Anti-racism is a permanent axis of struggle within the feminist movement to change the world. To understand how and why racism is part of the economic structure, we need to return to the origins of capitalism as we know it. The plantation system was a colonial economic and social order that, from the colonial period onward, combined three elements: the theft of Indigenous peoples’ territories, large-scale monoculture (such as sugarcane), and labor sustained through the exploitation of people abducted from the African continent and of Indigenous peoples.
The term “plantation” was used by English colonizers to describe these large agricultural estates in North America and the Antilles, an archipelago in the Caribbean. One of the authors who has written about this subject is Angela Davis, in Women, Race & Class, originally published in 1981.
This system, founded on slavery and the exploitation of nature, was not simply a historical period that came to an end. It laid the foundation for the primitive accumulation that fueled industrial capitalism in the Global North, and its legacy continues to this day. The wealth accumulated through the profitable and brutal trafficking of human beings remains tied to banks and financial institutions that still exist today.
Within the plantation system, women not only performed the same labor as men, but also had their reproductive capacity exploited to produce more labor for slaveholders. The rape of enslaved women was both a tactic of terror and another form of economic exploitation. The sexual and reproductive lives of Black and Indigenous women became strategic to capital accumulation.
Another defining feature was the logic of servitude: people were treated as though they had neither desires nor lives of their own, existing entirely in the service of others. They were regarded as commodities capable of producing and reproducing labor. This allowed one class of people to bear almost no responsibility for nearly every aspect of its own social reproduction, both in everyday life and across generations. For the elite being served, domination was all-encompassing: those in their service were responsible for everything, from breastfeeding to preparing meals, from caring for children to disposing of waste. Legalized slavery and the trafficking of human beings were perpetuated so that the labor force could be maintained by replacing workers rather than by sustaining their lives.
The patterns of exhausting labor, disposability, and servitude continue to operate today in service-sector occupations such as paid domestic work, as well as in jobs like security guards, drivers, and cooks. The way the sexual, racial, and international division of labor is organized reflects the way labor and capitalist accumulation are structured in each place and historical moment. History itself moves and changes through the conflict between capital and life. Yet even as the specific forms of work change, this division of labor persists because it is inherent to the capitalist mode of production.
To sustain this system, it is also necessary to construct a framework of subjectivities, that is, ways of perceiving, classifying, and defining people. Black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins calls these stereotypes controlling images: ideas that limit, discriminate against, and objectify Black women in order to justify and naturalize the position imposed upon them. Some of these images cast Black women as responsible for mothering society as a whole, including white people. Another is the image of hypersexualization: the idea that Black women should always be available to satisfy the desires of others. There is also the image of aggression and danger, constructed through a white perspective.
These images shape subjectivities, defining who can occupy which spaces and in what positions. They help naturalize and sustain Black women’s position within relations of servitude. They also render Black women invisible as political subjects, as well as the work they have carried out throughout history and within the economy.
The sexual and racial division of labor today
The sexual and racial division of labor determines and hierarchizes which jobs are assigned to white women, which to Black women, which to white men, and which to Black men. In the most precarious, stigmatized jobs associated with servitude, Black women are consistently overrepresented. Paid domestic work is the clearest example. Today, it embodies a colonial structure that continues to organize society by confining Black women to domestic work and the care of others. It is no coincidence that the struggle of domestic workers for labor rights gave rise to some of the earliest demands for improved working conditions in the early twentieth century, a struggle led by Black women.
Domestic and care work must be de-privatized, that is, removed from market-based arrangements inside private households and transformed into a collective, public responsibility. This is, therefore, an anti-racist struggle. Individual solutions mediated through the market inevitably reproduce the gender, racial, and class relations that structure that very market. By framing vulnerability as a fundamental human condition, feminist economy shows that everyone depends on care to survive. This understanding also helps lay bare the racism that assumes the endless availability of Black people to serve others, and of Black women to endure hardship while caring for everyone else.
The rigid separation between the public sphere (production, politics, and the access to and definition of rights) and the private sphere (care, social reproduction, and domestic life) is embedded in the very organization of urban space. A Black woman employed in paid domestic work, who lives 20 or 30 kilometers from her workplace, does not experience the city in the same way as the white employers who hire her. She spends hours commuting to paid work, may wait months for a medical appointment, and lives with the constant uncertainty caused by deteriorating public transportation or seasonal water rationing. The city itself organizes these distances and forms of precarity along racial lines. The militarized presence of the state is also experienced differently through police violence and the genocide of Black youth, which function as instruments of territorial control.
Environmental racism is part of this same structure. The greenest areas of cities are concentrated in affluent neighborhoods, while the consequences of environmental degradation fall disproportionately on Black and Indigenous communities. Floods are far more likely to destroy the homes of those living in informal settlements and landslide-prone areas. The persecution of communities and their forced displacement from their territories are also forms of racism.
Institutional racism is also embedded in public services. Discrimination operates through the assumption that Black people require less care and can endure more pain. This is why Black women make up the majority of victims of obstetric violence. There is also necropolitics, a politics of death. It is a politics that determines which lives are valued and which are considered disposable.
The international division of labor has also been present since the very beginning of capitalism, through the appropriation of territories and the exploitation of colonized peoples. Across Latin America, Indigenous peoples have resisted for five centuries, ever since the European invasion, and today continue to wage important struggles in defense of their peoples, cultures, memories, territories, and ways of life. As they reclaim their ancestral lands, they confront armed land grabbers and police forces, and continue to face violent attacks to this day. Alongside these land reclamation processes, there has also been the re-emergence of peoples who had been separated following their displacement. This struggle resists the international division of labor while proposing another way of organizing work, time, and life.
Black and Indigenous women are political subjects of resistance and transformation
Recognizing that the conflict between capital and life has shaped history means telling the story not only of exploitation, but also of the forms of resistance and the alternatives that have sustained life along the way. Since the period of slavery, Black people have combined different strategies of resistance: escape, sabotage, purchasing their freedom, and organizing autonomous communities.
Historical experiences of resistance can be found throughout Latin America and the Caribbean: palenques in Colombia, cumbes in Venezuela, Garifuna communities along the Atlantic coast, and quilombos in Brazil. These autonomous communities constituted alternative social systems, with their own ways of organizing labor, land, politics, and spirituality.
Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento helped us understand quilombos as more than sites of military resistance. She developed the idea of quilombola peace to describe community systems that function as imaginaries of freedom. Guided by their own methods and political determination, quilombos were not merely places of refuge. They were economic and political alternatives that rejected the logic of capital and affirmed other ways of life.
The struggle for territory remains central to building this alternative. Pressure on land rights, conflicts with landowners and corporations, and the murder of quilombola leaders reveal that the struggle for land is an anti-racist struggle. In a 2022 interview, Miriam Miranda, General Coordinator of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), spoke about the systematic violence experienced by the Garifuna people: “There is a process and a policy of genocide against the peoples who defend nature, who defend natural resources and life.” At the same time, she also described the Garifuna people’s process of achieving food autonomy in Vallecito, Honduras: “We are planting coconut palms to replace African oil palm plantations, not only to restore the Garifuna people’s traditional diet, but also to improve health.” Food sovereignty, health, memory, and territory are inseparable. The struggle for land, now expressed through the fight for People’s Agrarian Reform and the demarcation of quilombola and Indigenous territories, is an anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-racist struggle.
Black women have built countless economic alternatives. Care cooperatives, community kitchens, and solidarity economy initiatives weave networks of mutual support. In urban peripheries, we see women organizing themselves to confront violence, groups of artisans working through solidarity economy networks, and collectives that combine income generation with cultural resistance, among many other initiatives. These experiences embody the idea that the economy can be organized differently, not through the capitalist market, often presented as “entrepreneurship,” which fragments and isolates people, but through cooperation and community. We are committed to the concrete work of building an anti-systemic agenda that builds collective power for deeper transformation.
Quilombola women offer a framework for understanding climate change and community resilience that helps us think about an anti-racist feminist economy. At its center is territory, which they understand as the foundation of the relationships that sustain life. From the quilombola perspective, the economic cannot be separated from the political or the cultural. According to this worldview, we are body, territory, and memory, inseparable from nature. Aquilombamento as a political strategy is an invitation first articulated by Beatriz Nascimento and later taken up by writer Conceição Evaristo: “It is time for us to aquilombar ourselves.” The invitation is not simply to build parallel systems of resistance, but to create systems capable of dismantling every form of oppression. This struggle becomes stronger when it is articulated locally, nationally, and internationally by social movements, communities, and organized peoples around the world.
Struggles for reparations and transformation transcend borders
The struggle for reparations in response to this devastating process must be collective. The experiences of Black communities in South Africa and of movements of people affected by dams in Brazil show that reparations delivered solely as individual financial compensation can lead to debt and undermine ways of life. Reparations that strengthen social bonds and collective memory rebuild communities and restore communal practices. This is where we connect with the lessons of feminist economy, which broadens our understanding of what counts as economic and refuses to reduce collectively created wealth, sustained through social relations, to individual monetary compensation.
Reparations also articulate territorial and geopolitical dimensions. African countries proposed at the United Nations that the transatlantic slave trade be condemned as the greatest crime against humanity. The proposal was adopted in March 2026 with the support of 123 member states. Only the United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against it, while 52 countries, including the United Kingdom and the member states of the European Union, abstained. Discussions are now continuing to determine the different forms that reparations might take, including actions, public policies, and financial resources.
This struggle is also international. Pan-Africanism is the political and theoretical framework that connects the anti-racist struggles of the African diaspora with the struggles for liberation and independence across the African continent. Pan-Africanism sought to recognize and reconnect peoples divided by colonialism. Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon became key figures through their writings on the liberation of Africa, self-respect, mutual responsibility among people of African descent, and the social structures underlying the psychological suffering experienced by Black men.
Black feminism, in turn, has reclaimed the trajectories and theoretical contributions of women. One example is the work of the Nardal sisters and their reflections on Négritude, which informed the work of Aimé Césaire. Their contributions are explored in The Nardal Sisters: The Vanguard of the Black Cause (2025), by Léa Mormin-Chauvac. Feminist scholar Patricia McFadden also reflects on this process in an interview: “As each African country gained independence, Black women entered the public sphere as aspiring citizens, presenting demands to the new Black elites and, in general, rejecting the limitations that colonialism had imposed on us for centuries.”
Another example is Amy Ashwood Garvey, who helped organize the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) in Jamaica, the Pan-African organization that helped launch Marcus Garvey’s political work. One important reference on this history is Rhoda Reddock’s The First Mrs Garvey: Pan-Africanism and Feminism in the Early 20th Century (2014).
Lélia Gonzalez developed the concept of Amefricanity [amefricanidade], which continues to inspire our struggles. Amefricanity recognizes that what has been created across the African diaspora is not simply a juxtaposition of African cultures, but a set of original and creative syntheses that affirm our humanity and our collective power. As Lélia wrote, “By asserting our difference as Black women, as Amefrican women, we know full well that we carry within us the marks of economic exploitation and racial and sexual subordination. For that very reason, we also carry within us the mark of liberation for everyone.” In this way, she contributes to the debate on the Black diaspora by connecting regions, histories, and struggles.
An anti-racist feminist economy is a political practice grounded both in a critique of the capitalist economy and in the construction of alternative proposals and practices. Immersed in political organizing, we sharpen our understanding of the present moment, and through struggle we recognize both the limits imposed by the dominant order and the possibilities opened by the cracks created through resistance. This text is therefore the result of a process of collective reflection and organizing, but it is not an endpoint. It is nourished by all our practices of building anti-capitalist and anti-racist feminism and, like us, it remains in motion.
SOF Sempreviva Feminist Organization is part of the Brazilian and international feminist movement. It is part of the Executive Secretariat of the World March of Women in Brazil. This text is adapted from materials produced for the 2026 online course Feminist Economy: Anti-racism and Technological Sovereignty.
