The whitened quest for property is inherently tied to agency and racialized logics of credit and debt

As evident in the FFRN!, consequential agency is essential to the production of white benevolence during reparative giving. White people who see anti-Black racism as deeply violent can only imagine their whiteness to be non-harmful if they believe that they are doing what they can to address this violence and that their actions are meaningful and consequential. In short, a position of white benevolence becomes possible when white people acknowledge the harm of racism and believe themselves to be addressing it. As such, white people can only come to a position of white benevolence through a liberal humanist framework of agency which positions their individual actions as consequential.

Most simply, the liberal humanist subject is imagined as an autonomous, decisive figure who has the capacity to make rational decisions based upon knowledge. In her explanation of the liberal humanist notion of agency, Nadine Elhers (2012) writes, “The constituting subject is seen to be the masterful owner of property in his own person. Consequently, this individual (inevitably cast as ‘man’) has been thought of as selfdetermining and capable of exercising agency through the rational operation of free will” (p. 107). Here, Elhers connects the exercise of agency to the masterful ownership of property. To be agential within the framework of liberal humanism, an individual must have the capacity to exercise decisive control over the property in their possession — such as when voluntarily contributing to reparations funds.

Liberal humanism does not correspond to a tangible “reality” of the human, yet it is the overarching, dominant framework for being human under liberal modernity. This is not coincidental; instead, as Weheliye (2014) argues, the liberal humanist figure only exists as the central definition of the human due to processes of racialization that cast racialized people as not-quite-human or non-human. Weheliye writes that the categories of race and gender “carve from the swamps of slavery and colonialism the very flesh and bones of modern Man,” meaning that the constitutive features of “the modern, secular, and western version of the human” (as Man) are defined through racialization and coloniality (2014, pp. 29-30, p. 139). White people, particularly propertied white men, have been and continue to be most able to occupy liberal humanist subjectivity precisely because liberal humanism and whiteness are co-constitutive. This means that the occupation of liberal humanist subjectivity (and the forms of agency and individuality that liberal humanism entails) is not a neutral act. Instead, the occupation of liberal humanist subjectivity mobilizes racialized hierarchies which cast white people as fully human and racialized people as less-than-human.

Harney and Moten’s (2013) work is useful for problematizing and theorizing beyond liberal humanist constructions of agency and responsibility. They argue that it is necessary move beyond “balancing the score” as a means toward accountability and justice, writing that “to seek justice through restoration is to return debt to the balance sheet and the balance sheet never balances” (p. 63). Using accounting as a means to accountability cannot bring justice because this approach leaves in place a transactional framework for redress which assumes that the harm committed (and thus debt owed) can be measured, quantified, and paid. White people who seek to repay “their share” of the harm of racism operate within a liberal, legalistic framework of individual moral responsibility which is inadequate for understanding our responsibility to address racial violence (Rothberg 2019, p. 7).