Synopses & Reviews
Capitalism and slavery stand as the two economic phenomena that have most clearly defined the United States. Yet, despite African Americans' nearly $500 billion annual spending power, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the ways U.S. businesses have courted black dollars in post-slavery America. Robert E. Weems, Jr., presents the first fully integrated history of black consumerism over the course of the last century.
The World War I era Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern and southern cities stimulated initial corporate interest in blacks as consumers. A generation later, as black urbanization intensified during World War II and its aftermath, the notion of a distinct, profitable African American consumer market gained greater currency. Moreover, black socioeconomic gains resulting from the Civil Rights movement which itself featured such consumer justice protests as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, further enhanced the status and influence of African American shoppers.
Unwilling to settle for facile answers, Weems explores the role of black entrepreneurs who promoted the importance of the African American consumer market to U.S. corporations. Their actions, ironically, set the stage for the ongoing destruction of black-owned business. While the extent of educational, employment, and residential desegregation remains debatable, African American consumer dollars have, by any standard, been fully incorporated into the U.S. economy.
Desegregating the Dollar takes us through the "blaxploitation" film industry, the vast market for black personal care products, and the insidious exploitation of black urban misery by liquor and cigarette advertisers. Robert E. Weems, Jr., has given us the definitive account of the complicated relationship between African Americans, capitalism, and consumerism.
Synopsis
Two decades ago, historical practice in the United States and Europe was challenged by social historians with behaviorist approaches which diverged dramatically from the discipline's traditional preferences for textual evidence. Such accounts explained occurrences in terms of individual intention and a narrative presentation of results. This shift of emphasis in social history was toward routinely generated accounts of individual behavior treated quantitatively, explanations made in terms of functional or economically rational behavior, and presentations that incorporated the social-science formalization of hypothesis and test.
But such behaviorist trends by no means swept the field of social history, and today's historical practices go in yet another direction. Today what is widely called for involves actor-centered accounts that do not focus upon individuals to the exclusion of groups, markets, cultures, and other socially defined fields of action, and that consider power in human societies as well as the limitations upon that power.
Recognizing that historical practices as well as method and discourse are in flux, Theory, Method, and Practice in Social and Cultural History is the result of the second biennial conference of the Pittsburgh Center for Social History, in which a number of the best scholars in the field reflect on the current situation in historical writing and research.
About the Author
Robert E. Weems, Jr., is Professor of History at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (NYU Press).