As the US economy seemingly bends towards AI, media giants, and a bloating military, practicing financial literacy is especially important. The Library of Congress website offers suggestions for financial literacy, including components like budgeting, saving, and investing. In the Black community, financial literacy also means looking out for each other. We participate in annual business and supporting Black enterprises, as we wrote about in our December Umoja issue, when we return to and support the same local Black businesses month after month. At The SoulFolk Collective, we recognize that, in the United States today, both financial literacy and annual business are essential to fostering Black economic autonomy; we also continuously acknowledge the contentious nature of the historical relationship between Black people and Black labor.
Black people built America through the labor of our free and enslaved ancestors. Our very blood, bones, and sweat fertilized the soil of our country, yet have seldom been enough to be valued by the American economic apparatus. White men reaped the fruits of our enslaved ancestors’ labor, and, two centuries later, Black work is still too often exploited and devalued. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported that the gap between men’s and women’s wages, for example, grew from 2023 to 2024 to 19.1%, with the gap for Black women compared to white men growing to a staggering 35.4%. In a world where our Black sisters are so readily paid 64.6 cents for each dollar made by the white man, we at SoCo hope to do things differently.
We want to account for the invisible and visible Black labor that makes this city one where we can find community with one another. The Black people in Madison have dreamed up and built buildings, initiatives, and businesses, and we see how these efforts are starting to shift our social and economic landscape. We wish to sustain these efforts in our own small way by compensating Black creativity and knowledge in our work. We, of course, do so monetarily by paying participants for the time they spend sharing their stories with us. If they drove us around the city of Madison and showed us the spaces that affirmed their Blackness, we also paid for their gas. We have also been compensating Black labor by leveraging our institutional affiliations to preserve Black Madison’s oral histories with the Wisconsin Historical Society and to publish scholarship that makes a tangible impact on how we understand Black placemaking and resistance practices in a midsized predominantly white city like Madison, Wisconsin. Lastly, we strive to compensate our research collaborators spiritually by cultivating a safe and affirming Black interview space and conducting research that our community is proud of. We engage in social justice efforts when we value the hard work of Black people just as deeply as the world they helped build. By engaging in these justice efforts, we work for a world that recognizes Black labor as foundational and ensures it is properly recognized and compensated. It’s overdue.
Notes: The quote used in the title comes from the lyrics to “Old Dog” (2026) by J. Cole and Petey Pablo.
For the Library of Congress’s description of financial literacy, check out the “Personal Finance: A Resource Guide” on their website.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research’s 2025 national wage gap report can be found on their website.
If you are looking to financially support an endeavor for the Black community in Madison, the SoulFolk Collective is launching a Saturday Freedom School Program. Check out our website for more information.
The SoulFolk Collective’s editor is James Warwood and our photographer is Hope Kelham.
