Racial Liberalism, Racial Capitalism

Abstract

Chapter 4 traces the liberal reconstitution of racial security that accompanied capitalist expansion. Liberalism provided capitalism with a mode of political regulation that presented security for a society composed of possessive individuals as its highest value. Race now evolved into a real abstraction used to ensoul the unpropertied or improper person as a fundamental threat to the possessive individual, either by way of their likely criminality or through their revolutionary attacks on property. In the plantocratic colony, liberal freedom and whiteness became tautological, while in the metropole, revolution named the threat of a liberalism taken too far. In the long dawn of capitalist modernity, race became generalized as a biopolitical technology promising to guarantee bourgeois white freedom by waging war against those whose inner lives threaten that liberal freedom: violent criminals, rebellious slaves, revolutionary Jacobins, and communists.