Abstract
Growthism is cardinal and core to contemporary society, particularly under capitalist regimes where wealth accumulation and resource exploitation are pursued with a logic of infinite expansion. Degrowth scholars have engaged in both academic and activist deliberations on the dangers of perpetual economic growth, forming political coalitions and producing a range of literature. What critiques of growth often lack is a sociological and critical race theory lens, or references to race altogether, despite the very nature of capitalism being racialized. In this paper, whiteness is understood as having developed alongside growthist capitalism, not as isolated instruments but as an aggregate. In fact, whiteness has and continues to operate ideologically and materially as growth. From chattel slavery and land theft to the wages of whiteness, this racial invention is deeply tied to economic growth, and transcending white dominance and growth economics must be pursued in tandem.
Keywords
Capitalism, critical race theory, degrowth, growth, political economy, sociology, sociology of growth, whiteness
Cite
Neprad. (2026). Whiteness as Growth. https://neprad.com
Introduction
There are two features of society that we (a) assume to be normal and permanent, and (b) treat as disentangled and absolutely isolated: race and economic growth. What this space between the two holds in potential is the theorization of how they intersect into a form of whiteness as growth, or growth whiteness. The sociology of growth/degrowth operates to contain this potential dimension by applying sociological analysis to the social aspect of the growth imperative.
The growth imperative, or growthism, is a pervasive ideology that defines how the public understands and evaluates economic performance. Society sees economic growth as the “solution to all problems.”1 Firms and macroeconomic systems must “grow or die” under capitalism, and Marx describes this growth imperative as necessary due to the perpetual requirement for competition and accumulation.2 According to Okun’s law, unemployment rates are correlated to aggregate productivity, meaning that economic expansion is necessary for market stability and high employment.3 Under the private mode of production, a firm facing a narrowing profit margin must account for the shifts by a variety of operations, including reducing output and laying off workers. Through this mechanism, downturns are a snowball effect phenomenon. While degrowth and post-growth advocates recognize the flaws in capitalist growthism and the existential need to transcend it, scholars are largely ignorant of how growth developed, not just as a capitalist feature but also as a racial one. This essay will explore whiteness as growth; how the construction of whiteness as a property interest gestated alongside the growth imperative, not as parallel silos, but as intertwined subjects. Understanding whiteness as a form of growth would help fill the racial gaps in how degrowth approaches core ideologies and institutions within our political economy. Furthermore, transcending capitalism, growthism, and white supremacy must be pursued together, and the first step to building the scholarship and rhetoric around ending a collective compound of problems is to recognize how these issues connect.
Out of the agrarian boom
Race, as we understand it in the modern era, is rooted in the North American colonial context. Whiteness developed to maintain labor divisions in a booming agrarian economy.4 From its inception, whiteness has been deeply connected to economic growth, arguably embodying the ideology as it further expanded temporally and spatially. As white capitalists consolidated their own racial identity, whiteness as an invention fueled the growthist system and simultaneously segregated it across vertical levels, industrial sectors, and geographic regions.
Enslavement growthism
The slavery-industrial complex operated as the engine for capitalist growth, allowing industries from textiles to cash crops to exploit enslaved bodies as chattel.5 This historical slavery-industrial apparatus was the “colonizing ancestor and founding body that reproduces [the] many prison industrial complexes” we see today.6 Enslavement provided capitalists with generational assets and the means to financialize industrial development, advancing the growth imperative through which bodies were exploited for constant accumulation and expansion. This increasing demand for output and profit drove the need for brutality against and the exploitation of enslaved people.
This growthist approach to slavery was novel at its gestation, unseen before in human history. Here, slavery was a privatized institution. Bodies were bought, sold, and inherited as private property with no recognized rights. Not only was chattel slavery capitalist, but it also fueled the new ideology of economic growth, both in abstract and material senses.
Enslaved labor produced immense wealth for the United States, advancing the Industrial Revolution and cementing American global power.7 Through the intensification of labor and the proliferation of plantation enterprises, this economic engine relied on ever-expanding capital, labor, resource consumption, and the production of goods. In this era in United States history, slaves were the leading asset in the economy. They were exchanged, appraised, and treated as commodities, generating increasing wealth for owners and stakeholders.8 Further, enslaved people were speculative assets, treated as collateral for loans, traded as commodities, and the financial operations of slave speculation fueled systems of debt and insurance. Slavery as an institution laid the groundwork for modern finance.9
In the slave society, whiteness developed to consolidate and protect the capital investment in enslaved people. This ensured a renewable and expanding labor force to exploit, and a property interest to assert. The functions of whiteness as a wage allowed even working-class whites to opt into an exclusive interest, driving a wedge between white and non-white, especially Black, people.10 As whiteness delineated boundaries between the subordinate and the dominant, the contrast value of whiteness as property was fortified and maintained.
Whiteness developed into a form of growthism that embedded race into capitalism itself, implicating political, legal, and social systems in ways that mirror and facilitate the patterns of white dominance. As an institution of growth, whiteness in the context of its enslavement histories continues into the contemporary as a racial aftermarket.11 Black bodies, language, and art, through actors such as the media and prison-industrial complex, continue to be appraised, bought, and sold in the aftermarket. In this sense, whiteness’s need for constant growth perpetuates the racialized apparatus and the property interest in white status.
Land theft growthism
As racial capitalism required increasing expansion in industries such as plantations and factories, the need for physical land to host these firms played into the growth logic of whiteness. As courts in the United States and Australia heard cases involving land ownership, particularly plots claimed by both Indigenous peoples and colonizers, the legal doctrine of terra nullius influenced decisions that facilitated economic growth.12 Stolen land was converted into capital to be traded, valued, and developed for profit by white settlers and settler-colonial governments. This political economy of plunder allowed white people to steal and employ land as an engine for financial growth in terms of both firm profits and macroeconomic gains.13
However, it was not only whiteness in terms of a system that greenlighted this, but also in terms of an ideology that justified the violent dispossession of Native people. The doctrine of discovery and Manifest Destiny both ideologically affirmed land theft, not race-neutrally but explicitly as the means for whites to do what they suggested was rightfully claiming their lands.14 Discovery was reserved for whites, and it was white people’s destiny to claim discovered lands. That was the racial logic undergirding political and economic affairs. Land theft fueled economic growth by expanding industrial geography and land development, and by increasing financial speculation.
As whiteness developed into the (a) right to racial freedom, (b) right to discovery, and (c) right to land, it took on a growthist nature that thrived off and advanced visions of eternal economic expansion.
Contemporary whiteness as growth
In the current moment, whiteness continues to operate as growth by facilitating immense intergenerational wealth accumulation. Than people of color, whites have a higher average income, higher homeowner rates, less debt, more assets, better networks, better educational opportunities, and more upward mobility.15 With the reality that white wealth today is largely and deeply linked to chattel slavery and land theft, it is clear that whiteness has historically and continues to contemporarily drive economic growth. This wealth feedback loop keeps whites in positions of advantage.16 Whiteness is an economic asset that grants wealth access to white individuals while excluding people of color, at the expense of the macroeconomy in some cases.17
The value of whiteness as property appreciates over time, allowing white people to accrue wealth more quickly than non-white households.18 The possessive investment in whiteness influences white individuals to apply their whiteness for various benefits, including in the context of homeownership or employment, allowing a racialized form of growth.19 Whiteness also operates as a network standard, facilitating a feedback loop that allows racialized growth.20 In a more aggregate sense, the overall growth of settler-colonial capitalism occurs on the backs of minorities who are more likely to be poor or populate an economic underclass. It is through these mechanisms that whiteness is a form of growth to be contested with the same passion many of us are beginning to contest “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”21
Racialized gentrification, masked as urban renewal and neighborhood revitalization, operates to advance growth whiteness via capital accumulation and increases in property taxes and real estate values. Even integration was historically praised as economic stimulus, demonstrating a form of interest convergence.
Building on Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism, racial capitalist realism (RCR) holds that race is an immutable and permanent feature of Western society. While RCR, as a core of deliberation, encourages people to locate race as both seemingly ever-lasing and subduable, the same should be done for economic growth, particularly as it relates to whiteness. Further, RCR does not merely identify a racial locus, but both a racial and growthist aggregate.
Conclusion
Growth-critical theorizing, particularly in the context of degrowth theory, often overlooks questions of race. Through a sociology of growth approach, issues of racial domination can be linked to the growth imperative. From chattel slavery and land theft to the wages of whiteness, whiteness is deeply tied to economic growth. Struggling against both growthism and racism requires a combined approach; thus, transcending capitalism, growthism, and white dominance must be pursued together. The first step in building the scholarship and rhetoric around ending a collective compound of problems is to recognize how these issues are interconnected. Whiteness as a form of growth defines how the racial project sacrifices our collective potential and future for accumulation in the instant moment. When we engage with degrowth, we must integrate the teachings of sociology and critical race theory to better theorize how whiteness and the economic growth imperative, seemingly isolated from one another, share a common history–and that integration can be advanced by the sociology of growth analysis.
Citations
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↩︎ - Hearle, C. (2017). Economic costs of discrimination.
↩︎ - Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard law review, 1707-1791.
↩︎ - Lipsitz, G. (2006). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Temple University Press.
↩︎ - Lee, B. T. (2003). The Network Economic Effects of Whiteness. Am. UL Rev., 53, 1259.
↩︎ - Blanchard, K. D. (2023). Fairy Tales and True Stories:: Economic Talk for Ecological Flourishing. In Ecoflourishing and Virtue (pp. 221-234). Routledge.
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