“To Be in the Black”: Logics of Health, Race, and Value in the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company

This paper explores the history of NC Mutual, at one point the largest black-owned life insurance company in the United States. Responding to Frederick Hoffman's extinction thesis, written in his capacity as an insurance statistician, NC Mutual employed an ambivalent embrace of Hoffman's principles, accepting the idea that black people were weaker than white people, but arguing for an economic model of health that saw black people's health as a form of capital. In doing so, NC Mutual did not seek to merely disprove Hoffman, but instead attempted to make sense of these dominant discourses of extinction and the unequal health outcomes experienced by Black Americans as an opportunity for accumulation--challenging the notion that, in fact, black people had no future. Their ambiguous relationship to other insurance companies helps historians of the industry better understand how the language of risk and valuation developed in the US and how it mapped along the uneasy boundaries between black and white lives in the US.