“Racism Pays: Racial Exploitation in the Digital Age,” Daria Roithmayr, Colorado

Recent work on the history of capitalism documents the key role that racial exploitation played in the launch of the global cotton economy and the construction of the transcontinental railroad. But racial exploitation is not a thing of the past. Many of our most celebrated digital innovators have relied on racial exploitation to launch their revolutionary tech breakthroughs and jump start this most recent phase of capitalism. In a forthcoming book, I argue that racially exploiting workers of color has enabled tech pioneers like Apple, Uber and Amazon to create precisely the new forms of work that digital innovation demands. In this talk, I will focus on black, brown and immigrant full-time drivers for Uber, reviewing both theoretical and empirical support for the claim that Uber relied on racial exploitation to get its innovation off the ground. This story, like others involving Apple and Amazon, shows that even in the twenty-first century, racism still pays.

Daria Roithmayr teaches and writes about the dynamics of racial inequality, and in particular the persistence of structural disparities in labor, housing, political participation, wealth and education. Her book, "Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage" (NYU 2014), explores the self-reinforcing dynamics of persistent racial inequality. Her work is heavily interdisciplinary, drawing from economics, sociology, political theory, history and complex systems theory. She joined Colorado in fall 2023.

Before joining Colorado, Professor Roithmayr taught for seventeen years at the University of Southern California. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. She has also been a visiting law professor at the University of Michigan, Georgetown, and Yale. Professor Roithmayr received her B.S. from UCLA, and her J.D., magna cum laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a member of Order of the Coif and served as senior notes editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. She clerked for The Honorable Marvin J. Garbis, judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.