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Spring 2023 CAPE-JWG Meeting 3

Tess Wise, Assistant Professor at Wake Forest, will present on-going research on the racialization of the US political economy, through the case of America's wage-earner bankruptcy system. Joe Soss of the University of Minnesota will serve as a discussant.

Title: How the American Political Economy Creates Race: Critical Political Racialization Theory

Abstract: Wage-earner bankruptcy is one small part of the American political economy, but it is an excellent vantage point from which to see the necessity of a theory of political racialization. How else can we explain how an institution that appears race-neutral on the surface has such divergent outcomes for filers of different races? How else can we explain the prominence of racialized narratives in the ways white Americans understand their debt-based insecurity and eventual bankruptcy filings? American political economy (APE) scholars and legal scholars increasingly see race as central, but racial disparities are often taken as a given rather than a social construction. If we wish to do the work of deconstructing racism within the American political economy, including in law, we need tools that go further than individual motivated hate or observable disparities. In this (working) paper, I propose a theory of racialization in the political economy that allows us to answer a big question in the field of American political economy: How is racism constitutive of the American political economy?

Mar 15, 2023 03:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)