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In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

Noted: When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it.

Written by Matthew Desmond, a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a UW alumnus.