Black people are under attack in the Americas through structural violence and racism. It is completely logical that, as a historically oppressed group, Black people would invent new ways to reorient the economy to be inclusive of them. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, through its pillaging of the rich resources of Africa and elsewhere, funded the capitalist markets in Europe. Profits made from Black bodies in the plantation estates in Latin America and the Caribbean brought great wealth to White people in Europe and the USA (Rodney 1982; Williams 1944 [2004]).
Not only has the Black diaspora endured a horrific and painful past, but the economic history of the Americas has been recast in ways to show only progress, modernity, and industrialization as part of its history. Racialized people in the Americas have been used as slaves to enrich White colonizers. And it is the backdrop of this brutal past that indigenous and Black people have been forced to conjure up ways to survive in a hostile environment, as a result creating economies, oftentimes hidden ones, that were different from those they encountered. These economies that enslaved people were rooted in social service and community. As a consequence, indigenous and Black people have become deeply interdependent on one another for help and mutual aid (Gordon Nembhard 2014) as they sought respect for who they were as a people.
The social economy is made up of a plethora of organizations that have a dual objective: meet social needs as well as recover operational costs and be financially viable. The social economy is not beholding to the state or to business. Some social organizations may have ties or overlap with the government and private sectors, but people who have been excluded by both sectors (government and big business) have little trust in them. Black people have often had to turn to social economy organizations that are separate from the state or business sectors to meet their livelihood needs.
This book dares to conceptualize what is meant by the term âBlack social economy.â The case studies fall under the umbrella of this term because they recount the myriad ways that persons of African heritage organize economies that are autonomous from the state and private sectors. I use the terms âBlack people,â âAfrican descendants,â and âAfrikansâ to refer to people who define themselves as part of the African diaspora and who recognize they have a cultural link to the African continent. I capitalize âBlackâ to signify that this identity and the culture are of great importance.
Community organizing among Black people in the Americas usually happens as a response to a crisis. It develops organically and tends to be informal (Witter 1989; Mintz 1955). The coming together to help one another during times of adversity illustrates the African diasporaâs commitment to bringing change by offering up economic alternatives. It also shifts the social economy from something that is helpful to something that is necessary to fight social and business exclusion head on. While many organizations do what they do to help make the world a better place, community-based economies, created by Black people who encounter stigmatization, are essential to their survival. These marginalized people often have no choice but to participate in internalized local economies.
Black scholars who write about the diaspora such as W.E.B. Du Bois , Marcus Garvey , and Jessica Gordon Nembhard (2014) have traced the African diasporaâs community-focused economies back to the days of enslavement . They also note that Black people have taken great risks to develop new economies. Despite the terror Black people endured in the Americas and Europe, they found ways to create livable economies based on cooperation and collectivity. For example, in colonial Jamaica , Black people dared to develop their own cooperatives from the ground up to agitate for national independence. Again, in an independent Jamaica, the Rastafari community turned to cooperative enterprises to overcome exclusion by fellow Jamaicans who did not accept their way of life. And Haiti ans engaged in economic cooperation long before most African peoples were even liberated, and they still use cooperatives as a way of life today (Fatton 2007, 2002).
1.1 Addressing the Lack of a Black Perspective in the Social Economy
The academic literature has ignored the African diasporaâs contributions to the social economy. Most works examine the social economy through the lens of colonization to show the warped nature of cooperative development in the South. Some scholarships credit the White foreign colonizers with shaping cooperative development in many countries without acknowledging the localized cooperative systems already in place (Delvetere 1993). While colonial experts assisted some countries in developing cooperatives, this should not be assumed to be the case everywhere. In Haiti , for example, the development of cooperatives was driven by Haitians drawing on their own cultural understanding of African âkombit â (the Kreyol word for collectivity) (Hossein 2016a, b; Fatton 2002; Montasse 1983). Cooperation and self-help groups are an important aspect of Africa, and they became an important part of the living experience of Black people outside of Africa. Cooperation and group economics are cultural values that Black folk take pride in having.
Collectively run institutions can deepen the theory and practice in the social economy for Black people. Many books on the social economy (see Mook et al. 2015; Bridge et al. 2009; Quarter et al. 2009; Shragge and Fontan 2000) present an overview of the social economy that ignores contributions by racialized people. In other words, classic economics texts seldom reflect the social economy from a racialized perspective. The aim here is to broaden the opportunity for learning by injecting the voices and stories from the Black Americas and how people form community-based economies beyond a Euro-centric frame.
The anti-Black oppression the Black diaspora experiences in the Americas is unlike oppression elsewhere, tied as it is to the legacy of enslavement, colonization, and racism. The authors in this volume are concerned academics and activists who have come together to self-fund this project, believing that this work can fuel new thinking about economics, money, and social organizing. None of the authors have received a dime to write their chapters as it was near impossible to find a funding agency to support this work. They have made time and used their own resources to do this work because the project is so personally important. These are stories we know well, and sharing these experiences as part of the economic literature is long overdue. In this struggle to put together a project documenting the Black experience in the social economy, the authors have realized that there is no formal academic community. As a result, a hub has emerged through informal channelsâa collective of sortsâof sharing resources and talking about Black economics. The collective hopes that this work will provide a way to counteract business exclusion and think about alternative economies by showing the myriad ways that Black people reorganize their societies in the face of great adversity.
The collective pushes back against the idea that Black peopleâwhile clearly requiring redress for their suffering in the Americasâare not just beneficiaries of the social economy. The act of receiving aid by others has already been told in the literature. This view of Black people is one perspective. The collective embraces the view that Black people are constantly at the forefront of their communities, making meaningful contributions and reworking antiquated and exclusionary business models. They are innovating with new economies rooted in justice, fairness, and inclusion. No matter how relentlessly colonizers tried to make Black people conform to the mastersâ norms, the Black diaspora has held onto its African traditions. These traditions of living in society and making a living unfold in myriad waysâand much of what they do is grounded in cooperation.
1.2 Liberating Social Economy History
A revisionist account of the social economy from the Black perspective is long overdue. The origins of the social economy are often presented in a Euro-centric light by people who embody a White ethos. However, this is only one perspective of the social economy. This book opens up the interpretation and shows that the story of Black social economies in the Americas predates the Anglo-American experience (Hossein 2013, 2016a, b; Gordon Nembhard 2014; St. Pierre 1999; Du Bois 1907). Black people were forming conscientious collectives long before the concept was named. Indigenous African collectives were the mainstay of Black families and communities when they had nothing else. For example, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) , headquartered in Harlem, New York, under the leadership of Marcus Garvey (Martin 1983), was one of the worldâs largest membership organization. The UNIA was devoted to helping Black people access resources during times of hardship. This included pooling funds for funerals as a form of burial insurance. In another case, Caribbean and African immigrants to the USA and Canada and other parts of the Americas created informal daycare collectives to help new parents. In these, small groups of women come together and each woman takes a day to look after the children while the others look for work. Crowd funding (modern-day term meaning a virtual place where people come together to raise money for a cause), which appears to be a new phenomenon, is not new. Black families united in their immigrant experienceâbut not always relatedâoften fundraise to, for example, send a child to school, compensate a family after a burglary, or pay for piano lessons or a trip. This coming together is how Black people cope with raising a family.
The case studies in this book only scratch the surface of the kinds of distinct social economies Black people have created. Hundreds of volumes would be needed to capture the diversity of community-based economies among racialized peoples in the Americas. African peoples forced to work as slaves in Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the USA experienced unimaginable horrors for centuries under slavery and colonization, with the sole purpose of modernizing Europe. But they never lost sight of what matteredâhelping one another. No matter where Black people ended up, they kept a cultural link to the ancestral homeland. In particular, they retained an intuitive sense of the kind of businesses that were more humane. People who endure isolation and exclusion from mainstream society are forced to think of new economies and so create businesses that are embedded in the communities in which they live. In the 1970s, charismatic African-American Baptist preacher Leon Sullivan, outraged by the racist merchants and banks in north Philadelphia, spent his life working through Opportunity Industrialization Centers Inc. to train young Black people in trades and business to reduce their dependency on mainstream businesses.
This volume starts the conversation about these kinds of cooperation. Black people in all their diversity across the Americasâspeaking French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Englishâare united in the anti-Black oppression they encounter. They are also connected in their reaction to societal exclusion in turning to their understanding of cooperation to resist oppression. By acknowledging the indigenous systems brought over by African slaves, the authors of this book subvert the typical narrative, turning to one that addresses the activist way that Black people organize community-based economies. The Black Social Economy in the Americas moves the social economy literature away from a singular European tale to show that Africans and the African diaspora were creating social economies long before the French concept of the Ă©conomie sociale even emerged. African community economies predate cooperative development in Europe. Group economics among the Black diaspora are not all striving to be formal cooperatives; rather, they operate in their own right. Sometimes it makes more sense to remain an informal collective. Black people around the globe engage in collective economiesâpartly because of their...