Journal of Law and Political Economy

Racial capitalism provides a baseline analysis of how capitalist systems function inextricably from race. We contribute to the development of the concept of racial capitalism by arguing that as property is the lingua franca of capitalism, racialized, gendered property is the institution that undergirds racial capitalism. Even if we could eliminate the racial and gender bias of the capitalist system, the very disposition of the institution of property itself is so inherently racialized and gendered through the human interactions by which it is co-constituted that the resultant property-based capitalism is also raced and gendered. Those observations are the backdrop for a more probing set of arguments about the role of gender and race in shaping the property narrative, which we explore in a series of examples that reveal the inherently racialized and gendered nature of property in the extant capitalist system.  Our engagement opens space in this era of racial and gender reckoning to call upon property to become a site of advancing new or contested social values of justice or equality for communities that exist at the margins of society.