Britt Rusert
DONNA MURCH SHOWS that we continue to live in a world made by Reagan, one where corporate empowerment both benefits from and reinforces racialized regimes of punishment. In this smoke-and-mirrors theater of national distraction, nonwhite populations are stereotyped, locked up, and otherwise sacrificed so that corporate exploitation and dispossession can proceed apace, behind closed doors and beyond the reach of public accountability. Trump thus represents only the most recent—and chaotic—outbreak of a much longer epidemic of racial capitalism. His public speeches often sound like a hallucinatory rehash of sound bites from the history of U.S. conservatism, parroting the racist drug policy and rhetoric of earlier administrations. The age of Trump is thus an age of unveiling: his language blatantly exposes the usually unstated logic of state violence and its predation on vulnerable populations in the name of corporate theft, capitalist accumulation, and widening social immiseration and dispossession.
Murch gives the example of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin market strategy, which sought to avoid the PR and regulatory stigmas of being associated with “urban” (black) drug users. The result was a white market that took shape through aggressive marketing campaigns and targeting of states with majority white populations that were also known for their hostility to federal regulation. Thus the “white drug” was born. There is also the racialization of the crisis itself, which Murch does not discuss: the suffering and deaths of nonwhite users are virtually invisible, obscured by a discourse focused on saving innocent white users from harm. Purdue’s consumer strategy thus produced two dynamics: a market of control, in which white patients in pain became addicted to opioids, and a market of abandonment, in which black pain is ignored.