The Racial Rules of Corporate Power: How Extractive Corporate Power Harms Black and Brown Communities and How Race-Conscious Solutions Can Create an Inclusive Economy

November 25, 2019

The US economy has been structured by rules that either privilege or exploit people based on their race. Our nation’s legacy of implicit and explicit racial exclusions continue to have a deep impact on who is able to meaningfully participate and profit in the current American economy and who is left behind. The racialized policy choices of the past and present—the hidden rules of race—are driving economic and social disparities between people of color and their white counterparts into the future.


Outsized corporate power has entrenched these trends. To solve for its racialized effects, we must curb corporate power in ways that explicitly center racial equity and rewrite the rules to finally build an equitable economy for all.

In “The Racial Rules of Corporate Power,” produced in partnership with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Kirwan Executive Director and Roosevelt Fellow Darrick Hamilton and Madeline Neighly examine how concentrated corporate power has contributed to racial inequity and explore race-conscious policy solutions that are capable of curbing the power of corporations.