The Political Economy of Niggerdom: W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. on the Racial and Economic Discrimination of Black Males in America

Abstract

In The Color of Money, Baradaran argues that the defining feature of America’s racial divide is the wealth gap which is where the seeds of historic anti-Black injustice and the present economic sufferings of African Americans were sown. While exploring the philosophical thoughts of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., this essay grapples with such roots of anti-Black economic injustice by highlighting how the American capitalist economy was designed to, ultimately, destroy Black families through the exclusion of Black males from the system of wealth creation. I argue that insights from the structural, socio-political and economic critiques of W. E. B Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. reveal how America operated a “political economy of niggerdom”—a system that utilizes various modes of anti-Black misandry, and the stereotype of criminalization as the basis for racial and economic discrimination against Black males.