Nearly 250 years into the American experiment, the pursuit of liberty remains inseparable from the pursuit of wealth, and Black communities continue to face an economy that excludes them from both. The language of democracy is everywhere but often serves as a civic veneer over a deeper national project: the protection of racialized capitalism. This economic order, built on genocide and slavery, fortified through extraction and exclusion, and sustained by policies designed to preserve wealth for some while denying it to others, resulted in the racial wealth divide, showing the citak importance of exploring Black economic futures.

Black history in the United States is not separate from economic history; in fact, it is central to it. And any serious conversation about the future of democracy in this country must begin with a clear accounting of how wealth has been structured and the power it confers. Honoring Black history is not simply about commemorating triumphs. To understand the challenges of the present moment—and what it will take to build durable Black futures—we must be clear-eyed about the economic architecture that produced today’s inequities, demonstrating the necessity of exploring Black economic futures.

Exploring Black Economic Futures Requires an Understanding That Prosperity Was Engineered Through Racial Extraction

For over 400 years, the Atlantic slave trade served as the principal engine of wealth across Europe and the United States. By 1860, the market value of nearly 4 million enslaved people was conservatively estimated at more than $3 billion—the equivalent of $42 trillion today (based on conservative estimates—some scholars argue much higher economic equivalents)—making slavery one of the nation’s largest capital assets.

Black labor created wealth that Black people were never allowed to hold.

Slavery fueled US prosperity, and it is necessary to acknowledge and address this harm when exploring Black economic futures. Nowhere was this extraction more concentrated than in the South. By the start of the Civil War, the South produced 77 percent of the cotton used in Britain, 90 percent used in France, 92 percent used in Russia, and generated more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River Valley than anywhere else in the country. The United States was the world’s major cotton exporter for 134 years, from 1803 to 1937. This is the foundation of US economic power: Black labor creating wealth that Black people were never allowed to hold. The implications are not historical footnotes. They reveal that US economic prosperity was not merely accompanied by racial oppression—it was built on its back.

Read the full article about exploring Black economic futures by Janelle Williams and Jessica Norwood at Nonprofit Quarterly.