Good amount of information and insight packed into 15 minutes. Also, the first or second comment on the video has a transcript for those that would prefer to read. I copy/pasta’d the first few minutes below.
"The relationship between slavery and race, race and unfreedom, unfreedom and labor is one that we constantly try to untangle and, at our peril, we ignore it but, also at our peril, we make it too simplistic because the complexity of it matters for what we do in the current moment to undo the catastrophe of mass incarceration. So, I go down this path of trying to think globally in order to think about how today, given the catastrophe of racial capitalism on a world scale, its particular form of austerity and neoliberalism and permanent war that we struggle through requires an approach to solving problems that, however particular or local they are, have an international dimension, because it is an international problem. Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.
My name is Ruth Wilson Gilmore. I have been a teacher and a researcher into especially the prison industrial complex, but, in order to investigate that, I’ve had to lift up from that certain general themes that are very exciting that we’re going to be able to explore in our conversation, including racial capitalism, which is all of capitalism, abolition geography, and my role as a teacher in the university and in the streets.
Racial capitalism, which is to say all capitalism, is not a thing, it’s a relation. However, if we look back through the history of capitalism as it developed, we see that the understanding that those who own the means of production had of their differences from those whose labor they exploited were understandings that we can recognize today as racial practice.
So, all capitalism is racial from its beginning, which is to say, the capitalism that we have inherited-- that it’s constantly producing and reproducing itself, and it will continue to depend on racial practice and racial hierarchy no matter what. This is another way of saying we can’t undo racism without undoing capitalism.
Being a good geographer means going to look and see, and then to challenge oneself in one’s description of what we want to see. But, politically, it is giving all of the attention you have to the thing, so that you understand how it works.
The word discovery doesn’t sit well with anybody who knows anything about the history of the world, and yet people flock here to this Monument, unaware or uncaring about its fascist dimensions. Unaware or uncaring about the compass rose that is behind it that was a gift of the Apartheid government of South Africa to the fascist government of Portugal in the mid 1960s. Can we try to redescribe this world that has been described in these particular ways in this tourist location with this monument and this pavement.
Slavery and the slave trade-- it’s not something that was initiated when some people who became known as Europeans encountered some people who became known as Africans and grabbed them. It was never limited to African slavery, and, in fact, we ought take more seriously than perhaps we do, the fact of intra-- what we call today European-- slavery as being one of the forces that shaped the modern world.
The foundations of racial capitalism, the foundations of the social organization of human groupings in Western Europe during the rise of capitalism. They don’t have anything to do with Africa, Asia, North America, or South America. They have to do with what was happening here in Europe between people all of whose descendants might have become white. I mean, that is the major lesson of racial capitalism, and why does that matter? It matters because capitalism won’t stop being racial capitalism, if all the white people disappear from the story.
Capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it. It started racial without what people imagined race to mean, which is black people, and it will continue to be racial without what people imagine the not-race to be, which is white people."
