ABOUT DR. RACHEL LARYEA
Dr. Rachel is a thought leader who specializes in race and money, ethical entrepreneurship, and social good. After cutting her teeth on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs, she went on to receive her dual Ph.D. in African American Studies and Sociocultural Anthropology at Yale University. Her ethnographic research aims to understand nuanced forms of Black participation in capitalist economies. Dr. Rachel is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Research Fellowship award, and she received an honorable mention from the Ford Foundation for her research. She has held Adjunct Professor appointments at NYU Stern Business School, and worked as a racial equity investment strategist at JPMorganChase. Currently, she is an Asset Wealth Management researcher at JPMorganChase.
Dr. Rachel is the founder of Kelewele, a lifestyle brand based in Brooklyn, New York, that creates bespoke African travel experiences and vegan, plantain treats. Kelewele has partnered with The James Beard Foundation, Black Entertainment Television (BET), and has been featured in several global publications and media platforms including The New York Times, Forbes, MarketWatch, and CBS. She is the recipient of the Ghana UK-Based Achievement (GUBA) award.
ABOUT THE BOOK
What is the price on Black thriving? Dr. Rachel Laryea's speciality is race and capitalism - and the paradox of why some people participate in the economy differently than others. Her experience as the child of African immigrants, ascension to Wall Street and the Ivy League, and her entrepreneurial spirit led her to challenge the common belief that the only relationship Black people can have to capitalism is exploitative. Through a deeply personal excavation of her own life, Laryea uncovers the evolution of her financial literacy while wrestling with her relationship to race, money, and capitalism survivor guilt, along with her social network of young, Black Africans living in America. Laryea looks to the past and present in search of answers. Can capitalism ever be redeemed given its racist origins? And if so, how?
Teaching us about her original theory of Black Capitalism, while telling the stories of people she defines as Black Capitalists, Laryea proves how their race makes them outsiders, and yet their economic strategy, to secure the bag and the people, breaks norms and barriers. Making them a new kind of capitalist. Their bottom line is profit and social good. Their stories inspire new behaviours and ideas about what being a capitalist can mean and who can play the dirty game of capitalism - to both win and transform it.
And they reveal the tension race creates. There are costs to playing the game of capitalism as outsiders in the hopes of achieving collective financial freedom. One must be unusually brave, resourceful, and subversive to succeed in a system that produces inequality while not being consumed by it. All while being forced to remember that they were never meant to win.
Black Capitalists is a brilliant analysis of how race makes a difference in how we participate in capitalism, and how that difference teaches all of us something about how to create a more equitable version of it. Laryea weaves together hard truths from her economic experiences, prevalent theories of capitalism, and a decades' worth of her own anthropological research to tell an irrefutable story of how Black people still attempt to thrive in a political economy they were never allowed to benefit from.
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