Research

 Racial Capitalism

‘Racial capitalism’ has been an important hermeneutic for grappling with the inseparable processes of racialization and capitalism. Scholars and activists have used the term to shed new light on the racial dynamics of sub-prime lending, the profitability of punishment, and the longer genealogy of indigenous dispossession, slavery, capital accumulation and loss.

But well before the recent magnification of these issues in the public eye, members of what might be called ‘The Old History of Capitalism’ explored the intimacy between race and capitalism. Whether writing under the banner of the Black Radical Tradition, (the (1960s and 1970s iteration of) Black Political Economy, or otherwise, the ‘racial subaltern’ who navigated segregated academic and political spaces interpolated racial and gendered violence, racial hierarchy, the subtleties of racial discrimination and exclusion into a broader analysis of capitalism. Indeed, the more interesting debate is not whether race is an overflow of some general capitalism, but whether relations of production, land, commodities, and/or governance are the generative sites for racial capitalism; how to make sense of the obvious achievements of black and brown folks and the suffering of many whites; how to think about these dynamics across place and time without reifying the false starting point of primitive accumulation.   

Destin Jenkins has coordinated events at Stanford University, the New School, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago. He is also co-editor of the volume, Histories of Racial Capitalism (Columbia University Press, Forthcoming). Finally, he is part of an interdisciplinary group of scholars from around the country involved in the Race and Capitalism project.

The Business of Debt 

Drawing on the directories of bond traders, historic newspapers, advertisements and Congressional documents, Destin is the principal investigator and curator of a digital humanities project. “The Business of Debt” offers a visual analysis of the changing spatial and geographical scope of the municipal bond business from the depths of the Great Depression to the 1980s, a moment described by city officials, bankers, and others as one of profound “Chaos.” It moves from one period of precarity to another, and documents the remarkable growth of a tight-knit profession in the years in between. Ultimately, it showcases the financing networks that literally made possible the construction of infrastructure in cities, suburbs, and towns throughout the United States.

The Business of Debt supplements Destin’s book project and also reflects his broader interest in the interdisciplinary study of debt.

The study of African American Life

Underlying the different research projects is Destin Jenkins’s commitment to exploring African American politics in ways that cut across neat binaries of radicalism and conservatism, black capitalism and Black Nationalism, resistance and acquiescence, bottom-up and top-down history. As an undergraduate he detailed the rich history of African American perceptions of China during the early twentieth century. He has spent the last decade investigating how black people engaged with municipal debt, and how the institutions about which they knew little and the actors of which they were unaware profoundly shaped the waste management systems, education and recreational opportunities in their neighborhoods. His future research will explore how black Americans navigated a range of informal economies.

Through these projects he has sought to explore the contributions to, and challenges from, a world in which black life is at once threatened and deemed essential. Whether through the lens of black internationalism, debt, informality, or environmental history he remains committed to exploring stories forgotten or distorted.