Black Capitalists in the TransAtlantic Financial Industry

This dissertation is a study on the motivations and practices of willful Black participation in capitalism in the contemporary moment. With two sites of inquiry, Wall Street in New York City and Accra, Ghana, this ethnographic study examines how, and to what effect Black Capitalists successfully navigate financial institutions shaped by structural racism and covert inequality. I also track and assess the afterlives of Black professionals who leave Wall Street with an entrepreneurial posture as they sojourn across the Atlantic to create financial institutions of their own in Ghana. This migratory phenomenon is shaped in part by Ghana’s pivotal 2019 Year of Return campaign, which I examine through my first hand account in Accra during this time period as both an anthropologist and Ghanaian citizen. Lastly, I consider the complex lives of my interlocutors in relation to racialized representations of prominent Black figures in popular culture, television, and film to assess the actions, outcomes, and social limitations that arise as Black Capitalists extend the social boundaries of what Blackness can and should look like in practice. In doing so, I theorize the spaces of Black Capitalist thriving and their use value to create new conditions of possibility for how we imagine and enact Black participation in an imperfect political economy.