Racing Towards Global Racial Capitalism: Investigating the Impact of Racial and Gender Inequality on the Platform Economy

In this dissertation project, I explore how racialized and gendered stereotypes shape peer-to-peer transactions with the platform economy. Additionally, I demonstrate that racial capitalism changes the way we understand the impact and use of rating systems, in that these systems reproduce racialized gendered ideologies. I address how Black platform workers find new ways to use worker-provided tools within the platform economy to combat racialized surveillance within the on-demand side of the platform economy. Lastly, I argue that the narrative surrounding platform work as perpetuated by platform application companies hides the extent to which persistent racial occupational segregation in the formal economy systematically pushes Black workers into the platform economy.