ABSTRACT
Separate economic niches have emerged in the ethnic beauty aids industry for middleman minorities and blacks in response to each group’s ability to mobilize ethnic and class resources. Previous chapters focused on this issue. In them, it was pointed out that middleman entrepreneurs dominated the retail niche of the ethnic beauty aids industry because of their ability to mobilize class resources, while black entrepreneurs controlled the professional niche of the industry because of their ability to mobilize ethnic resources in the black community. This chapter expands the discussion of this relationship through an examination of contemporary black manufacturers in the ethnic beauty aids industry. The central argument of this chapter is that contemporary black manufacturers focus on doing business in the professional niche of the ethnic beauty aids industry, since they believed capital constraints and racial discrimination close opportunities in other economic niches to them.
