Dr. Rachel Laryea is an asset wealth management researcher at JPMorganChase and the founder of Kelewele, a cultural lifestyle brand that creates bespoke African travel experiences and vegan plantain-based treats. She is an anthropologist and Black Studies scholar specializing in race and money.
What’s the big idea?
We are living in unprecedented sociopolitical times that, for so many, make the elusive American Dream feel even farther out of reach. Those most disproportionately affected by the economic downturn in a highly polarized political climate are wondering how to make ends meet, take care of loved ones, and enjoy life. We are all bearing witness to the harm of capitalism as it works to pit us against one another. Black Capitalists are showing how to make the most of our broken system to secure prosperity—but not at the expense of others. They demonstrate that we can participate within capitalism from a place of power, purpose, and community.
Below, Rachel shares five key insights from her new book, Black Capitalists: A Blueprint for What Is Possible. Listen to the audio version—read by Rachel herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Race makes a difference in how we participate in capitalism.
To many, the term “Black Capitalists” is oxymoronic. Black people were the labor force that built the infrastructure of American capitalism through the violent enforcement of legalized slavery, so they cannot, and should not, aspire to be the beneficiaries of it. But the persistence of Black economic striving and achievement, despite this enduring history which has produced the Racial Wealth Gap, poses a provocative question: What if there is a way to thrive within capitalism without diminishing someone else’s life chances through exploitative practices? Black Capitalists are showing us how.
From newly minted undergraduates who find themselves working twenty-hour days to prove their worth on Wall Street to Nigerian startup founders working to build global credit scores, the stories and analysis of Black Capitalists (who are as ambitious as they are altruistic) demonstrate the resilience, creativity, and ingenuity of Black people who have long been excluded from the full benefits of the American economic system. Black Capitalists show us a more productive and inclusive way forward.
2. Black Capitalism provides a hopeful, pragmatic way forward.
The term capitalism comes with so much social and emotional baggage, but at its core, capitalism is a political economy in which private actors own the means of production to freely create and sell commodities with the intent to yield excess capital. Anyone can be that private actor. What’s important is how the tools of capitalism are used in restorative ways to create opportunities for collective economic thriving, rather than reproducing the harms of capitalism, such as exploitation and extraction.
I define a Black Capitalist as a Black person who is a strategic participant of capitalism with the intention to benefit from the political economy to create social good. Although the term ‘Black capitalism’ has been around for several decades, I redefine it as a pragmatic theory that accounts for the ways any actors—individual and collective, race-agnostic—reposition themselves within capitalism to achieve social good. The practice of Black Capitalism means:
- Acknowledging the sacrifices that you make to create opportunities for yourself, but always leaving room to name the privileges inherent in your experience and the responsibility that comes with that.
- Using the tools of capitalism to create and own the means of production and capital, unlocking access to economic power, and using it to advance people’s life chances.
- Being aware that your practice of capitalism connects to someone else’s practice.
- Using capital to produce ethical value out of an imperfect system and improve the life chances of the economic majority rather than the elite minority.
3. Black Capitalism is a unique form of fugitive planning.
The undercommons is a term coined by theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney and used to describe a subversive space wherein marginalized groups within an institution resist and challenge power structures without fighting for inclusion or attempting to reform these institutions. In what these scholars call “fugitive planning,” members of the undercommons discover ways to exist beyond the grip of institutional power to evade capture.
If this concept seems abstract, consider the creation of the Underground Railroad as one concrete example of fugitive planning in action. As people (enslaved and free) realized that they could not upend the system, they created an undercommons within it—the Underground Railroad—where activists became conductors and carried out the work of fugitive planning to liberate themselves and each other. Similarly, the practice of Black Capitalism serves as a blueprint for how we can break free from the version of capitalism that aims to trap us.
4. The tools of capitalism utilized by Black Capitalists.
During the antebellum period, Black entrepreneurship required enslaved men and women to double as bondsmen who hired their own time and depended on human capital to support their nascent businesses. During the War of 1812, an enslaved man named Free Frank McWorter contracted his time to build a saltpeter factory in Kentucky (saltpeter being a key ingredient in the creation of gunpowder). By 1817, he was able to purchase the freedom of his wife, and then his own two years later. He expanded his enterprise and went on to purchase freedom for sixteen of his enslaved family members.
Examples of Black ingenuity and resilience in capitalism were on full display then and now. In the recent past, a Black couple in Northern California whitewashed their home (i.e. removed all evidence that a Black family lived there, including swapping their family photos for photos of a white family and having white friends front as the homeowners) all in an effort to have their home appraised for what it’s worth—$1,482,500—almost half a million dollars more than the $995,000 estimation they initially received from a white appraiser.
Black Capitalists are finding meaningful ways to redesign capitalism’s house in various sectors, including industry, entrepreneurship, academia, the arts, and more. In corporate America alone, these visionaries are volunteering their time to recruit and retain Black talent in predominantly white institutions, leading the crucial conversation on Black ownership, consumerism, and communal methods to unlocking generational wealth, building grassroots programs to increase cultural competency across industries, democratizing access to financial and investing literacy, establishing special purpose credit programs to grant access to lending opportunities otherwise inaccessible to many, and allocating millions of dollars’ worth of capital to communities most affected by systemic inequality.
“Black Capitalists are finding meaningful ways to redesign capitalism’s house in various sectors, including industry, entrepreneurship, academia, the arts, and more.”
In the entrepreneurial sphere, founders like Wemimo Abbey are striking the balance between profit and social good. Having been born in Nigeria and immigrated to America as a young adult, Wemimo is the co-founder of Esusu Financial, a U.S.-based fintech company that automates credit building by reporting monthly rent payments to credit bureaus. Esusu was built to unlock access to better credit health or a new credit history entirely for millions of people. Those best positioned to benefit from Esusu’s technology are the economically disenfranchised. Due to the racial wealth gap in this country, the people in question are disproportionately people of color.
Today, this seven-year-old fintech company has a valuation of more than $1 billion. By December 2023, Esusu had reported the creation of over 107,000 new credit scores and more than $21.9 billion in capital unlocked for renters through new tradelines. More than 8,000 evictions were prevented. Mortgages totaling more than $14 billion became accessible, in addition to thousands of student and car loans for people who were once financially invisible. Wemimo describes his work as “bridging the racial wealth gap by leveraging technology to create a permanent bridge to financial access and inclusion.” Wemimo is using the tools of capitalism anew to build a bridge to economic access, namely for immigrants and minorities in America. This is Black Capitalism.
5. Black Capitalism is a global and scalable practice that prioritizes profit and social good.
The story of Sangu Delle and his Ghana-based venture is a perfect example. Having been born in Ghana but professionally trained in the U.S., Sangu built CarePoint, a real estate, financial services, and healthcare business designed to create value for African consumers across the continent. A proponent of Pan-Africanism (a movement that aims to build solidarity between indigenous people and diasporans of the African continent), Sangu realized that the remittances of African diasporans in America are a large market and funder of economic activity on the African continent. In 2023 alone, migrant workers remitted $95 billion to their communal networks in Africa.
One way Sangu’s firm is capitalizing on this phenomenon while producing social good is through the development of a product akin to health insurance. The diasporan pays a monthly fee, and physicians on the ground conduct regular check-ups on family members and provide access to the best medical care. As Sangu argues, “If the African Union represents 54 African countries, $2 trillion, and a billion people, it’s a different bargaining situation…If Black purchasing power can move with one voice, it suddenly has tremendous economic power.” This is Black Capitalism.
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