The bailout of the banks in 2008 represented a crisis not only in the economic system, but also in the hegemonic political and cultural order in the US. The hundreds of billions of dollars that went to the very banks that crashed the economy represented the extent to which the government had been co-opted by corporate interests. It pointed to the effects of ‘too big to fail’, and reminded onlookers of the dangers of monopolisation of any sector, but especially finance. The leftist critique of the concentration of wealth in power, in the hands of a few, became as plain as day. For the several decades prior, the financial sector had been slowly deregulated (or regulated so as to allow for great capital accumulation). Prohibitions on interstate banking were removed. Glass Steagall, which separated commercial and investment banking, was repealed. The oncediverse landscape of banks shrank as small banks were acquired by larger ones, leading to the dominance of four mammoths: Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chase. Millions of dollars were spent by bank lobbies to influence policy. Meanwhile, millions of Americans were being evicted from their homes, struggling to make ends meet, and graduating from university into an economy that offered a dismal future.

This crisis was experienced differently by different parts of society. While it ‘proletarianised’ former, largely white, middle-class segments of the population, it had a significantly greater impact on communities of colour. A 2011 Pew Research Center report shows the biggest disparity in family-income ratios since the institution began publishing such data a quarter of a century ago (Kochhar, Fry and Taylor 2011). The median wealth of white households, according to data collected in 2009, was 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households. The report goes on to show that income levels of Hispanic families plummeted by fifty per cent between 2005 and 2009, largely because of the housing bubble. Given evidence that people of colour were being steered into predatory loans, these families bore the brunt of a racialised crisis that was largely caused by bankers seeking to maximise profits.