This initiative brings UC Davis faculty and graduate students together with outside scholars and activists to advance a research agenda that focuses on racial capitalism. The historical relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial debates in U.S. historiography. Sometimes explicitly, often only implicitly acknowledged, it shapes fundamental questions about inequality, value, life, bondage, and freedom, among others, across the disciplines of race and ethnic studies, history, literary studies, law, economics, sociology and anthropology. Over the course of the next three years we will be staging dialogues across current work and chart new directions for the study of racial capitalism.