This manuscript includes a historically complex economic analysis of structural racism and its transformations across alternative periods of US political economic development. Exclusion is a central quality of Black life in the US political economy. During the era of chattel capitalism, Africans were commodities, wholly excluded from ownership of their own life, time, and activities, standing before the law, representation in the political system, or ownership of productive assets. Under chattel capitalism, Africans were not citizens, workers, consumers, or even people; they were commodities, that is, fixed capital inputs into the production process whose utilization and mobility were wholly determined by capitalist agricultural producers. From 1619 to 1865, the wealth produced by African commodities was appropriated by Whites.