Racism, Capitalism, and Covid19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural problems affecting nonwhite racialized workers in the core and periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, are race neutral or willfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global inequalities. This pamphlet explains how the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other nonwhite racialized labor in the core and the periphery persisted throughout the COVID-19 crisis through the lens of Black radical scholarship on racism and capitalism. Edwards not only captures how people of African descent have been disproportionately impacted by COVID, but also the historical, sociological and structural roots of the inequalities that affect vulnerable groups across the world, tied to what she has described as the architecture of the global economy linked to race and gender. She represents a refreshing voice in our time and part of a Caribbean radical tradition in the spirit of Claudia Jones, Eric Williams, Oliver C. Cox, and C.L.R. James, from her native Trinidad, as well as Guyana's Walter Rodney and Andaiye.