Race marks people as depreciated consumption goods to be written off

Evidence

Disposability, by the same token, is rendered acutely ambiguous. Throwaway things: commodities, the no longer useful, clutter, all up for sale to become someone else’s at one’s profit. Disposable people or groups, those who can be discarded because no longer (if ever) considered useful. Perhaps outliving their usefulness or having never lived up to a demand for it. But also collateral damage in wars, or the discardables, los olvidados, the throwaways of the urban landscape. The new or new old races of our time. Disposability, in short, signals the disposition to write off people as depreciated consumption goods, reverse-engineering people through their massification into the base metal of presumptive groups, marked by a debased character all their own. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1880

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines racial disposability: people reverse-engineered through massification into debased groups, treated as depreciated consumption goods.