The articulation of Blackness in Chester Himes’ The Real Cool Killers illuminates blind spots in Marx's notion of the “surplus population” by problematizing the idea that market forces are the sole constituent factor in producing capitalist society’s peripheral zones. Marx insists that “[t]he surplus population becomes … a condition of the existence of the capitalist mode of production” (Marx), yet asserts that the surplus population is only a consequence of economic tradeoffs, such as fluctuations in wages and labor supply. Instead, Himes reveals that in order for Marx’s analytic to have the theoretical gumption to explain Black people’s disproportioned representation in the surplus population, it must require a grammar that centers the dispossession, captivity, and fungibility of Black flesh through centuries of Atlantic chattel slavery. By drawing from both Saidiya Hartman’s theoretical framework and scenes of enjoyment and torture in The Real Cool Killers, Himes’ novel demonstrates that the state relegates Black people to the surplus population, not just through the push and pulls of market demand and capitalist expansion, but rather, to enable pleasure for white civil society, regulate Black racial uplift, and bolster the property value in whiteness. Beginning from Hartman’s claim that under capitalist white supremacy, Blackness's value is either as “the fungibility of the commodity or as the imaginative text that upon which the master and the nation came to understand themselves” (Hartman), what is at stake is an understanding of the inner workings of capital accumulation beyond just material and economic registers, as well as an account of how capital and race are situated in complex and varied ways, such that Black people remained subjugated and denied membership in the cult of the “human.” 

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   In The Real Cool Killers, Black people are marked as members of the surplus population in order to supply feelings of enjoyment, desire, and pleasure for white people through their status as fungible and commodified subjects, which ultimately secures and preserves white psychic health. Hartman provides the essential foothold that “the relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both figurative and literal sense, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave – that is, the joy and pleasure made possible by the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity – and the extensive capacities of property” (Hartman). Similarly, in The Real Cool Killers, Grave Digger Jones finds that Galen routinely whipped and lacerated Sugartit; after interrogating Ready, Grave Digger gets his informant to admit that “[Galen] was a whipper” who enjoyed maiming “big black” female prostitutes and “little colored girls” (Himes). Galen’s whipping demonstrates that Black women are pushed into the surplus population in order to derive pleasure for white civil society through a constant supply of sexual pleasure. In turn, Galen reproduces relations of mastery and subservience by securing himself in the position of power and domination that owns the commodified and fungible Black woman. However, Galen inflicts violence upon Black women, not just through materially lacerating their flesh, but also through his mere desire to consume the hypervisibility of Black women. In the novel’s first scene, Galen stands in the middle of a bar in Harlem, observing a group of Black women who “seemed to be dancing for his exclusive entertainment” (Himes). Beyond physical brutalization, Galen’s optical desecration of Black women reveals his capacity to openly exoticize and enjoy the pornotroped Black body as an “incorporeal hereditament” (Hartman) of his endowment as a member of whiteness. By inviting himself into the Black social space, Galen unveils how Black women's position in the surplus population renders their bodies and flesh as objects that could be consumed and enjoyed by the white gaze at any moment. Ultimately, both scenes of Galen’s literal and figurative ownership of the captive body demonstrate that the Black body's positionality in the surplus population cannot be explained solely through market economics but instead requires a grammar that captures the underlying libidinal economy of pleasure, enjoyment, and desire for fetishized Blackness.

   However, Himes also suggests that through architectures of white supremacy, docile and submissive Black people in the surplus population are also incentivized to provide and supply entertainment to whites, exposing the myriad ways whiteness and the state guide the futural trajectory of Black social progress through logics of racial uplift. In an interaction between Grave Digger Jones and Bucky, a bar owner in Harlem, Bucky claims that “everything is smooth and quiet” in his bar— “genteel people dining in leisure. Fine food, soft music. Low lights and laughter”; he proceeds to conclude that his bar “[d]oesn’t look like business for the police in this respectable atmosphere” (Himes). After asserting that he does not know who Galen is, Bucky claims: “I just play for[white people] and try to make them happy” (Himes). By presenting his bar as respectable, mannered, and proper, the social arena he constructs is a unique space for enabling white enjoyment. Put differently, “dutiful submission remain[s] the defining characteristic of Black subjectivity” (Hartman) and demonstrates that under white supremacist scaffoldings, capitalism bribes docile and agreeable Black subjects to accede to white decorum because to do so retain the relation of mastery and subservience. More broadly, by establishing Black people as permanent members of the surplus population, Black racial progress becomes registered through the adoption of white decorum and manners, which insinuates that the state enables white people to construct and maintain the historical telos of Black progress in order to maximize white enjoyment and entertainment. Ultimately, by presenting the spectacle of submissive Black subjectivities, The Real Cool Killers demonstrates that Black people are pushed into the surplus population in order to retain and bolster the scope and capacity of white supremacy in slavery’s afterlife through upholstering economies of pleasure, desire, and enjoyment in the public and private arenas that ultimately strive to fulfill social and public rubrics ensconced in the logic of racial uplift.

   While Black people in the surplus population are both fungible by white civil society and coerced to abide by barometers of white social progress, Black people are thrust into the surplus population also to increase the property value and exclusivity of whiteness, ultimately posturing Blackness as disposable and abject while securing whiteness as terminally pure. In particular, Coffin Ed’s extrajudicial killing of Black youth demonstrates the carceral state apparatus’ direct responsibility in inflicting racialized gratuitous violence upon the surplus Black population and enregisters Blackness as fundamentally disposable. Moments after Galen’s shooting sends a fleet of police to the scene, the Seargent asks, “Who shot the Arab?” to which Grave Digger responds, “Ed shot him.” the Seargent concludes: “That's all right then (emphasis mine)” (Himes). The state-sanctioned killings of Black youth without reasonable or probable cause demonstrate how the police view Black people as disposable and permanently open to mutilation insofar as doing so secures an implicit value in whiteness (in this case, justice for Galen’s killing). However, the state also forwards and invests in the metaphysical subjection of Blackness as constitutive of contagion, virality, and impurity while implying whiteness as its dialectical analog and opposite. After the cops capture Sonny, one of them makes an off-handed remark that Sonny “looks like barbecued coon” as he is “shaking like a leaf” (Himes). By framing Sonny's skin as humorously damaged, lacerated, and mutilated, the cops humiliate Sonny and present his Blackness as permanently constitutive of impurity and nonvalue while implying an inherent desirability of whiteness and white skin. If the state invests in both the material and metaphysical racialization of Blackness, it most thoroughly demonstrates a firm anti-Black posture in its practices for burying Black bodies. In the aftermath of Galen's murder case, the bodies of “Granny and Caleb, Choo-Choo and Sheik, lay unclaimed in the morgue” and “Caleb would be buried along with Sheik and Choo-Choo in potter field” (Himes). By giving each of the dead Black people improper burials, the police force unveils its solidarity with the view that Black life is disposable, undesirable, and generally dishonorable while insisting that Galen’s killing warrants and justifies extensive police labor, resulting in the “resubordination of the emancipated” (Hartman). Ultimately, state-sanctioned and extra-juridical violence against Black people in the surplus population cannot be explained solely through market dynamics; by interrogating the vestiges of violence, domination, and obliteration of Blackness, the state renders Black people as members of the surplus population to magnify, solidify, and protect the metaphysical character of whiteness as an inherently desirable and valuable commodity.

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   The framework that posits the Black worker as merely part of a “surplus population” the state must exploit to sustain capitalist economics obscures the state and condition of domination and forms of gendered and sexual violence that sustained and permutated the remnants of racial slavery. Through rendering Black women’s corporeality as terminally fungible, the manipulation of Black historical temporalities, and the persistent defilement of Blackness to posture whiteness as innately valuable, Himes’ novel catalyzes a pioneering complication of Marx’s “surplus population” by demonstrating its applicability and limitations. Himes reveals that what is at stake in including an axis of race in Western and European scholarship is an amplified understanding of how the afterlives of slavery were refurbished into the present through a historical and economic interval that is fundamentally interested in maintaining the color line and its precarity.