Upstream - The Limitations of Black Capitalism with Francisco Perez

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

There’s a broad conflation within our present day capitalist society between the success of individual members of certain oppressed and marginalized groups and their collective success and liberation. This is particularly true when it comes to Black people and their liberatory struggles. Too often, the successes of individual people — Oprah, or LeBron James, for example — or their rise to certain leadership positions, take Barack Obama — are seen as collective successes, whereas, when it comes to the material conditions of all Black people, these individual successes don’t have a significant impact. What are the dangers of this conflation between individual and collective success? Can Black liberation be achieved through individual successes within capitalism — through Black capitalism? And what would it mean to truly build Black wealth in the United States and beyond? In today’s Conversation, we’ve brought on someone to help unpack these questions. Francisco Pérez is the Executive Director of the Center for Popular Economics and author of the recent piece in Nonprofit Quarterly: How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Before we get started on this episode, if you can, please go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And also, upstream is a labor of love. It's really important for us to keep our bi-weekly conversation series and quarterly documentaries free of charge and accessible to anyone who's interested. But it all takes a lot of time and resources. If you can, if you're in a place where you can afford to do so and if it's important for you to

keep this content free and sustainable, please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. Do we actually want to live in a world where the top 1% looks like the people they oppress, but are still ridiculously wealthy while everyone else is poor. It's like, it's a problem simply that there aren't enough queer people or enough people of color or enough light people are women in the top 1%, or as a problem at the top 1% of the world has more wealth in the bottom half of humanity. You are listening to upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Dela Duncan. There's a broad conflation within our present-day capitalist society between the success of individual members of certain oppressed and marginalized groups and their collective success and liberation. This is particularly true when it comes to marginalized groups and their collective success and liberation.

This is particularly true when it comes to black people and their liberatory struggles. Too often, the successes of individual people, or their rise to certain leadership positions, are seen as collective successes, whereas when it comes to the material conditions of all black people, these individual successes don't have a significant impact. What are the dangers of this conflation between individual and collective success? Can black liberation be achieved through individual successes within capitalism, through black capitalism, and what would it mean to truly build black wealth in the United States and beyond?

Well, in today's conversation, we've brought on someone to unpack these questions. Francisco Perez is the executive director of the Center for Popular Economics, an author of the recent piece in non-profit quarterly, How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the limits of black capitalism. Here is Della in conversation with Francisco. MUSIC Welcome to Upstream. And we'd love for you to introduce yourself,

how might you introduce yourself, and also how did you come to be a solidarity economy activist? Great, thank you for having me. So my name is Ron C. Scopetus. I am the director of the Center for Popular Economics, which as the name suggests, our goal is to get progressive economics to the people. So we do workshops and trainings with activists for social and economic justice. And I got interested in this work from my own personal experience. So I grew up in New York City

in a working class immigrant community. My parents are immigrants of the Dominican Republic. And I didn't realize this when I was a kid, but it became apparent as I was a teenager that I grew up in a limited equity housing cooperative. So my parents were originally squatters in our building. It's really hard to imagine now, but in the 1970s when my parents arrived, New York City was bankrupt in 1975, when my dad first arrived, and you could just walk into an apartment, right? Due to white flight,

the city's population had decreased by one or two million people, and there were lots of empty apartments. It's the same era when the bron was on fire and landlords were willing to burn down their own buildings because the insurance was worth more than the rental payments. So I grew up right by Columbia University, which is really hard to believe that an area that is now very wealthy could be abandoned, but it was, right? So I saw gentrification firsthand, at this point my neighborhood has been gentrified several times over and many of my neighbors were displaced,

but we were able to stay. And it's because we own our building collectively, right? So it is a housing cooperative, we own it together, but it's limited equity, which means we cannot sell it for market rate, right? So to give you a sense, the buildings on my block, my mom has a three bedroom. A similar apartment just down the street would cost $2 to $3 million. I think ours is capped at about $400,000 the last time I checked.

So it provides permanently affordable housing in New York City. It's not a great investment vehicle. That is the trade off, but it taught me the importance of collective ownership and democratic management from a very early age, right? And I saw that in our building that, you know, it wasn't perfectly run, but we are the owners and we are theoretically accountable only to ourselves, right? So that taught me a very important lesson. If you're not talking about ownership when it comes to something like housing and gentrification, then you're not talking about anything. So that then led me to greater interest in the Solidarity Economy. I then spent

a lot of time in college in the few years after that traveling around South America. So I went to the world's social forum in Brazil in 2005, for example, and learned about participatory budgeting, learned about cooperatives, learned about land trust, and met a lot of people from around the world who are working on these issues. So that was sort of my entry point to all of this. Thank you, and I can absolutely see how so much of that is woven into the topic of our conversation today and the article, how do we build black wealth, understanding the limits of black capitalism, which is what inspired this conversation. And I'm wondering if you could share,

so what does your day-to-day look and feel like as a solidarity economy activist? Like, if one says they are that, what does that look and feel like? If you could describe that for someone, what does your day-to does that look and feel like? If you could describe that for someone, what does your day-to-day look and feel like? Yeah, so in my case, I come to solidarity economy mainly as a popular educator, right? So my day-to-day mainly looks like, you know, we organized workshops and trainings for social and economic justice activists. So, you know, we used to do these in person, they're all now on Zoom, so most, so sadly, most of these are now Zoom meetings, but, you know, we used to do these in person. They're all now on Zoom. So, most, so sadly, most of these are now Zoom meetings, but, you know, I work closely with

the Center for Economic Democracy, especially their education team led by Amrit the Lisan. And we meet with the various groups that are participating in our workshops. So, you know, we customize our trainings for them. We ask them, you know, what do your members want to learn? What are you hoping to get out of this? And we cover everything from what is an economy, like what is economics, to helping folks understand exploitation and the labor theory of value, the history of racial capitalism, monetary and fiscal policy, all the pandemic relief programs, stuff like that, all the way to what does a potential post-capitalist

future look like. So we plan the actual workshops in person, so we discuss what activities to use, what material to cover, nowadays, what slides, and stuff like that to use. And then afterward, we debrief on what worked and what didn't, and we're kind of continuously trying to striving to make the material as relevant and accessible as possible. Right. So we've added a lot of stuff, asked questions, come up in the workshops themselves. Right. So for example, you know, we suggest sort of teach the critique of capitalism and then talk about kind of, you know, then people are like, well, what's the solution? And we're like, okay, we'll let's talk about post-capitalist alternatives. And then people are like, well, that's great, but how do we get there?

So then we talked about, well, what are different kinds of revolutionary strategies that radical groups have tried in the past? So a lot of it is, you know, it's people centered, right? So we don't organize cooperatives, we don't organize land trusts, we don't offer technical assistance, you know, we do refer people to the groups that do that. We come in mainly as educators and really to support grassroots groups, space building organizations to really sharpen their critique of what is wrong with capitalism. Many folks have an intuitive sense that something is very deeply wrong, but helping them really put words to that feeling and then helping them think through, again, what the different potential alternatives could be.

Yes, and I can absolutely, in the article article that you wrote really sense that you are a popular educator in the way that the article felt very like I want to say gentle but just kind of guided folks through things and it even offered like it's you know understand that why people might think black capitalism could be a good thing and let's unpack that. It just felt very much educational in a really helpful way. I don't know how else to describe it, but thank you for the work that you're doing. And you've brought up this idea of racial capitalism. And in your article, you talk about the conception

that capitalism is seen as race neutral. So can you talk about what this myth or this idea of capitalism is race neutralism and why you're choosing frame racial capitalism? The choice of terminology here is interesting because so there's a lot of people, including me at times, where like capitalism is only ever racial, right? To call it like racial capitalism is to be like, it's capitalistic capitalism, right? Like, it's there is to be like, it's capitalistic capitalism. There is no other kind of capitalism,

but we use it to emphasize that it is always racial because there are plenty of people who think, there's capitalism over here and there's racism over there. And even many leftists who are anti-capitalists who agree that capitalism and racism are both bad, don't necessarily see the two as interlinked. And then there's plenty of people in the mainstream who are like, capitalism is race neutral.

The only color that capitalists care about is green. In the mainstream or conventional view, racism is something outside of the economy. It's this idea in people's heads, these ridiculous prejudices that they have, and it's extra economic. It comes from outside the economy and if we could just sort of get rid of that stuff, then capitalism, which is the greatest engine for building wealth in the world and world, history would do the same thing for black Americans and other populations of color that

is done for white Americans, because ultimately, all capitalist care about is money, and from that point of view, racism is irrational. There's a long lineage of this, so Gary Becker, the famous Nobel Prize-winning economist, who wrote a lot about discrimination, argued explicitly that greater market competition, freer markets, we'll get rid of racism because it is irrational.

If you are a racist, capitalism, you refuse to hire black workers or you want to pay them less, then some other smarter, capitalist, and come along and just hire black workers at a discount and make more money and compete you out of business. If you are unwilling to sell to black consumers or treat them poorly, try to overcharge them, then someone will also come in and undercut you or try to serve that market. So from that point of view, capitalism and racism are incompatible, or contradictory, where they certainly can be at times, but the frame of racial capitalism emphasizes that the two are conjoint twins. They? They were, are fundamentally connected, right? Racism is essential for capitalism to function. It is fundamental to how our capitalist economy works.

We've never had a non-racist capitalism, right? That is still a thought experiment. The only capitalism we have known has been thoroughly racist from beginning to now. Yes, and one thing that I'm reminded of is Marx's primitive accumulation. And just folks who think of capitalism as a historical Yes, and one thing that I'm reminded of is Marx's primitive accumulation. And just folks who think of capitalism as a historical or just ever present.

And instead when we look historically, like you're saying, at the very beginning, through the time of the enclosures and primitive accumulation, meaning how did folks who have a lot of capital and well, how did they get that? It was through legacies of imperialism, slavery, colonization, indigenous genocide and land theft, right? And so we have to go back to those roots and that time of its inception, one way we can do that is seeing that as absolutely deeply tied with racism. Is there anything else you'd add by why they are such joint twins, so to speak? Yes, so I'm glad you bring a primitive accumulation because there is also a distinction between

leftists about what role racism plays in current capitalism. So many people would agree that racism right primitive accumulation based on slavery, colonialism, and genocide is sort of the original sin of capitalism. But then many people would say, well, it then kind of disappears from the story and racial inequality sort of perpetuated by just sort of class oppression. And there's many people who argue that primitive accumulation shouldn't be called primitive because it's ongoing, right?

So David Harvey uses to, you know, re-brands it as a accumulation by dispossession to emphasize that this is an ongoing process, right? There are still indigenous groups being robbed of their land. There are still ongoing forms of imperialism and genocide, right? This isn't something that simply happened in the past. It certainly did happen in the past. It's still happening now, right?

And one of the threads that's always sort of united the Black Radical tradition, which Cedric Robinson writes about famously, is this notion that racism is essential to capitalism, right? To use the cliche, it is a feature not a bug, right? As long as you have such tremendous income and wealth inequality, then you have to figure out some way of justifying it, right? You have to figure out some way of justifying why some people have so little, why some people have less than what they need to survive. And from that point of view, racism is a very kind of useful social technology, right?

It allows you to say those people deserve what they get or what they don't get. And that has proven very useful for a capitalist society, which creates tremendous wealth and income inequality, both within countries and between them, right? So to say, well, you know, Africa is poor because those, you know, black people are sort of inferior, right? And black Americans are poor in the United States because they're simply inferior. And it allows you to deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing such tremendous poverty

and oppression in our societies. And when we were working on our episode on feminist economics, we heard this great quote about the quote is by Susan Folludi. You cannot simply replace women's faces for men's faces on top of a system of unchanged social and economic power. And I mean, really felt in your article, you're saying the same thing around black faces at the top of a system of unchanged social and economic power. And so I'm wondering, you know, what is your

felt response? Like, what is your reaction or felt response when you see celebrations of black capitalism or black capitalism? How do you react? And if you have any stories about that? Yeah, so the article really comes from that. So many people was tremendously moved by the brutal murder of George Floyd two years ago and participated in the protests and was shocked by how radical the rhetoric was at the moment about systemic racism, institutional racism, this is a fundamentally racist society, and the solution is like, by black, support by businesses, right? And it felt like we had this very radical criticism paired with a very kind of conventional, very milk toast, kind of moderate sounding solution, right?

Just sort of, you know, our society's fundamentally racist, like vote for Democrats and by black. And being like, you know, this isn't the solution. And really thinking about how would I explain to other people why this doesn't work? Because it would come up in our workshops, right? People would ask us like, well, what do we do then? And what I tell people is when folks root for black capitalists

and their success It reminds me of being a sports fan, right? So I had a you know my father dropped some jewels of working class wisdom on me about 20 years ago when You know, I was a grub of a big baseball fan rooted for the Yankees and they won the World Series in like 99 or 2000 what was one of those years and you know celebrating and my dad comes in and is like, you know Why are you so happy? I'm like all of you know our team won Yankee's won this wonderful and he's like what do you win? Like I still have to pay my rent the my bills don't go away Right and it just highlighted where it's like this is a symbolic victory, right? So to the extent that you identify

You know with these people with these businesses you derive some kind of psychological satisfaction, but it isn't, you've derived no material benefit, right? Again, my rent was still the same, or our bills did not go away, right? So I feel like, there's this big confusion between the successes of individual black people and black success as a collective, right? And the two, we must not confuse them, right?

I feel like a lot of this conversation relies on that kind of bait and switch, where it's like, if LeBron or Oprah went for your, you know, Jay-Z become billionaires, that's great for them and their families, does nothing for the rest of the U.S. black population, or even less for black populations, suffering poverty in places like Nigeria, or Ethiopia, or the Caribbean, right,, suffering poverty in places like Nigeria, or

Ethiopia, or the Caribbean, or South America, places like Brazil. So it reminds me of sports fandom where it's like, you know, I'm happy of my team wins. It really isn't going to make a material difference in my life. Yeah, really interesting that connection. So you write black capitalism as the primary path for achieving racial justice is certain to disappoint. Liberation will only come if we are expansive enough in our vision to address inequality in all forms.

So what does real racial and economic justice actually require? Real racial and economic justice requires reducing wealth and income and equalities overall. That is the only thing that has ever reduced the racial wealth gap, the gender wage gap, all of these various gaps. It's not sufficient and we can get into that but it is absolutely necessary. That's everything from social democratic reforms, stronger labor unions, a stronger safety net, some more public spending on health care and education and housing and universal daycare and higher pensions, to higher progressive taxes on wealth and income.

To actually expropriating the means of production from the capitalist class, right? So the times and places where we've seen racial, wealth, and income gaps truly start to close, has been when overall wealth and income gaps have also closed. So anything that creates a more egalitarian society is also going to create a less racist society. And the problem is, there's a few critiques of the kind of black capitalism will save us approach. So the first is that it's simply impossible, right? It'll never get us there.

Capitalism is an inequality producing machine and free markets left to their own devices will always generate more inequality. The second is, well, we could get there, but it's going to take forever, right? So sort of justice, delay, it's justice denied. It's happening at a snail's pace. We're talking to 300 years. And I don't know about you, but I do not want to wait three centuries for something approaching racial equality.

And then the third is, even if it could deliver on racial equality, do we actually want to live in a world where the top 1% looks like the people they oppress, but are still ridiculously wealthy while everyone else is poor? Right. To live where it's like, it's the problem simply that there aren't enough queer people or enough people of color or enough black people or women in the top 1%, or as a problem at the top 1% of the world has more wealth in the bottom half of humanity. Three to four billion people, right? And it's like, you know, I feel like even if we

grant the yes, maybe these tools can actually get us there, like, is this really the world that we want? Right? Is that really, is our vision of justice that sort of shallow and superficial? And in the spirit of imagining alternate visions, you offer Cedric Robinson and his book Black Marxism, and you also look at the book by Jessica Gordon-Nemhart, Collective Courage, A History of African-American Thought and Practice. So, you know, what would instead of that vision of a more diverse 1%,

what would be your vision of racial and economic dresses? What might it look and feel like? How might we see it differently in our communities and neighborhoods? Yeah, so one of the things that's always been really fascinating to me is this is a very old discussion, right? So starting with emancipation in 1865, you know, you start seeing two different visions for how to achieve racial equality. So, in the article I mentioned, the idea of sort of black capitalism, you can trace it back quite far. I like to start with Booker T. Washington, who presented a certain notion of racial

uplift, which is black capitalism. So, individual kind of effort, hard work, start your own business, keep your head down, work hard, and eventually, if enough black people do that, we will get to something like racial equality. And then there's always been an alternative vision around collective ownership, democratic management, community wealth building, right, which started with the formerly enslaved Africans in the US, starting mutual aid societies, starting their own cooperative farms. And this is the kind of stuff that W.E.B. Du Bois was talking about

in the 1880s and 90s. And we tend to think of the debate between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois as sort of the debate around racial accommodationism and how to kind of deal with Jim Crow. But part of that same debate was also what economic institutions, what kind of economic strategy is going to get us to equality. And again, Booker T. Washington said, individual success, build your own black businesses, and do boys and others were pointing to collective traditions

in black American history, which is the history that Jessica Gordon at heart so beautifully kind of excavates and displays where you see that cooperative thought and practice have very deep roots and that kind of alternative has always been there, right? So this is why I use the Fred Hampton quote, we're not gonna defeat white capitalism with black capitalism,

we're gonna defeat capitalism of socialism, which is if the problem is the concentrated ownership of wealth in white hands, the solution is not getting, you know, concentrated ownership in black hands, even if that was possible. The solution is having dispersed ownership, right? Having getting rid of anything like a capitalist class, and there's big debates there against some people say, you know, the nationalizing means of production, you know, public ownership class. And there's big debates there against some people say,

the nationalizing means of production, public ownership. And then there's also the solidarity economy tradition of cooperatives, right? So sort of more bottom up form of socialism. And it's ideal form that again has long deep roots in the African-American tradition, in the black-American tradition,

going all the way back to the mutual aid society, to the freedmen, to the young Negro's cooperative league of the 1930s, which informed a lot of the leaders of the civil rights movement. So there's a wonderful play about this. It was developed by Rich Flowers, a Black playwright, and they dramatized this conference where Bayard Russin was there, Ella Baker,

was famously there. Martin Luther King Jr. was there with his dad as a seven or eight-year-old child. So you can see the direct ties from the earlier efforts during the reconstruction period to the socialism communist organizing of the 1930s to the civil rights movements of the 1960s till today. So I feel like we've tried the Black capitalism path. We've tried the Booker T. Washington approach for decades. Richard Nixon did a Black capitalist program. We've had opportunity zones and promise zones and all these incentives for businesses and Black neighborhoods.

That's gotten us nowhere. I think it's important to let people know, look, there's always been this other alternative which has always held a lot of appeal and which keeps coming back because the problem remains. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Francisco Perez, author of the recent piece in non-profit quarterly, How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the limits of black capitalism. We'll be right back. Don't you know how, talking about the revolutionary illusion

It sounds like a whisper While there's stunning in the wolf headlines Crying at the doorstep of those armies of salvation Wasting time in the unlawful lines Sitting around, waiting for a promotion Don't you know, talking about a river The blue shouts, you smooth Where people gonna rise up, get there, yeah

Where people gonna rise up, a take what's there Just you know you better run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, We sing time in the inner glory of the lines, sitting around, waiting for our promotion Don't you know Talking about a real illusion Sounds like a listen And finally the tables I started to turn Talking about a revolution It's finally the tables I started to turn Talking about a revolution Oh, we know Talking about a Revolution by Tracy Chapman.

Now, back to our conversation with Francisco Perez. We had the opportunity to get to speak with Jessica Gordon-Nemhart in our Solidarity Economy episode. And one of the things that was so heartbreaking and what she shared in the book was how these two things were connected, racial justice and economic justice in such things like black cooperatives, and then how there were all these ways that folks tried to divide it, right, tried to separate it, and the separations that did happen. And so both to see that,

that legacy, to see how it still is, and see how the history of it, and then to reconnect even more, racial and economic justice together. It's a beautiful invitation. And I also love, you brought up solidary economy communities. I love that you and I are both in the new economy coalition. So we're in a community of solidarity economy practices in the United States. And if folks want to learn more about the new economy coalition,

definitely recommend checking out that ecosystem of solid solidarity economy practitioners. So one of the things that I want to ask, because this actually, somebody asked me this, I was working at Mama Sona Vibrant Woman, which is a black and brown women's birthing collective in Austin, Texas. And one of the members of the collective, a black woman, asked me, okay, so, you know, I'm understanding post-capitalism, I'm on board, but as a single black mother, I do also want to leave my child something, like a home or money, you know, wealth and heritance. And so what might you say to someone who says, hey, what about building black generational wealth?

What about leaving something for my children? What about raising my standard of living for myself and my family? Is that bad? Is there something I could do about it? How do I move through these questions right now? So anything that you would offer to someone like that who's wondering these questions? Yeah, I would tell them good luck, right? I would tell them, I understand the need for all of us to try to achieve some level of economic security in this capitalist system, right? Some level of secure housing, secure employment, you know, some savings to a little rainy day fun for

in case there's an emergency. So, you know, I live in this world too. I understand I'm pursuing many of the same goals myself. I want to also take care of myself and my family. Again, my beef is don't confuse that with black achievement, right? So your own individual success is wonderful, but that is not going to sort of solve the problem of racial inequality, right? Because ultimately it's a collective action problem, right? It's about all of us.

And I think, you know, this is where it helps to have some statistical literacy, where it's like, you know, what matters is what is happening to the average or median black person. So of course, there's outliers. So there's always going to be people who are extraordinary. I always remind people, Frederick Douglass was born enslaved on a plantation and managed to become Frederick Douglass. That doesn't mean that slavery was easy to overcome. It means that some people are extraordinary enough to overcome anything. But ultimately,

what matters is what is life like for the average black person. Your success is wonderful, that's your success. Don't confuse your success with black success, right? Because that is ultimately a collective problem that is measured by averages, right? It is measured by what is happening to the group as a whole, not a few outliers, right? So again, if Oprah has a billion dollars, that's wonderful for Oprah and her family. What does that mean for the rest of us? Not much. Yeah, as you're speaking, I'm really thinking about the essay by Danela Meadows, leverage points places to intervene in a system, which is an offering of like acupuncture points for systems change, and she orders them in order of effectiveness. And she says that at the kind

of lower end of the leverage points is things like fiddling with the numbers. And so in your article, you speak about some ideas, reparations being one of them, but also something like giving each person who is born without a trust fund, you know, something like $60,000 when they turn 18, just kind of like, you know, universal basic income can be a part of this that adding numbers to folks's wealth and income would be helpful for those folks, but would it fundamentally change the system, right? And looking at the operating principles of the system and how inequality is baked into

how capitalism functions. And I love how you brought in Thomas Piketty and, you know, capital in 21st century and how, as long as white wealth and also, you know, the one person's wealth is growing at a faster rate than everyone, there will not be this catch up, there will not be this equality in any kind of capitalist system. So I love that you're going into the really higher leverage points of changing the goal to, you know,

black solidarity, black cooperativeism, public services and black Marxism, black socialism, as well as, you know, changing the paradigm, the underlying way of thinking about this whole thing. So anything else you'd add by way of that systems change, how it happens, and what leverage points we might want to operate in? Yeah, I mean, that's why I think it's important to fundamentally reorder how our economic system works. And I have a lot of respect for the work that Sandy Derri and Derri Hamilton have done on the racial law cap. I've learned a lot from them.

If I was in political office, I would absolutely support Derri Hamilton's proposal for a baby bonds. I would absolutely support, well not quite absolutely other, there's some issues. But I would generally support the proposal for reparations put forth by Derriety and Kristen Mullen. My concern is these are all things that can help us close the racial wealth gap in the here and now, but these things are dynamic. They change over time. The baby bond, which you referenced, is Derrick Hamilton's proposal to give every child born without a trust fund, who's not from a trust fund, right, who's not from a high net worth family, who's not from a wealthy family, anywhere between 20 and $60,000 in some kind of

US government bond package, right? And then when you turn 18, you could use that money to go to college or start a business, which is all well and good. The problem is we have all kinds of evidence that white wealth grows faster than black wealth for two reasons one because you know as the Ketty points out the more money you have the easier it is to make more money right and if white folks have more money you know at the beginning period then they're gonna make more money and then the second is racism is ongoing right so we know that the returns to black wealth are lower than the returns to white wealth, which again is itself proof that racism is not something that is simply an original sin of capitalism that continues

and is self-reinforcing, right? So baby bonds close that racial gap, but as again as long as white folks have more money, that gap is going to either at best sort of remain the same and at worst it's going to grow. And then Dairy and and Mullins, sort of much more ambitious proposal for reparations, which are transferred something like 10 to 12 trillion dollars to black American families, would largely close the racial wealth gap. But does no guarantee that it wouldn't reopen? Because again, as long as white wealth grows faster, which is why I'm like, we need to change the very way that wealth is distributed and produced.

That's the only way we're going to really put an end to this. And obviously, I would love to take a nice chunk out of the racial wealth gap. I would love to completely get rid of it for at least a few years, but I would, you know, much more preferred to just get rid of it once and for all. And that requires again changing how wealth is produced and distributed. What would you recommend in how to change how wealth is produced and how it's distributed? Well, again, that's what brings me to the solidarity economy,

which is about who owns, who controls. So there's a difference between saying, I think about the example I started with, there's a difference between saying, I want to go to college and make more money and buy a nice house in the suburbs. That's great for me and my family, versus saying I want to create a whole community

of limited equity housing co-ops that can then provide permanently affordable housing for hundreds, thousands, millions of people forever. Once one thing, yes, it improves my life and that of my family, if that's the only option open to you, go for it, but it isn't a collective answer. So we can think about the same thing with business, right? So I can start a very successful business,

I can be Robert Johnson and start black entertainment television and then sell it to a white-owned company like Viacom and that's wonderful for Bob Johnson and his family. It does nothing for the rest of America's Black population. Right, so we have to think about who owns the businesses, who controls them. And once you own a control,

then you can make decisions about how we produce and how that wealth that we produced is distributed. Right, so in a co-op, most of them share their profits equally, which is a very different solution from, I keep all the profits as the owner, or as the shareholders. And that's a much narrower version of a much more individualistic notion

of black achievement and success. And I appreciate how you're weaving this back into the first question about your own upbringing. So in light of what you just shared, how do you look at your housing situation when you were growing up? Is that part of the answer? And what might you reflect on that now?

Yeah, so I absolutely think it's part of the answer. Again, my family has had nearly 50 years of affordable housing in one of the most gentrified parts of New York City. It isn't perfect. One of the things I've learned is it isn't enough to simply have a piece of paper that says we own this building. Real solidarity economy requires you have the actual spirit of collectivism. So part of the reason I didn't realize that we lived in a housing cooperative is because we called ourselves

tenants and we called it rent. When in reality we are shareholders and it is a maintenance fee, right? And, you know, we had a very corrupt political leadership that ran our collective, right? So there is no one sort of institutional fix that if you sort of, you know, I feel like leftists often fetishize institutional form and say, you know, if everything was a housing co-op then everything would be great. And it's like, everything would definitely be better. I can absolutely say that with confidence. It wouldn't all be perfect because we still have to practice democracy, we still have to actually run these things as if we own them collectively and we'd have to make sure that we don't discriminate against certain marginalized

groups, we have to make sure that like everyone's voice has actually heard that people are able to and willing to participate meaningfully in running these kinds of collectively owned businesses or housing. So, you know, that's the lesson that I've learned is, you know, the institutional form alone will get you very far, right? So, we are still there. And there is a trade-off, right? Like, there isn't, you know, like economists always love talking about this, and those such things are free lunch. And there isn't, right? Like, our solution isn't, you know, we're not saying, like,

because there's people who are like, you know, I want to do the collective thing, and I also want to be rich. And it's like, you can't do the collective thing, and I also want to be rich. And it's like, you can't do both, right? Like, you either have permanently affordable housing, or you have a wonderful financial asset. You can't have both, right? So limited equity means you're prioritizing housing as shelter, right?

Not housing as an asset, which means that, again, my family has permanently affordable housing. We're not millionaires, which, you know, we owned our apartment through a traditional kind of arrangement. We would be millionaires now, at least on paper. Yeah, I really hear you questioning, you know, what is success, what is progress, what's development, what's important to us, what's real wealth, right? I love that. And we experience that as well when we worked on our cooperative episode, that the cooperative, the structural form has so many benefits, transparency, democracy, sharing profits, and yet sometimes there were still cultural challenges, like white supremacy could

still show up in decision making, even if it's horizontal. So I absolutely hear you on structural changes as well as cultural ones. So I'm wondering what has been the response to the article. Again, I really shared, I found the article to be a very, I want to say again, I don't know why I keep seeing you gentle, but just very non-confrontational, just very engaging and kind of point after point, just really, I followed what you were saying very clearly, and I thought, wow, this is a great article for someone who might be in a disagreeing view or questioning of this. So I'm wondering what has been the response?

How have people received it? What kind of feedback or conversations has it sparked? Well, first, again, I'm happy you found it accessible. I, the more time I spend in academic spaces, the more I fear, kind of losing the ability to just talk to regular people. And I definitely see my writing in these kind of popular pieces as part of my popular education work. So a lot of it is just writing up the conversations that I have with activists who

ask me why not just buying black, why not just support black business. And really trying to explain, talk to people about, these aren't my arguments, these are the historical arguments of people that I'm going to have been making since due boys. I try to imagine some four million slave folks trying to figure out what do we do now, right? And I feel like those conversations probably started then, if not earlier, at least here in the US. And then the reception, so I've heard from a lot of people who've told me, I've worked for some of these efforts that they try to promote black businesses and I've always had this kind of lingering doubt. So thank you for naming it. I was sort of, couldn't put my finger on it or it was just sort of worried to kind of go against the current

and point out, like, I don't think this is actually going to work. So I think it seemed to be really useful for people like that. I do worry about actually reaching the people who support black capitalism, right? Because I feel like there's bigger questions there about a left-wing echo chamber, right? Like, how do we make sure that we're speaking to folks outside the choir?

And you have a friend of mine who says, you know, it's important for the choir to practice and be in tune, right? So there's definitely, you know, it's not useless to kind of preach to the choir, but we definitely have to, you know, reach out to all the people who think that this is the way to go, right? Like I was watching an episode of Atlanta recently, and in the show, they were talking about how the main character, Paperboy, who's a rapper from Atlanta, was talking about how to support more black business, right? And that seemed to be kind of the strategy, and he talks about kind of the resistance that someone like him would face trying to promote these ideas, and the way these ideas get

distorted. And I'm like, you know, this is still what is being offered as a somewhat radical critique of the system. And I feel like I want to, you know, obviously paper boys a fictional character, but I'm like the people who are watching the show and nodding along, how do we reach those folks? That's part of my project going forward

is to figure out how to refine these arguments, how to have these conversations and even more accessible ways and how to reach those audiences that aren't already hearing the choir practice. So an invitation for everyone listening to share Francisco's article with anyone who might be open to reading it and also to having a conversation about it. That's great. And, you know, this frame by black. I'm reminded that over the hill for more I am in San Francisco, a group of local activists painted Invest Black on the street. And I've also seen by black in murals or around urban spaces. I'm wondering how might you

offer to reframe that? What would be instead of invest black or buy black? What would you suggest or offer for folks to put on the streets or to share out by really inviting collective black liberation instead of maybe black capitalism? We own it. It's the name of a few organizations around the world and I think it emphasizes the two things that I think are really most important. Obviously, no slogan is going to capture all the nuance, all the fine print. But I feel like we collective own it. Right. And so I feel like moving towards that kind of frame of like, again, what does it mean for us to own our businesses, for us to own our housing, for us to own our money, for us to own our government. And again, it isn't simply we own it in the sense that like,

you know, we in some sort of abstract collective like, oh, you know, we own B.T. or something like that. It's like, no, we don't actually own B.T. Like, Viacom or Bob Johnson before that own B.T. Like, it's a different thing saying that we, you know, if you're in a neighborhood full of black homeowners saying we own our houses, right? But it's all individually.

We each family owning their house versus we own it as in like the community itself in terms of a land trust or some kind of larger cooperative structure owns it, right? So obviously the slogan wouldn't get to that level of detail, but I think it would hopefully spark those kind of conversations. Absolutely. And I appreciate it would hopefully spark those kind of conversations. Absolutely. And I appreciate it. It has in it visionary thinking. Like we own it. We may not own it yet, but it's that future vision that we own it. And then also I love that this would replace.

And when I'm talking about on the street, literally painted on the street, we own it. So it's like owning the streets, owning one's community. So beautiful. So final question, this show is called upstream. This show is called upstream based on a metaphor of seeing bodies in a river drowning and wondering if one goes upstream to figure out why are folks falling in? What are the root causes? So I'm wondering as you go upstream from white supremacy, from racial capitalism, from systemic racism, what are the root causes that are causing all of these challenges that we are working towards in this conversation and beyond? Yeah, this is a really tough question because I tend to think of white supremacy and capitalism

as the causes, as we have these sort of systems of exploitation and oppression that are the reason, you know, and then we walk around and see the manifestations in terms of, you know, inequality and housing and healthcare and education and income and wealth and, you know, really like the kind of entire range of our social lives, right? So in social media and dating, right, like racism

is everywhere, patriarchy is everywhere. And I'm like, what is upstream from that? And I think there you get into some really interesting philosophical conversations about why we are evil to one another, right? Where it's like we as human beings are capable of cooperation. We have the egalitarian instincts. We have an innate sense of fairness.

We are also capable of hierarchy and domination. And it reminds me of reading Freud and college about arrows and donateaus, the love drive and the death drive. And thinking about why we can be both sort of good monkeys. We can be bonobos who are just like scratching each other and finally each other's genitals. And while we're also gorillas who are like fighting to see who is the alpha male, right? So, you know, again, I mainly think of racism and capitalism as sort of upstream, but it is interesting

to think about why we choose to oppress or why some folks choose to oppress. I love it. So when you go upstream, you're finding questions of who we are as humans and who we can choose to be differently. Yeah, I mean, I think you get to something like human nature very quickly. Yes. What's next for you? Do you have any articles you're working on or questions you're pondering? Yeah, so I am, you know, always have my hand in different pots. So I'm working on a follow up article, when I'm working on another article for non-profit quarterly on philanthropy and non-profits, which probably won't resonate as much, because it is more particular to the non-profit sector.

But I used to be a grant writer, so I've always thought about why do non-profits really need to grow? We know why businesses, they're for-profit, they're maximized profits, they want to make as much money as possible. But why would a foundation or a nonprofit feel the same in impulse to continuously just grow?

And then in general, I'm working on trying to understand imperialism and specifically the monetary and financial aspects of it. So how does all the stuff we hear about with exchange rates and interest rates and foreign direct investment, all of that, how does the global capitalist system, especially its institutional and monetary forms, right to the international monetary system, institutions like the International Monetary Fund, how do they serve to originally create and then reinforce a global hierarchy of nations, which is a racialized one, right? So I study Africa and I strongly feel that as long as Africa's synonymous with poverty, then black people everywhere will face some level of discrimination.

Right? So I guess I think it's what's know, what's upstream from, you know, even the conversations we have about racism in the US is thinking about the kind of global racial hierarchy and global racial line and how to attack that. Wow. Excellent questions. And we had a guest recently, Jennifer Hinton, talk about the not-for-profit economy. So how can we have hybrid for profit and nonprofit businesses that liberate nonprofits from grant funding and donations and create more of a circular post-growth

economy model. So I'm excited to read what you learn around that and of course around imperialism. So nonprofit quarterly is where we can find this article that we talk about today. How do we build black wealth, understanding the limits of black capitalism as well as that upcoming one? Any other way, folks, can get in touch with you or follow your work? Yes, so I am at Blatlanomics, PLATA and O-M-I-C-S, on Instagram and Twitter.

Awesome. Thank you so much for all that you shared today and for the work that you do. No, thank you so much for having me. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Francisco Perez, author of the recent piece in Nonprofit Quarterly, How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the limits of Black capitalism? Thanks to Tracy Chapman for the Intermission Music. Upstream's theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Support for this episode was provided by the Gorilla Foundation and by listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love. We couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our

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