Abstract

Excerpted From: J. Benton Heath, Fetch the Bolt Cutters: Reflections on Racial Capitalism and the NAFTA/USMCA, 49 Brooklyn Journal of International Law 449 (2024) (129 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Thank you for this opportunity to speak on the subject of race and trade in the US--Mexico--Canada Agreement (USMCA).

I mean for this presentation to be an introduction to many of the issues that are on my mind as a scholar of investment and trade. It is also an introduction to the work of many others who have thought deeply about the relationships between race, global capitalism, and international trade law. I claim no particular novelty in this presentation. And my thinking today is heavily indebted to the work of others whom I will reference throughout.

In what follows, I want only to emphasize both the difficulty and the importance of thinking about race in the context of international trade law. I will start with an illustration (Part I). Then I want to make a few points about law and theory (Part II) and conclude with some rather imprecise suggestions for where we might go from here.

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This is the part of the talk where one is supposed to suggest what should be done next. Here there are no easy answers. To borrow from Bhattacharyya: “There will be no blueprint for the revolution here. If I possessed such a thing I would not be wasting my time in the lonely work of scholarship.”

The point here is not to condemn trade agreements and their supporters as racist. That asks the wrong question, and it misses the systemic level at which racial capitalism operates. Rather, the lens of racial capitalism explodes the distinction between commitments to international law and multilateralism, on the one hand, and parochialism, nationalism, and racism on the other. This, in turn, helps us break away from the interminable debates over liberalization versus flexibility in trade agreements. If we take redistributive justice seriously, our support for state action or trade liberalization will have to be contingent, partial, and tactical, always informed by the knowledge that both states and markets reflect and reinforce longstanding power disparities. We must select pathways that allow working people to exercise control over their lives, rather than having trade policy dictate to them that they must leave the fields for the factory, that they must supplement their insufficient earnings with gig work, or by literally selling off parts of their bodies.

What this wave of interest in racial capitalism offers, instead, is a mode of analysis. Let's return to pecans. In 1938, thousands of workers--most of them Mexican-American and many of them women--would stage a wildcat strike in pecan shelling plants of western San Antonio. Emma Tenayuca, a young radical and organizer, was a key leader in the strike. The following year, reflecting on the position of Mexican labor in the US, Tenayuca recognized the complex formations of racial capitalism. She wrote that the treatment of Mexican labor in the Southwest reflected a fusion of the anti-Black racism of the American South with “Wall Street's imperialistic exploitation of Latin America.” The unmet demands she articulated in that article remain the same today: economic, political, social, cultural, and educational equality for those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Trade law is not innocent in this struggle for equality, though it often purports to be. The critique of racial capitalism offers a vocabulary for reading inequality back into trade law and for strategizing about where to go from here.

Associate Professor, Temple University Beasley School of Law.