How can we, for example, address racism or sexism as purely cultural concerns, ignoring the degree to which we’re dealing in a political economy? Surely Manning Marable makes an argument—rhetoric—for understanding racism as economic. And there’s W.E.B. DuBois’s notions of the birth of U.S. racism against African Americans as he creates the story of Black Reconstruction in America. In Black Reconstruction, DuBois points to an economic cause of 19th century slavery, a matter of liberal economics in that the Southerner had to compete with an industrializing Europe and Northern U.S. DuBois writes that
The italics point to how DuBois relates an economy that gives rise to a politic which is represented rhetorically, as matters of persuasion, being convinced. DuBois later goes on to say that as poor white workers became disgruntled, the legislature and the press began a campaign to describe the African American as subhuman (thanks to the new science of naturalism—an offshoot of the also new zoology—and its discussions of evolution). Political exigence arising from economic conditions gave rise to a rhetorical trope—the inferiority of a race, according to DuBois.
slavery was the economic lag of the 16th century carried over into the 19th century and bringing by contrast and by friction moral lapses and political difficulties. It has been estimated that the Southern states had in 1860 three billion dollars invested in slaves, which meant that slaves and land represented the mass of their capital. Being generally convinced that Negroes could only labor as slaves, it was easy for them to become further persuaded that slaves were better off than white workers and that the South had a better labor system than the North, with extraordinary possibilities in industrial and social development. (37; italics added)
