The Economic Development Potential of Minority-Owned Businesses

2021 ◽  
pp. 089124242110322
Author(s):  
Timothy Bates ◽  
Joseph Farhat ◽  
Colleen Casey

The consensus view that discriminatory barriers limit the size and scope of America’s minority-business community is factually well-grounded. Rarely examined, however, is the question of why these firms are flourishing. The authors examine the scope of this growth and its causes. The process of selectively reducing discriminatory barriers inhibiting minority entrepreneurship’s development began in the 1960s, moved forward in the 1970s, and continues presently. This path-dependent process of lowering barriers has altered the incentive structures, previously making the entrepreneurial choice an unattractive one for most minorities. This, in turn, has drawn into business ownership a younger generation of highly educated and experienced minorities, many of whom have successfully obtained bank loans. Spatially, minority neighborhoods as well have successfully attracted talented, experienced African American and Latino owners and financing for their firms. Those with abundant expertise have driven the substantial gains in numbers of workers employed by minority-owned businesses.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Simko ◽  
David Cunningham ◽  
Nicole Fox

Abstract Following the racially motivated shootings at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, a wave of contentious campaigns around Confederate statuary emerged, or at least intensified, in communities across the country. Yet local struggles have culminated in vastly different alterations to the built environment. This paper develops a framework for differentiating distinct “modes of recontextualization” rooted in the relocation and/or modification of commemorative objects. Building on models of memory as an iterative, path-dependent process, we track recontextualization efforts in three communities—St. Louis, Missouri; Oxford, Mississippi; and Austin, Texas—documenting how each mode alters the meaning of contested symbols. An analysis of local news sources in the year following recontextualization shows how each mode exerts identifiable proximate effects on broader political debates and, through that process, structures the horizon of possibility for longer-range outcomes. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Alfano

Abstract Reasoning is the iterative, path-dependent process of asking questions and answering them. Moral reasoning is a species of such reasoning, so it is a matter of asking and answering moral questions, which requires both creativity and curiosity. As such, interventions and practices that help people ask more and better moral questions promise to improve moral reasoning.


Author(s):  
Michael Ahmed

This paper re-evaluates the significance of Sir Curtis Seretse, a black character from the 1960s television series Department S (ITV 1969-70) which has largely been ignored. While earlier critical and academic discourse of Department S has primarily centred on the flamboyant Jason King, the importance of Seretse’s character has been overlooked. Seretse, as the head of Department S, is in a position of authority and power over the other (white) characters of the show. Furthermore, he represents a highly educated character that converses on equal terms with Prime Ministers and Presidents, a unique representation of a black character on British television at that time. Seretse’s appearance on prime time television, at a period when black performers in the media were invariably confined to little more than token characters, is therefore worthy of further attention. This paper examines how Seretse represents a different type of black character not previously seen on British television, when compared to the representations of racial problems on other television crime dramas.


Author(s):  
Jason Young

This chapter chronicles the relationship between African religious practices on the continent and African American religion in the plantation Americas in the era of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. A new generation of scholars who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s have demonstrated not only that African religious practices exhibit remarkable subtlety and complexity but also that these cultures have played significant roles in the subsequent development of religious practices throughout the world. Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religion comprised a set of broad and varied religious practices that contributed to the development of creative, subtle, and complex belief systems that circulated around the African Diaspora. In addition, this chapter addresses some of the vexed epistemological challenges related to discussing and describing non-Western ritual and religious practices.


Author(s):  
Ronald J. Gilson

In the 1960s and 1970s, corporate law and finance scholars gave up on their traditional approaches. Corporate law had become “towering skyscrapers of rusted girders, internally welded together and containing nothing but wind.” In finance, the theory of the firm was recognized as an “empty box.” This essay tracks how corporate law was reborn as corporate governance through three examples of how we have usefully complicated the inquiry into corporate behavior. Part I frames the first complication, defining governance broadly as the company’s operating system, a braided framework of legal and non-legal elements. Part II adds a second complication by making the inquiry dynamic: corporate governance as a path dependent process that co-evolves with the elements of the broader capitalist regime. Part III considers unsuccessful efforts to simplify rather than complicate corporate governance analysis through static single factor models: stakeholder, team production, director primacy, and shareholder primacy. Part IV concludes by highlighting the tradeoff between a governance system’s capacity to adapt to change and its ability to support long-term investment.


Author(s):  
Michael Suk-Young Chwe

This chapter examines African American folktales that teach the importance of strategic thinking and argues that they informed the tactics of the 1960s civil rights movement. It analyzes a number of stories where characters who do not think strategically are mocked and punished by events while revered figures skillfully anticipate others' future actions. It starts with the tale of a new slave who asks his master why he does nothing while the slave has to work all the time, even as he demonstrates his own strategic understanding. It then considers the tale of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, along with “Malitis,” which tackles the problem of how the slaves could keep the meat and eat it openly. These and other folktales teach how inferiors can exploit the cluelessness of status-obsessed superiors, a strategy that can come in handy. The chapter also discusses the real-world applications of these folktales' insights.


Author(s):  
Matthew Whiting

This chapter establishes the main issues to be explored in this book, including the dramatic transformation that Sinn Féin and the IRA underwent. It provides a critique of existing explanations, arguing that they mistakenly assume the politics of Sinn Féin is driven primarily by the military capacity of the IRA. Existing explanations also assume that interplay between the British state and Irish republicans led to their moderation, but these explanations neglect the wider institutional context in which republicans chose to change their strategy. In contrast, this chapter sets out the argument that sustained contact with, and inclusion in, key political processes, namely party politics and a consolidated framework of democratic institutions, extracted moderate concessions from republicans in a gradual and path-dependent process.


Author(s):  
Mark Newman

Recollections from former students often present a positive appreciation of black Catholic schools primarily for their educational quality but also, in many cases, for their emphasis on self-worth and also, occasionally, on black culture and heritage. African American Catholics valued black schools and churches as religious and community institutions. Prelates generally sought to achieve desegregation by closing or downgrading black Catholic institutions. African American Catholics differed in their response. While some black Catholics reluctantly accepted such action as a necessary price for desegregation, others opposed these measures, upset by the one-sided nature of Catholic desegregation and inspired by the rise of black con consciousness in the second half of the 1960s. Some disillusioned African Americans, especially younger Catholics, left the church.


2016 ◽  
pp. 159-188
Author(s):  
Greg Robinson

This chapter offers a more complex and multiracial view of history by revisiting the narrative of the Japanese American redress movement and discovers a paradox at its core: while the campaign by Japanese Americans for reparations for their wartime confinement started at the end of the 1960s as part of a wider antiracist coalition, and received key support in its early stages from African American political leaders, Japanese Americans increasingly distanced themselves from their black allies as the goal of redress grew nearer, even as African Americans became increasingly public in their opposition. The chapter also shows how the victory of the redress movement in 1988 offered a major precedent, and a model, for reparations efforts by blacks.


Boom's Blues ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Wim Verbei

This chapter details the Netherlands' introduction to African American blues music. Most people believe that that the Netherlands' first became acquainted with African American blues music in the second half of the 1960s, during the American Folk Blues Festivals (AFBFs). However, AFBF of 1965 was not the first blues concert in the Netherlands. That privilege fell to the guitarist/singer Big Bill Broonzy, who more than a decade earlier had conquered the Netherlands on his own. The chapter also describes the beginning of the Dutch blues era in 1926 and Amsterdammer Frans Boom's attendance of Duke Ellington concert in 1939.


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