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Over the last several years the narrative that Black people have a buying power of $1.2 trillion has been spread all over the internet. Giving thought leaders, activists and anyone spreading this narrative a talking point to support the ideology that the only thing Black people need to do is re-purpose the Black dollar into Black businesses then we would solve a lot of the issues in our communities. According to a recent report from Nielsen on the current buying power of consumers of color, the report states that Black people are responsible for $1.2 trillion in purchases annually. However, the 1.2 trillion dollars of Black buying power can be a little misleading once you take a deeper look at the numbers and what buying power actually means.

Buying power has often been used as a propaganda tool to downplay the structural and intentional reality of the economic inequality that has been strategically used to keep Black people as a collective at the bottom of the podium toll concerning economics. The myth of buying power has been used to blame the poor for being poor often followed by the phrase “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” But the question that needs to be addressed is what if you never had any boots or even shoe strings.

The myth that Black America has a $1.2 trillion dollar buying power is a capitalistic point-of-view that insist that Black people’s spending habits are the reason why we are poor. This idea originates from Nielsen and other white-owned consumer survey companies who study how much consumers spend. First, we have to take a look at the difference between buying power and wealth.

Buying Power is a marketing term that refers to the power the consumer has to purchase goods and is often used as a measurement for corporations to market their products. This has no correlation to actual economic income that the black community has at its disposal. However, wealth on the hand is ownership that is passed down from generation to generation. Therefore, we can determine “buying power” has actually no power, because we have no control or ownership over the means of production of the capitalist system of which wealth is derived from.

The concept that all we have to do is utilize Black buying power is not a complete statement, because to be able to use a Black capitalism system it would require us to have our own slaves just as white American’s had. Thus, giving them an economic base that started this country and kept us unable to attain wealth of any kind for around 300 years. Some scholars and commentators would suggest, we will never have wealth under capitalism. They believe the system of racial capitalism will never allow Black people to catch up to the white elite by only consuming in our own community. Even if Black people as a collective made the decision to buy Black 365 days a year we will never obtain the same wealth as whites, because we do not own or control the means of production, whites do.

Here are three myths about Black buying power via imixwhatilike.org.

1. The claim that African America has roughly $1 trillion in “buying power” is popularly repeated mythology with no basis in sound economic logic or data. While the myth has a longer history it is today largely propelled by misreadings and poor (false) interpretations of Nielsen surveys and marketing reports produced by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the Terry College of Business housed in the Bank of America Financial Center in Athens, GA. and where, as their website explains, their bias and purpose is in their founding mission. The center was “Created to convey economic expertise to Georgia businesses and entrepreneurs, the Simon S. Selig, Jr. Center for Economic Growth is primarily responsible for conducting research on economic, demographic, and social issues related to Georgia’s current and future growth” (emphasis added).

2. “Buying Power” is a marketing phrase that refers only to the “power” of consumers to purchase what are strictly available goods and is used as a measurement for corporations to better market their products. “Power” here has nothing to do with actual economic strength and there is no collective $1+ trillion that Black people have and just foolishly spend ignorantly to their economic detriment.

3. The myth of “buying power” functions as propaganda working to deny the reality of structural, intentional and necessary economic inequality required to maintain society as it is, one that benefits an increasingly decreasing number of people. To do this the myth functions to falsely blame the poor for being poor. Poverty, the myth encourages, is the result of the poor having little to no “financial literacy,” or as resulting from their bad spending habits, when in reality poverty is an intended result of an economic and social system.

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