State policy, not market exchange, institutionalized US racial labor subordination.

Evidence

Exclusionist policies visavis Asian labor were soon firmly in place. After the Plessy decision in 1896 (and in many ways before), Jim Crow was institutionalized as state racial policy, severely curtailing black labor’s competitive threat to whites (and also holding down white wages). In the South after Reconstruction’s end in 1877, convict leasing was institutionalized by the state as a form of peonage on farms and in factories (Blackmon 2009). — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the Milgrom law-merchant material on how institutions, not markets alone, structure exchange.