American political theorist, longtime professor at UC Santa Barbara, and author of the book that introduced the phrase racial capitalism into Anglophone political thought. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) argues two linked theses that have shaped a generation of subsequent work. First, that capitalism did not emerge as a race-neutral economic system later fitted with racism as an accident or ideology; it emerged from feudal Europe already structured by what he called "racialism" — the differentiation and hierarchical ranking of European peoples themselves — and carried that logic forward into the Atlantic slave trade and colonial expansion. Capitalism, in his phrase, "did not break from the old order but extended it"; it has been racial capitalism from the beginning.
Second, that the Black radical tradition — Robinson traces it through slave revolts, maroon societies, and the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright — is not a branch of European Marxism but a distinct political current with its own ontology. Where Marx read history as the forward march of productive forces, the Black radical tradition, Robinson argued, preserved a collective moral memory of life before and beyond the commodity — something Marxism in its European form had forgotten how to see.
His earlier The Terms of Order (1980) was a critique of the Western concept of political leadership. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007) extended the analysis to film and the manufacture of racial imagery in American popular culture. For decades after Black Marxism was published, its influence was largely subterranean; since roughly 2015 it has become one of the most cited texts in American political theory, and the phrase racial capitalism is now inescapable in the scholarship on race and political economy.