“More than a practical partnership, black sacred thought and entrepreneurialism form an ideological alliance in response to racial capitalism concerned as much with nurturing black life as with critiquing capitalism in the West. ”
African American businesses, like churches, have been essential to black upbuilding. They call for revisions to metanarratives regarding race and progress under capitalist democracies. Surveying partnerships between religious communities and businesses such as banks and credit unions offers one path to examine industry that aims at moral and revolutionary work. Exploring the sacred dimension of economic practices similarly expands where we look for religion. In Black Merchant Religion: The Spirit of African American Business in the 19th Century Atlantic World, I read the cooperative economics of black merchant abolitionists in Sierra Leone as one expression of Black Atlantic religion given their project can be conceived as redressing the racial beliefs colluding with slavery and inequality and that it drew on an African diasporic sacred imagination of nation and return.