The Black Social Economy in the Americas

The Black Social Economy in the Americas PDF Author: Caroline Shenaz Hossein
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137600470
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This pioneering book explores the meaning of the term “Black social economy,” a self-help sector that remains autonomous from the state and business sectors. With the Western Hemisphere’s ignoble history of enslavement and violence towards African peoples, and the strong anti-black racism that still pervades society, the African diaspora in the Americas has turned to alternative practices of socio-economic organization. Conscientious and collective organizing is thus a means of creating meaningful livelihoods. In this volume, fourteen scholars explore the concept of the “Black social economy,” bringing together innovative research on the lived experience of Afro-descendants in business and society in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, and the United States. The case studies in this book feature horrific legacies of enslavement, colonization, and racism, and they recount the myriad ways that persons of African heritage have built humane alternatives to the dominant market economy that excludes them. Together, they shed necessary light on the ways in which the Black race has been overlooked in the social economy literature.

The Black Social Economy in the Americas

The Black Social Economy in the Americas PDF Author: Caroline Shenaz Hossein
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137600470
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
This pioneering book explores the meaning of the term “Black social economy,” a self-help sector that remains autonomous from the state and business sectors. With the Western Hemisphere’s ignoble history of enslavement and violence towards African peoples, and the strong anti-black racism that still pervades society, the African diaspora in the Americas has turned to alternative practices of socio-economic organization. Conscientious and collective organizing is thus a means of creating meaningful livelihoods. In this volume, fourteen scholars explore the concept of the “Black social economy,” bringing together innovative research on the lived experience of Afro-descendants in business and society in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, and the United States. The case studies in this book feature horrific legacies of enslavement, colonization, and racism, and they recount the myriad ways that persons of African heritage have built humane alternatives to the dominant market economy that excludes them. Together, they shed necessary light on the ways in which the Black race has been overlooked in the social economy literature.

African Americans in the U.S. Economy

African Americans in the U.S. Economy PDF Author: Cecilia A. Conrad
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742568598
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Over the last several decades, academic discourse on racial inequality has focused primarily on political and social issues with significantly less attention on the complex interplay between race and economics. African Americans in the U.S. Economy represents a contribution to recent scholarship that seeks to lessen this imbalance. This book builds upon, and significantly extends, the principles, terminology, and methods of standard economics and black political economy. Influenced by path-breaking studies presented in several scholarly economic journals, this volume is designed to provide a political-economic analysis of the past and present economic status of African Americans. The chapters in this volume represent the work of some of the nation's most distinguished scholars on the various topics presented. The individual chapters cover several well-defined areas, including black employment and unemployment, labor market discrimination, black entrepreneurship, racial economic inequality, urban revitalization, and black economic development. The book is written in a style free of the technical jargon that characterizes most economics textbooks. While the book is methodologically sophisticated, it is accessible to a wide range of students and the general public and will appeal to academicians and practitioners alike.

Know Your Price

Know Your Price PDF Author: Andre M. Perry
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815737289
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The deliberate devaluation of Blacks and their communities has had very real, far-reaching, and negative economic and social effects. An enduring white supremacist myth claims brutal conditions in Black communities are mainly the result of Black people's collective choices and moral failings. “That's just how they are” or “there's really no excuse”: we've all heard those not so subtle digs. But there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can't solve. We haven't known how much the country will gain by properly valuing homes and businesses, family structures, voters, and school districts in Black neighborhoods. And we need to know. Noted educator, journalist, and scholar Andre Perry takes readers on a tour of six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued. Perry begins in his hometown of Wilkinsburg, a small city east of Pittsburgh that, unlike its much larger neighbor, is struggling and failing to attract new jobs and industry. Bringing his own personal story of growing up in Black-majority Wilkinsburg, Perry also spotlights five others where he has deep connections: Detroit, Birmingham, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. He provides an intimate look at the assets that should be of greater value to residents—and that can be if they demand it. Perry provides a new means of determining the value of Black communities. Rejecting policies shaped by flawed perspectives of the past and present, it gives fresh insights on the historical effects of racism and provides a new value paradigm to limit them in the future. Know Your Price demonstrates the worth of Black people's intrinsic personal strengths, real property, and traditional institutions. These assets are a means of empowerment and, as Perry argues in this provocative and very personal book, are what we need to know and understand to build Black prosperity.

Family Life in Black America

Family Life in Black America PDF Author: Robert Joseph Taylor
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803952911
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Most studies of Black families have had a `problem focus', offering a narrow view of important issues such as out-of-wedlock births, single-parent families and childhood poverty. Family Life in Black America moves away from this negative perspective and instead deals with a wide range of issues including sexuality, procreation, infancy, adulthood, adolescence, cohabitation, parenting, grandparenting and ageing. A fresh aspect of this book is the amount of diversity it reveals within black families and the forces that shape, limit and enhance them.

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America PDF Author: Manning Marable
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608465128
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
"How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is one of those paradigm-shifting, life-changing texts that has not lost its currency or relevance—even after three decades. Its provocative treatise on the ravages of late capitalism, state violence, incarceration, and patriarchy on the life chances and struggles of black working-class men and women shaped an entire generation, directing our energies to the terrain of the prison-industrial complex, anti-racist work, labor organizing, alternatives to racial capitalism, and challenging patriarchy—personally and politically."—Robin D. G. Kelley "In this new edition of his classic text . . . Marable can challenge a new generation to find solutions to the problems that constrain the present but not our potential to seek and define a better future."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "[A] prescient analysis."—Michael Eric Dyson How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is a classic study of the intersection of racism and class in the United States. It has become a standard text for courses in American politics and history, and has been central to the education of thousands of political activists since the 1980s. This edition is prsented with a new foreword by Leith Mullings.

Blacks and the Quest for Economic Equality

Blacks and the Quest for Economic Equality PDF Author: James W. Button
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271056649
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The civil rights movement of the 1960s improved the political and legal status of African Americans, but the quest for equality in employment and economic well-being has lagged behind. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to be employed in lower-paying service jobs or to be unemployed, are three times as likely to live in poverty, and have a median household income barely half of that for white households. What accounts for these disparities, and what possibilities are there for overcoming obstacles to black economic progress? This book seeks answers to these questions through a combined quantitative and qualitative study of six municipalities in Florida. Factors impeding the quest for equality include employer discrimination, inadequate education, increasing competition for jobs from white females and Latinos, and a lack of transportation, job training, affordable childcare, and other sources of support, which makes it difficult for blacks to compete effectively. Among factors aiding in the quest is the impact of black political power in enhancing opportunities for African Americans in municipal employment. The authors conclude by proposing a variety of ameliorative measures: strict enforcement of antidiscrimination laws; public policies to provide disadvantaged people with a good education, adequate shelter and food, and decent jobs; and self-help efforts by blacks to counter self-destructive attitudes and activities.

Our Black Year

Our Black Year PDF Author: Maggie Anderson
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1610390253
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Maggie and John Anderson were successful African American professionals raising two daughters in a tony suburb of Chicago. But they felt uneasy over their good fortune. Most African Americans live in economically starved neighborhoods. Black wealth is about one tenth of white wealth, and black businesses lag behind businesses of all other racial groups in every measure of success. One problem is that black consumers -- unlike consumers of other ethnicities -- choose not to support black-owned businesses. At the same time, most of the businesses in their communities are owned by outsiders. On January 1, 2009 the Andersons embarked on a year-long public pledge to "buy black." They thought that by taking a stand, the black community would be mobilized to exert its economic might. They thought that by exposing the issues, Americans of all races would see that economically empowering black neighborhoods benefits society as a whole. Instead, blacks refused to support their own, and others condemned their experiment. Drawing on economic research and social history as well as her personal story, Maggie Anderson shows why the black economy continues to suffer and issues a call to action to all of us to do our part to reverse this trend.

The Color of Money

The Color of Money PDF Author: Mehrsa Baradaran
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674982304
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment...Beautiful, heartbreaking work.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates “A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.” —The Atlantic “Extraordinary...Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out of the financial engines that create wealth in America.” —Ezra Klein When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than 1 percent of the total wealth in America. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money seeks to explain the stubborn persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. With the civil rights movement in full swing, President Nixon promoted “black capitalism,” a plan to support black banks and minority-owned businesses. But the catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. In this timely and eye-opening account, Baradaran challenges the long-standing belief that black communities could ever really hope to accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. “Black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “A must read for anyone interested in closing America’s racial wealth gap.” —Black Perspectives

Histories of Racial Capitalism

Histories of Racial Capitalism PDF Author: Justin Leroy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549105
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism—since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades. Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today’s scholars and activists.

A Haven and a Hell

A Haven and a Hell PDF Author: Lance Freeman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545576
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The black ghetto is thought of as a place of urban decay and social disarray. Like the historical ghetto of Venice, it is perceived as a space of confinement, one imposed on black America by whites. It is the home of a marginalized underclass and a sign of the depth of American segregation. Yet while black urban neighborhoods have suffered from institutional racism and economic neglect, they have also been places of refuge and community. In A Haven and a Hell, Lance Freeman examines how the ghetto shaped black America and how black America shaped the ghetto. Freeman traces the evolving role of predominantly black neighborhoods in northern cities from the late nineteenth century through the present day. At times, the ghetto promised the freedom to build black social institutions and political power. At others, it suppressed and further stigmatized African Americans. Freeman reveals the forces that caused the ghetto’s role as haven or hell to wax and wane, spanning the Great Migration, mid-century opportunities, the eruptions of the sixties, the challenges of the seventies and eighties, and present-day issues of mass incarceration, the subprime crisis, and gentrification. Offering timely planning and policy recommendations based in this history, A Haven and a Hell provides a powerful new understanding of urban black communities at a time when the future of many inner-city neighborhoods appears uncertain.