Description
There are compelling arguments that political economists are uniquely suited to measure the ‘wages of whiteness’, or the material impacts of the racial regime of white supremacy. However in this paper, I argue that political economists must also account for the ideational environment that allows such inequality to be legitimised. Indeed, I contend that the practice of giving meaning to economic language obfuscates the imperialist context in which this language emerged. The drive to catalogue the material, then, ought not to foreclose an investigation of more banal processes of political ideology that can imbue mundane economic language with whiteness. To demonstrate my case, I analyse the rhetorical situation of the 2024 US presidential election. While there is abundant evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates modelled more overt forms of racist argumentation, the number one issue mobilising voters was ‘the economy’ and the rise of prices/inflation according to the most credible polling firms. Instead of seeking to uncover prejudicial beliefs of voters, I provide evidence that ‘the economy’ is a linguistic/rhetorical device that normalises the hierarchisation of human beings that bestow material privileges to those aligned with whiteness at the cost of violence against minoritised groups.
