African American Co-ops with Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Upstream
Upstream
4.9 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2017
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this Upstream Conversation we spoke with Professor Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. We spoke with her about the history of solidarity economics--particularly worker co-operatives--within the African American community. We travel in time from the era of slavery, through to Jim Crow segregation, share-cropping, and finally within the modern day prison industrial complex, looking at how cooperatives have formed in prisons in Puerto Rico. What can we learn for the United States, where African Americans comprise one-third of the prison population? We also spoke about the intersection of capitalism and racism. How do capitalism and racism support each other? And how can the act of participating in cooperative economics chisel away the power of capitalism? Jessica was also featured in our episode on Solidarity Economics. To listen to that episode, visit: http://upstreampodcast.org/solidarityeconomy
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to an upstream conversation with Jessica Gordon Nemhart. |
| 0:05.1 | Jessica is an associate professor of community justice and social economic development |
| 0:11.1 | in the Department of Africana Studies at John J College, City University of New York. |
| 0:17.0 | She is also the author of Collective Courage, A History of African AmericanAmerican cooperative economic thought and practice. |
| 0:25.0 | She was recently featured in our Solidarity Economy episode. Welcome to Upstream, Professor Gordon Emhart. |
| 0:45.0 | Thank you. |
| 0:46.0 | Can we start by just tell us where we are right now? |
| 0:50.0 | You're in my office on 11th Avenue and 59th or 58th Street in Manhattan, New York. |
| 0:57.1 | I'm a professor here at John Jay College, which is a branch of the City University of New York. |
| 1:03.0 | And can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to do the work that you do? |
| 1:08.0 | I am a PhD in economics and I've been a professor teaching for I guess 14 or 15 years but before that I was a researcher in nonprofit think tanks and looking at the issue particularly of black |
| 1:26.9 | economic development and the ways that we could configure community |
| 1:31.1 | economic development that would be much more humanizing and family-friendly |
| 1:35.8 | and supportive of prosperity for all that kind of thing. |
| 1:39.1 | And while studying that, I stumbled across cooperatives and realized that cooperatives had a lot of the |
| 1:46.4 | attributes of the things that we were looking for and then became an expert and I started talking to black communities about |
| 1:54.8 | cooperative economics and found out that most black communities didn't know much |
| 1:59.4 | about it or felt alienated from it and I tried to understand that which led me to |
| 2:04.4 | realizing that African Americans thought that we didn't have a legacy or a history |
| 2:09.6 | or a connection with co-ops which didn't sound right to me so I started talking to more people |
| 2:15.8 | about it ended up with a classmate from my grad school days who had actually |
| 2:20.6 | studied W. E. B. DuB. DeB. DeB. |
... |
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