Their understanding of the human as a rational economic decision-making subject criminalizes Black bodies as irrational uncompliant subjects

Homo Economicus’s Others: Black Objects and Black Debt One of the financial literacy programs run by the government, Money Smart, is a free “instructor-led curriculum” that can be taught in “a classroom or small group setting.”56 The curriculum covers “deposit and credit services offered by financial institutions, choosing and maintaining a checking account, spending plans, the importance of saving, how to obtain and use credit effectively, and the basics of building or repairing credit.”57 These materials, among many others, display the basic and well-established assumptions of financial literacy education: that individual financial stability requires rational calculations and decision-making. In other words, financial literacy is a normative project to bring individuals into compliance with the simplistic assumptions of economic models, or what James Kwak terms “economism.”58 As such, financial literacy acknowledges and seeks to remediate what behavioral economists have long noted: that models do not match reality because individuals do not act rationally.59 However, if individuals can be made to act rationally, optimal economic outcomes can be achieved. In other words, the purpose of financial literacy is to make each of us a well-functioning and rational “homo economicus,” the idealized subject of free market capitalism. Financial literacy is just the latest narrative to deploy a version of homo economicus as the baseline subject of economic rationality. Although the term is said to have originated only in the nineteenth century in response to the writing of John Stuart Mill, the notion of a “proper” capitalist subject who acts correctly within various models of capitalism is much older.60 It is also a raced subject. The history of capitalism reveals that the dominant notion of economic rationality is constructed as/in a white subject over and against black bodies both as objects rather than subjects of capitalism and as intense targets of exploitative debt. This racial tension at the heart of economic rationality reveals the racial stakes of calls for financial literacy education of black consumers. White Subject, Black Object According to Michel Foucault, the homo economicus of the late twentieth century eschews the early political economic concern of buying and selling one’s own labor power—with all its potentially collectivist political implications—for the individualized pursuit of self-interest “as an entrepreneur of himself.”61 Foucault offers as evidence Gary Becker’s universalizing idea of “human capital.” Homo economicus is he who can solve any social problem by accumulating human capital that produces an earnings stream for the entrepreneur of himself. But this entrepreneurial self-determination is not equally accessible by all raced subjects. According to Denise Ferreira da Silva, the black is not self-determined but “outer-determined,” which is to say, always open to being “affected,” manipulated by the Western subject for his own benefit.62 The black, then, functions as one about whom choices are made, not one who makes choices. Sylvia Wynter provides the most explicit argument of the overrepresentation of homo economicus as white within the Western construct of the human, which she argues cannot be disarticulated from capitalism. Indeed, homo economicus emerges out of the shift from the Renaissance’s conceptions of politics and Western Judeo-Christianity as signifiers of the human, what she calls “Man1,” to “Man2,” or “a figure based on the Western bourgeoisie’s model of being human that has been articulated as, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, liberal monohumanism’s homo oeconomicus.”63 Likewise, Lisa Tilley argues that Wynter’s homo economicus is a revision of a racialized humanness, “formulated within the colonial episteme’s Darwinian distortions as divided between the naturally selected (Europeans) and the naturally ‘dysselected’ (those racialized as naturally inferiority).”64 Wynter finds the origins of this shift in humanness in the “colonial matrix of power.”65 In her essay “1492,” she argues that Christopher Columbus functioned as a racialized turning point for Europe, one that replaced Western religious conceptions of knowledge, such as the world being flat, with secularized conceptions of the world.66 Further, Columbus’s voyage had as much to do with spreading Chris- tianity and glorifying the Spanish nation as it did with enriching “himself and his family with all the gold and tribute he could extort from the indigenous peoples, even from making some into cabezas de indios y indias (heads of Indian men and women), who could be sold as slaves.”67 Wynter notes that Columbus is often positioned in terms of celebratory American “discovery” in ways that brush over the colonial, nationalistic, and imperialistic implications of his individual financial aspirations and the objectification of black bodies on which those aspirations depended. Walter Mignolo follows Wynter, providing some insight into the racial foundations of homo economicus, particularly connecting it to Western colonialism and imperialism, both of which are inseparable from the post-Columbian context.68 Mignolo argues that the self-interested optimization that fleshes out the figure of homo economicus assumes coloniality and imperialism.69 In effect, Western colonial enrichment—at the expense of indigenous racial others of Europe—is already inherent in the “economic rationality” of homo economicus, as it is seen as a financially rational tool of enrichment, rather than a moral wrong. Elsewhere Wynter claims that the proto-notion of homo economicus that circulated in the sixteenth century underwent important transformations by the nineteenth century. Further removed from Judeo-Christianity, conceptions of economic rationality in the nineteenth century functioned in raced form to articulate both black and indigenous populations in the “New World” as the epitome of economic irrationality. Wynter notes that by the nineteenth century, the black slave “would now be made into the physical referent of the ostensibly most racially inferior and non-evolved Other to Man, itself redefined as optimally homo economicus.”70 The black slave is in effect the defining opposite of homo economicus, that nonbeing who is less than human and/ or not human at all. Where homo economicus is self-interested and free to choose—the subject who can fulfill the ultimate human goal of surplus accumulation on his own—the slave is utterly removed from not only this goal but even the possibility of choosing or acting within the construct of the self.