Monthly Review | Is Black Capitalism Still a Myth?

This article is the introduction to the new edition of Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Myth of Black Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2023). The year was 1968. Then Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon was in the midst of an intense dogfight with Democratic presidential nominee and the vice president Hubert Humphrey for the White House. Nixon needed an edge. The edge was the race card. He covered two of his political flanks playing it. One was his so-called Southern Strategy. Put simply that meant saying little and doing even less on the fight for racial equity that would rile the white conservative South. The second was to come up with something, anything that would dent the ironclad lock the Democrats had on the Black vote. This meant he had to appear that he was not the polarizing racist that many Blacks regarded him and the GOP as. His idea was crass and cynical, but in one sense it was brilliant. He combined two words that appeared on the surface to be an oxymoron. They were “Black” and “Capitalism.” This was not just a con man’s eye-catching sloganeering. Nixon sought to put body behind it. In his acceptance speech at the 1968...