How does capitalism create racism?

[papaspace]

I've often seen it claimed that racism is a product of capitalism. Can someone elaborate on that?

[HEAD ICE]

Racism is beneficial to capitalism because it divides the working class and sets the sights of their problems on other workers, away from the capitalist class and the capitalist system. Subjugation of one or more "races" creates a super-exploitable substrata of the working class as well. This is why racism is such a prominent feature of capitalist society.

[Kamos]

I don't know about what they think. The way I see it, though, is that racism in capitalism is not created, but rather tolerated and occasionally encouraged. Remember that capitalism cares not about the people, but about political interests. If your party can get votes through racist propaganda - so be it. If you want to weaken an opposing country by inciting racism and supporting genocide in itself: excellent, it will work like a charm. This applies to almost every capitalist regardless of ideology, although a left-liberal generally prefers to advocate a tolerant society at home to gather all the minority votes and such.

[HEAD ICE]

I disagree that racism is something of a policy or some devious plot of capitalists. The real, actually existing material capitalist requires racism as a necessity. That isn't to say that other capitalist countries don't have their own intricacies in their race relations. In fact, that should be stressed. Academic boneheads like to point out that racism is a "social construct" but their analysis is ironically very Euro- and Amero- centric and can't comprehend that racial divisions in America and across the world develop out of material factors as diverse as the "races."

[L.A.P.]

sure xenophobia would be a problem in society once in a while but racism became a full blown problem when things such as "white man's burden" were used by the European states to justify their imperialist ventures into Africa, a lot of the racism drilled into our culture today can be directly linked to the events that took place at that time. Of course the European empires needed to exploit resources and create new markets to gain more and more profit as the capitalist system requires that or it will completely collapse. And as previously stated, racism is a great tool for dividing the working class against each other blaming the exploitation by the bourgeois on each other.

[jake williams]

Sometimes capitalism simply creates racism; sometimes it exploits existing racism; but lots of the time, it has to fight racism - anti-semitism used to target the financial industry, anti-hispanic racism making it difficult to hire cheap labour, anti-Chinese racism making trade deals with China difficult, etc. In fact, a lot of the struggles within the bourgeoisie are struggles for and against racism, within the class - often, between domestic manufacturers and the finance industry.

[Tommy4ever]

Simple. Capitalism doesn't create racism. However, in some cases racism is beneficial to capitalism.

[Desperado]

What janmoe said is bang on. We must always remember that different elements of the bourgeoisie at different times act in different ways, as one or against themselves, consciously or unconsciously in their interests and sometimes accidentally against. They are neither consistent, homogeneous nor omniscient.

[ArrowLance]

Right, racism isn't so much created in capitalism as accepted as already existing problems of inequality and class make racism seem natural. Although liberal democracies often combat what they see as racism because it is socially condemned they also exploit it to move markets.