Black capitalism and IP rights in particular are key to racial progress that gives full rights to black creators and undermines a legacy of theft and exploitation by corporations.

In part, Prince’s about face on music was related to industry-wide struggles over¶ copyright infringement, specifically music piracy. Prince redoubled his efforts to combat¶ piracy, including copyright infringement of his music and images, sometimes alienating¶ his fans with his zealousness. Yet in pushing for strong copyright protection, Prince¶ took aim at hundreds of years of theft and “racial plagiarism” (Pham, 2017) of Black¶ art, including music from Blues to jazz, and the underlying commitment to treating¶ Black people as property, not humans. Take, for instance, a statement that he made several years ago in an interview with the Guardian: “We made money [online] before piracy was real crazy. Nobody’s making money now except phone companies, Apple and¶ Google. I’m supposed to go to the White House to talk about copyright protection. It’s¶ like the gold rush out there. Or a carjacking. There’s no boundaries” (Lynskey, 2011).¶ Through his anti-piratical stance, Prince made clear that Black musicians, like their¶ White counterparts, deserve full property rights for their creative works. Prince’s call¶ for property ownership in the Rally 4 Peace was emblematic of his embrace of Black¶ capitalism as is his lyric in “Dear Mr. Man,” “Your thousand years are up; now you got¶ to share the land.” Prince crafted a narrative of Black entrepreneurship and Black communitarianism that celebrates the work of Black creators and values Black lives. In¶ Prince’s narrative, Black people are equal citizens who have a right to access the¶ American Dream, which James Baldwin argues in his famous speech “The American¶ Dream and the American Negro,” was never granted to them (Baldwin, 1965). Unlike¶ in the world of racial capitalism that Cedric Robinson pointedly noted has existed since¶ the beginning of colonialism, Prince’s Black capitalism imagines new and powerful labor¶ and commodity relations. Although Black capitalism, as Prince imagines it, is not radically invested in undoing the inequities produced by capitalism or intellectual property¶ law, it is invested in undoing the racist logics that make dispossession and disenfranchisement thinkable political and social options. Prince’s imaginings of commodity relations have formed the foundations for a popular cultural narrative of Black capitalism in which Black art merits respect and protection. For instance, Fox’s hit television show, Empire, takes up Prince’s piracy narrative¶ with surprising realism. In the first episode of the show, rap and R & B magnate¶ Lucious Lyon explains in a prelude to announcing that his company is going public, in¶ words almost identical to those that Prince used just a few years earlier before testifying¶ about copyright policy before Congress:¶ I started selling drugs when I was nine years old in Philadelphia. I did it to feed myself.¶ But it was the music that played in my head that kept me alive when I thought I was¶ gonna get shot … Times have changed, though. The Internet has destroyed the musician’s¶ ability to make money because our work is downloaded for free online. And now it’s¶ impossible for the disenfranchised kids growing up in the projects to overcome poverty the¶ way that I did. We are gonna change all of that. (Empire, 2015)¶ In Lucious’ fictional world, Empire Entertainment posits itself as the protector of the¶ Black urban poor, providing a way out of the confines of the structural oppression of¶ race and class. Lucious, in selling Empire Entertainment, asserts that Black musicians,¶ particularly during the rise of rap and hip hop, used music as a tool of racial uplift. The¶ realities of intellectual property ownership are more complicated than Empire would¶ have us believe. After all, for an artist to own their catalog is likely a necessary, though¶ not sufficient, means of undoing the structural inequalities that fuel systematic oppression. Nonetheless, the music mogul’s own success is represented in the show as a means¶ of empowering Black youth. In a scene later in the season, at Cousin Bunky’s funeral,¶ Lucious gives a child an advance on his first record, symbolically showing how he parlays¶ his success into support for the Black community. The micronarrative of copyright law¶ and creatorship that show creator Lee Daniels tells through Lucious is part of a notably¶ intersectional, though still quite imperfect, story of Black creatorship and Black entrepreneurism that the show weaves. In later seasons of the show, Cookie, not Lucious,¶ becomes the hustler extraordinaire that keeps the company and the family together. She¶ is coded as a Black woman with the intellectual prowess, street smarts, and esthetic¶ instincts to keep Empire Entertainment afloat. Yet there are no illusions that she does so¶ through government subsidies or small business loans. Cookie’s founding donation to¶ Empire Entertainment is drug money for which she pays—and ultimately profits.¶ Netflix’s series, The Get Down, reflects a similar narrative. Though crime is represented as endemic to the Bronx in the late 1970s, music, both disco and hip hop, offer¶ a way out of the deteriorating neighborhood in New York. In one of the show’s central¶ plots in the first season, DJ-in-training Shaolin Fantastic and his crew must demonstrate¶ their loyalty after getting caught with a Grandmaster Flash bootleg tape. Though the¶ show’s creator, Baz Luhrmann, had a history of collaboration with Prince, including on¶ Romeo þ Juliet and The Great Gatsby (Tribeca, 2016), The Get Down does not explicitly¶ echo Prince’s language in the same way as Empire. It nonetheless partakes in mythmaking around the American Dream and Black entrepreneurialism that echoes Prince’s thematic foci. Grandmaster Flash seeks only to protect his intellectual property, which as¶ we know from historical hindsight, gives rise to an entire new genre of music. The first¶ season sets protagonist Ezekiel on the road to success, confirmed in the shows frequent¶ flash forward moments. By preventing the circulation of bootleg tapes, Grandmaster¶ Flash ensures the value of the good he is selling. If it is only possible to consume his¶ music at his parties, he must profit. Many years later, Prince used the digital version of¶ Grandmaster Flash’s theory of preventing bootlegging to posthumously secure a record¶ breaking five spots in the Billboard Top 10. As such, The Get Down becomes part of a¶ larger metanarrative of Black creatorship. In a post-Prince world with post-Prince popular culture, there is public space in which to engage that question. Moreover, there is¶ greater ideological space than ever before for Black artists to think not only about¶ claiming their creative autonomy, just as Prince did over the course of his career, but¶ also controlling their (intellectual) property and personas, as creators, citizens, and¶ whole persons who are entitled to full property rights.