McDonald’s and the Failed Promise of Black Capitalism
McDonald’s has long portrayed itself as a champion of black uplift through black ownership of its franchises. But McDonald’s version of black capitalism, like the idea of black capitalism as a whole, has only ever benefited the few, not the many.
A McDonald’s cashier takes an order. (Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
As Darnella Frazier’s video of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin circulated, hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding an end to racist state violence flooded the streets in cities all across the US. They were met with violent, retaliatory cops tear gassing and shooting them with “rubber” bullets. For the first time in a mass protest against police brutality, corporations from Starbucks to BlackRock released statements supporting “Black Lives Matter,” pledging to promote racial equity. Local businesses posted signs in their windows reading “black-owned” and “buy black,” protecting themselves from the fray in a symbolic gesture of support with protesters. Meanwhile protesters in Minneapolis burned down a police precinct and the Wendy’s where another black man, Rayshard Brooks, was killed by a police officer, and they occupied city squares all across the country.
After the summer of uprisings waned into fall and the Coronavirus pandemic continued ravaging poor and working-class communities, slogans such as “buy black” and diversity trainings held at JPMorgan Chase served as a reminder that superficial market solutions have long been recommended by capital and the state in response to demands for wide-ranging, structural change in society — while those same forces have simultaneously disinvested in the social welfare of these communities.
Historian Marcia Chatelain writes about the co-optation of black radical protest against state violence and economic disenfranchisement into the “struggle for silver rights,” defined by inclusion of black people in the institutions of the free market, in Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. This wildly entertaining and instructive book covers four decades of the civil rights movement — beginning in the late 1960s, when black protest was militant, anti-capitalist, and frequent, to the early 1990s, when, in the absence of meaningful state investment, the movement had been trampled by a violent, reactionary government and the logic of black capitalism.
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