The histories of cooperative practice and ownership of Africana communities have a long history, particularly when we account for an Africana human agency in the face of hyper-exploitation and hyper-extractive logics and practice of racial capitalism. These systems and logic encompass the privatization and monopoly over agriculture, manufacturing, finance, housing, healthcare, land, water, and other natural resources, etc. Articulated through plantation/neo-plantation-based economic systems and power relations, aligned with industry and codified in the state and/or state-sanctioned violence animated by false notions of racial supremacy. The affect has produced an active intergenerational disaccumulation of wealth for Africana people, evolving forms of political disenfranchisement and a sustained attack on “programs designed to lessen ethnic and class exploitation,” “the spread of mass impoverishment, the erosion of human rights protections, and the increased deadliness of daily life” (Woods 1998, 5). The question must be posed, at its core, did the state, as birthed as a settler colonial project ever have a twinkling of a notion of the existence of other human beings? History and analysis would suggest in some ways yes, in many more ways, not even close. Foregrounded by Africana ontology and epistemologies that produced (and continues to produce) a distinct and radical paradigm of land use, social organization, and economic development, which cultivates political power in the form of strategies for realizing global social justice. Today, Africa World Now Project’s senior researcher, content contributor, and production designer Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and associate producer Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry speak with Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard about the History of African and Diasporic Cooperative Thought and Practice. Author of Collective Courage: A History African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard is a professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College, of the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City. Dr. Gordon Nembhard is a political economist specializing in community economics, Black Political Economy and popular economic literacy. Her research and publications explore problematics and alternative solutions in cooperative economic development and worker ownership, community economic development, wealth inequality and community-based asset building, and community-based approaches to justice. Dr. Nembhard is an affiliate scholar at the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where she is co-investigator for the “Measuring the Impact of Credit Unions,” Community and University Research Partnerships (CURA) project; and an affiliate scholar with the Economics Department’s Center on Race and Wealth at Howard University. Today’s program was executive produced by Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and as always in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!