Racialization and Class Governance

Abstract

What do we learn about class governance if we focus our inquiry on household debt faced by racialized residents of working-class neighbourhoods? To answer this question, this article unpacks the relationship between racism, spatial confinement, labour devaluation, and the predatory debt industry. Focusing on the widespread indebtedness of Roma in Czechia, it develops a theoretical intervention on the role of housing segregation in the reproduction of indebted and highly precarious over-exploited labour. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, the author argues that a Roma neighbourhood—itself an outcome of structural and societal racism—functions as a captive target of predatory capital. Its residents are entangled in unpayable debt, which reproduces the conditions of unequal exchange of value for Roma labour. The article then proceeds to develop an argument that debt is a force that shapes life opportunities at a structural level and operates a mode of racialized class governance.

Citation: Černušáková, Barbora, ‘Racialization and Class Governance: Devaluation of Roma lives through Predatory Debt,’ (Date of Publication), in Beverley Mullings (ed.), Labour and the Economy, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context (Oxford, online edn., Oxford Academic, presumably September 2026 -), DOI, accessed date.