Focus on rights and equality are coopted by pursuits of accumulation and hegemony – cements racial cap. The Neoliberal assumption by default promotes to capitalize on suffering and gratuitous violence and the way to move away is necessary.

Following the insights Cedric Robinson, Patricia Williams, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Colin Dayan, and others, we note that today we are undergoing another seismic transformation of liberal rights to coordinate and arrange emergent hegemonies of accumulation. Often referred to as “neoliberalism,” today’s racial capitalism is creating what we term a differential rights order, transforming “rights” into an anchor for administrative actions, from the local to the supranational, that facilitates the required (de)valorization today’s financialized and extractive racial capitalism. Important scholarship has made us familiar with the ways in which differential rights schemas have been used to organize capitalism in racial modernity: the bestowing of liberal rights to white, property-holding European men and the assignment of degrees of gendered and racialized rightlessness to all others, an asymmetry that structured colonial, plantation, and early industrial modes of capital accumulation globally. From others, we have learned that the revolutionary upheavals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in which enslaved, colonized, and Indigenous people fought for freedom—struggles conventionally narrated as “winning rights”—did not end the rights-based operationalization of racial capitalism. Rather, differential rights schemas continued to coordinate racial capitalist economies, enabling racial capitalist exploitation and settler colonial dispossession through the extension of rights.2 Operating through ostensibly democratic processes, today’s rights-regimes expand differential rights by prioritizing expansive rule-making capacities and rule-enforcement, seeking to bend social formations to the changing interests of capital. Unlike previous eras of racial capitalism, the neoliberal era governs through administrative apparatuses that presume rights-bearing as an abstract universal, all the while using rights as a material force that generates both the systemic and haphazard violences necessary for contemporary practices of accumulation. Since the passing of the Civil Rights Acts and the success of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the basic dynamic of racial capitalism has been the Republican mobilization of white constituencies to block democracy in favor of elite capitalist interests (combining antitax, probusiness rights with white supremacist identity politics) and the political economic management of negatively racialized urban populations through intertwined regimes of asset-stripping, public aid, and law and order. This dynamic has been tempered by neoliberal multiculturalism and the emergence of a multiracial professional managerial class.3 Yet, with the passage of Citizens United, the dynamic has transcended to a level marked by opportunistic racial capitalist assemblages of business, investment, and governance that can articulate rules as mundane as municipal zoning regulations and as lofty as global economic alliances.