Upstream - Sneak Peak: Racism & capitalism (Jessica Gordon Nembhard)

Episode Date: January 5, 2017

You're listening to a Sneak Peak of our Solidarity Economy episode with scholar & activist Jessica Gordon Nembard, Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College in New York City. Professor Nembhard is the author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. She will be featured in our upcoming Solidarity Economy episode in collaboration with STIR Magazine, to be released Jan 15th, 2017. For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org Facebook.com/upstreampodcast Twitter: @upstreampodcast Instagram.com/upstreampodcast Together we can be a force for positive change: please like, comment on, and share this interview.

You are listening to an Upstream sneak peek with Professor Jessica Gordon-Nemhard, author of Collective Courage, a history of African-American cooperative economic thought and practice. She will be featured in our upcoming episode, The Solidarity Economy, released in collaboration with Stur Magazine on January 15th at upstreampodcast.org. Professor Gordon Nembhardt, when you think about the economic challenges and problems facing African Americans today, as well as all of us in the current capitalist economic system, and you go upstream to the root causes of those problems, what do you see? My upstream is I actually feel like if we can intervene in the sense of have small local enclaves of people practicing economic justice and living in relative economic independence, that if we can create interlocking systems and a larger and larger cooperative commonwealth,

we can both insulate ourselves from the oppression, both the economic and the racial oppression, but also maybe we can change the system eventually if enough of us get into this interlocking system that we might even be able to change it, and change it in two ways. In terms of the racism, I feel like if African Americans can establish themselves as equal partners with some of their own economic prosperity and independence, that then integration makes sense. But integration until now has been, we've integrated from a position of inequality. And so integration has been false for us. It hasn't really, it helped a few of us to get ahead, but the rest of us actually

been worse off since integration, unfortunately. So we can't even end racism and really integrate until we can enter as equals. And part of that entering as equals is having control over our own economics and having some prosperity and stability and that kind of thing. So that's part of the racism thing. But also we can't undo racism if we don't undo capitalism. But then I also believe that the act of participating in cooperative economics and solidarity economics also helps to chisel away the power of capitalism. And I think one possible scenario is that eventually we have so many interlocking co-ops and solidarity economic structures that we don't really need capitalism anymore and we undermine it. But I think that's

a long-term strategy. So I don't have a lot of hope for it in my lifetime, but I do think it's possible because of all the ways that I've seen co-ops transforming people, that it's possible if we can just get more and more of them happening, that we can create a more transformative, liberatory economy and world. You've been listening to an Upstream Sneak Peek with Professor Jessica Gordon-Nemhard, who will be featured in our upcoming episode, The Solidarity Economy, on January 15th. Listen for more at upstreampodcast.org.