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Brand New Thoughts/Economics and Power
Black Buying Power Is Not Black Power
Consumer spending can make a market valuable without giving that market control over the companies, assets and institutions collecting the money.
By ElleJanelle|August 6, 2026|5 min read
A Trillion Dollars Can Sound Like Power
Big numbers are persuasive.
Tell people that a community has more than a trillion dollars in "buying power" and the phrase naturally sounds like evidence of enormous collective economic leverage.
That assumption became part of the argument on Those Are Not Heroes, a Brand New Thoughts episode that moved through Killer Mike, Jay-Z, class politics, Black capitalism and Dr. Jared Ball's critique of the language of Black buying power.
ElleJanelle kept returning to a basic distinction:
Is the ability to spend money the same thing as having power over where the money goes, what gets produced and who owns the assets afterward?
It is not a semantic question. It changes what the statistic actually tells us.
A market can value you as a customer without giving you power as an owner.
Brand New Thoughts
What "Buying Power" Actually Measures
The University of Georgia's Selig Center, one of the organizations that publishes widely cited estimates of consumer buying power, defines buying power as total personal income after taxes.
That is useful information.
Businesses want to know the size and growth of consumer markets. Advertisers want to know where potential customers live. Researchers can use the measure to understand changes in income and consumption capacity.
But notice what the definition does not measure.
It does not tell us:
- how much wealth a group owns;
- how much business equity it controls;
- who owns the firms receiving the spending;
- who controls land, housing or intellectual property;
- how much debt sits against the income;
- how much money is transferred between generations;
- how much political or institutional power accompanies the spending.
Buying power is a measure of a consumer market.
That is not the same category as collective economic power.
The glossary: income, spending, wealth and ownership
One reason the language gets slippery is that several economic concepts are regularly collapsed into one.
Income is money received over a period of time.
Consumer buying power is generally framed around income available after taxes.
Spending is what actually leaves the household in exchange for goods and services.
Wealth is the value of assets minus liabilities.
Ownership asks who holds the underlying asset, company, property or intellectual property.
Those categories interact, but they are not interchangeable.
A household can earn a strong income while carrying very little net wealth.
A community can spend heavily in an industry while owning very little of that industry's productive infrastructure.
A customer can be essential to a company's profits without receiving any equity in the company.
What the wealth gap shows
The Federal Reserve's analysis of the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found that the White-Black median wealth gap exceeded $220,000.
That statistic and a large estimate of Black consumer buying power can both be true at the same time because they measure different things.
One is about income available to participate in consumer markets.
The other is about accumulated assets after liabilities.
That is precisely why substituting "buying power" for "wealth" can create a misleading picture.
The Jared Ball Challenge
The Brand New Thoughts conversation was partly responding to Dr. Jared Ball's book, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, and to arguments around Black capitalism as a route to liberation.
The strongest version of that critique does not require claiming that Black spending is irrelevant.
Of course where people spend money can matter.
A purchase can keep a local business alive. Customer demand can help an entrepreneur grow. Collective boycotts can impose costs. Procurement decisions can redirect capital. Consumer behavior is one tool among many.
The problem begins when a useful consumer-market statistic gets promoted into a theory of power it cannot support by itself.
What Would Economic Power Look Like?
If buying power is not enough, what else would we want to measure?
Business Ownership
Intellectual Property
Asset Ownership
Investment Capital
Collective Bargaining
Institutional Control
The exact list can be debated.
The larger point is that power usually involves the ability to set terms, not merely participate under terms set by somebody else.
An owner can decide whether to sell.
A lender can decide whether to finance.
An employer can decide where to locate jobs.
A landlord can decide whether to rent.
A platform can decide which creators get distribution.
A consumer can decide whether to buy, but that is only one position inside the system.
Supporting Black business still matters
This distinction should not become an excuse for fatalism.
"Buying power is not structural power" does not logically entail "where you spend money never matters."
It means the claim should become more precise.
If the goal is helping a specific Black-owned business survive, purchasing from it may directly serve that goal.
If the goal is closing a racial wealth gap, consumer purchases alone are unlikely to be a sufficient mechanism.
If the goal is increasing ownership, then the relevant questions include financing, equity, inheritance, housing, business formation, access to capital and who owns the underlying assets.
Different goals require different tools.
Consumers or Constituents?
The phrase "Black buying power" can subtly frame a political and economic community primarily as a market segment.
That is useful to companies because companies need customers.
But a community is more than a customer base.
Its members are workers, renters, homeowners, entrepreneurs, borrowers, voters, creators, owners, parents, students and citizens.
The Brand New Thoughts argument becomes clearer once those roles stop being collapsed into one giant consumer identity.
The amount companies can earn from Black customers tells us something real.
It just does not tell us who has the power.
Watch the episode
What should count as economic power?
Add to the DiscussionIf consumer spending is only one measure, which forms of ownership or control should matter most when we talk about collective economic power?