Nelson George from The Lost Treasures of R&B at Elliott Bay Book Company .
Nelson George reading from The Lost Treasures of R&B at Elliott Bay Book Company. Charles Mudede

I have to make this as clear as possible. Racism and capitalism are not the same thing, in the way capitalism and democracy are not identical. Racism and democracy are in fact much older than capitalism, which, in my opinion, began with the founding of the Bank of England (1694), an institution that coupled one form of the market (finance, moneylending) with one of the main functions of the state (war). Capitalism is above all about state debt, which is why we find that the most significant developments in its history almost always coincide with major wars. The formation of the Bank of England (the Battle of Beachy Head); the Bretton Woods monetary system (World War Two); Nixon closing the gold window in 1971 and the global shift to floating currencies (the Vietnam War). The conflation of capitalism (state finance) with racism always leaves the structure of capitalism free to reproduce itself in different cultural or social conditions. To understand this is to understand why all 20th-century liberation movements in black Africa ended in failure, ended with blacks economically oppressing blacks. Also, and more directly, this is why Nelson George, an important critic of American popular culture, is correct to point out that black Americans can easily be the beneficiaries of gentrification—a process by which surplus capital shapes and reshapes urban spaces for the storage and extraction of monetary value.

From my review of Nelson George's new mystery novel The Lost Treasures of R&B:

George can see that this urban transition [gentrification] is a complex matter. On the bad side, of course, the neighborhoods are becoming like all other neighborhoods that service middle-class American consumers. This is old news, and George knows it is old news. He also knows, as he explained during his reading, that it's happening in every city around the world. "When I visited Brixton [London's black neighborhood] last year, I was surprised. It used to be like the old Brooklyn, and now it is like the new Brooklyn. Cafes moved in, blacks are moving out." But there is also, surprisingly, a good side that is seldom registered: Poor and middle-class blacks in NYC are selling the old homes they bought for a song 30 years ago to developers for big profits and moving to the South. Bloggers and op-ed pieces rarely note that gentrification has been good for a lot of black folks. (In fact, it turned them into gentrifiers in cities like Atlanta and Charlotte.)

My point: All capitalism can do is work with the cultural and social materials that are available to it. If racism is among these materials, it will express that in economic terms. As a consequence, it is not impossible for blacks to be on the good side of gentrification and whites on the bad. What you will fail to find in capitalism is something that could prevent a radical racial realignment of winners and losers. This is the deeper meaning (or understanding) of a statement Nelson George made at Elliott Bay Book Company last Saturday: "There's nothing natural about capitalism."