Black studies,crisis,and the social reproduction of capitalist space

What is the role of crisis in the racialization of the built environment? Four of the articles in this special issue take up this question. In the process, they reveal how scholarship investigating the racialization of the built environment extends the framework of racial capitalism. They also underscore potential new directions for scholarship focused on how racialization shapes the commodification, development, and experience of ecologies and the built environment. In Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines crisis as when, “the social formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the pre-existing system of social relations (Stuart Hall and Bill Shwarz cited in Gilmore, 54).” Crises, in Gilmore’s view, are not good or bad but rather emerge from the complex relationship between profit and surplus in capitalist societies. As she continues,

the purpose of capitalist business activity is to make profit, and profitability is dependent on. . .keeping wages as low as possible, while selling all goods produced. [. . .] this means that implicit in capital’s imperative to accumulate is an equal necessity to disaccumulate. Systemic failure to disaccumulate constitutes crisis. (Gilmore, 55)

When surpluses accumulate that cannot be disaccumulated—especially surpluses of land, potential workers, and capital—they cause sectoral or system-wide crises that capitalists and the state seek to ameliorate through fixes. To stave off crisis, or respond when it inevitably emerges, capitalists and state actors transform the geography of capitalism to try and soak up surplus that has not been disaccumulated through markets as they currently exist (Harvey, 1982; Schoenberger, 2004). The principle of the spatial fix offers a framework to understand how both ecologies and built environments are unevenly developed by capitalist entities.

Given the work in this special issue, what is racial about the spatial fix, and what can it offer scholars interested in studying ecologies and the built environment? Each of these scholars engages race, and especially Blackness, in multiple registers. First, these scholars point to how Black people are figured as surplus in capitalist societies. Across these articles, from the Great Migration to the prison, Black people are understood by bureaucrats and entrepreneurs as exceeding the numbers needed to feed capitalism’s labor force—marking them for state and extra-legal control. Second, they effectively show how racism functions as an ideology—a system of making meaning of the world that values white lives over Black lives. In their varied accounts, racial ideology is an essential ingredient that ties Blackness to notions of valuelessness. Justin Hosbey (2025) is most clear in where this ideology emerges from—the history of chattel slavery and the forms of land use and development—like Angola Prison—that have been recapacitated after legal emancipation. Walker et al. (2024) demonstrate how racial ideology shapes notions of urban nature and ecologies—marking some spaces as desirable and some as less so, entrenching patterns of uneven investment in urban nature and amenities. Vickers’ (2024) article points to a third role of race in the spatial fix—racial ideology rationalizes Black spaces for extraction and disinvestment as part of the geographic restructuring that defines the spatial fix.

The joint depictions of Blackness and the spatial fix in these articles constitute an important intervention into scholarly approaches to racial capitalism across multiple fields of study. Adherents to Cedric Robinson’s framework of racial capitalism argue that capitalism emerges from, drives, and benefits from the differentiation of workers. Robinson contends that capitalism did not constitute a fundamental rupture from previous forms of social and economic organization in Europe, as traditional Marxists argued. Rather, Robinson argues that capitalism emerged from a context where Europeans had already begun to categorize each other as inherently unequal based on innate traits and that this constituted an important continuity between the pre-capitalist and capitalist social and economic organization of society (Robinson et al., 2021). However, accounts of racial capitalism have been curiously despatialized outside of the field of Geography. By building on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s conception of the prison fix and Clyde Woods’ concept of a social-spatial fix, these authors demonstrate that the production of space, nature, and urban environments should be at the center of scholarly investigations of how racial capitalism has changed over time (Gilmore, 2007; Woods, 1998). While geographers have been central to beginning to answer these questions, this special issue underscores the need and analytical purchase for this framework to reach beyond Geography to all fields invested in working with racial capitalism as a hermeneutic.

However, if these texts collectively reveal the central place of Black Ecologies—which expose how Black people are inflicted with disproportionate ecological harm and how Black people have responded to these conditions—in the maintenance of racial capitalism, this raises questions about the centrality of reproduction as an important new direction for scholars of race, ecologies, and the built environment to explore. As Gilmore writes in Golden Gulag directly after her definition of crisis, “the pivotal verb ‘to reproduce’ signifies the broad array of political, economic, cultural, and biological capacities a society uses to renew itself daily, seasonally, generationally (54).” In other words, at stake in the racial-social-spatial fix is not just crises of production but also crises of social reproduction. Social reproduction is defined as the processes through which new workers and the working class are generated to provide the energy capitalism must exploit to continue its accumulation of value (Bhattacharya, 2017). In this conception of social reproduction, unwaged social reproductive labor is not important because it generates value, but rather, because it generates potential workers, and therefore, labor power (Ferguson, 2022). Because this approach to social reproduction theory (SRT) does not see unwaged labor as directly creating value, these scholars of social reproduction understand (social) reproduction and production to have a fundamentally contradictory relationship, where one, rooted in the domestic sphere, recreates the conditions for life, and the other, rooted in the market, generates value (Fraser, 2016). This approach to SRT has been predominant in the reemergence of the theory into public and scholarly consciousness.

What is the relationship between social reproduction and land? Feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser argues that scholars should think about land and care in tandem as noneconomic capacities that capitalism relies on to undergird the accumulation of value and profit while simultaneously exhausting these same capacities (Fraser, 2022). The intersection of social reproduction and space also has a rich history among feminist geographers (Mitchell et al., 2004). However, while these feminist geographic accounts of social reproduction have, in the last 10 years, started to take up intersectionality and decolonial thought to enrich their usual frameworks of gender and class, approaches to race rooted in Black Studies remain marginal to geographic approaches to SRT (Rodríguez-Rocha, 2021). Political theorists of social reproduction have tended to conflate intersectionality with all approaches to race and Blackness rooted in Black feminism (Camp et al., 2019; Ferguson, 2016; McNally, 2017; Vogel, 2017, 2018). Given the already rich overlaps between Geography and Black Studies, it is imperative that geographers interested in SRT avoid repeating this mistake.

While scholars outside of Black Studies have tended to view the relationship between Black people, capitalism, and space through the lens of inequality, Black Studies scholars have powerfully demonstrated how the emergence of Blackness and whiteness shaped the very terms scholars use to analyze capitalism—value, human, and exchange, just to name a few (Morgan, 2021; Spillers, 1987). At stake in this distinction, for me, is not necessarily a claim about the severity of Black oppression in capitalist societies. Instead, Black Studies illuminates how anti-Blackness shapes capitalism’s grammar and logic, rather than just its unequal outcomes. This is the true Black Studies lesson of racial capitalism that must shape investigations into the intersections between place, capitalism, and care.

What could a Black ecological approach to SRT look like? Such an approach would require scholars who study the racialization of space to intervene in the limitations of SRT’s approach to race and mobilize Black and Marxist geographic thought to “blacken” SRT theorists’ approach to land. As I have argued elsewhere, the exclusion of Black people from social reproduction was and continues to be constitutive of the contradiction between capitalism and care (Sherley, 2026). Therefore, we should understand capital as fundamentally hostile to Black social reproduction—defined here as labor oriented toward making Black life and flourishing possible—not because of its drive toward accumulation, but because of how the ungendering and kinship shattering violence of anti-Blackness defines capital’s emergence and challenges scholars to investigate Black family life without using binaries of home and work (Sherley, 2026). What new insights could result from triangulating concepts like a Black sense of place, Black Ecologies, and a Black feminist approach to SRT (Hosbey and Roane, 2021; McKittrick, 2011)? How do Blackness, gender, and sexuality shape the co-production of space and capitalist value? How could the concept of the spatial fix overlap with fungibility of Blackness and technologies used by racial capitalism to resolve its inherent structural crises in the short term?

Justin Hosbey begins to explore what this might look like through his invocation of Orisanmi Burton’s concept of Black masculine care work as a strategy for resisting the devastating racial logics of the prison fix (Burton, 2021; Hosbey, 2025). But a deeper engagement with both feminist theories of social reproduction and Black feminist theories of care and reproduction would give these early forays into how care and Black Ecologies overlap even more heft, clarifying the racialized gendered stakes and histories that inhere in caring labor and situating these labors in an analysis of racial capitalism that can think race, gender, labor, land, and Black Ecologies together. The racial-spatial fix underscores both how Black people are the surplus capitalism tries to “solve” in the short term and how the plundering of Black land and communities is one method capitalists use to resolve crises of surplus. But a Black feminist approach to social reproduction has the potential to reveal how both Black Ecologies and the racial-spatial fix are examples of how Blackness and Black people are figured in the social reproduction of racial capitalist society and the roles of gender and sexuality in the management of land in capitalist societies.

The question at the center of our overlapping crises of care, nature, and democracy is the question of humanity—its future and its configuration. There are no greater experts on the question of humanity than the field of study that emerged from its denial.