Racial capitalism and student debt in the U.S.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the current phase of Black resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which urges us to recognize and reckon with the differential racial impact of student debt in the U.S. and calls for the cancelation of student debt as an explicit part of its demand for reparations. Using the concept of racial capitalism, the paper examines the structure of student debt and its consequences for Black borrowers, analyzes the structural reasons behind the disproportionate debt burden borne by Black students, and highlights movements such as the Debt Collective and BLM, which not only offer a critique of the debt regime but also suggest ways of organizing against it.

Debt has become one of the central organizing principle of our times and functions as a mode of discipline and governance. A variety of scholars have persuasively argued that the growth of indebtedness is but the inevitable outcome of an advancing neoliberal order (Debt Collective, 2020; Feher, 2018; Graeber, 2014; Lazzarato, 2013; Soederberg, 2015; Strike Debt, 2014). The process of the “financialization” of the economy has resulted in indebted nations, indebted corporations, and indebted citizens, all beholden to “financial markets, dominated by large universal banks and institutional investors” (Feher, 2018: 17). As wages stagnate or fall, marginalized citizens are pushed further into indebtedness through the hands of a rapacious poverty industry. One of the most pernicious forms of debt today is student debt, which at more than $1.7 trillion has surpassed all other forms of consumer debt even as it has been systematically stripped of consumer protections such as bankruptcy (Cancel Student Debt, 2020; Center for Responsible Lending, 2019; Frederickson, 2016; Frotman, 2018). Millions of young Americans graduate each year only to find themselves saddled with enormous and unpayable debt as part of an “ideal initiation to the rites of capital” (Lazzarato, 2013: 66). However, the burden of this debt is unevenly distributed and is disproportionately borne by African-American students (Federal Reserve of New York, 2019; Goldrick-Rab et al., 2014; Huelsman, 2015), echoing an earlier period of Black indenture.

In this paper, we focus on a new phase of Black radical resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which urges us to recognize and reckon with the differential racial impact of student debt in the U.S. and calls for the cancelation of student debt as an explicit part of its demand for reparations. We begin by exploring the concept of “racial capitalism,” which highlights the fact that the wealth of the West was built on the backs of the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans in the U.S. and their descendants and argues that “the construction of Black people as racial inferiors was not incidental but integral to the historical development of capitalism” (Marez, 2014: 261). We show how the ongoing project of racial capitalism has subverted the emancipatory potential of education for Black Americans to such an extent that the formal system of higher education now serves as a mechanism for pushing far too many Black students into forms of debt servitude. Using newly released data including a tranche from the Federal Reserve of New York (2019) that finally allows researchers to make evidence-backed claims of racial discrimination in the student loan process, we examine the nature of student debt and its differential impact on Black borrowers. We offer a brief analysis of the structural reasons behind the disproportionate debt burden borne by Black students, focusing specifically on the consequences of the racial wealth gap on student debt. Finally, we highlight the activism of movements including the Debt Collective and BLM, which seek not only to expose the perniciousness of the current regime of indebtedness but suggest ways of organizing to address what is evidently a civil-rights issue of our times.

Racial capitalism, education, and the project of Black emancipation

The last several years have served up an extraordinary amount of scholarship on the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Prominent books such as Schermerhorn’s (2015) The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, Baptist’s (2014) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; and Rosenthal’s (2018) Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management have forcefully demonstrated that American capitalism was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and their descendants. This wealth of recent scholarship draws upon earlier pioneering works of Black historians such as Williams (1944: vii) whose book Capitalism and Slavery sought to “place in historical perspective the relationship between early capitalism. . . and the Negro slave trade.” Further back, in his masterpiece Black Reconstruction, the African American intellectual Du Bois (1935) had rooted the account of capitalism in the history of slavery in the United States, detailing the manner in which Black slave labor in the sugar, rice, tobacco, and most importantly cotton fields laid the foundations of capitalism.

Later in the 20th century, the stage was set for a deeper discussion of racial capitalism with the publication of Cedric Robinson’s groundbreaking book Black Marxism in which Robinson (1983: 2) points out that in “contradistinction to Marx’s and Engel’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so did social ideology.” Using the insights of the Trinidadian-American radical sociologist Cox (1959, 1964), Robinson rejects the Marxist notion that capitalism was “a revolutionary negation of feudalism” arguing instead that capitalism and racism “did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of racial capitalism dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide” (Kelley, 2000: xii–xiii).

The term “racial capitalism” seeks to draw attention to the persuasive claim that racism has not been incidental to capitalism but has been constitutive of it starting with the period of chattel slavery and continuing till today, notwithstanding the historic struggles and gains of the Black community (Kelley, 2000). Robinson’s insight—that race is built into the very structure of the capitalist system, and that the domestic nation-state project in the U.S. has long been animated by this racial capitalism—continues to energize the discussion among African American race scholars and activists (see, for instance, the Winter 2017 special issue of Boston Review on the theme of “Race Capitalism Justice,” especially Robin D.G. Kelley’s introductory essay titled “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?”). Radical Black public intellectuals of the early 20th century like Du Bois (1903) and Wells (1892) recognized that within the project of racial capitalism, African Americans remained positioned as raced and colonized subjects long after Emancipation. In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois famously declared that “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (a phrase that bookends his essay titled “Of the Dawn of Freedom”), where the color-line refers both to systems of deeply embedded racism in general and to racial segregation in particular. This color-line denies African-Americans equal access to economic opportunities and helps maintain not only a racial wage gap, but also—and more crucially—a racial wealth gap: today, Blacks with college degrees earn less than whites with high school diplomas, and the median wealth of a Black family is a tiny fraction of a white one (Economic Policy Institute, 2019). Additionally, Black Americans are half as likely as whites to have a college degree, have an unemployment rate twice that of whites, are two and a half times more likely to be in poverty than whites, make up a disproportionate number of the country’s ballooning prison population, and have a lower life expectancy than whites (Economic Policy Institute, 2019).

It is in this context that Black student activists demand that their indebtedness today be understood as a new form of indenture, one that troublingly resonates with the racialized form of debt servitude experienced by African Americans in the wake of Emancipation. The BLM movement, with young Black women in its core leadership, sees itself as the most recent iteration of the long tradition of Black radicalism in the US, and draws consciously from the histories of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Students for a Democratic Society, the black lesbian feminist politics of the Combahee River Collective, and the speeches of Sojourner Truth. The list of demands issued by the BLM range from economic justice to community control of laws, institutions, and policies which impact African Americans. One of BLM’s most important demands is for reparations, and tellingly, the access to free higher education is seen as a crucial form of reparations, as is the cancelation of student loans:

We demand reparations for past and continuing harms. . . This includes: Reparations for the systemic denial of access to high quality educational opportunities in the form of full and free access for all Black people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated people) to lifetime education including: free access and open admissions to public community colleges and universities, technical education (technology, trade and agricultural), educational support programs, retroactive forgiveness of student loans, and support for lifetime learning programs (The Movement for Black Lives, 2019).

BLM’s emphasis on education comes from a specific history. Enslaved Blacks in the U.S. had been denied any access to education and were therefore largely illiterate at the time of Emancipation. Reformers from within the Black community understood the importance of education for their people, especially the ones that had been newly freed. As Balfour (2003: 36) argues, for someone like Du Bois, democratic citizenship entailed “at least a basic education and the economic wherewithal to live a relatively comfortable life free from unearned debt.” However, racist public policies as well as de facto forms of racism have not only left the emancipatory potential of education unmet but have actually turned the project of higher education into a debt trap for African Americans. It is precisely because of the connection made by Du Bois between education and Black emancipation, and the actual perversion of the promise of public education—both as the guarantor of social mobility and as the means for achieving racial equality—that the BLM movement seeks to draw our attention to the racial aspects of the current crisis of student debt.

The manufactured crisis of student debt

In his paper “Seeing in the red: Looking at student debt” Marez (2014: 262) argues that “the contemporary regime of university debt constitutes a form of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism based on the incorporation of disposable low-wage workers and complicity in the occupation of indigenous lands.” As Lazzarato (2013: 64) points out, the American university is a model of the debt economy of our times. On the one hand, it is “the ideal realization of the creditor-debtor relationship” while on the other “the American student perfectly embodies the condition of the indebted man [sic] by serving as a paradigm for the conditions of subjectification of the debt economy one finds throughout society.”

Before we look at the data on student loans, a brief context is in order. Fifty years ago, students graduated from college with few outstanding loans, if any. In the wake of WW2, the GI Bill offered returning soldiers free access to higher education, and millions of predominantly white military personnel took advantage of this opportunity. In the 1960s, President Johnson’s Great Society initiative included legislation such as the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963, which expanded college aid dramatically, and the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created scholarships, established low-interest student loans, and increased federal funds for universities; both generated a spike in college enrollment and graduation. Tuition was low, and grants covered much of the expense of going to college. The mid-60s to early 70s proved to be the zenith of the dream of an equal educational opportunity for all Americans. It is worth keeping in mind that this was a time when a college degree was not a necessary pre-condition for a decent job that could underwrite a middle class lifestyle. However, this dream of an affordable higher education for all Americans was to prove short-lived. The Higher Education Act was amended several times in subsequent years with each amendment either stripping away a right from students and/or handing over a privilege to a lending institution.

The welfare state, with its social subsidies and safety nets, had strong support during the 25 years after the Second World War while the war-ravaged economies and societies of Europe and Japan were being reconstructed (Harvey, 2007). Decolonization, along with the desires of newly independent third world countries to build their national economies and societies, affirmed the hegemony of the welfare state and state regulated capitalism. The oil shock of the 1970s provided the opening for neoliberal forces to overturn the historic compromise between capital and labor represented by the welfare state, which was now deemed costly and inefficient, while the “free market” was pitched as the best allocator of social resources (Klein, 2008). Higher education was no exception, and the subsequent neoliberal policies that were enacted resulted in the steady diminishing of state support, the rise of tuition even among public universities, and the easy availability of student loans to make up the difference.

As unionized manufacturing jobs with decent wages and benefits were being eliminated while the US economy underwent a restructuring, high school graduates could no longer count on finding employment that could afford them a middle-class lifestyle. Over time, getting a college degree has increasingly become an imperative. Even by the late 1970s, the college earnings premium (the amount college graduates make over those with high school diplomas) had gone up to a robust 40%. A report by the Federal Reserve of New York (Abel and Deitz, 2019) shows that “a typical college graduate earns a premium of. . .nearly 75 percent.”

As a college education gained in importance, more students borrowed money to get a degree, and as tuition increased, the amount of borrowing grew. The student debt servicing and debt collection industries were passed into private hands, which created a perverse incentive on their part to steer students toward default since there were huge profits to be made from penalties and fees. Unsurprisingly, student debt exploded and has been growing at an alarming rate. Even a cursory look is enough to indicate that the problem is of significant proportions: 45 million borrowers in the US hold student debt which totals over $1.7 trillion and is growing at a rapid rate, annual student borrowing has increased five-fold over the last 30 years and is up to $100 billion per year, 71% of students who graduate from 4-year colleges are indebted, and debt levels have been rising steadily over time (see Chamber of Commerce, 2019; Debt Collective, 2020). Student debt surpassed credit card debt in 2010 and only trails mortgage debt in terms of outstanding loans. According to the Student Borrower Protection Center (2018), the year 2018 saw a growth of $83.5 billion in outstanding student debt. Over 8.5 million new student borrowers accounted for over $100 billion in new loans. Further, a full 13 million borrowers defaulted on a federal student loan in 2018 alone. Even that number conceals the real level of distress because unlike other loans, student loans are considered to be in default only 270 days after a borrower fails to make payments. A study that examined the data of 35,000 debtors from the credit bureau Experian found that around 40% of students who had borrowed money for college were either in default or in long-term delinquency (Hiltonsmith, 2017).

As one might expect in an uneven society, the impact of the debt burden is uneven. For students from top or middle-income families, debt is a helping hand during their education and the repayments represent a minor outflow relative to their income. Students who come from lower income families experience debt very differently. For them, debt is the only means to a college education, which in turn is often the only way for them to advance up the socio-economic ladder. However, high school graduates from low-income families—those who come from school districts that are not well funded and thus fail to train students to be successful in college—have a very poor graduation rate. Data on graduation rates by income is not easily available but estimates show that only around 20% students from the bottom income quartile graduate with a bachelor’s degree (see Chingos and Dynarski, 2015). Data on race indicates a similar story. African-American and Latin-American students are disproportionately represented among those who fail to graduate and those who struggle to repay their college loans (Hiltonsmith, 2017).

The impact of student debt on African Americans

In 2016, activist organizations sent a letter to the Department of Education asking it to “collect and release the data necessary to learn the true extent of the impact of student loan debt communities of color” (National Consumer Law Center, 2016). The NCLC was making the case for a closer look at the data on student borrowing by race because of troubling results shown by preliminary research. For instance, a study by Hiltonsmith (2017) had shown that 52.6% of Black and 43.7% of Latino borrowers were either in default or “seriously delinquent” on their loans. The default rate for Black borrowers (19.4%) was significantly higher than that of white ones (12.3%). Similarly, 33.2% of Black borrowers were in serious delinquency when compared to 24.3% of white borrowers.

That race is a major predictor of default and delinquency is not surprising. Black borrowers find it difficult to repay their loans because they often end up working in lower-paying jobs as a result of job-market discrimination. For instance, in 2014, the median income of white workers with a bachelor’s degree was $63,338; Black workers earned around $13,000 less than that (Hiltonsmith, 2017). Black borrowers thus find it much harder to pay off their student debts. Scott-Clayton and Li (2016) summarize their findings in the executive summary of an insightful report published at the Brookings Institution: “The moment they earn their bachelor’s degrees, Black college graduates owe $7,400 more on average than their white peers ($23,000 versus $16,000, including non-borrowers in the averages). But over the next few years, the black-white debt gap more than triples to a whopping $25,000. Differences in interest accrual and graduate school borrowing lead to Black graduates holding nearly $53,000 in student loan debt four years after graduation – almost twice as much as their white counterparts.” Scott-Clayton and Li (2016) go on to argue that “racial gaps in total debt are far larger than even recent reports have recognized, far larger now in the past, and correlated with troubling trends in the economy and in the for-profit sector.”

The findings of yet another report titled “The Debt Divide: The Racial and Class Bias Behind the ‘New Normal’ of Student Borrowing” (Huelsman, 2015) reveal that (a) 81% of Black students borrow money to go to public colleges for a bachelor’s degree as opposed to 63% of white students; (b) greater numbers of Black students borrow money (and borrow more money) to obtain an Associate’s degree than white students (the more compelling statistic is that this gap in borrowing is growing over time); (c) 40% of Black students drop out of college compared to 29% of white students; (d) two in three Black and Latino students at for-profit 4-year institutions drop out before completing their degree; and (e) 47% of Black students drop out of for-profit 2-years-or-less institutions.

In response to the pressure exerted by the advocacy groups, the Department of Education finally released a report in October 2017, which for the first time offered a look at the impact of student debt on borrowers broken down by race and ethnicity (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2017). The report looked at 12-year outcomes by race for the cohort that began college in 2003–2004. If earlier studies had made a compelling case that student debt had become a public crisis of enormous proportions in Black communities across the country, the Department of Education report revealed that the depth of the crisis had been underestimated (see Miller, 2017). The data showed that African Americans were forced to borrow at a higher rate than white, Latino, or other categories of students. Seventy-eight percent of Black students who joined college in 2003–2004 borrowed money while only 57% of white students and 58% of Latino students did. This disparity in borrowing rates holds true for public, private, for-profit, 4-year, and 2-year institutions. A full 12 years after starting college, far from having paid down the loan, a median African American borrower owed 113% of the original loan amount. Almost half of all African American borrowers had defaulted on loans. Nearly 25% of Black students who successfully graduated with a bachelor’s degree had defaulted (compared to 9% for the overall population). Even those Black students who graduated from a 4-year public institution defaulted at a rate of almost one in four. The problem was the worst among those Black students who had to drop out of college. Two-thirds of these dropouts had defaulted.

While examining the contents of the report, we must keep in mind that the data examines student debt outcomes from 2003 to 2004 onwards, a period when the for-profit college industry hadn’t yet started booming. The situation today is a lot worse, as underscored by another recent report. In response to a query by Senator Cory Booker, the Federal Reserve of New York (2019) released new data that shows the huge gap between the percentage of borrowers in default in “majority-minority neighborhoods” and “majority-white neighborhoods” in the 10 most segregated metropolitan areas in the U.S. While it is obvious that the student loan system fails all borrowers, it is equally obvious that it fails borrowers of color the most. To take just one example from the report, student borrowers from minority-dominated neighborhoods in Milwaukee have a default rate that is four times that of borrowers from predominantly white neighborhoods. It is important to note here that these numbers precede the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus crisis starting March 2020. As Brown and Zheng (2020) point out, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the profound and layered social crises of America’s working class. A McKinsey report indicates that African-Americans will be disproportionately affected by the pandemic; around 40% of jobs held by African Americans will be impacted by layoffs, furloughs, reduction in working hours, or lowering of wages (Florant et al., 2020).

As universities struggle with their budgets and as Black incomes inevitably fall, the ability of African-American students to finish college and have a reasonable chance of paying off their debt will also be greatly diminished. Student debt already a critical civil-rights issue before the pandemic will become even more so over the next few years. Given the vital importance of education in social mobility, burdening young people of color with crippling student debt amounts to “colonizing their future” (Marez, 2014: 265).

The racial wealth gap and its consequences on student debt

While it is evident clear that the African American community bears a significantly larger burden of student debt, we need to understand the process by which this racialized student debt has come to exist and is sustained, and the role of the racial income gap and more importantly the racial wealth gap—which is generated and perpetrated by the project of racial capitalism—in the disproportionate rates of default for Black students (Darity, 2019). In its annual report on the State of Working America, the Economic Policy Institute (2019) examined government data to show that the regression-adjusted Black-white wage gap had gone up over the last year, exacerbating an ongoing trend: while the gap had been recorded at 10.2% in 2000, it had widened to 16.2% by 2018. The data on the Black-white wealth gap is even more sobering. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median net worth for an African American family was $12,920, compared with $143,600 for a white family (see US Census Bureau, 2019; it is worth noting that most Black assets are held in the form of home equity and other non-liquid resources). These income and wealth gaps are reinforced due to structural racism and widespread discrimination in housing, lending, education, policing, and employment, and not only forces African American families to borrow more and at greater cost, but also makes it nearly impossible for them to use savings as a buffer in the face of an emergency (Center for Responsible Lending, 2019).

Because of the unique nature of wealth, the racial wealth gap serves both as a way to encode the history of past wrongs and to index in concrete, quantifiable terms, the extent of the damage wrought on African Americans by racial capitalism as individuals and as a community. Unlike income, wealth can be passed down, and possesses the capacity to grow exponentially over generations. Home ownership forms the bulk of middle class wealth in the US today, and as a report of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard points out, home equity enables families to buy other assets, to pass on their wealth to future generations, and to send children to college (see Marksjarvis, 2017). For middle class Americans, wealth also provides an important cushion in the event of an unexpected financial crisis. The racial wealth gap is thus a very important factor behind the racial differences in student debt and the higher default rates of Black students.

Racial discrimination has been an enduring feature of the housing market and continues to the present day ensuring the perpetuation of the Black-white wealth gap even within the middle class. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out much of the wealth which Black households had managed to build for themselves. In the lead up to the crisis, during the period of the housing bubble, banks and their subsidiaries used predatory lending practices such as reverse redlining to target minorities for sub-prime loans, and the wave of evictions that followed devastated African American communities (Strike Debt, 2014). As a result, the racial wealth gap between Black and white households has grown to proportions not seen since 1940.

This disparity in Black-white wealth, engineered and preserved through a variety of racist policies, especially housing policies, plays a vital role in the disproportionate impact of student loans on African Americans. Household wealth is strongly linked to educational outcomes. The probability that a student will finish her degree is higher among higher-wealth households. Further, defaults almost always occur among low-wealth families. Since the cost of defaulting is so enormously high—huge penalties and additional collection agency fees can increase the value of the outstanding loan by up to 50%—only those who have no other option will let their loan slide into a default. It is no surprise therefore when the data shows that Black students, who are far more likely to borrow than white students and who borrow more than white students to attend college, are several times more likely to default on their student loans than white students (Federal Reserve of New York, 2019).

The resistance to the debt regime: From occupy wall street to Black Lives Matter

The Movement for Black Lives, which emerged in 2013 partly in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of 17-year old Trayvon Martin (Fulton and Martin, 2017), was bolstered by increasingly visible evidence of contemporary police violence against Black bodies provided by cell-phone cameras and disseminated via social media. The police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner on Staten Island, both in 2014, generated widespread protests. In 2015, the suspicious death in police custody of Sandra Bland resulted in the hashtag #SayHerName, designed to bring attention to the fact that Black women too were targets of police violence (African American Policy Forum, 2015). The movement erupted again in 2020 following the brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and “protestors could be heard demanding that police be defunded, and regular people’s debt be canceled” (Debt Collective, 2020: 47).

In 2011, just 2 years before Black Lives Matter burst on the international scene, another youth-led movement had sought to bring attention to the magnitude of the student loan crisis in the US. On September 17, 2011, young activists responded to a call issued by Canadian-based youth culture magazine Adbusters to “occupy wall street” (Gitlin, 2012). They were members of the first generation of Americans to experience negative social mobility and the movement they spawned, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), focused on the issue of severe and increasing inequality. The idea behind the occupation of Wall Street was, of course, to highlight the role of global financial institutions in creating and maintaining this social apocalypse. For OWS, the 2008 crisis was part of the neoliberal order and its creation of a society—in fact a world order—organized around debt. Notwithstanding its inability to live up to its grand ambition (“This Changes Everything” in the words of one chronicler of the movement, Van Gelder, 2011), OWS’s impact on the political landscape has been underappreciated in the years following the end of the occupation of Zuccotti Park. By projecting the battle for the nation’s soul as being between “the 99%” or the working people and the 1% who owned the majority of the wealth in the US, OWS provided a powerful meme around which a critique of capitalism, specifically of its contemporary neoliberal form, could be articulated.

An offshoot of the OWS, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign (OSDC) organized a campaign in April 2012 marking the day when student debt reached the astounding figure of 1 trillion dollars and asked that public higher education be made free and outstanding student debt be canceled, demands which seemed outlandish at that time. Soon after, a collective of intellectuals and activists called Strike Debt (2014) published the Debt Resisters’ Operation Manual which offered an explainer of how various forms of debt traps worked and suggested ways in which they could be collectively resisted. The two groups joined forces to crowdfund a project that purchased debt on the market for pennies on the dollar; the Rolling Jubilee erased over $30 million of consumer debt.

In 2014, the Debt Collective was launched as a union of debtors in a radically different approach which recognizes that while individual debtors are helpless, they can be powerful as a collective force. In a book titled Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition, the Debt Collective (2020) argues that just as the concept of “class” brought workers together as a structural unit allowing industrial unions to focus on sites of production and exert their collective power by withholding their labor, debtors’ unions can unite borrowers to exert their collective power in the sites of capital circulation by withholding their payment (going on “debt strike”) in coordinated campaigns of resistance. The movement has already made impressive gains: activists have succeeded in the cancelation of over $1 billion in student loans, made free college and student debt abolition a legitimate demand, and launched a campaign “Cancel Student Debt Now” that is endorsed by many elected representatives and has actual traction within the Biden administration.

In a recent essay, Astra Taylor (2020: 7) of the Debt Collective writes: “With huge numbers of people recently out of work and vital social services being slashed, one thing is certain: many households, disproportionately households of color will be forced to take on massive debts to survive the next year. Life was already difficult before COVID-19 crashed the economy; things are now becoming untenable. Racial capitalism is a centuries-long pandemic. We cannot afford not to rebel.”

One such rebellion forcefully (re)announced itself in May 2020, when the Movement for Black Lives persuaded millions of people across the country to take to the streets to protest police violence against Black bodies. As it has done since its inception, the BLM movement also sought to draw attention to the connection between slavery, racial capitalism, police violence against Black bodies, and the prevailing form of predatory capitalism which uses debt, especially student debt, as a mode of discipline (Khan-Cullors and bandele, 2018). This is the reason why “full and free access” to “high quality educational opportunities. . .for all Black people” and the “retroactive forgiveness of student loans” are such an integral part of the BLM’s platform on reparations (The Movement for Black Lives, 2019). By highlighting the impoverishment of Black America under the regime of racial capitalism, and by showing how student debt serves this project, BLM underscores the fact that African Americans continue to be colonized subjects and that Black emancipation remains an unfinished anticolonial project.

A few weeks before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in “A Testament of Hope”:

Today’s dissenters tell the complacent majority that the time has come when further evasion of social responsibility in a turbulent world will court disaster and death. America has not yet changed cause so many think it need not change, but that is the illusion of the damned. America must change because twenty-three million black citizens will no longer live supinely in a wretched past. They have left the valley of despair; they have found strength in struggle; and whether they live or die, they shall never crawl or retreat again. Joined by white allies, they will shake the prison walls until they fall. America must change (King, 1969).

King, celebrating the “magnificent fervent” among African Americans, was hopeful that this “black revolution” would force the US “to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism” and would expose “systematic rather than superficial flaws” and show that “radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced” (King, 1969). While his words are painful reminders of how far the movement for racial justice still has to go, the recent mobilizations offer reason to hope that the long moral arc of the universe will continue to bend toward justice (King, 1968).