Racial Justice in an Age of Finance

• In Event: The Politics of Racial Capitalism

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that new types of financial activism can be mobilized for a vision of racial economic justice. While novel forms of financial activism seldom engage explicitly with the question of racial economic justice, I maintain that they offer important conceptual resources for re-conceptualizing racial economic justice in an age of finance.

So far, political theory has adopted a defensive stance when it comes to financialization. Financialization has been seen as part and parcel of the illegitimate encroachment of economics on the political. In contrast to this pessimistic view, some financial activists argue that it is possible to reshape, influence or subvert techniques and technologies of financial actors and institutions in order to redirect capital flows towards socially desirable outcomes. They propose two main ways of doing so: first, constructing alternative investment semiotics that rate the social impact of firms and investment opportunities. Here, the aim is to construct standardized signs that rival (but do not replace) price signals on the market that allow investors to direct their capital flows in accordance with social or environmental goals. Second, there are attempts to build networks of alternative financial institutions that are committed to social sustainability, such as networks of so-called value-based banks.

I argue that this politicization of financial capital flows can provide a conceptual impetus for envisioning racial equity in a financialized economy (despite the fact that these new forms of financial activism seldom engage with questions of racial justice explicitly). Novel forms of financial activism, I maintain, are engaged in a politics of valuation. Socially based financial activism attempts to reconfigure economic value in the image of given social and political values and to create institutions that allow for democratic intervention into the process of valuation itself (rather than merely allowing for redistribution). Contesting processes and institutions of financial valuations, however, means that they could also be evaluated according to criteria of racial justice. One could, I argue, mobilize such a politics of valuation in the service of struggles for racial justice by seeking to construct alternative investment semiotics that seek to target and remedy the racial segmentation of financial markets.

Author

• Emily Katzenstein, University of Chicago