When slavery ended the white people viewed the enslaved person’s freedom as a debt to be paid back to them that still affect the racialized labor today.

Conditions of domination and exploitation that reach further into the past, however, are also extended into the present of bad debt through subprime loans that are difficult to repay. 59 Dispossession by slavery, and the prevention of ownership of property and other assets by ‘freed people’, remain at the root of the asymmetrical economic relations of debt in the present. A repetitive white moral discourse inculpates non-white borrowers as being responsible for their own plight and therefore ‘not credit worthy’, which was what caused them to (again) take on unpayable debts and live beyond the means allotted to them.60 This unpayable guilt/debt is ascribed to debtors through sexist-racist constructions of subordination and lack, thus rendering invisible the entanglement of capitalism and racism in slavery and colonialism. In this discourse, the racially marked body is not allowed to fully cultivate the subjectivation that a loan contract demands. Endless indebtedness corresponds to the status of being not-yet-white; in the white ideology of superiority, work on the ‘black’ self always falls short of the white norm.61 And this was precisely what allowed financial profit to be made from subprime loans. Already with the end of slavery in the US in 1865, freedom and recognition as a self-responsible subject capable of entering into contracts was not an instant right, but something that freed people had to prove themselves worthy of. Corresponding to the Latin meaning of the word emancipatio, emancipation literally meant being discharged from the hand (manus) of the pater familias, the slave-holder, to be set free by him. In this logic, distinct from the logic of white self-liberation as a sovereign act, former slaves became freed people, but not free people.62 Even after 300 years of enslavement, whites still feared that black workers, supposedly characterized by sluggishness and laziness, would not comply with a capitalist production system based on free labour and possessive individualism. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman has shown how, by means of advice books first and foremost, freed slaves were to be trained and disciplined as free workers.63 In order to counter the refusal to become a working subject capable of signing contracts, white discourse promoted a ‘willingness to endure hardships, which alone guaranteed success, upward mobility and the privileges of citizenship’.64 In fact, coercion and violence were the more usual means of compelling freed people to sign labour contracts and subject themselves to labour discipline, means that went far beyond those used in capitalist labour relations otherwise, and that were predicated on inequalities created by racist conditions of domination. The subordination demanded of the former enslaved workers marked the continuities between slavery and freedom. As emancipated persons made competent to sign contracts, of necessity they had to behave in accordance with liberal individualism as both dutiful subordinates and rational, self-responsible individuals.65 Particular to the racist ambivalence of subordination and freedom, however, was its basis in the construction of the guilt and debt of emancipation, which meant that there was no prospect of freed people ever achieving the ideal autonomy of white heterosexual masculinity. The freedom granted by the whites was seen as a gift from the ‘benefactors’ to the enslaved, for which they needed to demonstrate gratitude and worthiness, and which put them in debt to the whites, making them guilty and increasing the compulsion to discipline. ‘The burden of debt, duty and gratitude [was] foisted onto the newly emancipated in exchange or repayment for their freedom.’66 In the entanglement of autonomy and (self-)responsibility, the white ‘investment of faith’ was viewed as moral debt to be paid back, as an investment which the involuntary ‘borrowers’ had to prove themselves worthy of through sustained repayment. ‘To be free was to be a debtor – that is, obliged and duty-bound to others.’67 This racist guilt/loan relationship is upheld by the linking of guilt/debt and time. The freed were bound to the past by means of an indebtedness for their freedom, because as free(d) autonomous individuals they were now made responsible for the deeds attributed to them, including ones from the past. Should they fail, the concessions could be revoked. This temporality of guilt/debt is a linear time that assures compliant behaviour. It binds the present to the past and grafts a present full of deprivation onto the promise of becoming a worthy and respected citizen some day in the future.68 According to this cynical logic, the ‘freed people’s’ guilt/debt for emancipation continues to bind them even today, in an inverted responsibility to the past: the lasting individualized guilt/debt enables the construction of a white national innocence and widespread amnesia with regard to slavery. 69 This racist bad-loan logic supports the construction of white superiority, for which repayment of the loan can never end. For the whites, it is a necessarily non-returnable debt. The white guilt/debt discourse demands of its others a double subjection: selfdiscipline as a free(d) subject and the affirmation of eternal guilt in relation to white superiority, driven by the promise of and desire for future independence, for a freedom which releases one from social connections. For this reason, too, credit is asocial and uninterested in care.