Racial capitalism is a concept that explains how capital accumulation within capitalism in certain societies is achieved through the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, particularly BIPOC communities. Some view it as a reframing of the history of capitalism in the United States, especially in relation to black people and the legacy of chattel slavery.

The concept behind the term "racial capitalism" was first articulated by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, which, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. Jodi Melamed has summarized the concept, explaining that capitalism "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups", and therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value". While adding how currently the ideologies of democracy, nationalism, and multiculturalism are key to racial capitalism.

Before Robinson, earlier scholars and theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Eric Williams had extensively documented how industrial capitalism was built on the foundation of colonialism and slavery, who also made departures from the Eurocentrism of Marxism. Furthermore, Black radicals in American sociology such as Du Bois, St. Claire Drake, Horace Cayton, and Oliver Cromwell Cox established a foundation for academic research on the intersection of racism and capitalism.

Robinson's articulations of racial capitalism became central to the field of Black and diasporic African studies, wherein new connections were drawn between capitalism, racial identity, and the development of the disconnected social consciousness—that is, the discontinuity of interhuman relations—in the 20th century. In Robinson's own words: "the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions," and "it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism." Building upon earlier examinations of racial discrimination in and inherent to various political ideologies and societal structures, Robinson challenged the Marxist notion of capitalism's negation of the basic discriminatory tenets of European feudalism, namely, its rigid caste system and reliance upon multi-generational serfdom. Hence, rather than considering capitalism as revolutionary and radically liberating, as, say, Michael Novak did, Robinson argued the inverse: that capitalism did not liberate those in racially oppressive positions, nor did it abolish feudalism's discriminatory practices; instead, capitalism gave rise to a new world order, one that extended—not deconstructed—such discriminatory practices, and one that developed and became intertwined with various forms of racial oppression: "slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide."

Although racial capitalism is not limited to European territories or those previously under Europe's colonial or imperial rule, it was during Western Europe's 17th-century economical and intellectual flourishing that capitalism and racial exploitation were first linked. Racial capitalism, according to Robinson, therefore emanated from the "tendency of European civilization...not to homogenize [groups of peoples] but to differentiate"—differentiation which led to racial hierarchization and, consequently, exploitation, expropriation, and expatriation.

In modern academic literature, racial capitalism has been discussed in the context of social inequities, ranging from environmental justice issues, through the South African apartheid and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, to disparities in COVID-19 pandemic contraction rates.

Beginning in the early modern period and reaching its apogee during the New Imperialism era, "racism formed an indispensable weapon in the armoury of the state elites, used to contain the class struggles waged by subaltern populations with a view to making the system safe for capital accumulation."

European colonialism was in large part driven by the gradual collapse of feudalism, the decline of which was hastened by events such as the Black Death, famines, and wars in as early as the 14th century. Such decline created a crisis of capital accumulation, which resulted in class struggles undermining the feudal system, and many elites gradually looked to colonization as a way to maintain their wealth and power. The fusion of race and capitalism first materialized in the modern epoch with the advent of the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th century. Though slavery existed for thousands of years prior to the Europe's colonization of the Americas and the subsequent transatlantic slave trade (for example, slavery was widespread in ancient Greece and Rome), racism and its convergence with capital, as it is understood today, emerged concurrently with European colonialism and slavery in the 17th century. The transatlantic voyages of Northern European explorers to the New World, unlike the conquests of Spanish colonizers, which yielded significant deposits of gold, silver, and other valuable metals, was subsidized primarily through agricultural plantations. In 1619, a group of enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia, coinciding with the establishment of tobacco farming as a major component of the colonial Virginian economy. However, cash crop agriculture in European colonies was serviced chiefly by white indentured servants in its inception, and it was not until the second half of the 17th century that servitude was gradually supplanted by slavery in Europe's American colonies. Indentured servants in the Americas, mostly indebted or imprisoned Europeans, worked under a plantation owner for a set period of time, usually for four to seven years, before they obtained the status of a 'free man'. As plantations grew in number, workloads surged, and indentured servitude terms expired, white American colonists searched for more sustainable means of economical, unrestricted employment to meet growing demand and ever-increasing profit quotas.