Elites drew the gambling-speculation line along class, race, and gender divisions

Evidence

This vexed division between gambling and speculation was thus drawn along class, gender, and race lines. Historian Ann Fabian (1999) has documented the links between the antigambling crusades of early financial capitalism and successive US administrations’ racist attempts to defend economic liberalism’s political rationality from “a logical revolt” (137). Fabian illustrates this most deftly in her discussion of “policy shops”—lottery betting establishments, whose primarily African American clients were commonly portrayed as “idle, indolent and thriftless” (127), not least because their speculative activities “reappropriated the extravagance that the rich had reserved for themselves” (125), thus instilling fear in the heart of “White middle class political economy.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 128

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral-panics and class-sigmpnaling literature the reader has engaged elsewhere; the antigambling crusade as class policing parallels sumptuary-law moral panics. — connects to: The gambling-speculation split was drawn along class gender and race lines — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 198
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ pattern: designated vices pathologized when practiced by subaltern groups but licensed when practiced by the elite — same mechanism, different object.