None of this is news, especially if you are a woman who has ever held a job. Living inside a capitalist system that thrives off of “global theft, racially uneven playing fields, and unidirectional wealth that rushes upward,” women have been and continue to be exploited, often providing free or cheap labor, working in sexually violent conditions, and working without many of the basic rights afforded to men. But I would add a third component to Kendi’s twins, as I see instead a tripartite monster of three equal faces: capitalism, racism, and misogyny. I’d arrived at a similar conclusion years ago, around the time I stopped identifying as a Libertarian, started to see the lies upholding many of my beliefs about the free market, and realized that subjugation and exploitation undergird capitalism as much as racism. “The life of capitalism cannot be separated from the life of racism.” Capitalism emerged alongside the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and thrived during colonialism, and the two institutions have grown together and solidified over the last four hundred years. “The origins of racism cannot be separated from the origins of capitalism,” he says. Kendi writes about what he terms the “conjoined twins” of racism and capitalism. In his bestselling book, How to Be an Antiracist (2019), Ibram X.
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