Chapter 3 (Johnson)- Capitalism, Class, and the matrix of domination

In the book “Privilege, Power, and Difference”, I read chapter three entitled Capitalism, Class, and the matrix of domination. This chapter asks the question if race is socially constructed and doesn’t exist otherwise, and human beings don’t have to be afraid of each other then where does racism come from. The book goes on to mention other relative questions about where oppression, hostility, and violence comes from and why did people make it up in the first place. To be able to fully understand the concept of racism you have to know where it comes from and jus how long it has been around. The book says that racism has been around for hardly more than several centuries. Hardly more than three hundred years this in my mind is a very long time. It also states that its appearance in the Europe and American coincided with the expansion of capitalism as an economic system. Capitalism has played a major role in the development of privilege with the main goal of capitalism being to turn money into more money. Capitalism distributes wealth so unequally that the richest ten percent of the U.S. population holds more than two-thirds of all the wealth including ninety percent of cash, and more than ninety percent of business assets meaning stocks and bonds. Finally capitalism plays a major role in surrounding privilege in relation to race and gender. Another statement in the book that was made, said that white men often portray black men as predators and threat towards white women. This creates a dependent position of black men toward white men that leaves them vulnerable of the white man’s control over them .A question that was asked was how to get rid of racism. The only way to get rid of racism is to get rid of the sexism and classism as well, because these are all interconnected in and help to produce one another.
I personally think that capitalism does help reinforce racism. Simply for the fact that since capitalism distributes wealth so unequally many of the people that it affects mostly are races other than white. Privilege can defend or reinforce another form, access to one form can affect access for others, and also access to one form can serve as compensation for not having access to another. Knowing this information I think it would make a lot of sense try and curtail the way we let privilege control society and how it affects everyone.