ABSTRACT
This introduction presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a meta history of the most important changes and continuities of elite white strategies to maintain power that began in the 1980s. It argues that neoliberalism is just the latest elite white strategy that uses racism to preserve elite white political and economic power. Racism was a product of European modernity. European racism was constructed during the formation of the world capitalist system, as slavery became the key source of labor to extract commodities such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco in the Americas. Systemic racism helps us understand how racism shapes the networks between social institutions and our identities. In The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills mapped out overlapping elite networks to show how the centralization of power in the middle of the 20th century focused on a narrow segment of elite American society.
