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No Heroes Here - Black Economics and Building Black


“Black” is transcendent – the culture, the music, the food, fashion, and tastes. If this is not clear to you, you probably also enjoy your food bland. This is not a shot. It is a reinforcement of the fact that your last car commercial probably had a black person in it and the last branded clothing item you appreciated was on a black person.

Now, this piece is about Black economics which tends to be about heroes. Individuals who “made it” and are eager to tell everybody else how it should be done. Why is that? Heroes are not welcome here. The laziness around the narrative of Blacks not supporting Black Owned businesses is lazy if we are being honest. 

There is a phrase in Latin - Post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Since event Y happened before event X, therefore Y is the cause of X. 

Back to Black economics, since black businesses are not thriving, black people do not support their businesses. Simple and lazy enough yet convincing on the surface. One layer below this surface is the $1.6 trillion in buying power of the Black American Consumer. This goes to banks, grocery stores, fashion providers, entertainment companies,  tech platforms, auto companies and other service providers which are overwhelmingly owned by the white majority. This also explains why the black dollar does not circulate in the black community. How do we change this? There are many things we could do but none of them are going to come from heroes or saviors.