Capitalism in the United States cannot be disentangled from colonialism. At its core lies the juridical unit of property, which organized both land and labor into commodities and transformed them into the foundation of American political economy. This was not a neutral development. To turn land into property required the violent expropriation of Indigenous territory, legally sanitized through doctrines like “terra nullius” and the Doctrine of Discovery. To make that land profitable required coerced labor—first and foremost, the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans.
Property in America was thus born in blood: land theft on one side, human theft on the other. These processes were not incidental but mutually constitutive. Territorial expansion created the demand for enslaved labor; enslaved labor made territorial expansion profitable. Together, they structured a racialized system of accumulation that became the DNA of U.S. capitalism.
Over time, this structure was naturalized through race. Property rights defined insiders and outsiders, owners and owned, citizens and subhumans. The very capacity to possess was restricted to white settlers, while Black and Indigenous peoples were reduced to forms of property themselves. Property, then, was never merely a technical legal category. It was a racial technology: a way of allocating personhood, wealth, and belonging.
Even after slavery’s abolition, the racial contract of property endured. Jim Crow real estate codes, redlining, urban renewal, predatory lending, and gentrification all extended the same architecture of exclusion. To this day, property functions less as a universal right and more as a boundary: who belongs, who accumulates, who decides. It is also a matter of psychology and political identity. Here the insights of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing and Joel Olson are essential.
Dr. Welsing argued that white supremacy is not simply greed or prejudice but a survival strategy for a global minority. Caucasians, as a demographic minority worldwide, constructed systems of domination as a compensatory response to their insecurity. For Welsing, the obsession with control over land, labor, and wealth reveals a deeper anxiety about vulnerability and loss. Property in this sense is not just economic—it is existential. The need to possess, to exclude, to dominate is less about abundance and more about survival through control. Taken together, Welsing and Olson reveal that the behavior of the Caucasian in the history of U.S. property regimes has been:
The Black Infrastructure Trust (BIT) begins from the recognition that property, as historically constituted, is inseparable from racial hierarchy. To seek justice merely by demanding “a fair share” of property within this system is to remain trapped in the master’s framework. BIT does not ask for inclusion into a broken model. It redefines property altogether.
