It was these same systems of human ranking that were deployed to justify the mass kidnapping, shackling, and torturing of other humans in order to force them to work that stolen land—which led the late political theorist Cedric Robinson to describe the market economy that gave birth to the United States not simply as capitalism but as “racial capitalism.” The cotton and sugar picked by enslaved Africans was the fuel that kick-started the Industrial Revolution. The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none
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