Locating race in capitalism’s laws of motion: the case of subprime

Through a critical engagement with the racial capitalism literature, this article problematizes interpretations of the subprime crisis that foreground expropriation and the historical continuity of racism on the grounds that they end up treating race and finance as contingently related and fail to capture the distinctly capitalist dynamics underpinning the subprime crisis. Building on scholarship that explains race in terms of capitalism’s abstractive drive, we advance an account of subprime in which race is a form of capitalist power that operates through capitalist exploitation and capitalism’s wider laws of motion. In the case of subprime specifically, racialized norms of housing consumption are a dimension of the uneven distribution of the value of labor power. The transformation of these norms by interest-bearing capital allowed global finance to convert racialized ground rents into fictitious capital. Abstractions of race therefore both created opportunities for accumulation and helped manage its uneven forms.