The Metastasis of Economic Hate

The neoliberal construct of perpetual indebtedness to nonhuman financial entities has created a populace so focused on debts “owed” to Wall Street that we have almost no memory of any other kinds of debts. If Malcolm X was correct that we “cannot have capitalism without racism,” we have to ask ourselves whether racism has really declined with color blindness or whether color blindness might be neoliberalism’s corollary. The article examines how color-blind ideologies naturalized racial inequality, allowing the process of predatory lending to be understood as class based and made it acceptable to turn a blind eye to the economic attack on African American communities. It was under the invisibility of color blindness that a predatory debt system was advanced that stripped African Americans of all economic gains subsequent to civil rights and that spread throughout the rest of the economy, impacting generations to come.