Black Economic Power? Is It Racist For Blacks To Support Black Businesses?

Let me see? Black Americans  spend less than  2% of the $800 billion we spend annually with everyone else but outselves, yet a Black Chicago couple's experiment to try for one year to buy from Black owned businesses is called racist by some.

For The Empowerment Experiment (EE), the Anderson Family publicly commits to "Buy Black" for one year. National media covers The Empowerment Experiment's Goal. Their hope is the Black community supports and joins their pledge. Black businesses grow. Black professionals, too.  Black households and communities are economically empowered.  The Black community shows the world the true value and strength of Black business, Black talent, and the Black consumer and investor dollar. This dream can become reality if we are committed to change.

Black Stats:

Black Unemployment Rate - 20+%

Black People In Prision- 1 Million +

Black High School Drop Out Rate- 40+%

Black Male College Graduation Rate- Less than 50+%

Black Life Expectancy- We die 8-10+ Years Earlier Than Whites

Black Wealth: The average black family holds just 15 cents of assets to a white family's dollar.

Have you ever heard of a Jew, Hispanic, Korean, or Caucasian asked why do they shop in their own community and with their own people. Why then is it wrong for Black Americans to finally want to tap into the wealth we generate for everyone else but our selves. 

If whites spend 100% of their money with white owned businesses and blacks spend 98% of our money with everone else, then how will the economic condition of Black people ever change?

A friend of mine sent me this ensightful email that was sent by someone who claimed to be white to a black programmed New York radio station and read on the air. I urge you to tells other about it.

THEY ARE STILL OUR SLAVES

We can continue to reap profits from the Blacks without the effort of
physical slavery. Look at the current methods of containment that they
use on themselves: IGNORANCE, GREED, and SELFISHNESS.

TheirIGNORANCEis the primary weapon of containment. A great man once
said, 'The best way to hide something from Black people is to put it in
a book.' We now live in the Information Age. They have gained the
opportunity to read any book on any subject through the efforts of their
fight for freedom, yet they refuse to read. There are numerous books
readily available at Borders, Barnes &Noble, and Amazon.com
not to mention  their own Black Bookstores that
provide solid blueprints to reach economic equality (which should have
been their fight all along), but few read consistently, if at all..

GREEDis another powerful weapon of containment. Blacks, since the
abolition of slavery, have had large amounts of money at their disposal.
Last year they spent 10 billion dollars during Christmas, out of their
450 billion dollars in total yearly income (2.22%).

Any of us can use them as our target market, for any business venture
we care to dream up, no matter how outlandish, they will buy into it.
Being primarily a consumer people, they function totally by greed. They
continually want more, with little thought for saving or investing.

They would rather buy some new sneaker than invest in starting a
business. Some even neglect their children to have the latest Tommy or
FUBU, And they still think that having a Mercedes, and a big house gives
them 'Status' or that they have achieved their Dream.

They are fools! The vast majority of their people are still in poverty
because their greed holds them back from collectively making better
communities.

With the help of BET, and the rest of their black media that often
broadcasts destructive images into their own homes, we will continue to
see huge profits like those of Tommy and Nike. (Tommy Hilfiger has even
jeered them, saying he doesn't want their money, and look at how the
fools spend more with him than ever before!). They'll continue to show
off to each other while we build solid communities with the profits from
our businesses that we market to them.

SELFISHNESS, ingrained in their minds through slavery, is one of the
major ways we can continue to contain them. One of their own, Dubois
said that there was an innate division in their culture. A 'Talented
Tenth' he called it. He was correct in his deduction that there are
segments of their culture that has achieved some 'form' of success.

However, that segment missed the fullness of his work. They didn't read
that the 'Talented Tenth' was then responsible to aid The Non-Talented
Ninety Percent in achieving a better life.. Instead, that segment has
created another class, a Buppie class that looks down on their people or
aids them in a condescending manner. They will never achieve what we
have.. Their selfishness does not allow them to be able to work together
on any project or endeavor of substance. When they do get together,
their selfishness lets their egos get in the way of their goal Their
so-called help organizations seem to only want to promote their name
without making any real change in their community.

They are content to sit in conferences and conventions in our hotels,
and talk about what they will do, while they award plaques to the best
speakers, not to the best doers. Is there no end to their selfishness?
They steadfastly refuse to see that Together Each Achieves More (TEAM).

They do not understand that they are no better than each other because
of what they own, as a matter of fact, most of those Buppies are but one
or two pay checks away from poverty. All of which is under the control
of our pens in our offices and our rooms.


Yes, we will continue to contain them as long as they refuse to read,
continue to buy anything they want, and keep thinking they are 'helping'
their communities by paying dues to organizations which do little other
than hold lavish conventions in our hotels. By the way, don't worry
about any of them reading this letter, remember, 'THEY DON'T READ!!!!

Please share this message with others who really want to improve the condition of our people.  For the sake of our children, we must begin spending some of our money in our own self interests.  You can also make a donation to fund the experiment. I Paypaled them $100. We all have to move beyond lip service.

To join The Experiment Click  Here.

What do you think?

Comments

[John]

My old pastor used to comment that in the White communities, the dollar turns over 11 times.
In the Asian community, it is 7
In the Latino community, it is 4
In the Black community, it is "One and Done".

We take OUR money and run to Rodeo Drive instead of Crenshaw.

Or, we take OUR money and buy counterfeits that help fund the flow of drugs into our children's.

WAKE UP BLACK PEOPLE!

[Dan]

Is reverse racism still racism? YES!

You're asking the wrong question.

Is It Racist For Blacks To Support Black Businesses? YES!
BUT... Is it wrong? Is it necessary? Is it possibly the only way to redress other problems? These are questions that have to be answered by each person's ethics.

So it's a bit of a cop-out to ask if racist behaviour is still racist just because it's going in a politically correct direction. Just ask if it's ethical in the circumstances.

[Dan]

To clarify, I didn't mean the above comment as a correction, I just thought maybe we should look at it another way because we spend so much time equating racism with wrong -- meaning that any reverse racism done for a positive reason couldn't be racism because that would be wrong.

In an absolute sense any discrimination is wrong. But we live in a world where it's not absolutely perfect and some relative wrongs and rights need to be balanced.

Some good questions have been asked, including why is it considered okay for other groups of people. To me and, I suspect, a lot of other people, it isn't necessarily okay. But to many others it has just been traditional and "the way of the world". Human beings have a way of being both fearful and lazy about changing "the way of things".

I don't think it's necessarily wrong for a group to be a little racist in matters of self-preservation as a group. I say group because we're not just talking about race or even ethnicity when we're talking universally. We're talking about something analogous to geographical groups ("Save our Town, Buy Local" campaigns) as well as to any group of people finding themselves on the wrong end of an entire history of exploitation and exclusion (like Jewish communities, Irish in recent history, lots of people). Let's be honest, it's discrimination, it's not technically "right". But how else do groups of people survive in a world that tears up groups that don't have support networks and eats people alive without mercy?

True, as human beings we need to get beyond all forms of racism and discrimination, even positive efforts, but first we have to survive. We have to take care of each other as members of smaller groups (neighborhood) and larger groups (ethnicity and cultural identity) because those are sometimes more manageable as well as the ultimate group (as human beings on one world).