Racism gets reorganized by each mode of production rather than being constant

Evidence

In part, this must be because one cannot explain racism in abstraction from other social relations—even if, alternatively, one cannot explain it by reducing it to those relations. It has been said that there are flourishing racisms in pre-capitalist social formations. This only means that, when dealing with more recent social formations, one is required to show how thoroughly racism is reorganized and re-articulated with the relations of new modes of production. Racism within plantation slave societies in the mercantilist phase of world capitalist development has a place and function, means and mechanisms of its specific effectivity, which are only superficially explained by translating it out from these specific historical contexts into totally different ones (Finley 1969; Davis 1969 and 1966). Others have argued that, though slavery in the Ancient World was articulated through derogatory classifications which distinguished between the enslaved and enslaving peoples, it did not necessarily entail the use of specifically racial categories, while plantation slavery almost everywhere did. Thus, there can be no assumed, necessary coincidence between racism and slavery as such. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 633

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘articulation’ of racism with modes of production — each economic epoch reshapes racial categories.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the plantation-slavery and sacrificial-economy concerns in the sacrifice article — different modes of organizing coerced labor.
• XREF: connects to: Empire is a contingent process that reproduces itself through shifting racism. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 93; Racism operates as a changing process rather than a fixed project; Racist discourse varies by context of production, not only by underlying beliefs — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1071