitalist realism through implicit race realism. It’s a very good book & thoroughly researched.
If you can’t find a free copy online I will try to find one for you.
thx
Yw comrade. let me know how it goes