Can Black Power Be Bought?

In this essay, I discuss the question of black buying power and buying from black businesses.

The black business has been fetishized in liberal and conservative black political discourse. Holidays that were created so we could educate ourselves and others about the sacrifices and victories of historical and current black heroes have been turned into days where we “Buy Black” and “Support out local black business”. There has been a conflation of black buying power and black business ownership with Black Power. There is nothing wrong with buying from a black owned business, but when buying black and “circulating the black dollar” takes center stage in celebration and discussion of black history/identity, it becomes a major problem. We have replaced genuine black revolutionary politics with black reactionary politics. We have replaced discussions of seizing power with discussions of black consumer dollars. This black capitalism and the repurposed “bootstraps” argument cannot and has not done anything to alleviate the suffering of the masses of black peoples. If anything, this focus on the black business/black capitalism/buying power has contributed to the suffering of the black population, or black nation as black intellectuals have not been able to move past this neo-liberal thinking and gain a correct analysis of what makes black people in this country continue to suffer. We continue to wonder why we cannot make any progress as a people. If we cannot get a correct analysis, then we will never be able to find a solution to this seemingly eternal problem.

The idea that black business ownership and black buying power equals actual power comes out of the reaction to the black power movement in the 1970’s under the Nixon administration according to Jared Ball of Morgan State University. Jared Ball also states in his book “The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power” that the idea of “Black Buying Power” comes out of the original definition of buying power is a managerial tool developed and used by the American Business class and the U.S. government against labor and calculate production cost. This idea was further developed by the Nixon administration as a right-wing alternative to the left-wing currents of the Black Power Movement. The politics of the black power movement at the time was dominated by the black panther party and later the Black Liberation Army. The definition of black power presented by these groups was actual power over the economics, education and political decision making within the black community. They saw the black community not just some part of the United States, but as a captive nation within a broader colonial system that needed to be liberated and one that needed a state. To achieve black power, these organizations did everything from breakfast programs to armed intervention, from protest to shootouts. They attempted to build parallel institutions within the black community to serve our needs, educate our community members, build up our political forces and bolster their numbers. The Black Power Movement of the past did not focus on our people’s “Buying Power” or if black people buy something from someone that looks like them. No oppressed people have ever gotten their freedom by simply moving the oppressor’s currency around to different bourgeoisie within it. No people have ever gained their freedom by simply buying from each other and selling to each other. The peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America have gotten their freedom by building their own institutions and seizing state power to implement their own policies. No people have ever lifted themselves out of poverty without having a state whose policy was focused on poverty alleviation, building infrastructure, and raising their incomes.  

What is the fundamental thesis of the “Support Black Businesses” and “Buy Black” movement? The movement supposes that black people themselves are to blame for their conditions. We simply don’t “Spend Smart” or work as hard. The supporters of this thinking infantilize the problem and make it a problem of character, both individual and collective, without understanding how the world economy works. Killer Mike is an excellent example of this. His support for black banking and his attempt to become “the Black federal reserve” proves his ignorance on what the federal reserve does and how most banks make money. The federal reserve controls the money supply by increasing or decreasing the cost of debt. The main goal of the federal reserve ever since the major inflation event in the 70’s and the rise of neo-liberal thinking in economics has been curbing inflation. The federal reserve’s main constituency are the major banks and the smaller banks. Large and well-established banks Most successful banks do not make the most of their money by lending to businesses and productive expansion of a business. Banks make the bulk of their money through monopolization/mergers, loans on stock buybacks, lending to hedge funds and property ownership. They lend against already established assets, not to create new assets generally as the risk is a lot lower. The point being made is that black poverty is a policy and power issue, not an issue of individual oligarchs or black working people’s spending habits. You cannot spend your way to empowerment, only to oblivion. Successful businesses pop up in a community due to state planning. Every economy on this planet is planned, it is just a question of who plans it. Who controls state power in an area and who doesn’t. The American economy is planned by white FIRE sector oligarchs, meaning the economy is geared to rent extraction and speculation, not the real production of small businesses. This is why poverty is pervasive within the black community. We were left out of the Keynesian period of the depression and the early cold war. All we received was the pain of deindustrialization and the epidemic of drugs and violence that followed it. We do not have a state whose policy it is to alleviate poverty. We are a captive nation within a country whose policy is to make more money for a voracious white financial oligarchy at the expense of peoples across Africa, Asia and Latin America and of us here. This is what the former Black Power Movement had realized, and this is something we need to understand, or we will get nowhere materially.

If black peoples in this country are going to be free, we need a correct analysis of how the economy works. This analysis must be local, national, and international. The US dollar is the global reserve currency, how does that impact the inflation rate and the ability for businesses to export? The US government’s actions abroad are forcing countries to de dollarize and seek alternatives. How will this impact black America? Interest rates ae being pushed up by the federal reserve, engineering a recession in an attempt to curb inflation. What will be the impact to black working mothers? In Shreveport, the city council voted to allow smoking in casinos. How will this impact the health and safety of those black people who go to casinos and work in them? These are all questions of who controls state power and the policies the state pursues, not of individual business and consumers with mythical black dollars. Seizing state power should be the principle aim of any black political organization in this country. It is only through state power where the economy can be planned to benefit the masses of black people and lift us out of poverty. We need to stop believing in this fairy tale that Black Power can be bought and sold. It can only be gained through struggle.