What the Logics of Racial Capitalism Allow

Over the past week, numerous folks have rightly noted the swiftness of the arrest and charging of Chamel Abdulkarim (the employee who filmed himself burning down the Kimberly-Clark Warehouse) in comparison to the complete lack of arrests of those appearing in the Epstein files. Most are rightly noting that this country cares more about profits and products than people. Most are rightly noting the impunity of the ultra-wealthy. The reason for this impunity, however, is not simply because those in the Epstein files are rich and powerful and can pay for a different justice system than the rest of us.

The reason why Abdulkarim was arrested so swiftly for destroying $650 million worth of commodities and real estate and no one appearing in the Epstein files has been arrested and charged in the US for the trafficking, r*pe, kidnapping and potential murder of children is because within the logics of racial capitalism, human bodies aren’t merely units of labor but commodities themselves.

The burning of a warehouse is not simply a property crime, but a direct threat to the logics, and order, which racial capitalism asserts. Conversely, the “use” of commodities as sanctioned by these logics (even if not by the laws of the state which mediates them) does not register as a threat to that system (or even out of bounds) even as it threatens our very sense of humanity.

The common refrain is “the system isn’t broken; it’s working just as it was intended to.” This is true, but the intention of this system wasn’t simply the protection of the elite at the expense of vulnerable populations (workers and their children); it was the unequal commodification (and thus disposability) of human bodies. * What registers as depraved to us within our moral framework cannot register as such within an amoral system in which vulnerable populations are created by necessity and the most vulnerable are made to be expendable vehicles of pleasure for the capitalist elite and/or vectors through which their power is expressed and accumulated.

In the Kimberly-Clark warehouse fire, Chamel Abdulkarim caused $650 million in losses overnight. Between December 2007 and June 2009, bankers and financial executives wiped $8 trillion from the stock market. Abdulkarim would have to burn a $650 million warehouse every night for 33 years to equal that sum. He would have to burn a $650 million warehouse every night for another 41 years to equal the $9.8 trillion in wealth Americans lost between vaporized retirement accounts and home value. He would have to spend another 8 years doing the same to equal the $2 trillion in losses to global economic growth. Abdul Karim would need to commit the same crime every night for 82 years (29,930 times) to even touch just the numbers of the 2008 financial collapse to say nothing of the long-term systemic echoes of that calamity. One could devote the entirety of their life to the mass incineration of inventory and real estate and still not burn as much as Wall Street was allowed to in less than two years.

Kimberly-Clark warehouse fire, image courtesy of ABC7

Abdulkarim was arrested within hours of filming himself start the Kimberly Clark fire. And what of the white-collar fraudsters who crashed the economy? Those who collapsed the housing market leading to mass buy-ups of whole neighborhoods by private equity firms, allowing those of the same milieu who drove working—and middle—class families off the map to then profit from their plundering and displacement?

Only one financial executive was ever arrested in the US. Kareem Serageldin (a reader will quickly notice a commonality here), was arrested in 2012 for his role in the crash. Egyptian born with dual US and UK citizenship, Serageldin was extradited to the UK where he served out a short (33 month) sentence. He gave up his US citizenship in exchange for this extradition. Even the modicum of “accountability” that the “justice” system exacted was exported (and I use exported intentionally here) to the UK. A single actor who could be narrativized as external to the US and its economic system, his country of origin and dual citizenship conveniently allowing for the displacement of Wall Street’s culpability into a single figure, a “foreign” criminal.

The impunity of powerful men Vis-à-vis their wealth cannot alone explain the above dynamics. Only that, while the practices which caused the 2008 financial collapse may have broken laws, they did not break the logics of racial capitalism or state which mediates it. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli might as well have said as much when he declared that, “America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism. Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we’re gonna come after aggressively.”

Subprime lending and predatory financial executives are not an attack on the values or system of racial capitalism. The mass trafficking of poor women and girls to feed the depravities of financiers, power brokers and heads of state is not an attack on the capitalist way of life. Convicting these men, however, would be.

Even in the UK, where there have been two high profile arrests in relation to the Epstein files (former Prince Andrew, and Lord Peter Mandelson), neither were arrested for sex crimes (for which, at least in the case of Prince Andrew, there are mountains of evidence beyond what would be necessary to bring charges) but rather they were charged with divulging trade secrets to Epstein.

The nature of the charges in the UK, and the absence of any legal action in the US, equally reveal which actions threaten the global economic order and which of those affirm its logics. Abdulkarim’s crime—like Luigi Mangione’s—is being treated not in relation the numbers, human impact or interpersonal contours of their respective deeds, but their relative threat to that order.

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*I’d like to note here for anyone who might critique the use of racial capitalism (as opposed to a classical Marxist definition) as a framework for understanding all human trafficking, including the Epstein network which almost exclusively preyed upon poor white girls, that racism (white supremacy) is inseparable from modern categories of not only race but class, gender and nationality. The supremacist logics of racism which are coterminously constructed alongside capitalism are wielded in ordering the value, desirability and disposability of all bodies and in particular shape the ways in which women across races are seen as objects. While gender, gender oppression, and sex slavery predate racism and capitalism, the acceleration and systematization of global patriarchy finds its engine in racial capitalism wherein whiteness and maleness are positioned (seen and treated) as the paragons within the human hierarchy. Racial capitalism, hinging upon the commodification, degradation and fetishization of Black bodies (but not only), devalues all bodies (to varying and shifting degrees). As a result of the colonizers model for the world, codifying women as commodities, race, class and gender reach their modern definitions not in order to justify sexual violence but rather sexual violence was used as a technology of social ordering, identity formation and ascension.