You are listening to an upstream sneak peak with Professor Jessica Gordon Nemhard,

author of collective courage, a history of African American cooperative economic thought and

practice. She will be featured in our upcoming episode

The Solidarity Economy released in collaboration with Sturm magazine on January 15th

at upstream podcast.org. Professor Gordon Nemhart, when you think about the economic challenges and problems facing

African Americans today, as well as all of us in the current capitalist economic system.

And you go upstream to the root causes of those problems.

What do you see? My upstream is I actually feel like if we can intervene in

the sense of have small local enclaves of people practicing economic justice and living in some relative economic independence that if we can create

interlocking systems and a larger and larger cooperative Commonwealth.

We can both insulate ourselves

from the oppression, both the economic and the racial oppression.

But also maybe we can change the system eventually if enough of us get into this interlocking system

that we might even be able to change it and change it in two ways in terms of the racism I feel like if African Americans can

establish themselves as equal partners with some of their own economic prosperity and independence that then integration

makes sense but integration until now has been we've integrated from a

position of inequality and so integration has been false for us.

It hasn't really, it helped a few of us to get ahead, but the rest of us actually have been

worse off since integration, unfortunately. So we can't even end

and racism and really integrate until we can enter as equals and part of that

entering as equals is having control over our own economics and having some prosperity and

stability and that kind of thing.

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