Property law and ownership claims reinforce the racialized flows of capital and enforces debt---whiteness acts as a veneer for legal relationships exclusively afforded to white people while excluding Black relationality.

Was this the emancipation of the enslaved, or was it the emancipation of capital? Shareholder whiteness is a cover for law-breaking, an enfranchisement of whiteness over Indigenous and Black modes of relationship. Corporations slithered between legal conceptions of “real” person and “collective aggregate” in ways that allowed them to capture legal and political rights while shirking responsibilities and obligations. The context for these maneuvers was a historical transformation of the concept of personhood and the emergence of the singular individual, harnessing the idea of free labor to the idea of free trade as constituent elements of liberal imperialism.23 By delinking from claims on actual existing assets, which represent the capital of a corporation, and instead organizing around future claims on corporate assets, the share, in the present moment, multiplies the capital in circulation for a given set of tangible assets, such as land, resources, or labor. As these fictitious capitals developed, they were reified and fetishized as things in their own right, and capital itself began to be understood as equally productive as labor. In the United States, this “fetishization of money capital,” the basis of the dominance of market ideologies beginning in the midnineteenth century, grew out of interactions with fetishized whiteness, and the corresponding dominance of nationalist myths of frontier and lost-cause masculinities. Once slave property claims were removed from the balance 160 • c h a p t e r 8 sheet, property claims in future revenues became depersonalized and increasingly immaterial, seeming to take on a personality of their own. The withdrawal of capitalists from the production process, henceforth to be supervised by managers, facilitated the development of shares and other forms of credit, but it also reflected the large-plantation model of management by overseers. The modern corporation bears traces of the antebellum plantation.24 Against an emerging ideal of “shareholder democracy,” corporate power increasingly emphasized managers and directors, technocrats and experts, over a democracy of property owners. Shifting accountability from public governance to the structures of corporate capitalism, shareholder democracy involved a concentration of economic and political power, transforming relationships within and beyond whiteness, splitting the ownership of industrial capital from money capital, multiplying the actual assets of a corporation. A divide between those with rights in the corporation, and those who “are merely ‘owed’,” reflects a divide in whiteness, between the technocratic administrators of racial and colonial capital, and the beneficiaries of imperialist futures. Capturing and controlling corporate assets as common property would fail to resolve the colonial and racial contradictions that shape corporate assets. Railroad unions that actively excluded Black workers from membership and employment, sometimes striking to demand the elimination of Black workers, fulfilled shareholder whiteness.25 In the post-emancipation era, corporate property was defined through legislation and judicial reasoning, rated and regulated by state institutions, the sanctity of individual property claims upheld, in the final instance, by the police and the army. Compulsory Black labor, justified by notions of Black indebtedness to the United States, shaped a transition to a new racial regime. This transition took place in a context of mass white terrorism under state sanction; Ida B. Wells pointed to the legal impunities of racist violence as a constituent feature of the law itself. Expansion of police powers informed the Indian Appropriations Act, passed by Congress in March 1871, in which Congress declared that it would unilaterally suspend the treaty process with tribal nations, thereby evacuating the international diplomatic protocols governing the U. S. “national” interior. While the United States continued to acknowledge the presence of “independent tribes, nations, or powers” it would not recognize these as distinct political actors “within the territory of the United States,” expanding the scope and claims of the federal government.26 S h a r e hol de r W h i t e n e s s • 161 While the United States was suspending diplomatic relations with Indigenous nations, a debate over the legal status of corporations was shaped, in part, by relations of debt. Amidst land grants to railroad corporations, and a growing international market in railroad securities, U. S. courts began to reconceive the corporation as an entity apart from its shareholders, focusing on the terms of contract between the corporation and its shareholders. If the corporation was a person, it was indentured to its shareholders. This was a very different form of debt than the racial and civilizational debt invoked to valuate Indigenous and Black modes of relationship. Corporate debt was, instead, an enabling sort of debt.27