Our Black Year (11 page)

John's dad told us he was worried about our safety, which made me a little uptight.
Our safety? What's he talking about?
He explained his concern that people would view our experiment as racist. We had given that issue some thought and figured we could counter the contention by explaining that this was an academic exercise and no different from the practices of other ethnic groups. John's dad sighed and shook his head when I told him that, as if to say,
You poor thing. You just don't know what it is really like out there.

Then came more sobering news from Michael Bennett. He would run the study for $120,000.
Wow
. After we got over the sticker shock, I reworked our budget to include that number. Our major expenses were paying for the study as well as hiring a public relations firm and a website developer. Other costs included travel fees for us and our advisers; a part-time staff person; a part-time documentarian who could capture the journey in video, pictures, and audio; a fund for professional services like
legal, administrative, and accounting; and basic operational incidentals like a phone line, computer, the website, and office supplies. This experiment wasn't coming cheap, but we didn't want to do it on the cheap. This was a big idea, and big ideas often cost big bucks. But now we realized we were going to need big help too. The January pitch to the business owners was becoming even more important.

Aside from the Bennett's warnings, we received other signals we should have noticed. Back in September, I had sent a bunch of letters soliciting support—monetary or otherwise—from places like the National Association of Black Hotel Owners, Operators and Developers; the National Black Chamber of Commerce; the National Black MBA Association; the National Black McDonald's Operators Association; and my former colleagues at McDonald's, where I'd worked as a Corporate Strategy Manager and Strategic Communications Manager, a fancy title for speechwriter. None were responding. Meanwhile, another friend, Shawn Baldwin, a hot-shot broker with media exposure as well as Capital Management Group founder and CEO, had tried to set up a meeting for us with a few African American corporate heavyweights, but they all fell through.

Only in hindsight did we realize that these were indications of what Rogers had cautioned us about—that The Ebony Experiment might scare businesses. But I perceived these disappointments as speed bumps and kept pushing, telling myself that something would break our way if we just worked harder. And we still had the big pitch meeting. Despite the discouragement, I felt like an inventor with an awesome new product who had scored a big meeting with the venture capitalists. I revised the PowerPoint presentation, giving a healthy workout to my business school muscles, rehearsing with John and my brother Eduardo over and over.

At the time we were sufficiently guileless to think that these corporate types would help us based on the merits of the idea. Not until later did we realize that those relationships would be based almost entirely on cold—dare I say selfish—calculations.

By the last two months of 2008 The Ebony Experiment seemed to have legs. Cheryl Jackson at the
Chicago Sun-Times
interviewed us for a
story, and we'd received indications that AOL's Black Voices, the largest Black-oriented social networking site, might be receptive. Missing in action, however, was
Ebony
, a foretelling sign.

The
Sun-Times
piece ran on December 20, which made us feel—finally—that The Ebony Experiment was the real deal. It was encouraging, validating, and a little scary. For the most part, the article focused on our personal story as a family trying to give back, and it indicated how difficult the experiment would be to carry out, given the lack of Black representation in so many industries. The best thing about the article was how it positioned The Ebony Experiment—not as an outlandish, militant, or groundless scheme but rather as a unique, credible, and potentially historic social exercise that would explore an important issue for all Americans. Reading the article and seeing pictures of our family made me realize that we couldn't turn back now, not even if we wanted to.

What brought me to tears, though, were the negative comments in response to the article, calling us racists and worse. For days I went through the responses posted to the online article—all twenty pages of them—deleting those using the N-word or some other offensive stereotype. Here's a sampling of what was left (reproduced here verbatim):

“annie84” wrote:
If she does this she would be considered a patriot. If I did this I would be considered a racist. Ok what if something happened to one of their kids and they had to go to the hospital??? And had to see a white/hispanic /indian/chinesse doctor??? Are you going to deny help from them???. . . . What about taxes? You pay taxes dont you??? Who does that go to??? You can't refuse that!

A person with the moniker “suburbia” wrote:
what a joke that the sun-times put these racists in the paper

Our friends and family were feeling sorry for now-dispirited Maggie the Optimist, trying to cheer me up and prepare me for what might ensue as the project progressed.

During the anxious weeks leading up to the EE launch, John—keenly intuitive John—was the one who calmed my anxieties, mostly by using humor to keep us loose. He likened the inevitability and fear of EE's launch to a scene in the movie
Vacation
. You may remember it. Chevy Chase's character is standing at the edge of the pool and about to cheat on his wife by skinny-dipping with Christie Brinkley's character. Chevy, as dad Clark Griswold, rocks back and forth on his heels, slaps his hands together, and repeats, “This is crazy. This is crazy.” John would do a dead-on impersonation of a Black Clark, and it cracked me up every time. It became a running joke.

We sent an e-mail blast to all our friends, announcing our pledge and linking to the
Sun-Times
article. I guess you could say the news went viral. We even got the attention of Ann Coulter's blog, where she compared The Ebony Experiment to Kwanzaa, arguing it was another useless project aimed at stirring up Black nationalists.

Steven Rogers had forwarded the
Sun-Times
story to Cheryle Jackson—no relation to the reporter. In addition to being the president of the Chicago Urban League, Cheryle had a show on WVON radio as well as
Next TV
, a local Fox show focusing on Black issues and featuring Black entrepreneurs. She loved the idea. Other promising leads emerged.

Despite the decidedly mixed reaction we were getting, I was upbeat and a little nervous, sort of like how I felt before starting law school. The night before we launched, the girls couldn't settle down. This wasn't excitement over our new venture; they were just being adorably squirrelly. We hadn't discussed the project with them yet, as we were planning on taking an eyedropper approach—telling them a little at a time, as needed. News of their grandmother's sickness was enough for them to digest for the time being. Besides, how much of this effort could we expect two girls under the age of four to comprehend? They barely understood the concept of shopping. John and I couldn't sleep either, so we
decided to surrender and bring the girls into our room. They lay between us and finally started dozing while John and I held hands across them and whispered through the night, giving voice to our dreams for The Ebony Experiment.

We thought all we had to do was get things going and, in time, everyone would join the movement. It was going to be so cool.

What was an exciting adventure in January was, by March, an ominous undertaking. Despite almost daily searches online and elsewhere, I hadn't found a single Black-owned drugstore or pharmacy, small department store, or retailer selling electronics, athletic gear or clothing, shoes, or toys for the girls. Sometimes I felt as if I were a religious ascetic, testing my faith by driving past all these lovely, overstocked stores on my way to a desert in search of diapers.

By this time we all needed new clothes and shoes as well as stuff for the house, like a new coffeemaker, car seat for Cara, picture frames, and linens. God First God Last, our miraculous household goods supplier, did not stock appliances, and although they had a couple frames, they were of very poor quality and not the right size. Later in the year they were able to scrounge up some sheets. And as much as I loved Farmers Best, shopping there wasn't the visit to the Emerald City Grocer that it appeared to be in January. The employees who gave the girls lollipops and helped me find the freshest meats and produce were lovable, but they had trouble getting specific items that I'd request.

We got used to going without most of those items—not that the girls and John stopped asking for them. But there were a few products, especially pull-ups, which were crucial to Anderson Family, Inc. At three and a half, Cara was potty trained and wore underpants in the day, but sometimes she slept in pull-ups. Cori, age two, was still transitioning from diapers to pull-ups. Before the experiment we had been making progress in this area. But we'd run out of pull-ups, and the situation got more aggravating at Farmers Best. I'd make the fourteen-mile trek on the staff's
promise they'd stocked the item. Then I'd get there to find no pull-ups. I'd storm back to the car, muttering a few choice words to myself, and be forced to stop at the dump we called J's Fresh Meats—the only Black-owned place I'd found that sold diapers. Not pull-ups—diapers. As any mom can tell you, there's a difference.

Those days would just about break me. Every time Cara wet her bed unnecessarily or Cori cried because the diapers I forced her to wear were for babies, I cursed everybody. One of my regular targets was that group of wealthy business owners that months earlier had made very encouraging noises regarding funding. This was another painful lesson learned.

Because the holidays had pushed our meeting to January, we had had to bank—literally—on the over-the-top enthusiastic vibes I was getting from their president three months earlier. We had public relations people, a web designer, and the Bennetts already working with the promise of getting paid when the funding arrived in the early weeks of our venture. It sounds risky, I know. Hell, that looks downright foolhardy now. But that's how confident we were at the time.

We experienced a couple hiccups at the meeting, including only half of the executive committee members showing up. Karriem was there, though, to offer his perspective as one of the business owners who would benefit from their support of the project. The meeting was going fine until someone asked about marketing opportunities.
Marketing opportunities?
This was about funding a movement that would empower underserved Black neighborhoods. But if they wanted marketing rights, that was fine with us. I also offered product displays, interview mentions, a prominent spot on the website—whatever they wanted.

Karriem and I left feeling encouraged. A few days later the group's executive director informed John, Eduardo, and me that the executive committee endorsed the idea and was going to present the proposal to the full membership on January 26. After that, the president called. He talked at length about how the group is self-funded and struggles to survive solely on membership dues. He mentioned that they typically don't sponsor causes or events as a group; support of this kind was up to the individual
members. So when he wanted to know what the members were going to get for their money I thought,
Didn't we cover this at the meeting?

My bullshit meter started crackling, and it was dead-on accurate. They didn't give us any money. We'd extended ourselves; had counted on them based on their early, effusive response; and now they were pulling the proverbial rug out from under us. This group had been slated to be our primary funding source. Without it, our “movement” felt a little emaciated.

I moped around for a short time, wondering how the project would proceed without a sponsor. John said we should just focus on the experiment and not let their unwillingness to support us deter our resolve. We decided this fiasco was a test of our fortitude, the quintessential character-building experience.

“Oh well,” Eduardo said. “Their loss. We'll show them. One day, they're gonna need us, and not the other way around. That's how big EE is gonna be.”

Despite that one huge disappointment, in other ways we were getting a little bigger. Our efforts to garner attention from the mainstream media began paying dividends. In February Cheryle Jackson featured a lengthy segment about EE on her
Next TV
show, which prompted me to create a Facebook group so that folks could watch the video. On March 9 the
Chicago Tribune
ran a front-page story about The Ebony Experiment under the headline, “Oak Park Couple Travel Far and Wide on a Mission to Spend Their Money Only at Black-Owned Businesses.” Up to that point we'd received a lot of media attention, but most of the mainstream press focused narrowly on our personal story without going into why we made the commitment. The
Tribune
piece—which ran on the front page of its sister paper, the
Los Angeles Times
, a day later—offered a balanced perspective and put our actions into a greater context. It included an interview with James Clingman, a University of Cincinnati instructor on Black entrepreneurship and a prolific writer on Black economics who also served as an EE executive adviser.