Dr. Christian Chun, the professor of the Department of Applied Linguistics, gave a presentation at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. During the yearly Historical Materialism conference, themed The Cost of Life: Oppression, Exploitation, and Struggle in the Time of Monsters, he presented a speech entitled Racism and Capitalism in the U.S.: Longtime Partners in Crime.

Here is the abstract of the presentation.

The historical invention and ensuing enactments of racial discourses, identities, and practices have been essential in their purposeful enabling of capitalism in the US for over three centuries, with the divisions of enslavements and indentured servitude that continued with the post-Civil War sharecropping, much higher rates of unemployment among Blacks than Whites, and the former’s lower wages for the same work. This talk, drawing on a linguistic ethnography, addresses what has been called the psychological wages of Whiteness (e.g., Du Bois, 1992; Roediger, 2007) and how this has prevented time and time again throughout the past 170 years or so the unified solidarity and actions of what has always been a diverse working class in the U.S. The talk features several in-depth interviews with people on how they perceive the role of race in their lives and society that illuminate the theoretical and critical debates on the role of race in aiding and abetting capitalism in the U.S., and how counter-hegemonic discourse approaches can be co-constructed to begin dismantling wages of Whiteness.