Cedric Robinson

Um, it's not just a media phenomenon, of course, but this is, for example, the general function of any given Atlantic article that says some health threat isn't a big deal, or the function of any number of Emily Oster articles, or the function of the kinds of headlines that suggest a group of Palestinians have simply died of starvation and absolutely no one, no states, no armies are to blame.

Cedric Robinson called this kind of thing the product of, uh, quote, "clever weavers of aristocratic flummery." And he was talking about figures like Plato and Aristophanes.

But you can see today's manufactured indifference as a degraded but continuous line through much of the history of capitalism and settler colonies.

The ruling class has never met a negative externality it couldn't portray as a virtue.

So I think that all capitalism is racial capitalism.

And I draw on people like Cedric Robinson and Gargi Bhattacharya.

who argue that from the start, capitalism was reliant on ideas about race because from the start, capitalism was reliant on colonisation for both the massive extraction of natural resources, the conquest of lands, the enslavement of different populations, the use of populations as forced labour.

And so...

Mm-hmm.

Um, you know, whether it's, you know, whether he's got, you know, Cedric Robinson in the book, but, you know, it's this, it's a, a tradition in a, in a mode of inquiry that, um, uh, you know, dates back to those that, you know, some of the giants that, that we would, you know, think of, uh, as being the, the folks whose, you know, shoulders we stand on.

Uh, yeah, so it's, uh, like work about, uh, about the field itself.

Uh, a lot of great work, uh, within the field, too.