Dr. Claud Anderson's PowerNomics

Dr. Claud Anderson's PowerNomics uses specific statistics to illustrate the economic and social predicament of Black Americans, attributing these disparities to historical and systemic racism.

Key Statistics Cited in PowerNomics

Based on information related to Dr. Anderson's work and interviews, he has highlighted the following concrete numbers to underscore the need for his empowerment plan:

• Ownership of Resources: Black people in America are cited as controlling less than one percent (1%) of the nation's businesses and owning less than one-half of one percent (0.5%) of anything of value. Anderson argues that to be competitive, Black Americans—who make up around 12-13% of the U.S. population—should own at least a proportional 12% of everything that exists.

• Economic Dependency: Black Americans are often described as being zero producers and 100 percent consumers, meaning they are totally dependent on non-Black competitors for the daily necessities of life. This leads to a constant drainage of resources from Black communities.

• Incarceration and Productivity: In a significant older data point (cited around 2008 in relation to his institute), it was noted that 40% of Black men between the ages of 18–35 (the most productive years) were either in prison, on probation, or on parole.

• Political Representation vs. Group Benefit: While the number of Black elected officials increased by 9,000 percent from 1960 (when there were 103) to a later period (over 9,500), Anderson argues that the quality of life for Black people as a group has deteriorated, indicating a lack of quid pro quo benefits for the community's monolithic political support.

• Geographic Concentration: Approximately 75% of all Black Americans live in and around 10 large metropolitan areas that are described as socio-economically devastated.

PowerNomics Core Principles

The central plan put forth in PowerNomics is a framework for Black America to become a self-sufficient and competitive group by creating its own racial monopolies to counter those held by the dominant society. The main action steps revolve around redesigning core areas of life:

1. Economics (Group Economics): Establishing a unique economic structure, including pooling resources and industrializing Black communities. This involves securing control over industries and enterprises that predominantly serve the Black community and fostering interlinked Black-owned businesses.

2. Politics (Group Politics): Shifting from passive civil rights advocacy to a strategy that leverages the collective Black voting bloc to demand and secure group benefits. This includes acting as a political majority in cities where Black people are the largest group.

3. Culture: Promoting a new culture of empowerment, self-respect, and cooperative values to foster group solidarity and replace a Eurocentric framework with one focused on Black autonomy.

4. Education: Revamping education to emphasize vocational growth, business development, and the principles of PowerNomics to prepare the group for economic competition.

“Used in War, Erased in Peace”

“Used in War, Erased in Peace”

It reveals something painful — and painfully consistent — about the United States that the military has repeatedly relied on the courage, labor, and sacrifice of its African American citizens while failing, generation after generation, to honor the promises made to them.

From the Revolutionary War to Iraq, the pattern is unmistakable:
The nation calls on Black Americans when it needs bodies, but too often discards their stories when it comes time for recognition, rights, or remembrance.

Black soldiers fought for a freedom they were denied.
They defended a democracy that routinely excluded them.
They shed blood for a country that refused to see them as equal citizens.

This is not hyperbole; it’s history.

• Enslaved men fought for the Continental Army, only to return to chains.

• Black veterans of World War I returned home to the “Red Summer” of lynch mobs.

• Tuskegee Airmen risked their lives while segregationists fought to keep them on the ground.

• Black Vietnam veterans came home to discrimination in housing, education, and employment benefits.

• And now, in 2025, we watch the Department of Defense — the most powerful and lavishly funded arm of the federal government — purge, erase, and downgrade the very histories of those soldiers it once depended on.

When the Pentagon scrubs its archives of the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers, or Black Medal of Honor recipients, it isn’t just an administrative error.
It is an extension of a long tradition: using Black service in wartime, and minimizing it in peacetime.

This isn’t simply indifference — it’s betrayal.
The descendants of people enslaved by government policy have answered every call to defend the United States. Yet the country has repeatedly reneged on the promises made to them: citizenship, equality, safety, opportunity, dignity.

The arbitrary nature of these recent purges — deleting pages with no explanation, removing histories simply because an algorithm flagged them — only underscores the deeper truth:

Erasure is easier than accountability.

Frederick Douglass, B.F. Smith & Son, photographers, 91 Middle Street, Portland.

But if history teaches us anything, it’s that African Americans have never accepted invisibility. From Frederick Douglass recruiting soldiers for the 54th Massachusetts, to Black veterans who fueled the Civil Rights Movement, to families who insist their ancestors’ service be recognized — the fight to be remembered is ongoing.

And necessary.
Because a nation that erases those who built and defended it is a nation afraid of its own truth.

 

 

US Slave Blog: Reopening Letter, 2025

To our readers, old and new:

The US Slave Blog returns in 2025 because the truth demands it.

What began years ago as a personal effort to document the hidden, neglected, and deliberately buried history of American slavery has become, unexpectedly, a living archive. This blog grew because people across the country were searching for the truth — the full truth — about the nation we inhabit. They wanted history that was unvarnished, unsanitized, and unafraid to name the brutal foundations of the United States.

And today, that work is more urgent than ever.

We are living in a moment when Black history is being erased in real time.
Government agencies are purging content about Black soldiers, Indigenous heroes, LGBTQ service members, women trailblazers, and anyone whose story disrupts the myth of a whitewashed America.
DEI programs are being dismantled.
Books are being banned.
Public institutions are scrubbing their own archives, deleting the historical record to satisfy the demands of political fear and racial resentment.

This climate is not new — it is simply louder.

From the beginning, the US Slave Blog existed because America has never fully confronted its past. The shame of this nation is not the existence of slavery, but the refusal to grapple with its consequences: the land theft, the generational trauma, the economic exploitation, the legal apartheid, and the ongoing inequalities that reach directly from bondage into the present.

This blog has always been about telling the truth that sits beneath our feet.

Truth like this:
Arlington National Cemetery — the most sacred military ground in the country — was once the plantation of Robert E. Lee, built by the enslaved labor of the Custis estate, Martha Washington’s family.
Those enslaved people were freed during the Civil War and given a small settlement called Freedman’s Village. The U.S. government later betrayed them, seized their land without compensation, and pushed them aside to create the cemetery we honor today.

The marble is beautiful.
The history beneath it is not.
But both are true.

The US Slave Blog was created to preserve stories like these — stories that explain how the past structures the present, how injustice repeats itself when unacknowledged, and how the nation’s collective amnesia harms us all.

In 2025, this space returns with renewed purpose:

To remember what America tries to forget.

To document what institutions choose to delete.

To honor the people whose stories built this country but were never allowed to define it.

To resist historical erasure, wherever it appears.

We will continue to publish archival materials, photographs, documents, forgotten histories, scholarship, maps, oral accounts, and contemporary analysis. We will examine the roots of American inequality, the afterlives of slavery, and the physical landscapes that still whisper their pasts — plantations disguised as parks, universities funded by slave labor, neighborhoods shaped by redlining, and monuments that tell only half the story.

This blog may be dusty in places. It may be imperfect. But it is alive — because the truth is alive.

To every reader who finds your way here: thank you.

Thank you for caring about the parts of history that America prefers to bury.
Thank you for refusing to look away.
Thank you for believing that the truth, even when painful, is a form of liberation.

The US Slave Blog is open again.
Let’s do the work that memory requires.

— Ron Edwards
US Slave Blog