Fortunately, the situation has been changing in recent decades. In my article "The Trouble With Public Accommodation," for example, I looked at how some relatively recent scholarship has chronicled the economic importance of ethnic enclaves and small business development in increasing entrepreneurship among non-Anglo ethnic groups and among immigrant groups in general. Works of note on this topic include An American Story: Mexican American Entrepreneurship and Wealth Creation by Mary Ann Villarreal, and a collection of essays called Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy.
Now, a new book by Douglas Bristol examines how barbershops became an economic fixture for black business owners and black entrepreneurs during the 19th-century, both before and after the Civil War. Bristol's book, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom, examines not only how barber shops formed both a social and economic function within the black community, but also how barbers were able to build barbershop-based capital into other ventures such as insurance firms.
Read more: https://mises.org/blog/how-unions-used-licensing-crush-ethnic-barbershops
