The one week my Yale graduate Anthropology 101 class spent studying Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men felt like a glass of cool water on a hot summer day. Learning about her scholarship and her refusal to accept the way her white colleagues recentered whiteness through their research on nonwhite people reminded me of the anthropologists who first led me to the discipline.
But the fact that Hurston was the sole Black woman anthropologist whose work we studied suggested that she was the only Black woman anthropologist whose work was worthy of the ivory tower. As if she was the only Black person committed to using the tools of anthropology to create knowledge about the people relegated to the Global South in ways that are mutually beneficial to the researcher and their interlocutors. Hurston’s singular inclusion in my graduate training paired with the general exclusion of Black and brown scholars aimed to pacify the problematics of anthropology without upending the infrastructure of a discipline that is in crisis.
As my graduate school years continued, I grew increasingly disillusioned by the idea of a career in academia. Even though I had come to terms with a definition and practice of anthropology that felt useful, identifying as an anthropologist myself felt wrong. How could I proudly claim affinity to a discipline that knowingly promulgated the othering of Black and brown people around the world and within the discipline itself? The answer would come through my research on Black Capitalists, and through my own experience beyond grad school as a Black entrepreneur and Wall Street professional.
My experience as a Ghanaian American on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase exposed me to the ways in which Black people use the tools of capitalism to create new outcomes centered on collective thriving. They led me to my definition of what it means to be a Black Capitalist: a Black person who is a strategic participant in capitalism with the intention to benefit from the political economy in order to create social good. What they were doing was complicated, contradictory and, for many, oxymoronic.
To many, to be a Black Capitalist is to be in an identity crisis. Black studies scholars I’ve spoken to have gone so far as to say, “Black Capitalists don’t exist!” or “It’s impossible for any good to come from capitalism!” I’m usually taken aback by such rebuttals. Because if the Black people I spent hours talking to who identified themselves as Black Capitalists don’t actually exist in real life, are they fictions of my imagination? And is my own experience invalid? Black Capitalists are as real as the version of capitalism we experience today that aims to entrap us all. Black Capitalists are merely trying to get free and help others do the same while facets of society attempt to place limits on how they can narrate, and ultimately live, their own lives.
Surely, one’s ability to disavow capitalism depends on what continent they are on, or come from. For the Black Capitalists I’ve spoken to who are from Africa, for example, it’s neither a matter of loving capitalism nor wanting to dismantle it. Living in and through capitalism is the reality of trying to build a life in countries that imperialist capitalist forces have already destroyed and continue to exploit. If they are to live their later years comfortably in their homeland, leaving it in the meantime is a requirement. And hustling in the Western world to achieve this dream is so often the method. So for them, much like it was for my mother, who emigrated to America from Ghana with the haunting knowledge that her family was counting on her and that “failure was not an option,” the question becomes: For our own collective thriving, how do we game a system that was founded on us as its pawns?
So how are Black Capitalists using the tools of capitalism to create new outcomes that allow them to secure the bag and the people they care for? Their methods are as diverse as Black people themselves. But the common denominator between all of their practices is a focus on communal uplift.
Some are strategizing throughout key industries within corporate America to develop sustainable initiatives that subversively promote diversity, equity and inclusion—especially in the wake of its demise. Some are leveraging grassroots approaches to build community-forward real estate clubs that make the dream of homeownership and passive income possible through the resources—money, credit, knowledge and social connections—that are shared among members.
Others are teaching aspiring entrepreneurs in their community the fundamentals of effective entrepreneurship and shepherding them through the process of collectively buying successful small businesses formerly owned by white entrepreneurs. Some are using the skills they developed during their tenures on Wall Street to create investment firms on the African continent to help grow pan-African businesses focused on health care, technology and agriculture that generate value for the African consumer. Some of the companies these Black Capitalists are building are worth millions of dollars—even billions. Irrespective of the spaces Black Capitalists occupy, their impact in Black communities globally is invaluable in the fight to close the racial wealth gap that has Black people lagging behind across key wealth indicators including homeownership, small business ownership and financial health.
But their existence is unnerving to both Black and white people alike, for very different reasons. For many Black people, the very idea of a Black Capitalist makes their toes curl, because when you’ve been on the wrong side of capitalism for so long—as its most valued commodity but never its greatest beneficiary—it’s hard to believe that another relationship to capitalism, or a more equitable version of it on our journey to collective liberation, is even possible.
And for white people invested in upholding the racial hierarchy that shapes social, political and economic life, they worry and wonder what they are set to lose when Black people are organized and move as one unified body in an economic system that nurtures individualism. Both perspectives reveal the underlying truth that money and our obsession with it is a culture of its own. And this revelation presents a growing problem society has created but has yet to solve: What do we do when money becomes the dominant culture in a society wherein most people don’t have enough of it to live?
In the face of paralyzing social anxiety about the expansiveness of Black life, anthropology’s superpower lies in its ability to use evidence from the human experience to upend our social scripts and create space for us to dream up new ways of being that are both scalable and sustainable. I realized that being a Black Capitalist and being a Black anthropologist were both seen as oxymorons. I now gravitate toward the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston and other exceptional Black anthropologists. I learned that I can be a different kind of anthropologist who uses the tools of anthropology, like ethnography, oral histories and participant observation, to tell new stories about Black life that are restorative, hopeful and reflective of the power Black people carry.
But even so, my existence as a Black anthropologist is unnerving to “scholars” who benefit from and are invested in perpetuating the harms of traditional anthropology. To raise the standard of knowledge production to ensure it is created in community with those who play a role in developing it threatens the validity of how scholars have traditionally conducted research and the scholarship that is held in high esteem. It’s damning enough that anthropology is like a snake eating its tail. My presence is the proverbial pain in the discipline’s side—a reminder of the work that is needed to transform the discipline, and realize what anthropology can be, but has yet to become.
