ALOOSE

Anchored in Cedric Robinson's framework of racial capitalism, Dennis Maurice Dumpson coins the term and uses this book to expose The Black Pain Economy: a parasitic social contraption that generates hundreds of billions annually by converting Black trauma into America's most reliable cash cow.

Dumpson posits that our pain is woven so tightly into the contours of America that we have been collectively conditioned to internalize and trade on our own wounds to survive. It is within this financial and psychological chokehold that right-wing demonization, radical liberation rhetoric, and the many morally impoverished contributors in between are equally incentivized to commodify the deficits, anguish, and conflicts unfairly aligned with Black people.

He complicates this by suggesting that across racial, ideological, political, and social lines, many of us are shareholders in this economic engine. This incentivizes people, systems, and institutions to facilitate the endurance of Black suffering, leveraging this extraction of the collective Black body as a cyclical revenue source.

ALOOSE offers a capstone, which identifies a starting framework for a Black Solutions Economy to untangle the knots, break the complicity, and aggressively free ourselves from the bind of racialized capitalism.

If you are looking for a book that further amplifies and laments the darkness of this oppression, put this down. This is an eviction notice, not an autopsy.