Frazier argues that Washington’s approach was not only misguided, but based on faulty analysis of the economic potential of African American business. The total net worth of all 115 original attendees did not even amount to $1 million. By the time Frazier wrote his book in 1955, all eleven black-owned banks in the nation combined did not represent the amount of capital in the average local bank in smaller white cities. There was simply not enough black wealth for a separate black economy to “bootstrap” itself up. Even if the initiative successfully encouraged people to buy black—for example, with dollars earned at their jobs at the Ford plant—it would still not create a black economy. Nonetheless, shortly after the group’s fiftieth anniversary, the league doubled down on its goal to preach the gospel of faith in black business. No wonder Frazier concludes that an African American economy would remain a pipedream into the 1960s, as it had been at the turn of the century.
Why did the myth of a black economy as a comprehensive response to anti-black racism survive, even when prominent black businessmen could have known that it wasn’t a serious possibility? In Frazier’s telling, it was the particular class interests of the small but influential black bourgeoisie that carried the idea. Some were business owners, hoping to enjoy a monopoly of the African American economic market. Others were salaried professionals—far and away the largest percentage of the black middle class at the time—hoping to work their way into white-owned marketing firms on the strength of their presumed knowledge of untapped black purchasing power. Either way, the National Negro Business League promoted a viewpoint that encouraged people to confront the complex problem of white hegemony over politics, culture, and the economy with the mythical premise that black people could spend and invest their way out of domination.
Frazier saves his most scathing criticisms for the black press, “the chief medium of communication which creates and perpetuates the world of make-believe for the black bourgeoisie.” While acknowledging the contributions of black publications such as the Chicago Defender and Frederick Douglass’s Paper, he nevertheless insists that the black press’s “demand for equality for the Negro in American life is concerned primarily with opportunities which will benefit the black bourgeoisie economically and enhance the social status of the Negro.” The elite control of prominent black media advanced these subgroup interests seemingly without regard to the larger group. As an example, Frazier notes that the Norfolk, Virginia, black newspaper Journal and Guide celebrated the election of a black doctor to the presidency of a local affiliate of the American Medical Association—in spite of the fact that he had opposed “socialized medicine,” which no doubt would have benefitted working-class African Americans.
Frazier concludes that, whether in the black press or in business, “the black bourgeoisie have shown no interest in the ‘liberation’ of Negroes”—that is, unless “it affected their own status or acceptance by the white community.” At every opportunity, “the black bourgeoisie has exploited the Negro masses as ruthlessly as have whites.” Frazier surely overstates things here, but his book is a window into a common phenomenon.
The amount of ignorance and retardation you showcase regularly is truly mindboggling.
