The Public Wages of Whiteness: Hardship Compensation and Settler Kinship in the Canary Islands

Since 1492, the Canary Islands have been hubs of transatlantic exchanges, where anxieties about proximity to Arabs, Africans, and Latinos have fueled European calls for compensatory privileges. Spaniards still refer to the idyllic islands as ‘el culo del mundo’ (“asshole of the world”), referencing their colonial history as a hardship outpost for imperial officers. This designation continues to have public and material consequences, as 16th-century subsidies have been formally adopted by the E.U. to compensate European presence in its ‘outermost territories’. The notion of hardship underpins the modern codification of these subsidies and is intimately connected to whiteness made ambiguous by imperial categorizations of Canarians as non-Europeans. Resulting in crisis discourses – about “kamikaze migrants,” terrorism, environmental and epidemiological threats, and “primitive” promiscuity of the queer kind – that racialize welfare as reparative politics for Spaniards and dependency culture for others. I theorize these subsidies as a form of “hardship compensation,” akin to indemnities granted to slaveholders in the past and to danger pay for diplomats and humanitarian workers today. Canarians naturalize whiteness and settler kinship by moralizing economic privileges as hazard pay for the necessary but onerous civilizational border work that they perform at Europe’s frontiers, just 108km off the coast of West Africa. Viewing the 20th-century welfare state through this deeper historical lens reveals its earlier roots in a political economy of settler intimacies across Europe, Africa, North America, and South America.