Neoliberal exceptions: racialized debt, crisis, & austerity

This project examines the stakes of racialized discourse on materiality through intelligibility, or the ability to be viewed and understood as a complex human being with similar needs and abilities to other racialized subjects whose race is obscured and ignored. This exploration of racialized discourse occurs in the context of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and multiculturalism, which indulge official-antiracist rhetoric of diversity, multiculturalism, colorblindness, and post-racialism. This project argues that racialized discourse becomes material in people's lives in various forms such as representations, stereotypes, and practices of loans and debt. These racialized discourses subject certain populations to exploitation, oppression, displacement, and dispossession while conforming to the colorblind optics of official anti-racism. While the appearance of anti-racism has augmented stereotypes and representations, the problematic underlying significations remain stuck to bodies of color, providing justification for systems of privilege and white supremacy. Because stereotypes and racialized narratives have conformed to official anti-racism stereotypes are presented as hegemonic discourse that manifests materially through discrimination, practices of loans and debt, and austerity policies. These material changes generally favor privileged people and in the process reify hegemonic racial discourse as true/natural descriptions. Finally while this project explores stereotypes it also goes beyond them by identifying how stereotypes can distract from the larger racial apparatus, non-overtly racialized narratives, and structural issues by framing racism as an individual issues.