The role of racist ideologies (racialism) and racist practice (racism) in societies, such as the United States, is that it assists the capitalist classes (the ruling elite) in meeting five objectives: exploitation; scapegoating; division; competition; and psychic satisfaction.

(a) Exploitation

It permits the direct exploitation of victims through measures such as low wages, dispossession of their lands, enslavement, etc. For example, today, the racial demonization of immigrants (documented or otherwise [1]) in the U.S. masks an industry of exploitation of a large swath of this population that originates from Latin America. There are four main low-paying exploitative sectors where undocumented immigrants are most often employed: the construction sector, the domestic workers’ sector, the leisure and hospitality sector, and the agricultural sector (most especially the produce and meat processing sub-sectors). Of these four sectors, the sector that affects the lives of every person who lives in the U.S. is of course the agricultural sector. Human beings, regardless of who they are and where they live, have the unfortunate habit of being hungry for food on a perpetually regular basis. Now, as the scurrilous racist attacks on immigrants by racists continues to mount, it appears not occur to anyone among these racists that every time they bite into that juicy apple, or slobber over a steak, or slurp a bowl of pasta coated with spaghetti sauce, or crunch some lettuce from a salad, or crush a grape in their mouths, or cut into a chicken breast as they drool over it, or fry an aroma rich omelet, chances were very high that they are partaking of the product of the labor of those they routinely, hypocritically, and abusively demonize. In other words, their access to relatively cheap food is in part a function of the exploitation of one of the most racially marginalized groups in U.S. society, undocumented immigrant agricultural workers. Riding on the back of the racialized marginalization that facilitates the massive exploitation of these workers (ranging from extremely low wages to sometimes even no wages; and from near-indentured servitude to horrendous working conditions) the vast majority of the U.S. population is guaranteed affordable and adequate food supply; while at the same time the agricultural food industry rakes in billions of dollars in profits annually from this exploitation. 

(b) Scapegoating

It facilitates political and economic stability by using racial/ethnic minorities as scapegoats for the severe problems that the activities of the capitalist classes as a whole produce: unemployment, falling standards of living, environmental destruction, scarcity of resources, climate change, etc. Racism helps to deflect resistance and rebellion away from the capitalist class and the capitalist system. (Note: in the absence of race, other ideologies of oppression become salient: sexism, classism, etc.)[2] Propaganda by capitalists and their allies via the media often elevates Black and Brown people to the level of scapegoats for the inequality, alienation and powerlessness that the white working class experiences and thereby assure stability for the capitalist system as a whole. Instead of targeting the real sources of their woes (the capitalist class) the white working class ends up targeting Black and Brown people instead. The following example by Reich (1977) will drive home this point: “[M]any whites believe that welfare payments to blacks are a far more important factor in their taxes than is military spending. Through racism, poor whites come to believe that their poverty is caused by blacks who are willing to take away their jobs, and at lower wages, thus concealing the fact that a substantial amount of income inequality is inevitable in a capitalist society. Racism thus transfers the locus of whites’ resentment towards blacks and away from capitalism.” It should be pointed out here, that historically, the black working class has been used by employers to help break white trade unions by using black workers as “scabs” when white unions are on strike. In fact Cherry (1991: 61) convincingly demonstrates that “[t]he post-World War II profit boom [in the United States] resulted from the ability of capitalists to exploit a racially divided southern workforce and a growing low-wage female workforce. The profitable employment of these workers enabled capitalists to undermine the benefits obtained by unionized workers.… Thus, race and gender discrimination made the postwar profit boom possible, and provided industrialists with the opportunity to weaken the power of the unions.” Such strategies are clearly not conducive to healthy race relations among black and white workers.

(c) Division (Class Fragmentation)

It allows them (the capitalist class) to sow division among the working classes so that they can keep each other in check in their class struggles with the capitalist classes. A classic example is the use of African Americans and other minorities to break up labor strikes of Euro-American workers. Historically, and up to the present, racism has been one of the most important tools used in this country to buy the allegiance of white workers by capitalists. By allowing white workers to exchange their whiteness for a few privileges, the capitalist classes have kept all working classes from demanding a fundamental change to the entire political and economic system for the benefit of all. Racism creates an us and them mentality, whereas genuine socioeconomic progress in a society is only possible under conditions of cooperation and mutual respect. Racism, in other words, serves to displace class struggle in capitalist societies.

To be sure, the white working class (to take the U.S. example) may maintain a short-term advantage relative to the Black working class in terms of better employment opportunities relative to the Black working class, but in the long-run the fact that it is not united with the black working class prevents it from demanding a greater share of the total profits generated from its labor but kept by the capitalist class. At the same time, working-class disunity prevents it from mounting successful struggles in increasing the “public wage” (which takes such forms as unemployment insurance, life-long medical insurance, public schooling, environmental protection measures, and so on).[3] Racism therefore serves as an additional factor, besides the workings of impersonal “market forces,” in hiding the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class—an exploitation that many workers in capitalist societies deny because of their ignorance of the workings of the capitalist system. (See also the Southern Strategy.) 

Replacement Theory 

Associated with racism as a mechanism for the displacement of class struggle, is the increasing popularity among white racists with the so-called theory of "Replacement." One of the key obsessions of today’s white racists is their belief in the myth of white demographic implosion; meaning by the mid-century whites will cease to be a demographic majority and thereby, in their view, ending the supremacy of whiteness. This view is also referred to as the “Replacement Theory” (originally articulated in France by one Renaud Camus as an extension of his Islamophobia, and later popularized via social media by right-wing populists) meaning people of color will replace whites, not only through birth rates, but as a consequence of immigration. While on the face of it, it may appear that this so-called Replacement Theory is harmless buffoonery engaged in by the white supremacist ignorantsia, the reality is that as with other conspiracy theories they peddle via the social media, there are real world tragic implications for those who are the targets of these conspiracy theories. 

It is important to point out that the notion of whites being replaced by people of color has been part of U.S. racist discourse almost from the time of the first European (undocumented, hence illegal) immigrants or colonists arriving in the Americas, where those who truly and legitimately feared being replaced (the indigenous peoples), and eventually they were by means of genocide, were instead victimized as the Other who would replace the interlopers. (Here, the forced expulsion to the West of Native Americans from their ancestral lands via the infamous Trail of Tears, from 1830 to 1850, can also be viewed in terms of white replacement theory.) Later this notion was also extended to black people, especially after Emancipation, and later still to immigrants from Asia (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for example, being a legislative incarnation of this age-old theory). 

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(d) Competition

Racism/ethnicism facilitates unfair advantages for the majority among the working classes as they compete with minorities for societal resources (such as access to decent housing, jobs, healthcare, education, and so on) in an environment where capitalism creates an artificial scarcity of these resources because of the monopolistic stranglehold of the capitalist class over them. For example, the monopolistic control over jobs by the capitalist class ensures that jobs are fewer to go around; thereby creating unhealthy competition among the working classes for them. Similarly, a monopolistic control over taxation policy held by the capitalist class (hence allowing them to avoid paying their fair share of taxes) ensures a permanent governmental budgetary crisis--even though wealth in society in general may be expanding--thereby creating funding shortfalls for everything that requires financing through taxes; ranging from the social safety net to education and from environmental protection /remediation to construction/repair of essential infrastructure. In this kind of competitive environment, the majority are able to use racist discrimination against minorities to unfairly gain a bigger share of these scarce resources, best achieved, for example, through racist/ethnicist residential segregation. This in turn, of course, allows the capitalist class to retain its overall monopolistic control over these resources. 

(e) Psychic Benefits

Racism provides for the white working class an avenue of psychic satisfaction: As Reich observes, for example, “the opportunity to participate in another’s oppression compensates for one’s misery” (1978: 387). Karp (1981: 91) calls it the displacement of mistreatment in which one’s own hurts are taken out on others. There is a German word that best captures this phenomenon (deriving joy and pleasure from the suffering and/or oppression of others deemed as "not one of us"); the word is schadenfreude. 

Then there is the solace one obtains by seeing oneself as “above” another group to psychologically compensate for life’s tribulations in capitalist societies. Note, however, that while there may be group-level psychic benefits to racists in coping with the capitalist system, it is also true that at the individual level racist behavior is a manifestation of a psychosis. It is manifest in the irrational expenditure of mental (and often physical energy) in hating people of color (e.g., in the U.S.). When a white person undergoes mental distress every time he or she sees or comes into contact with a person of color (or vice versa) because of their hate and prejudice, there is no question that the person is not mentally healthy. There are, of course, other personal costs too that go with micro-level racism: the self-denial of potentially powerful and meaningful friendships with other human beings, the failure to explore the full range of life’s experiences by avoiding experiencing other cultures, the constantly distorted mental world in which the person lives where everything is “lily white,” and so on. (See Karp 1981)

In explaining the genesis and functions of racism, we have seen that the best approach to understanding racism is to see it as an ideology (racialism), and as an ideology it has evolved to play a very specific function in society: the structural domination and exploitation of one group of people by another. (A question for you guys: So, which came first: the ideology or the structure? The answer is that both came first in a process of dialectical evolution. Hence, Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, for example was, at once, a racist project and a capitalist venture.) And that this function has not evolved in contradiction to the evolution of the dominant socioeconomic system: capitalism. On the contrary, the relationship between capitalism and racism has been one of symbiosis. After all, capitalism is like racism in the sense that whereas racism involves exploitation on the basis of pigmentation, capitalism involves exploitation on the basis of class. But the analogy does not end here. Compare the role of ideology: the exploitation within the capitalist system is legitimated among both the exploiters and the exploited via an ideology (the capitalist ideology) that includes among its tenets the elevation of this exploitation to the level of “natural law”—expressed through the concept of meritocracy, namely the proposition that it is “natural” that some in society (capitalists) deserve to be richer than others (the working class) since not all are equally endowed with intelligence, discipline, self-sacrifice, capacity for hard work, etc. and other similar attributes that capitalists mythically assign exclusively to their class via a perversion of the history of societal evolution. Within racist societies the exploitation is similarly legitimated via a perversion of the scientific explanation for biologically determined phenotypic differences in which the inferiority of the target victims is mythically deemed to be naturally ordained. And in the case of both capitalism and racism this legitimation of exploitation serves to perform two complementary roles: to “dehumanize” the victims and to “uncivilize” the victimizer.[4]

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In light of the foregoing, the principal conclusion that we may draw is this: racism is unacceptable in civilized and democratic societies; yet its eradication is bound up with the very structuring of their dominant economic system: capitalism. Unless the capitalist system is changed in a radical way, the ideology of racism is here to stay.[5] The problem was best described by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French social philosopher, writing in 1830 about racism in the United States—albeit his identification of the root cause of the problem, democracy, was well off the mark:

I do not believe that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere. An isolated individual may surmount the prejudices of the religion of his country or his race but a whole people cannot rise, as it were, above itself. A despot who should subject the American and his former slaves to the same yoke might perhaps succeed in co-mingling the races but as long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task and it may be foreseen that the freer, that is the more democratic the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated it will remain. (From Bell 1991: 44).

It is not democracy that has underwritten the racist ideology in the United States, it is capitalism. In fact, without democracy it is unlikely that progress would have been made in the area of civil rights for blacks (and, of course, women too).[6]

While racism is functional for capital as a whole, it is not necessarily so for individual capitalists—at least the theory of capitalism would suggest that. Individual capitalists seeking to lower their production costs relative to their competitors may find the artificially high wages of white workers (as in South Africa for example prior to 1992, made possible by apartheid laws enacted at the behest of racist white unions), dysfunctional. For the individual capitalist the only criterion that should be of significance in a worker is his/ her ability to do the work at the lowest wage rates that a free labor market can bear, not his/her color, gender, religion, etc. This argument is ably summarized by Edwards, Reich and Weisskopf (1978: 362):

[T]he capitalist drive to rationalize production, lower costs, and expand profits is itself a strong force for the elimination of racial discrimination. Employers are trying to maximize their profits, and in organizing their workforce they will be interested in a worker’s productivity and potential contribution to profits and not in his or her skin color. The pressures from other firms competing for workers will overcome the resistance of racist employers who persist in discriminating. … Thus, market forces, by allocating labor to its most efficient use, are themselves a strong stimulus for ending discrimination.

Consequently, racism in capitalist societies can, in principle, play both a functional and dysfunctional role. Yet, as Edwards, Reich and Weisskopf (1978) point out, in practice, to take the U.S. example, this has not always worked out. Just as in South Africa today, the economic advantage enjoyed by whites as a whole because of their skin color has remained, for the most part, unassailable despite the supposed rationality of the capitalist system and despite the struggles of the civil rights movement; the lukewarm implementation of the much touted “affirmative action” programs of the 1970s; and despite even the election of an African American (Barack Obama) to the U.S. presidency in 2008. Neither the “magic” of market forces, nor obtaining the right to vote has translated into concrete economic progress for the majority of blacks sufficient to bring them on par with the majority of whites—except for the tiny emerging black middle class (the “token blacks” [see below]). What explanation can one offer for the constancy of racial inequality (which most whites, deliberately or because of ignorance, refuse to acknowledge) in terms of income and employment in the U.S.—especially considering that the U.S. does not have an apartheid system (akin to the one that South Africa had)? The answer is that, sure, there is no de jure apartheid, but in reality there is a de facto apartheid system of sorts at work. Consider, for example, the racialized residential segregation that exists across the entire United States.

While logically the theory just outlined above ought to have worked by now to eliminate (or nearly eliminate) racial inequality in the U.S.—especially in the post-Civil Rights era. The problem, however, is that as was noted earlier racism (or any other fissionary avenues: gender, religion, ethnicity, linguistic heritage, etc. that fragments the working class) is in the interest of capital as a whole. This is not to say that capitalists produced racism in the U.S. (or South Africa for that matter), but they used and maintained it to their own advantage: specifically to keep the working class divided and as a result pliable—thereby keeping the capitalist system stable. In other words, capitalists will adapt whatever forms of social structural divisions that may exist in society for their own ends. If there is no racial division, then they may use divisions based on ethnicity, or religion, or gender, or old age, and so on.

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The mechanisms by which racism against racial minorities have continued to operate in the U.S., for example, despite the fact that racial discrimination in education, employment, housing, etc. is illegal, are subtle and many and involve the operation of both micro (individual-level) and macro (institutional-level) racism; they include:

• (a) psychological assaults on one’s dignity in the media, work-place, and schools—by means of “micro-aggression”—aimed at creating self-doubts, an inferiority complex, etc.;

• (b) physical assaults by the police, and white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan and their allies;

• (c) Inadequate funding for de facto black schools leading to inferior education and high drop-out rates;

• (d) discrimination by personnel agencies and personnel officers (that is people who ordinarily are not concerned with the health of the economic unit they work for because they do not own it, and therefore noneconomic factors like race are allowed to intervene in their hiring practices);

• (e) “last hired and first fired” tendencies among employers in recessionary periods, which invariably works against black workers;

• (f) discrimination in the judicial system;

• (g) segregation of residential areas in apartheid fashion, thus facilitating discrimination at the level of city services, loans for housing, police protection, access to transportation, etc.;

• (h) passage of rules and regulations aimed at gutting the intent of civil rights legislation by the federal government—especially under Republican administrations; and so on.

Clearly those who see in market forces as social engineering panaceas are either deluding themselves as a result of ignorance or are simply engaged in fomenting a lie for the consumption of the unwary in order to justify the status quo. To put the matter differently: racism in western societies (both as an ideology as well as behavioral practice) serves to objectify the subjective (race) and subjectify the objective (class) which then permits, among other things, the super-exploitation of racial minorities, the scapegoating of racial minorities for the socially disruptive consequences of the activities of capital, and the fragmentation of the working class as a whole in the context of a permanent classstruggle intrinsic to all capitalist societies.

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NOTES

[1] The preferred term among many in the U.S., especially among the right-wing, is "Illegal" immigrants. This term, however, is problematic in a country such as the U.S. because in reality all who live in the U.S.—with the exception of the indigenous peoples (Native Americans) are either illegal immigrants or descendants of illegal immigrants. No, you do not establish legality of domicile through the barrel of a gun. In other words, for those who are not Native Americans, their moral claims to citizenship do not really exist in the face of that “sacred” law, the natural law of prior claim.  It should also be noted that while, ostensibly, the focus is on undocumented workers, in reality, their racialized target is all immigrants—with the exception of white immigrants (documented or otherwise). 

[2] An adage I have coined that is always worth remembering: prejudice is a powerful antidote to truth.

[3] It should be remembered that capitalists need workers to survive, but workers do not need capitalists to survive; all that the workers would have to do is to start their own enterprises and redirect all their labor away from capitalists toward their own enterprises in order to survive and thrive. (Where would the workers get their start-up capital? They would have no need for it; they can use their labor initially and use a barter system to exchange commodities with other workers.)

[4] The irony, ultimately, is that ideologies of exploitation are necessitated by the very fact that human beings have evolved to a level higher than animals and thereby acquiring the capacity to be “civilized”; otherwise such ideologies would be unnecessary (e.g.: lower order animals such as sharks do not need ideologies of exploitation to consume other marine animals).

[5] Those who may jump to the conclusion, therefore, that the answer is communism of the type this planet has known so far, may do well by looking at the revelations of unimaginable horrors (not unlike those, in modern times, of Nazi Germany) that emerged out of the secret archives of that Soviet monster called the KGB. However racist the United States may be today, it is very doubtful that any black person would choose to live in what was once the Soviet Union (or Communist China for that matter). Though, of course, in saying this one must agree with Cornel West (1991: 61–62) that it is a choice in relative options: “who wouldn’t choose capitalist democracy? That doesn’t mean we can’t be critical. It means we have lives to lead, kids to feed and dreams of being able to exercise certain freedoms of speech and worship. We will choose a place where we at least have a chance, even if the odds are against us.”

[6] Notice too, however, that democracy has not by itself alone induced this progress. Other forces had to come into play too: in the case of the abolition of slavery, for example, capitalism had to undergo a radical change in mode: from one based on agriculture to one based on manufacturing and industry (at least in the North). Similarly, to take another example, the civil rights movement was helped considerably by the onset of the cold war with the Soviet Union where the United States, in its effort to win over onto its side the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia, was compelled to make progress in the area of civil rights in order to demonstrate to the PQD nations, what it felt, was the moral superiority of capitalist democracy over Soviet style communism.