In September of 2019, The Nielson report claimed that African Americans had a spending power of over 1 trillion dollars. With that much money to spend, loud has been the cry to strengthen black communities through ownership, entrepreneurship, and making conscious efforts to shop black. The idea is to liberate Black Americans by generating and maintaining wealth within their own communities, but is this enough?
One trillion dollars, in theory, sure does seem like a lot but the real stats tell a different tale. According to statistics published in Mother Jones, the wealthiest 100 people in the country control more wealth than the entire black population. Statistics also show that the average white family has a net worth of roughly $140,000 more than their black counterparts. With disparities that large, there’s no amount of shopping black that could possibly bridge the gap, but how did we get to this place?
There is no argument about it; the United States that we know today was built on the backs of slaves. Over 12 million Africans were brought to North America during the Atlantic slave trade. During this time, America saw tremendous economic growth with slave labor producing over 60 percent of the world’s cotton, amongst other crops.
During the radical reconstruction era, shortly after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, black Americans saw a brief period of enfranchisement. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 was passed, and the South was divided, temporarily, into 5 military districts that set guidelines for government organization. The 14th Amendment was also passed, granting constitutional rights to black Americans.
During this time, African Americans won Congressional elections and even held the majority in the State House of Representatives. Black Americans also held local offices such as county commissioners, sheriffs, city council members, and justices of the peace. The presence of black people in these everyday roles and positions of power gave hope that true equality was attainable. It positioned them to make changes that would help their communities thrive economically, but many white Southerners viewed it as a threat and feared “black dominance” instead. As a result, the Ku Klux Klan and other violent white supremacist organizations began to emerge.
Prior to 1876, black Americans had a level of federal protection with military troops maintaining a presence in the South. The military presence helped prevent violence against blacks while also helping to enforce laws that granted them equal rights, but that protection was negotiated away for political advancement in the election that happened that year. Federal troops withdrew from the South and reconstruction came to an end, replaced by the era of the Jim Crow South.
During the Jim Crow era, economic growth in African American communities didn’t simply cease, but actually began to regress. Black Americans were denied rights granted to them during the reconstruction era and were violently forced from their positions in local and United States government. With limited access to land, housing, education, and work opportunities any economic progress that had once been made was entirely erased. Though Jim Crow eventually came to an end with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the damage had been done and, in its place, a new more subtle Jim Crow was formed.
In 1969, Richard Nixon was elected into office. The Black Power movement was strong, and activists were tired of being financially oppressed. In an effort to subdue black protestors while simultaneously assuring white voters that racial tensions were nearing an end, Nixon’s “black capitalism” program was proposed.
Nixon insisted that black Americans needed a “hand up and not a hand out,” and proposed programs that would theoretically empower blacks to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Each of the programs that Nixon proposed required voluntary participation from private, primarily white firms, and received little to no investment or enforcement. Ultimately, these programs were set up to fail for the black community, but they succeeded in creating the myth of liberation through capitalism.
In June of 1971, Nixon declared his “War on Drugs,” which further helped destroy the black economy. African Americans were targeted for crime at a disproportionate rate and often received harsher sentences. Once behind bars, black Americans were once again able to be exploited and forced to work for someone else’s financial gain. This was allowed due to a loophole in the 13th amendment allowing slavery to continue in the United States as punishment for a crime. Imprisoning the black community became a lucrative source of income, and it is even more lucrative today, with the continued growth of the multi-billion dollar privatized prison system.
One arrest can leave a person disenfranchised for life; losing the right to vote, losing access to food stamps, losing access to public housing, and losing workplace eligibility. Unable to find jobs, food, or places to live, it’s no wonder so many people find themselves back behind bars, generating more revenue for the state.
The United States of America was built from scratch through a system that exploited black people for profit. Throughout history, that system has consistently reinvented itself, finding new ways to accomplish its goal. The black community can never successfully “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” when there is a well-crafted machine at work with a mission of keeping them down so perhaps, instead of learning to successfully exist within the machine, the real key to black liberation is tearing it down.
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