Jessica Levy on the Strange Career of Black Empowerment

Today, we welcome Jessica Levy, co-host of Who Makes Cents , onto the program—not as an interviewer, but as a guest. She's here to talk about her remarkable new book, Black Power, Inc: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics . This book traces the strange career of black empowerment: from civil rights protests to the boardroom, and from the streets of urban America to the townships of South Africa. Black empowerment, she reveals, was a protean concept, at once radical and conservative, that allowed different constiutencies to sometimes push for change, and at other times, to co-opt more transformative alternatives. Along the way, we'll grapple with a big question: is it possible to use corporations to combat the inequalities that racial capitalism has created?

You can listen to Jessica Levy on the Strange Career of Black Empowerment online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Jessica Levy on the Strange Career of Black Empowerment is an episode from Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast by Jessica Levy.

This episode is 42:51 long.

This episode was published on Mar 4, 2026.

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