Crypto secures a place in the African American saga

cointelegraph.com:

February is Black History Month, and it’s worth recounting that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology have already had a significant impact on the African-American community. 

Peoples of color own cryptocurrencies at consistently higher levels than white people, surveys show, while anecdotal evidence suggests crypto has also unleashed a wave of innovation and entrepreneurial energy in the Black community — from New York City’s new mayor converting his first paycheck into crypto to basketball star Kevin Durant launching a new special-purpose acquisition company to focus on cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

And all this may just be scratching the surface. “Blockchain has the potential to be a beacon of light in the story of Black economic empowerment,” Marco Lindsey, associate director of diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, told Cointelegraph. 

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain enterprises with their special qualities that can turn users into owners and owners into users align with historic Black aspirations such as financial independence and security, University of Kansas professor and historian Nishani Frazier told Cointelegraph, adding:

These “powerful possibilities,” as Frazier described them, are exciting — and not just in the United States. In the global context, crypto continues to be, at least in part, about disenfranchised peoples participating in mainstream economic life, often for the first time. 

It’s sometimes forgotten, after all, that 1.7 billion people globally remain unbanked, underbanked or lack access to traditional financial systems, Cleve Mesidor, public policy advisor at the Blockchain Association, told Cointelegraph. For this group, sometimes