There’s a peculiar kind of tension that settles in your chest when you sit in a room built to inspire ambition—but only for those who were always meant to succeed.
This quarter, I enrolled in my first class toward the entrepreneurship minor with the UCLA Anderson School of Management. As a humanities student, I carry the quiet burden of that ever-present whisper: make yourself marketable, do something that pays, there are no guarantees. It’s a whisper that’s easy to ignore—until the rent is due.
So I sit there—back straight, face blank—as the professor extols the genius of the McDonald’s franchise model. He calls it beautiful. Efficient. Replicable. I grit my teeth as his guest speaker casually diminishes the value of manual labor: “None of the people in this room will have to work blue collar jobs.” Meanwhile, my mind is caught in protest. My Public Affairs training is screaming. I see not beauty but bureaucracy; not genius but the logic of a machine designed to turn people into parts and land into profit.
The professor chuckles at his own misogynistic jokes, flaunting the kind of self-satisfaction only a man rewarded by capitalism can afford. He speaks like someone who has never had to question his place in the world—only how to expand it. And I’m told this is the path to security. He had a home in the Palisades—had, because it burned down. But the system that built it still stands.
This is the contradiction I’m forced to hold. I want stability, yes. But I also want dignity. I want to create, to redistribute, to dream—without becoming the thing I oppose. I want to be of use to others without assuming I know what they need. And so, in this article, I turn away from the empire and toward the village—from franchised ambition to ancestral wisdom. I look to Indigenous Afrikan governance structures to imagine what entrepreneurship could mean if it wasn’t built on extraction, but on reciprocity.
The Kenyan ethic of harambee—“all pull together”—offers a sharp contrast to Western business ideals rooted in individualism and profit. Instead of celebrating competition and personal gain, harambee prioritizes collective responsibility and mutual aid. Success is measured not by wealth accumulation, but by how well a community thrives together. Applied to Western entrepreneurship, this philosophy challenges the myth of the self-made founder and urges a shift toward businesses that are relational, redistributive, and rooted in care.
