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This essay advances a materialist theory of race. In my view, race oppression dialectically intersects with the exploitative logic of advanced capitalism, a regime that deploys race in the interest of surplus accumulation. Thus, race operates at the (economic) base and produces cultural and ideological effects at the superstructure; in turn, these effects—in very historically specific ways—interact with and ideologically justify the operations at the economic base. 1 In a sense, then, race encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist social relations, which is why race cuts across a range of seemingly disparate social sites in contemporary US society. For instance, one can mark race difference and its discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care, housing/real estate, education, law, the job market, and many other social sites. Unlike many commentators who engage race matters, however, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to reformist measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the existing socioeconomic arrangements intact; instead, I foreground the relationality of these sites within the exchange mechanism of multinational capitalism.

Consequently, I believe, the eradication of race oppression also requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism—a system that produces difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the resulting social inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race—a theory that …