Today, we welcome Jessica Levy, co-host of Who Makes Cents, onto the program—not as an interviewer, but as a guest.
She's here to talk about her remarkable new book, Black Power, Inc: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics. This book traces the strange career of black empowerment: from civil rights protests to the boardroom, and from the streets of urban America to the townships of South Africa. Black empowerment, she reveals, was a protean concept, at once radical and conservative, that allowed different constiutencies to sometimes push for change, and at other times, to co-opt more transformative alternatives.
Along the way, we'll grapple with a big question: is it possible to use corporations to combat the inequalities that racial capitalism has created?
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast