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The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power: Media, Race, Economics
The second edition of this Palgrave Pivot offers a history of and proof against claims of "buying power" and the impact this myth has had on understanding media, race, class and economics in the United States. For generations Black people have been told they have what is now said to be more than one trillion dollars of "buying power," and this book argues that commentators have misused this claim largely to blame Black communities for their own poverty based on squandered economic opportunity. This book exposes the claim as both a marketing strategy and myth, while also showing how that myth functions simultaneously as a case study for propaganda and commercial media coverage of economics. In sum, while “buying power” is indeed an economic and marketing phrase applied to any number of racial, ethnic, religious, gender, age or group of consumers, it has a specific application to Black America. A new foreword by Dr. Darrick Hamilton, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at the New School (in New York, USA), and a new chapter on cryptocurrencies are included in this new edition.
- GenresNonfiction
202 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 30, 2023
About the author
Jared A. Ball
4 books31 followersJared A. Ball is Professor of Communication Studies at Morgan State University, USA. He is the curator of imixwhatilike.org, an online hub of multimedia dedicated to the philosophies of emancipatory journalism and revolutionary beat reporting.
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October 2, 2025These are basically my sparknotes and they r for me really more than a review, but I think their volume will tell u that I took a lot from this great book.
Jared A Ball’s the Myth of Black Buying Power refutes the notion that Black liberation/uplifting can happen via strategic consolidation, movement, and internal/communal Black capitalism, “Black buying power” oft used as the term to define the potential financial purchasing body the Black American population represents.
Privileging the strategic use of Black buying power as the means for the community to self-enrich itself obfuscates the historical material concerns of Black folk and the public policies which influence(d) them, and, more sinisterly, can imply that economic inequality is an individual-made-communal choice of poor financial planning or spawns basely from “a culture of misspending.”
The main dispel of the book for me is that the statistics of the myth of Black buying power— that the Black population in the US have a “buying power” of over a trillion dollars, which will be close to 2 trillion by 2030— were propagated by consulting companies and marketing agencies (Nielsen Surveys, The Selig Center, and more recently, McKinsey & Co.), primarily to convince white owner classes to invest more money in advertisement and marketing toward Black communities and heighten extractive potential, rather than a metric of Black economic standing and agency.
In a more logical explanation, the numbers themselves of buying power are frequently inflated, muddied, or abstracted, as their use case was never there to be used as a measuring stick of comparison or potential. Black buying power can not be compared to GDP, as GDP growth itself is a faulty indicator for equitable advancement: since 1979, the bottom 20% of income earners in the US rose income-wise by 18%. The top 20% rose by 65%. The top 1% rose by 277%. All the while the GDP doubled; as such the growth of GDP actually often indicates a growth rather in inequality. Another logical inconsistency pointed out is that Black buying power is frequently conflated with the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s (BLS) numbers of total income, but nobody spends every penny one earns on non-essentials. Also, how much spending that’s made on credit is not part of the equation. Really interesting/evil side-truth: the BLS was founded in part to ascertain exactly how much the owning class could price things to keep the working class complacent/stop them from striking. This notion extended to the purpose of ascertaining “Black buying power” in quelling Black Power, anti-capitalist movements (more on that below).
Ball calls for a comparative economics which is far more sobering; the medium household net worth for white families in 2002 was $90,000, whereas for Black families it was $6,000. Unemployment rates are higher and income is lower comparatively. Home ownership of the total housing stock has consistently hovered between 1%-4% for Black families for the last 100 years— and the houses frequently are less valuable, as they have been redlined into “less desirable” locations. When all these things are plugged in, Ball argues that Black folk have been in an eternal recession— and a depression when white folk have recessions.
Another line of argument I found compelling is the usage of the ideal of Black capitalism to quell more Black radical socialist/marxist lanes of thought about economic redistribution, social equality, and political power that was happening throughout the second half of the 1900s— Ball makes this argument through a lens of media propaganda. WWII placed the US at the top of the pecking order, and they made sure to make democracy synonymous with capitalism, consumption as liberation. Demand needed to be created to compensate for the overabundance of production capacity post-war. Media was used to turn everyone into a consumer— Black populations were localized as a new, “untapped” group. The CIA funded universities to develop communications and marketing majors to quell and engender these ideas at home. In part too were Black folk promised to be behind the capitalist reins; Nixon-backed ventures like Office of Minority Business Enterprise promised Black Capitalism, but in practice did not equip folk with meaningful equity stake or means of production for fear of losing the southern vote. Still, Black Capitalism sought to supplant Black Power.
Dr. Darrick Hamilton expresses in the introduction some of the cultural/psychological drivers of support for “Black buying power” in different shades across the political spectrum in Black communities: “the underlying commonality is that all are drawn to the myth’s promise of agency and self-efficacy….” It misattributes hope and power through consumption. Larry Elder, Jay Z, and Killer Mike represent more conservative/bourgeoise visions of this value; early Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey were behind Black Buying Power as a means to legitimize Black nationalism/separatist flavors. Martin Luther King spoke on the limited value of choosing where to financially support and where to boycott, but ultimately said that’s not enough within a global, pluralistic, capitalist economy. His socialist bend toward the end of his life would have been really riveting to watch unfold had he not been killed. But I wish Ball spoke on this sociological/cultural slant more, but that’s not what the essays are primarily interested in, though he does open the preface with two quotes which compliment Hamilton. Kwame Ture: “Black visibility is not Black power” (reminds me of the book “Elite Capture”). And then, on what Power is, by Huey P. Newton: “[Power is] the ability to define phenomena and have it act in a desired manner.”
At the end of the day, you can’t do much in a vacuum— you can’t even ever have a true vacuum. Ball’s chapter on Black banks argues that these banks, like Killer Mike’s Greenwood (side note at end of paragraph), are still propped up or supported by larger banks that have found a new foot-in to a demographic— it’s not the closed, self-sufficient economy which is how its posited. When there are true “through-and-through independent Black banks”, they function often similarly to community banks, with the disadvantage that their target audience historically had and presently has far less capital, outside investment, and equity to compete with the loans, interests, and debts they can take on compared to larger banks. Having a Black Bank won’t spur more capital — redistributing wealth or actual access to wealth production does. Side note: even the famed “Black Wall Street”, the Greenwood District in Tulsa for which Killer Mike’s bank is named after, was not its own “closed economy”, but instead built most of its wealth off of interfacing with adjacent white communities (this does not discount the success story of Greenwood nor the legitimate horror or the Tulsa Race Massacre, but it does complicate Greenwood’s mythological status as a “American Black capitalism that was/could have been”. Also, come on Killer Mike).
A small addendum chapter talking about crypto reasserts that not much is new with the “currency,” save for its cloud cover of tech-futurism post-2008 crisis and re-upping on entrepreneurial sensibilities / economic separatism (once again handedly points out that “revolutionary” NFT’s made by the likes of Tory Lanez and Nas were still owned by white folks and that crypto at large is overwhelmingly white-owned).
As Ball writes himself in the conclusion, the book does not end with or pivot toward a specific, practical solution to the problem of the pervasive mythology beyond the need to address wealth inequality other than some kind of redistribution. This puts the collection of short essays in the category of books which dispel/counter a commonly-believed concept and then leave the reader armed to figure things out in its wake. With other books this can peeve me— especially when they promise to layout some roadmap of actionable prescriptions in the second half which turn vague/hippy-dippy/cut short— but the relative concision of this book and its stated purpose makes me fine with it.
Jared A Ball’s the Myth of Black Buying Power refutes the notion that Black liberation/uplifting can happen via strategic consolidation, movement, and internal/communal Black capitalism, “Black buying power” oft used as the term to define the potential financial purchasing body the Black American population represents.
Privileging the strategic use of Black buying power as the means for the community to self-enrich itself obfuscates the historical material concerns of Black folk and the public policies which influence(d) them, and, more sinisterly, can imply that economic inequality is an individual-made-communal choice of poor financial planning or spawns basely from “a culture of misspending.”
The main dispel of the book for me is that the statistics of the myth of Black buying power— that the Black population in the US have a “buying power” of over a trillion dollars, which will be close to 2 trillion by 2030— were propagated by consulting companies and marketing agencies (Nielsen Surveys, The Selig Center, and more recently, McKinsey & Co.), primarily to convince white owner classes to invest more money in advertisement and marketing toward Black communities and heighten extractive potential, rather than a metric of Black economic standing and agency.
In a more logical explanation, the numbers themselves of buying power are frequently inflated, muddied, or abstracted, as their use case was never there to be used as a measuring stick of comparison or potential. Black buying power can not be compared to GDP, as GDP growth itself is a faulty indicator for equitable advancement: since 1979, the bottom 20% of income earners in the US rose income-wise by 18%. The top 20% rose by 65%. The top 1% rose by 277%. All the while the GDP doubled; as such the growth of GDP actually often indicates a growth rather in inequality. Another logical inconsistency pointed out is that Black buying power is frequently conflated with the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s (BLS) numbers of total income, but nobody spends every penny one earns on non-essentials. Also, how much spending that’s made on credit is not part of the equation. Really interesting/evil side-truth: the BLS was founded in part to ascertain exactly how much the owning class could price things to keep the working class complacent/stop them from striking. This notion extended to the purpose of ascertaining “Black buying power” in quelling Black Power, anti-capitalist movements (more on that below).
Ball calls for a comparative economics which is far more sobering; the medium household net worth for white families in 2002 was $90,000, whereas for Black families it was $6,000. Unemployment rates are higher and income is lower comparatively. Home ownership of the total housing stock has consistently hovered between 1%-4% for Black families for the last 100 years— and the houses frequently are less valuable, as they have been redlined into “less desirable” locations. When all these things are plugged in, Ball argues that Black folk have been in an eternal recession— and a depression when white folk have recessions.
Another line of argument I found compelling is the usage of the ideal of Black capitalism to quell more Black radical socialist/marxist lanes of thought about economic redistribution, social equality, and political power that was happening throughout the second half of the 1900s— Ball makes this argument through a lens of media propaganda. WWII placed the US at the top of the pecking order, and they made sure to make democracy synonymous with capitalism, consumption as liberation. Demand needed to be created to compensate for the overabundance of production capacity post-war. Media was used to turn everyone into a consumer— Black populations were localized as a new, “untapped” group. The CIA funded universities to develop communications and marketing majors to quell and engender these ideas at home. In part too were Black folk promised to be behind the capitalist reins; Nixon-backed ventures like Office of Minority Business Enterprise promised Black Capitalism, but in practice did not equip folk with meaningful equity stake or means of production for fear of losing the southern vote. Still, Black Capitalism sought to supplant Black Power.
Dr. Darrick Hamilton expresses in the introduction some of the cultural/psychological drivers of support for “Black buying power” in different shades across the political spectrum in Black communities: “the underlying commonality is that all are drawn to the myth’s promise of agency and self-efficacy….” It misattributes hope and power through consumption. Larry Elder, Jay Z, and Killer Mike represent more conservative/bourgeoise visions of this value; early Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey were behind Black Buying Power as a means to legitimize Black nationalism/separatist flavors. Martin Luther King spoke on the limited value of choosing where to financially support and where to boycott, but ultimately said that’s not enough within a global, pluralistic, capitalist economy. His socialist bend toward the end of his life would have been really riveting to watch unfold had he not been killed. But I wish Ball spoke on this sociological/cultural slant more, but that’s not what the essays are primarily interested in, though he does open the preface with two quotes which compliment Hamilton. Kwame Ture: “Black visibility is not Black power” (reminds me of the book “Elite Capture”). And then, on what Power is, by Huey P. Newton: “[Power is] the ability to define phenomena and have it act in a desired manner.”
At the end of the day, you can’t do much in a vacuum— you can’t even ever have a true vacuum. Ball’s chapter on Black banks argues that these banks, like Killer Mike’s Greenwood (side note at end of paragraph), are still propped up or supported by larger banks that have found a new foot-in to a demographic— it’s not the closed, self-sufficient economy which is how its posited. When there are true “through-and-through independent Black banks”, they function often similarly to community banks, with the disadvantage that their target audience historically had and presently has far less capital, outside investment, and equity to compete with the loans, interests, and debts they can take on compared to larger banks. Having a Black Bank won’t spur more capital — redistributing wealth or actual access to wealth production does. Side note: even the famed “Black Wall Street”, the Greenwood District in Tulsa for which Killer Mike’s bank is named after, was not its own “closed economy”, but instead built most of its wealth off of interfacing with adjacent white communities (this does not discount the success story of Greenwood nor the legitimate horror or the Tulsa Race Massacre, but it does complicate Greenwood’s mythological status as a “American Black capitalism that was/could have been”. Also, come on Killer Mike).
A small addendum chapter talking about crypto reasserts that not much is new with the “currency,” save for its cloud cover of tech-futurism post-2008 crisis and re-upping on entrepreneurial sensibilities / economic separatism (once again handedly points out that “revolutionary” NFT’s made by the likes of Tory Lanez and Nas were still owned by white folks and that crypto at large is overwhelmingly white-owned).
As Ball writes himself in the conclusion, the book does not end with or pivot toward a specific, practical solution to the problem of the pervasive mythology beyond the need to address wealth inequality other than some kind of redistribution. This puts the collection of short essays in the category of books which dispel/counter a commonly-believed concept and then leave the reader armed to figure things out in its wake. With other books this can peeve me— especially when they promise to layout some roadmap of actionable prescriptions in the second half which turn vague/hippy-dippy/cut short— but the relative concision of this book and its stated purpose makes me fine with it.
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