The thesis that capitalism is not a race-neutral economic system that later acquired racial features as ideology or accident, but is and has been from its inception structured by the racial differentiation and ranking of human populations — first within Europe itself, then across the Atlantic slave trade, colonial expansion, and contemporary global labor regimes. The phrase entered Anglophone political theory through Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism (1983), which argued that European capitalism inherited from feudalism a "racialism" that organized exploitation by group long before it took its modern color-coded forms; Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) had laid much of the empirical groundwork, with its account of slavery as foundational to Atlantic capital and of the freedpeople as protagonists of an interracial democratic experiment.
The concept does several kinds of work. It blocks the move — common in liberal economics and in some strands of orthodox Marxism — that treats race as an epiphenomenon of class, to be dissolved as capitalism matures. It blocks the symmetrical move that treats racism as a free-floating ideology unrelated to material structures. It explains why purportedly race-neutral economic mechanisms (real-estate finance, credit scoring, sentencing algorithms, supply chains) reliably produce racially patterned outcomes: the mechanisms operate within and reproduce structures that were racialized from their formation.
Since roughly 2015, racial capitalism has become one of the most cited frames in American social and political theory. Wilkerson's Caste framework, the contemporary scholarship on housing and policing, and a strand of climate writing all draw on it. The concept is contested: critics argue it can flatten regional and historical specificity, or imply a more unified system than the historical record supports. Its central claim — that race and capital are co-constitutive, not separate — has nonetheless become difficult to dismiss.