“Unusual returns”: Transnational whiteness and the dividends of empire

Abstract

struction in America, has received canonical status in contemporary theories of racial capitalism. 1 These "wages of whiteness," in David Roediger's (2007) incisive phrase, generated forms of psycho-affective compensation that positioned white laborers above black labor yet helped industrial capitalists artificially suppress wages, amplifying the extraction of surplus value from the working classes. As Nikhil Pal Singh puts it, the concept of racial capitalism is not simply an assertion about the racial origins of capitalism, but pertains to how "racial differentiation is intrinsic to productive processes of capitalist value creation and financial speculation" (Singh, 2016, 30-31; Douglas, 2019, 10-12;Robinson, 2000). Through the psychological wage, Du Bois captured how the production of racial difference enabled the rise of industrial capitalism in the United States by dividing the white and black working classes, with capital value production hinging on racial value production (i.e., the production of racial difference). In connecting the production of racial and economic value, he refused "the idea of a 'pure' capitalism external to, or extrinsic from, the racial formation of collectivities and populations" (Lowe, 2015, 150;Knox, 2016). Racial differentiation is not a separate process from capital accumulation, but a primary mode by which the commodity form of value is produced and ongoing relations of production are reproduced.Following but also departing from recent calls to move "beyond the psychological wage" (Myers, 2019), this essay explores how Du Bois used distinctive metaphors of value production derived from discourses of financial capitalism such as dividends, shares, and returns on investment to illustrate the economic, affective, and political benefits that accrue to white workers from their position in the racialized division of labor marking global capitalism. To capture the homology between racial value production and capital value production, he referred to the "income-bearing value of

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