Black Americans were not born thinking small. We were conditioned into it. The scarcity mindset began the moment emancipation arrived without land, payment, or reparations. Freedom came with nothing attached.

Anti-Blackness is not just something we experience in society. It is something we are trained to internalize long before we can name it. For generations, the world has been saturated with messages that distort how Black people see themselves, how we treat each other, and the choices we believe we deserve to make.

You cannot separate Black consumer behavior from the systems that shaped it. After slavery, Black workers generated massive economic value but had little access to land, credit, or capital to build intergenerational wealth. Segregation forced Black communities to rely heavily on outside industries. Later, integration came and opened our consumer market to everyone except us, while closing the businesses we’d built for ourselves.

Black people have survived what no other group in America has—enslavement, forced illiteracy, family separation, legal exclusion, psychological warfare, and economic dispossession. Yet we remain the most spiritually resilient people on earth. Black spirituality has always been about more than belief. It has been a technology of survival, a way to preserve dignity, identity, and purpose when the world attempted to erase all three.

What stories have you been told about Black strength? And what truths are you willing to confront in order to unlearn them?

If most people agree Jesus wasn’t blonde with blue eyes—why is that still the image we see in churches, movies, and homes across America?

Contrary to what is being taught in schools, our story did not start or stop in the fields. After emancipation, Black people became what they always were: master builders. We wasted no time building businesses, buying land, founding towns, and forming banks.

On the plantation, slaves were not given last names in most cases. It wasn’t until after they left that these names were obtained

As surely as Abel’s blood cried out to God from the Earth, so does the blood of slain Black ancestors in America and within the path of the sea from the motherland cry out to Almighty Yah. Some were fallen with a fist held high shouting and singing “Let freedom ring!” While others were slain while slanging poison to their own brothers, sisters, mothers, sons, and daughters. But their blood cries aloud for an Abba! A Father! A Father who hears. He hears the cries of the slain