OP-ED: Black Capitalism Is Still Capitalism — And Our Ancestors Wanted More Than That

A Black-owned business can underpay, overwork, and pollute just like any other. If our answer to a rigged economy is a bigger seat at the same table, we've mistaken representation at the top for freedom at the bottom.

Nixon Sold It First

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not against Black-owned business. I've built my life around it. But "Black capitalism" was never a liberation strategy. It was a slogan the Nixon administration embraced in the late 1960s, creating the Office of Minority Business Enterprise in 1969, as a more comfortable answer to the demands of the civil rights and Black Power movements: own a piece of the system instead of changing it.

The problem is that the system doesn't care who owns the machine. Extraction is extraction. A smokestack puts out the same carbon whether its owner is Black or white, and a payroll squeezed to protect margins squeezes the same people. Capitalism rewards growth at the expense of workers and the planet, and a more diverse set of owners doesn't change that math. It only changes who gets photographed cutting the ribbon.

The Tax Story Is the Smoke Screen

This isn't new, and neither is the con. We're taught that the Revolutionary War was a fight against taxation without representation. I'd argue the more honest story is about property, specifically human property. In 1772, Britain's Somerset decision alarmed slaveholders across the colonies. In November 1775, Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to enslaved people who left rebel owners and joined the Crown. Months later, the Declaration of Independence accused the King of stirring up "domestic insurrections amongst us." Taxes were the slogan. Protecting wealthy planters' wealth was the stake.

The Civil War ran on the same logic, and the people who started it said so plainly. Mississippi's 1861 declaration of secession opens with the line, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." Two wars, both shaped by the same question: who gets to profit from other people's labor.

Why Take Capitalism Apart at All?

Because understanding capitalism means understanding where American capitalism came from. The nation's early economy was built on enslaved labor, and I'd argue capitalism is a hierarchical system that designates a permanent working class: the people whose labor produces the wealth while their ceiling stays fixed. That design hasn't changed. It has only been refined.

Today it shows up as corporations exploiting arbitrage and making more money than ever while the working and middle class are squeezed. When wages can't cover the cost of living, some in the working class are pushed toward crime just to make ends meet. The middle class, meanwhile, grows complacent to avoid sliding into the working class. Both are predictable outcomes of the system, not failures of character.

Identity Is the Distraction. Class Is the Fight.

That playbook is still running. The two-party system keeps us arguing over identity, regardless of political affiliation, while the one crisis actually hurting our society, class warfare, goes unaddressed. It isn't new either. It's the same war in new costumes, with divisive tactics and smoke-screen distractions that keep working people looking at each other instead of up.

Look at what goes unexamined. I believe we fight wars that too often serve to secure the U.S. trade position at the expense of less-resourced countries. We maintain a militarized workforce, then rely on large corporations to create jobs with little to no oversight, while those same corporations pay lobbyists to advance their cause. Working people supply the labor that drives America's global financial dominance and are asked to be grateful for the paycheck.

What Our Ancestors Actually Dreamed Of

I don't believe our ancestors' wildest dreams were for us to become better capitalists. They endured what they endured to fight for equality and for representation of the working class, the people whose labor has always built this country's wealth. Ownership alone was never the goal. Dignity, power, and a real say in how work and its rewards are shared were.

Build the Moat Together

Entrepreneurs of color are far more likely to start businesses with a social benefit built in, and that instinct is worth protecting. But we can't let it drift into the luxury of an apolitical or conservative stance while our communities' wages and financial security stay out of reach. That luxury was paid for with real sacrifice, and forgetting it isn't ours to spend.

Our ancestors built a moat around their communities by collaborating: pooling money, sharing risk, hiring and buying from each other. That's the model worth rebuilding through cooperatives, worker ownership, and collective purchasing power, not a race to become the next billionaire. It matters more now, in the wake of the Trump administration's moves against DEI programs. Washington State's federally funded Minority Business Development Agency Business Center has already closed because of federal cuts, and I can attest to that locally. And it matters most in places like Seattle, where Black residents are a small share of the population and decades of displacement have already thinned our networks. This work isn't done, and we can't afford to act like it is.

So skip the question of how to get a seat at the table. Ask who built the table, and who is still carrying it.

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The Local Mogul is King's Dream Business Consulting's blog, covering the people and small businesses building our local economies.