The second edition of this Palgrave Pivot offers a history of and proof against claims of
buying power and the impact this myth has had on understanding media race class and economics
in the United States. For generations Black people have been told they have what is now said to
be more than one trillion dollars of buying power and this book argues that commentators have
misused this claim largely to blame Black communities for their own poverty based on squandered
economic opportunity. This book exposes the claim as both a marketing strategy and myth while
also showing how that myth functions simultaneously as a case study for propaganda and
commercial media coverage of economics. In sum while buying power is indeed an economic and
marketing phrase applied to any number of racial ethnic religious gender age or group of
consumers it has a specific application to Black America. A new foreword by Dr. Darrick
Hamilton Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at the New School (in New York
USA) and a new chapter on cryptocurrencies are included in this new edition.
