UC Berkeley

A network of levees, channels, and weirs means to protect Sacramento, CA from catastrophic flooding. However, civic boosters never claimed geomorphological reinvention as infrastructure’s sole fantastic promise for the capital city. Their assurances intrinsically imbricated riverine stability with guarantees of infrastructural financial steadiness and civilizational might. This economic consistency remained an alluring promise within a developmental ethos encouraging speculation and wealth concentration.

Through racial capitalist critique, I dissect three prominent Sacramentan hydrological corporations that appealed to whiteness as aligning these values: Natomas Consolidated, the Sutter Basin Company, and the California Steam Navigation Company. Despite uneven development’s racialized landscapes alternately stockpiling potential value or sinking excessive commodities, eventually overproduction or ecological variation inexorably induces market crisis. In response, elite Sacramentans mitigated inherent capitalist contradiction by fabricating a novel white racial form tethered to infrastructural development. They imagined whiteness as a balancing force capturing nature’s potential, harnessing returns through technological abstraction, and allowing ceaseless circulation—including of capitalism’s detritus. They fantasized a universal, domestic, and fecund whiteness yielding productive landscapes from waste in whatever context. In their fantasy, whiteness could transit ceaselessly from empire’s hinterlands back to its core with minimal friction, mimicking infrastructure and avoiding expansion’s inevitable limits.

I analyze affective traces from these firms’ developmental schema to critique their reliance on whiteness across scales to resolve crisis. They prioritized the domestic imperative, technofetishism, and abstraction of whiteness through infrastructural association. The massive public works offered concrete stability for wandering investment once particular resource caches withered, individual financial parachutes for overeager speculators, and even novel intimate racial identities for an emergent imperial settler colony. I track ephemeral traces of this emotional attachment, recounting the beating heart of capitalism’s inevitable catastrophe and an innate racial recourse deferring disaster through offers of white civilizational redemption.