Our Black Year

by Maggie Anderson

  Bill’s teenage helper came back and informed us that there were no takeout menus. Too bad—I would have ordered in dinner from there. John took the girls back to the truck, leaving Bill and me to chat, mostly about his business. Before we said our goodbyes, he looked me in the eyes.

  “Don’t give up,” he said.

  That day Mahogany became our printer; it still produces our business cards and promotional materials, along with a couple Black-owned Minuteman Press franchises we found in Philadelphia and Atlanta.

  Bill’s encouragement notwithstanding, I climbed back into the Trailblazer more than a little disheartened. But the girls were up for another adventure, so we headed east. In the distance I could see signs from some familiar brands—McDonald’s, Advanced Auto Parts, Athlete’s Foot—and thought the chances were decent that we’d find a business owned by someone in the community.

  Turns out the stores were in a strip mall next to a large car wash, Captain’s Hand Car Wash. Hmmm, I thought, that might be Black-owned.

  We pulled into the mall lot and parked amidst the swirling trash. The bass thumping from the car in the stall next to us—a tricked-out Cadillac Escalade with spinning, twenty-inch rims—was so loud the girls covered their ears. I was tempted to say something until I saw the three hundred–pound driver push himself out of his vehicle. I did, however, give him my best disapproving mommy scowl. He responded with a smile, showing off his platinum grille. He was wearing a fur coat and had a massive amount of jewelry dangling from his neck. All I could think was, Does everyone have to look like a damn stereotype?

  “Successful business owner perhaps?” I whispered to John.

  “Um, successful businessman,” John said. “And we ain’t buying what he sells.”

  Cara walked, holding John’s hand, and I carried Cori. We went into the Athlete’s Foot, the McDonald’s, and the car wash; we found Black employees and asked whether the places were Black-owned. They all said no.

  The strip mall was big, though, so we kept canvassing and hoping. We visited MK Cleaners; Whale Fish & Chicken; Joe’s Barbecue Fish, Chicken and Ribs; a T-shirt store; and a flower shop—completely struck out.

  I wanted to stop our search because I was mindful of the psychological impact this might be having on my daughters. Admittedly, they were probably too young to appreciate what our research was uncovering, but everyone—I mean everyone—we saw on the street and in the stores was Black, but not the store owners.

  I told John I wanted the girls to stay in the car if we were going to continue looking farther east. He suggested we take turns getting out so we could avoid the hassle of pulling the girls from their car seats and then plopping them back in a few minutes later. With that, we left the mall, got back on Madison Street, and the first place we passed was Moo & Oink. Figures. Moo & Oink is a Chicago-based, White-owned chain of stores selling low-quality, high-priced meats. Due to its famous ads—with Black voiceovers and Black singers, airing only on Black-themed (but not Black-owned) radio stations—and the fact that the outlets are situated in the poor, Black areas of Chicago, most people think the company is Black-owned.

  After the strip mall, the car wash, the McDonald’s, six barber shops or braid salons, a huge church and a couple of small ones, we had traveled almost a mile, walking into any business that was not obviously Black-owned—like the barber shop—and was not a funeral parlor, community center, or church. Even though the ratio of boarded-up storefronts to open businesses continued to grow, we still found a flower shop; a couple dry cleaners; five or six food marts; two check-cashing spots; a bunch of bulletproof, take-out joints; a soul food restaurant; two beauty supply stores; a Laundromat; and four liquor stores. Actually, it was more like eight liquor stores because the food marts and minimarts hardly had any food but were well stocked with alcohol.

  We went into every business along a four-block stretch on Madison between Laramie and just past Cicero. Not one was Black-owned except for the funeral parlors, two of the fast-food places, and all but one of the barber and braid shops. These West Side neighborhoods were all Black. The idea that a non-Black business owner resided here seemed highly unlikely. But, to test our assumption, we’d ask. And just like when we went hunting for a dollar store, we discovered that all of these business owners lived in places other than the West Side.

  And the residents were not happy about it.

  People complained to us about Moo & Oink, about how it was overpriced and that they’d never put a low-quality store like that on the affluent North Side, the predominantly White, wealthier part of town—the Chicago that people refer to when they describe how great the city is. Residents lamented that they had to go to “White parts of town” to find a Wal-Mart or other decent place to shop.

  Next, the four of us paused by a minimart, looking inside while debating whether to enter. A guy a shade or two lighter than me and underdressed for the weather was leaning on a pole outside a Laundromat, maybe getting ready to have a smoke while waiting for his clothes to dry. His short Afro needed combing and trimming.

  “Are y’all lost?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I decided to take a direct approach. “We’re just looking for Black-owned businesses. You wouldn’t happen to know of any in the neighborhood, would you?”

  He looked at me like an antenna had sprouted from the back of my head.

  “Man, we don’t own shit!” he said.

  John explained what we were looking for. The guy nodded and then shook his head.

  “Nothing like that around here,” he said.

  We started to leave. But before we could, a middle-aged woman with freshly done microbraids who had overheard our conversation chimed in.

  “These damn A-Rabs come up in here and take our money,” she said. “Then, they got the nerve to treat us like shit when we in their store.”

  We got back in the truck, with a collective pall spreading over us, and headed home.

  How naive we were. We went into The Ebony Experiment to engage in self-help economics—the practice of buying from Black businesses to empower the struggling Black community economically. All we had to do, we blithely thought, was “buy Black.”

  But it wasn’t so simple. How were we supposed to shop at Black-owned businesses when next to none exist? And for all its fine points, Karriem’s store had its drawbacks. Its location was inconvenient for those who don’t live on the South Side. It didn’t carry the breakfast cereals, Pop-Tarts, or cheese crackers my kids were addicted to, and John was dying without his bagels. I missed my sundried tomatoes, feta and boursin cheese, and ahi tuna. Sometimes the store did not have skim milk or specialty foods for kids. And we couldn’t always depend on it for basic personal hygiene or cleaning products, like toothpaste, baby wash, bubble bath, deodorant soap, bathroom cleaner, or detergent and especially pull-ups—a problem I never had at my local Dominick’s or Jewel.

  These cold realities—that buying from businesses in Black neighborhoods doesn’t necessarily work, that so few Black-owned businesses actually exist, and that even competitive Black-owned establishments have shortcomings—became clear in the early days of The Ebony Experiment. Uncovering the reasons why would take longer.

  Chapter 3

  Leakage

  THE FORMAL TERM FOR WHAT’S HAPPENING IN BLACK neighborhoods is “leakage.” I wasn’t familiar with the word—except in the context of diapers and roofs—until days before we embarked on The Ebony Experiment, when I met with Gus Tucker, director of the Chicago Urban League’s Entrepreneurship Center. I conveyed to him the details of a recent instance in which we’d been accused of being racist. He said that we needed to make people understand that the central concern in empowering struggling Black neighborhoods wasn’t as simple as choosing to support Black businesses over non-Black ones. Rather, it was about stanching the rapid exit of dollars—and much needed economic power—from these communities.

  His statement prompted me to do some research of my own. One of the first things I u
ncovered was a report from 2004 showing that for every $100 flowing into an average underserved Black community, about $95 leaves, either by being spent at local businesses owned by “outsiders” or at businesses outside the community. I read about the Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, located in the area known as Greenwood. At the beginning of the twentieth century, because of segregation, these residents had virtually no contact with the city’s White community yet still generated vibrant wealth. In those days a dollar would remain in the community for up to three years before circulating elsewhere—as opposed to the few hours it now remains in a Black neighborhood.

  Just as illuminating was a radio piece produced in 2009 by WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s National Public Radio outlet, that examined retail leakage in thirty Chicago neighborhoods. Its findings: “Thirty neighborhoods have more than 50 percent retail leakage. Of those, 20 are on the South Side. Almost all are majority-Black neighborhoods. In 2007, residents in these neighborhoods spent a collective $3.8 billion outside of their own South Side communities.”

  And in a book about Anacostia, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, DC, author Michael H. Shuman notes that in 1998 the total income of all households there was $370 million a year. Where were all those dollars going?

  “Most of this money quickly departs in the hands of landlords, business owners, and bankers who live in more upscale parts of town,” Shuman writes. “The principal affliction of poor communities in the United States is not the absence of money, but its systematic exit.”

  Like many Blacks aware of economic disparities between us and everyone else, John and I were familiar with the oft-cited statistic that only 5 percent of the money spent in Black communities stayed there. I thought I would need only a few minutes of online research to verify that number, but I soon realized that little information exists about the economy of Black neighborhoods. There is a flood of data about problems in the Black community related to health, education, crime, drugs, unemployment, and poverty, but there is nothing about the fact that outsiders own most of the thriving businesses in Black neighborhoods. I found a couple of universities that studied leakage but none that focused on neighborhoods with an abundance of minorities. I also found two articles—the most poignant was almost thirty years old—about how many businesses were owned by outsiders in the Black community. Entitled “From Other Shores—Recent Wave of Asian, Latin American and Caribbean Immigrants Is Stirring Fears of Displacement in the Black Community,” Black Enterprise published the article in 1983.

  I had always ascribed that 5 percent—such a low number—to our own psychosis, our negative perceptions about Black entrepreneurs, goods, and services. John and I believed that the inclination to prove our worth by shopping at “White” stores was both a heavily promoted sign of our advancement as well as a reaction to the lower-quality Black businesses. We didn’t think that practice had anything to do with the shockingly low number of Black-owned businesses.

  But what I found—what The Ebony Experiment taught us—is that leakage is even more insidious than that. A big part of what’s going on is that immigrant groups and corporate America took advantage of the situation. A more jaded individual might even say they exploited it.

  Most discouraging was our realization that even when a West Sider “buys local,” he or she is contributing to leakage. And this led to another, more ominous conclusion: Things may never change for areas like the West Side. Leakage is perpetual there and in all places like it in America. The social epidemics accompanying this corrupted economy were likely immovable. The “outsiders” had established strongholds, and the local Blacks could not compete. Meanwhile, Whites were not going to relocate to places like the West Side, bringing mainstream retailers, grocers, and banks with them.

  All this was depressing and perplexing. John and I started wondering who or what we were fighting for. How can we admonish Black people for not supporting Black businesses when hardly any Black businesses exist? How could we tell our people we have so much to be proud of when we are the only group failing to harness the American Dream? Should I join the militant groups who hate the Koreans for taking over the Black beauty supply industry, or join the marches on stores owned by outsiders who are openly racist, refuse to employ from the community, and overcharge their customers? How are we ever going to turn around these suffering communities?

  And where does that leave folks on the West Side? Are they supposed to keep relying on government generosity and corporate munificence? Are they going to continue the generations of hopeless dependency? Seeing the situation any other way was difficult. Cynicism and pessimism were spreading in me. The Ebony Experiment was starting to feel more like pushing a boulder uphill than leading a charge on horseback.

  Despite J’s Fresh Meats, Mario’s Butcher Shop, and the other examples of commercial decay we saw in our travels through Black neighborhoods, that the Black community has economic might is undeniable. Here are a few statistics that might change the way folks think about Black consumers:—African American buying power rose 166 percent in seventeen years, from $318 billion in 1990 to $845 billion in 2007.

  —In 2002 advertisers spent $457.9 million to market to African Americans, including cable TV, Internet sites, and magazines. Four years later that spending jumped by nearly 73 percent to $791 million.

  —US Census Bureau data show that the Black population of about forty million is growing 34 percent faster than the population as a whole and that the number of Black households making at least $75,000 has increased 47 percent since 2005. Those statistics suggest that not only is our population growth robust but a Black middle class is expanding as well.

  Although we might be a consumer group to reckon with, we still haven’t figured out how to flex those muscles. According to author Robert E. Weems Jr., professor of African American history at the University of Missouri, “Black consumers . . . have a history of being disrespected,” with retailers in the first half of the twentieth century regularly treating us as “second-class” citizens while advertisers insulted and belittled us by using “a proliferation of products . . . that included such derogatory terms as ‘mammy,’ ‘pickaninny,’ ‘coon,’ and ‘nigger.’”

  African American buying power started to gain the attention of companies and advertisers with the Great Migration of 1916 to 1970, when nearly seven million southern Blacks moved to urban areas in the north searching for jobs, largely in war-related industries and other manufacturing.

  By 1920 Black spending power was more than $3 billion, about a third of which was spent on goods and services that African American companies produced. Record companies and makers of hair care products were two of the first industries to pay attention to the burgeoning Black market. White- and Black-owned companies alike began advertising heavily in African American newspapers, with much of that advertising pedaling products like skin lighteners and lip reducers.

  The National Negro Business League, formed by W. E. B. Du Bois and others in 1900, started a national survey of Black businesses in 1928 in cities across the country, and it showed that savvy, powerful, White-owned corporations were hiring Black managers, sales reps, and employees to take business away from Black companies. At the same time, African American consumers were making purchases to, as Professor Weems states it, “buy respect and dignity. Sophisticated market research and advertising campaigns have helped American corporations to continually profit from Blacks’ lingering social and psychological hangups.”

  In the 1940s and ’50s the Black migration to northern cities accelerated, and more White businesses made a concerted effort to reach the “Negro Market.” Beyond hiring Black managers, sales reps, and other employees, as had been done in the 1930s, large companies started to get into the act in a bigger way by bringing on Blacks as “Negro market specialists,” whom Professor Weems calls “the true African American pioneers in corporate America.”

  One of the most prominent Black researchers was David J. Sullivan, who, in the early and mid-194
0s, authored several pieces on African American demographics and offered advice to companies trying to appeal to African American consumers. Many of his tips are cringe-worthy to today’s readers, such as: don’t exaggerate Blacks’ physical traits, avoid using White people in blackface makeup, and don’t depict Black women as “buxom, broad-faced, grinning mammies.” Sullivan also discouraged the use of “nigger,” “coon,” “shine,” “darky,” and “Pickaninny” in advertising.

  If there were ever a point in time when we could have demonstrated unity and pride—and do so as consumers—it should have been then. Though we fought to force White business owners to hire, sell to, and serve us, we did not assert that same kind of might when it came to how we were portrayed in their advertisements and how we were treated once we were in their establishments. Historically, the NAACP has led the struggle to ensure that the media did not perpetuate destructive stereotypes of Black people, but consumers were never called on to boycott these firms or, better yet, support our own companies. We let the political and community leaders handle it when the consumers actually had the power to change things.

  By the mid-1940s African Americans’ gross income was $10.3 billion, which was $1.5 billion more than the national income of Canada. Pepsi and Esso Standard Oil were taking active interests in the Black market. But perhaps the most powerful embodiment of White overtures to Black consumers wore the number 42 for the Brooklyn Dodgers. When Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947, followed by Satchel Paige a year later, the move “represented not only a source of pride for African Americans but a box-office bonanza” for Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, Professor Weems writes. Of course, those players moving to the major leagues also led others to do the same, which ultimately caused the downfall of the Negro Baseball League.