PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
“Electoral Democracy and Structural Injustice” [click title for link]
Journal of Social Philosophy, March 2023
Despite the increasing depth and breadth of scholarship on structural injustice, political philosophers have yet to explicitly examine the links between everyday practices of electoral democracy and unjust social structures. This essay argues that three quotidian dimensions of electoral democracy contribute to structural injustice: the competitive party system, norms of compromise, and the dispersion of power. More specifically, I claim that these aspects of electoral democracy contribute to a specific type of structural injustice—the concentration of capital, understood in two ways: as accumulation and as centralization. Capitalist concentration, in turn, facilitates the interpersonal domination that contemporary defenders of electoral democracy seek to minimize.
“White Dominion as Control: On Scientific Management and Racial Capitalism” [click title for link]
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis, May 2022
This essay deepens the analysis of whiteness-as-dominion recently advanced by political theorist Ella Myers. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois, Myers focuses on the role that ideas of ownership and possession play in white racial identity. While I am persuaded that ownership and whiteness are cojoined, ownership does not necessarily imply control, although the former may be a prerequisite for the latter. I therefore argue that the idea of white dominion can be enhanced by paying greater attention to practices of racial control. More specifically, I focus on racialized modes of labor control via scientific management, or what recent scholars describe as “whiteness-as-management.” Understanding racial capitalism through the lens of control helps us see the tactics that are used to create and maintain racial identity and dominion.
OTHER WRITING
“The Legacy of Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts” [click title for link]
Jacobin Magazine, Nov. 26, 2022
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis showed how late 19th-century state violence and neglect created colonial markets and infrastructures, which, combined with shifting weather patterns, led to astonishingly brutal famines across the Global South. I argue that not only is state violence central to primitive accumulation processes, but so too is state neglect. This is one lesson of Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts.