Black capitalism

Black capitalism is a concept that emerged^[a] some decades after WW2 and took on popular traction^[1] sometime around the time Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States. Nixon had endorsed the idea that the human rights of black Americans was intimately bound up with their rights to own property and accrue the economic power that comes from proprietory wealth.^[2][b] Around this juncture (1969), some 163,000 black firms existed in the United States.^[3] The fact that black businessmen and economic thinkers flourished in the first half of the 20th century has been ignored or neglected in standard economic history books until relatively recently.^[4]

Since Afro-American entrepreneurial activities take place within the capitalist economic system of the United States, political and economic theories have lacked a concept that might recognize black capitalism as a distinctive practice. By 1975, the notion itself was often dismissed as meaningless, or an empty slogan,^[5] since capitalism is considered "colour-blind" or neutral with regard to the ethnicity of its exponents.^[1] In 1993, Earl Ofari Hutchinson dismissed it as a myth.^[6]

In 1975 Arthur J. Tolson recognized that the term was something of a misnomer. Adducing a remark by Theodore Cross, Tolson stated that White Americans would have defined black capitalism as any form of investment practice adopted by Afro-Americans to improve the economy of ghettos and transfer businesses from white to black control.^[1] The assumption in usage was that communities where black capitalists concentrated their investment strategies formed an autonomous block running alongside, or segregated from, the wider system of American capitalism.^[1]

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