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Explores race, class, and identity in relationship to wealth inequality in America.
From Black Wall Street to the Story of O.J. explores the relationship between race and class in the United States, with an emphasis on wealth as a prism to interpret inequality from the Antebellum period to the present. Lori Latrice Martin introduces new ways of understanding classic works about race and class such as E. Franklin Frazier's The Black Bourgeoisie, as well as figures in contemporary popular culture, including in music and film—for example Sinners (2025) and the Met Gala. She also examines historical events like the Tulsa Massacre and the life of O.J. Simpson and includes commentary regarding the latest battles in the ongoing American culture war and provides some strategies for navigating what may sometimes feel like a landscape of political landmines.
"Refusing to make Simpson into either saint or sinner, Martin engages O.J.'s infamy as both an object lesson and entrée into a larger analysis of the stormy relationship between Blackness and wealth, all within the raging tempest of an American apartheid. A whirlwind tour from 'Black Wall Street' in the '20s, reactions against E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoise in the '50s, to Jay-Z's 2020 viral song 'The Story of O.J.', Martin provides an empirical shelter from the downpour of pathological narratives of Black dysfunction and one-sided tales of Black homogeneity. Out of the fog of raced and classed mythologies, Martin shines a light on the complexities, contradictions, and creations of Black wealth. The Story of O.J. thus stands as a rich almanac that not only provocatively recasts the paleoclimate of race and class in new perspectives, but forecasts both clear and blustery conditions to befall us still." — Matthew W. Hughey coauthor of Racialized Media: The Design, Delivery, and Decoding of Race and Ethnicity.