Description
The concept “Whiteness as property,” originally formulated by Cheryl Harris (1993), has recently been the object of renewed interest within the field of critical phenomenology (Guenther 2019; Luzardo 2023). In this paper, building on analyses by Harris and Guenther, I interrogate to what extent a materialist account of race needs to take into account how “the other side of the coin” of Whiteness as Property is not merely dispossession of land, territory, wealth, and bodies, but debt. Connecting the flourishing literature on Whiteness as Property with different accounts of debt and indebted lived experience (Graeber 2011, Ferreira da Silva 2022, Lazzarato 2012, Zambrana 2021) as well as with my own work on immigrant experiences of indebtedness in a Norwegian context (Rathe 2023), I ask: what does it mean to understand racialized lived experience through the moral-economic relation of debt? I argue that while “Whiteness as property” offers a unique materialist framework for understanding racialized lived experience beyond questions of identity, such analyses can benefit from turning the spotlight on the peculiar dynamic of debt that seem to go hand in hand with various forms of racialized existence. This work, however, requires remaining sensitive to how different contexts will inevitably inform different of debt-relations, questioning the universability of any phenomenological account of race and debt.
