Maggie Anderson, who made it a year-long mission for her family to shop only at black-owned businesses. (via newshour)
This is a good piece from PBS, surprisingly. Recently so-treu posted on racist collusion among white executives in Hollywood, and I noted that “the Black community is barred from the systemic self-multiplying creation of wealth”. This Black family’s project explores a similar issue, from a different angle: the angle of an upper-middle-class consumer trying to put their money back into the Black community. They run into the (unsurprising) reality that it’s not easy for a Black family to re-invest their earnings in the community, because there simpler are not that many Black business owners.
Which begs the question, Why are there so few Black business owners? Why does a mere and measly 2 percent of Black buying power get re-circulated into the Black community? That is a truly depressing statistic, driving home the point that almost all of that hard-fought hard-won money which Black US Americans earn ($1 trillion) in a hostile environment goes back into white hands. The answer is, of course, incredibly simple: racism. White collusion along the lines of the Hollywood lawsuit mentioned above has been preventing Black uplift in every walk of life for centuries. In fact, US society has probably even developed slicker, more sophisticated and covert racist practices in the past 50 years to accomplish a form of economic red-lining which specifically targets Black communities into a vampiric relationship in which more capital value is pulled out of the community than is put back into it.
(via zuky)
(via bad-dominicana)