me you could argue there are anti-racist tendencies within capitalism too, and to declare it as essentially racist is to overstate the case.
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Milton Friedman and libertarians like Robert Nozick and Richard Epstein argue that capitalism, or anyway neoclassical economics, is antiracist for the reason stated by Doug. Economist in this vein try to explain economically irrational racism by positing a "taste" for discrimination that racists are willing to pay for.
A different approach is suggested by John Roemer, who has theorem supporting the "divide and conquer" thesis, that racism is economically rational for capitalists because if you divide the working class you can pay everyone lower wages. This is in the Bell Jour. of Econ 10: 695-710 (1979). I believes Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have some empiricalw ork supporting this sort of hypothesus. It's waht Amrx believed, for what that's worth. See his letter on the Irish question.
This doesn't go to whether capitalism is _necessarily_ racist. Depending on how strong you want to read "necessarily," I doubt it, at least if one means, e.g., that capitslism is supposed to be necessarily racist the way it is necessarily exploitative. After all, one might imagine a capitalist system operating where everyone was the same race and there were no racial distrinctions made.
But perhaps Charles means that if there are racial distinctions made, then capitalsim will necessarily, not as part of its nature but as one of its effects, seize on these to promote divisions. That is not implausible. In that way, capitalism might be necessarily racist the way it necesasrily involves domination. Domination at the point of production is not logically required for capitalism, but it is a causally inevitable consequence of capitalism at a certain stage of development.
--jks