Re-Conceptualizing Underrepresented Racial Minority Entrepreneurs

In recent publications, entrepreneurship researchers have begun to note the changing environments underrepresented racial minority (URM) entrepreneurs face in the modern world (Bates et al., 2022; Peterson and Crittenden, 2020). We build upon these extant studies by reconceptualizing the URM entrepreneur by noting (a) their historical role as wealth creators in the formation of the United States, (b) their approaches to entrepreneurship, which includes cultural empowerment as an outcome, and (c) their distinctive voices as business owners that manage to survive, and even thrive, despite the institutional and environmental barriers they face as racial minorities. Unique to this study is the deconstruction of the URM entrepreneur (Ogbor, 2000) by URM academics, who have themselves also experienced racial inequities. Thus, we are able to reveal new insights about the URM entrepreneur that have previously not been addressed by other researchers and expose research gaps that we encourage addressing by the academy. This analysis culminates in the proposal of a new theory of the URM entrepreneur that reflects our findings.