A recent Cato Institute Survey showed that 62 percent of adults ages 18–29 favor socialism, with a full 34% even viewing communism favorably.

But is that idea helpful to marginalized communities?

Let’s get something out of the way.

Any system, capitalism or otherwise, ought to have ethical restraints and fairness built in. Otherwise, it will do exactly what systems always do: concentrate power in the hands of those who already have it.

For instance, banks once used redlining maps to decide who was “worthy” of loans, systematically denying Black families access to homeownership and the wealth that came with it. That wasn’t capitalism failing. That was capitalism operating without guardrails.

The GI Bill expanded the American middle class, but Black veterans were largely excluded in practice. Again, not a failure of capatilsim’s existence, but of how it was misapplied.

Even today, algorithms in lending, hiring, and insurance can facilitate discrimination if left unchecked, because they’re trained on data produced by unequal conditions.

Our tax system likewise is unfairly lopsided. It can’t be that a billionaire gets taxed at rates lower than auto manufacturing plant workers. Or that the uber rich ought not pay more, especially since it was precisely America’s systems that helped pave their path to wealth.

Our capitalist system obviously needs major fixing.

It needs rules. It needs accountability. It needs intentional correction where history unfailry bent the playing field.

It needs, in plain terms, a conscience.

But the trend these days isn’t to advocate for fairness constraints on capitalism. It’s to label capitalism itself as the villain. As if the entire concept of ownership, innovation, and value creation is inherently corrupt. That the drive to “arrive,” should no longer be promoted.

Occupy Wall Street called for the complete “dismantling of capitalsim.” Democratic Socialists today say we should “move past capitalism.”

That all sounds quite righteous on the surface. It feels like striking injustice at its root.

But look closer.

What you’re also saying, whether intended or not , is something far more limiting. And indeed racist.

You’re telling Black folks and other marginalized communities:

Don’t build.
Don’t own.
Don’t create.
Don’t accumulate.
Don’t aspire to economic power.

Don’t start the business.
Don’t become the investor.
Don’t scale something meaningful.
Don’t step into spaces where decisions, and dollars, are made.

And, don’t desire things others in society get to enjoy.

Because capitalism itself needs to be abolished.

So instead, what? Sit it out? Opt out of the very mechanism that, when properly constrained, has historically been one of the most powerful tools for upward mobility? Or just wait until the Democratic Socialists win the White House?

That’s not liberation from racism.

That’s restriction and stagnation, just dressed up in nicer language.

History doesn’t support that approach.

When Black communities have had access to capital and the ability to build (think Tulsa’s Greenwood District before it was destroyed, or the rise of Black-owned businesses during Reconstruction, or the growth of minority entrepreneurship in recent decades ), the results were: Empowerment, ownership, stability, generational progress.

The problem has never been the idea of building wealth.

The problem has been unequal access to the ability to do so.

So the answer isn’t to demonize capitlism in favor of some socialist construct.

It’s to fix it so more people can fully participate in it.

Because telling people who’ve been excluded from ownership and generational wealth building that the solution is to reject those concepts altogether is just a new way of telling them what they can’t be.

This time clothed in purported love garments.

How about we instead promote programs and ideas that level the playing field and correct injustice by helping people achieve economic power.