Addressing Systemic Racial Injustice in the United States from the War on Poverty to Social Enterprise to Black Lives Matter

Despite the many years of reform since the Civil Rights movement, racial justice in the United States has remained elusive because of the endemic nature of racism and anti-Blackness at all levels of American society, including the structures of the welfare state. Using a critical race theory approach, this article examines the evolution of structural social policies from the Great Society of the 1960s to the devolved entrepreneurialism of neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium. If the large-scale social programs of the American welfare state were seen as the only entity with sufficient capacity to collectively change structural racism in the Great Society, neoliberalism brought an austere decentralized vision of social policy that sought to roll back collective security in favor of individual responsibility and risk. Social enterprise emerged in the 1990s as a highly touted method to achieve social justice on the grassroots level amidst the rise of neoliberal ideologies that hollowed out many of the core programs of the American social welfare state. Many extolled the value of social enterprise as a rigorous way to apply efficient business methods to social welfare without taking into account the history of Black enterprise. The neoliberal logic of social enterprise ultimately deters systemic thinking because it focuses on individual abilities and uplift, rather than institutional and structural change. The article ends by reflecting on how the radical imagination of social movements like Black Lives Matter might contribute to achieving racial justice in the United States by re-envisioning collective welfare.