Marketizing the Wealth Gap? Geographies of Risk and Power in the Pursuit of an Anti-Racist Finance

Date and Time
Location
319 and 112 Walker Building
Historical and ongoing structural discrimination has created racialized geographies of inequality in the United States: wealth gaps, wage gaps, employment gaps, and so on. This history, coupled with continued constraints on state social services following the 2008 financial crisis, has prompted claims that private and charitable capital must fill these gaps. Many these capital flows piggyback off state efforts to incentivize (rather than directly fund) social investment in dis/underinvested areas, bolstered by voluntary commitments from private and philanthropic capital to shrug off a racist past in favor of revitalizing disinvested communities with investments guided by a “lens” of racial justice. While at first glance these efforts might simply seem like another pretext for private profiteering, they partially align with the demands of marginalized communities and organizations like the Movement for Black Lives: demands for reinvestment in health, education, and social services in historically disinvested communities. Based on an analysis of the burgeoning array of investments constructed along these lines, I explore the social and financial geographies of the emerging field of racial justice investing. In particular, I ask how different actors perceive the responsibilities of private capital to the improvement of racially-marginalized places – places in which private capital has also been a private driver of racialization and marginalization.