Racism and Capitalism: Africana Studies 1024, University of Pittsburgh

This is a training program in radical ideology. It is self-evidently designed to indict American capitalism as a system associated with colonialism, slavery and the slave trade and as racist. Of course, American capitalism led the world in ending colonialism and did not create slavery but accounted for less than 4% of the global slave trade in Africans (or approximately 800,000 out of a global trade estimated at more than 25 million – see Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture, p. 188) and is one of two societies – the other being capitalist Great Britain -- which are responsible for ending slavery in the Western World and much of Africa itself.
Course Description
This course examines the historical growth and theory of capitalism from a global perspective with special emphasis on its relationship with imperialism, colonialism, slavery and slave trade, and the consequent global pauperization, impoverishment, oppression and the structural incorporation of Third World peoples and all peoples of color in the Diaspora into the capitalist world economic system. Next the course examines the theory, history and practices of racism with special emphasis on the United States, Europe, Africa and Latin and Central America. Finally the course attempts to trace the interactions between Racism and Capitalism and how such historical and contemporary linkages and structures combine to explain the contemporary social, political and economic predicaments of the Third World and peoples of color in the Diaspora. The aim is to demonstrate that the historical oppression of Black peoples cannot be explained without a comprehensive study and understanding of the historical and global linkages between Racism and Capitalism.
Note that the alleged linkage between racism and capitalism – a controversial idea -- is uncritically accepted throughout, along with their allegedly explanatory potential for explaining the “social, political and economic predicaments of the Third World.” This is not education it is indoctrination in a narrow left-wing and racialist perspective.