ABSTRACT
A striking feature of systemic racism in the United States is how long it has persisted with a strikingly inegalitarian racial hierarchy firmly in place. Since Karl Marx's time, Marxist analysts and other critical analysts have usually ignored or downplayed the racist architecture of centuries of Western colonialism. Numerous positive features of distinctive modernity have played a major and negative role in the genocide, land theft, and labor theft that accompanied the global expansion and colonialism of European countries beginning in the late 1400s. Strikingly, colonialism, capitalism, modernity, and global exploitation all have a common genealogy. European colonialism and capitalism were in their early stages of development when they generated the cross-Atlantic slavery system. The high court usually rejected accounts of oppression and pleas for redress provided by African Americans in regard to slavery, segregation, and other racial oppression. The everyday operation of racial oppression, its routine and stable equilibrium, is only occasionally disrupted in a significant way.
