Capitalism is the root cause of the idea of “debt” – the only way to evaluate race inequality is through the lens of class

What we suggest is missing in the preceding discussions of accumulation/ dispossession and debt is the consideration of how these “new territories” of consumption and investment have been mapped onto previous racial and colonial (imperial) discourses and practices. If we go back to C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, to name only three classic anticolonial, racial, and global interrogations of historical materialism, we are reminded of how historical materialism alone cannot account for the ways in which capitalism has lived off—always backed by the colonial and national state’s means of death—of colonial/racial expropriation.24 As Manu Goswami writes in her critique of both historical materialism and the “excision” of “socioeconomic coordinates from colonialism” in postmodern theory, we must look at the “tangled causal relationships” of the lived experiences of the colonial space and the “expansive logic of capital.”25 Contesting the “evolutionary assumptions” that guide Harvey’s theories (“Flexible accumulation follows Fordist production as barbarism follows savagery”), Anna Tsing proposes instead the notion of “spectacular accumulation,” which “occurs when investors speculate on a product that may or not exist.”26 This could mean biotechnology or real estate, but her point is that it could also take us back to the “South Sea bubble and every gold rush in history.”27 Returning to how the subprime crisis allows us to highlight links otherwise missed by prevailing accounts of racial subjugation, we draw on Roy’s argument that microfinance (subprime) loans targeting poor women in the global South are part of a “frontier of empire.” Roy traces the travel of microfinance mediated by a “kinder and gentler World Bank” from Bangladesh to Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East: “As microfinance is a preferred weapon of mass salvation, so the Middle East is the site at which the war on terror and the war on poverty are conjoined.”28 This evokes a kind of space of death Achille Mbembe describes as distinctive of the postcolony.29 In short, the essays in this issue add to the library of postcolonial and critical racial theories of the statethat establish how neoliberal architectures and discourses of dispossession act on earlier forms of racial and colonial subjugation. Building on this challenge, we come back to the question of how to theorize racial/ postcolonial subjugation and economic exploitation in the context of the current financial crisis.30 The concept of differential inclusion seeks to attend to the degrees in which the various racial subaltern collectives enter into the U.S. racial configuration,31 but cannot help explain why Blacks and Latino/as figure as highly profitable as aberrant economic subjects in the very articulation of postracial claims of achieved equality. Race in the naturalized ways U.S. Americans deploy the term cannot be the privileged and sole critical descriptor of the variety of ways in which the racial/colonial logic of displacement, dispossession, debt, and death have visited the “others of Europe,” as conquered/ colonized natives, enslaved Africans, Asian indentured laborers, and so on. The common usage of the term assumes that race as a social operator enables and protects white privilege against every other nonwhite collective. In the case of the subprime crisis, this might mean that because Asian home owners were more protected than their Black and Latino/a counterparts, one could make the case that class inequalities as opposed to race offer more explanatory insight. In fact, scholarly and popular writing about inequality in the United States today and its social consequences by both liberal scholars like Theda Skocpol and neoconservative provocateurs like Charles Murray of Bell Curve infamy make exactly this argument.32 As with other improper economic subjects, the excess value the Black and Latino/a subprime mortgage holder refers to their ontological deficiency, or as G. W. F. Hegel describes Africa, for being a thing.33