The Power of the Black Dollar

Asa Shaw in conversation with Jared Ball of Black Power Media

A Conversation from WARTIME Issue No. 4

Asa Shaw

Whats good Jared, glad to have you hear to illuminate some of the darkness around these conversations of Black wealth and Black buying power. Just want to say that we appreciate the perspectives you and other folks bring on Black Power Media. Folks in BMB watch the channel often. So, thank you for your continued contributions to the work brotha.

Jared Ball

Right on.

Asa Shaw

Lets get right into it, we hear often people like Jay-Z, folks at Earn Your Leisure, and others, parroting this idea that Black wealth is the key to a better black future. That the more billionaires we have the more powerful we will be as a people. Is this right?

Jared Ball

Again, I always like to preface these conversations with the fact that, professionally, my expertise is in Africana and media studies. I’m not an economist. I try to study political economy as it is part of media and Africana studies. I’ve tried to certainly study political economy as an activist, but I always just like to be clear about where my professional credentials are.

To answer your question though, It’s less about whether or not it’s right. I’m saying that it is not possible. There are no Black people in this country, as things currently stand, that have a capacity to build actual wealth. That is pure fantasy that is only supported by well-promoted and positioned propagandists. Black people, the only power we have is through political organization and the threat that we are as an organized political entity. That’s the only power we have and can build upon. Black wealth is going to be zero by 2053. It’s not even 1% of the nation’s wealth now, but it’s going to be zero pretty soon. It’s not a matter of do I think we could do this or should do this about wealth? It’s an issue of just objectively, there is no wealth to build more wealth. There’s no current political power. There’s no military threat, so there is no wealth coming. There is no possibility to build wealth in this current configuration.

Asa Shaw

Before we move forward lets take a step back and examine wealth. How is wealth created?

Jared Ball

So just very quickly, wealth is created in the interaction and exchange between people working and people consuming what that work produces. The capitalist investor or owner presents themselves as having created all of this. But in reality, they’re just taking credit for the wealth created from that basic relationship. So, if I’m buying a piece of pizza or I’m selling the pizza, if I’m walking into the pizzeria or I’m owning the pizzeria into which someone else is walking, the exchange between the two is what comes to be wealth.

Asa Shaw

Thank you brother for making that clear, very clear. What do you say to folks that are looking for answers inside of capitalism and even, I think, understand the troubles of capitalism and the issues with it and the inherent racism, inherent exploitation, and the inherent corruptness of capitalism, but can’t find another way out of the situation because they need to survive?

Jared Ball

The first thing I say always is I get it. I understand. I mean, there are few avenues that present a challenge to capitalism and the “get our money right before we get our politics right” narrative. So, I’m fully aware that that’s where people are conditioned and encouraged to believe is our only opportunity. Everyone from conservative Black spokespeople to those who present themselves as radicals make these kinds of arguments. Certainly, all the popular media outlets make those arguments. So I get it. I understand. I also get that the struggle is difficult and it’s frightening. It threatens all of our comforts. So I fully get why nobody is excited at the idea that we have to build movements and organizations that will threaten whatever comforts we have. I get it. Nobody wants to do that.

But if I’m asked the question, honestly, as you have just done, I have to give an honest answer, that there is no other alternative. There is no exception in terms of historical movements where this was not ultimately understood, and that wing of the struggle was the most violently attacked, leaving largely just this argument around Black entrepreneurialism and capitalism. So I get it. But ultimately, if we want to see legitimate change for the collective, then we have to look for political power. We have to be seeking power over public policy.

I date myself with this film reference, but I’m very Frank White with this. I’m very King of New York with this. If there is a nickel bag sold in the park, I want a cut for our people. That’s it. If money is being made anywhere in this country, we have all already contributed to establishing the process by which that occurs. 

We’ve helped create the society. We’ve gone to school. We’ve folded the boxes and stuffed the boxes. We’ve driven the vehicles. We’ve done all of the work. We’ve shopped. We’ve paid our bills. We have created wealth. So that wealth, by public policy, has to be redirected back to us as a first step to a better society. That’s the movement we should be working towards, and instead of having pundits constantly coming before us telling us to invest better or shop better or save better or whatever, we should be encouraging each other to fight on the political level for control over the apparatus. Then we say, look, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be a great business person. I shouldn’t have to be a great business person for us to survive and be comfortable in a society where the wealth that is being created is in part, on an equal level, created by us.

Asa Shaw

Right. Right. Thank you for that, brother and for making it so clear. Again, Black Men Build definitely is on the same page as you, and we struggle every day in the communities that we work in to do what Mao talked about when he talked about mass lines. How do you have an analysis that is not too far ahead of the people and not too far behind them, but you’re working with them to understand what’s happening. It is a struggle though, because our people are not capitalist. We are just trying to survive.

Jared Ball

That’s it.

Asa Shaw

You wrote the Myth of Black Buying Power. Great book. Can you walk us through the origin of this myth and the pervasiveness of it?

Jared Ball

The origin goes back to what we were talking about earlier about how do those in power manage this need to pay people enough to consume, but not enough that they quit or demand more, and not so little that they rebel?

This concept of buying power, which was originally meant to be an estimate of the value of the money people are being paid, is not a measurement of economic strength. It’s not a measurement of income. It’s not a measurement of wealth. It’s a measurement of how much consumption can a person or a group engage in.

Over time, particularly around the Second World War, and then later in the 1970s, and I try to track some of this, the mythology took a really pernicious and violent turn. Particularly as it pertains to Black people and the need to project the formerly enslaved as now being able to join the economy and become middle class Americans, because now the world had to see what American capitalism could do for it. So, if even the former slave can rise up, then look at what we could do for you poor white folks in Eastern Europe and everywhere else in the so-called developing world.

But at the same time, and this is where the contradictions really get heightened, the Black commercial press, John H. Johnson among them, Ebony and Jet magazine said we want to use this idea of buying power to demonstrate to white corporations that Black people can now buy all the things that white corporations want to advertise and get them to spend money to advertise in Black commercial media. So, there became this incestuous symbiotic relationship where the Black capitalist class wanted to project this idea that Black people could spend a good amount of money in the economy to get more ad revenue for themselves, but also from the need from the white power structure to say, “We’re able to uplift even the lowest among us with our capitalism,” and through that buying power became redefined as actual economic strength of Black people.

So for instance, just very quickly, the very popular Black capitalist promotional crew of Earn Your Leisure, that some of your audience may have heard of, just very recently had a discussion on their platform, like just a couple of months ago around a report that was confusing people. The report said, on the one hand, Black buying power had increased last year to over $1.6 trillion, but Black wealth had decreased. So they were on their platform saying, “How could this happen? How could our buying power be going up and our wealth be going down? I don’t understand it.” This is where my argument and my work, humbly speaking, comes in to fill that void because people have been mythologized into thinking that buying power is a measurement of economic strength, which is measured actually by wealth and income, and it is not. It is a measurement of what Black people or any other group can spend in the economy based on projections, based on their overall income.

Jared Ball

Some of this I detail in the book, and comes out in the well-supported Black capitalist mythology that look, if we just did better with our buying power, we could come up. If we invested it better, if we could do this better, if we could do that better, and that’s again, to my previous point, not possible because there is no $1.6 trillion that Black people are sitting on that they could then determine to invest or to manage in any kind of meaningful way. 

Jared A. Ball is a Professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. and author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Palgrave, 2020). Ball is also host of the podcast “iMiXWHATiLiKE!”, co-founder of Black Power Media which can be found at BlackPowerMedia.org, and his decades of journalism, media, writing, and political work can be found at imixwhatilike.org.