Our Black Year (22 page)

I had a strong sense about all this before embarking on The Empowerment Experiment, but I refused to acknowledge it. Once we got rolling I wanted to believe that the desire to empower ourselves was latent but strong in all of us. If we just had a spark to ignite it, we could overcome our ingrained, destructive history. Maybe our belief was a survival tactic. Or chalk it up to our guilelessness. Or maybe I just didn't think that the defeatism would be so intractable that it could kill Karriem's store.

What made it worse, if that's possible, was reflecting on all the empty promises people—Prominent Black Folks and not so prominent—made
to us regarding their support of Farmers Best. I call it the “art of civilized hypocrisy.” Basically, folks were lying to our faces, especially people in Bronzeville and Hyde Park, vibrant neighborhoods with substantial Black populations near Karriem's store. People there had no excuse to bypass the place except for the obvious reason: racism among our own people, against our own people.

Then, once the stored was closed, folks would respond in shocked disbelief and ask why it had closed.

“What?” I remember one guy telling me. “No way. It's gone? I didn't even get a chance to go. Damn. That's rough.”

“Wow! He should've been a little more patient,” somebody else said. “I was going to come and bring some folks with me. He gave up that quick?”

That question would really light my fuse.

“Not enough support,” I'd say, trying to stop the burning between my ears. After a while I stopped being polite and let them have it, which is what happened with a congregant of Trinity United Church of Christ who made the mistake of asking me about the project after she recognized me from the CBS
Early Show
interview. When she suggested that I ask Pastor Moss to include Farmers Best coupons in the church bulletin, I told her it was too late: The store was closed. She reacted the way everyone else did—with surprise.

“It's your fault,” I told her, “and everybody else in this church's fault who didn't have the simple decency to empower one of our own brothers by doing nothing more than shopping at his beautiful store once in a while.”

Poor woman never knew what hit her. But I had all these other thoughts—questions, really—about what went wrong for Farmers Best. Why would folks like this seemingly well-intentioned woman never, ever wake up on a Sunday morning and drive a few blocks to Farmers Best but instead drive eight miles to the closest Whole Foods or Target Greatland? Why do we spend our hard-earned money in those disgusting neighborhood minimarts, owned by people who live in prosperous suburbs with high-performing schools and who treat us, their
customers, with contempt while offering overpriced, inferior goods? Why are we so willing to help send their kids to college instead of supporting someone like Karriem, a caring, committed, hardworking role model who provides a wonderful store employing and mentoring at-risk Black youth?

Are we that ignorant? Are we that comfortable with our misery? Do we really hate ourselves that much?

After our Black year ended, the
Chicago Tribune
ran a second article reflecting on what had transpired, including the closing of Farmers Best. Karriem publicly pointed to the rough economy, deep-pocketed and not always upright competitors, and the unavailability of capital—there it is again—as the culprits. His love for us and his appreciation for our efforts on his behalf were strong, which was noble of him. However, his feelings for The Empowerment Experiment and the notion of Blacks supporting Black-owned businesses were ambivalent. Grudgingly, he acknowledged that the lack of community support was a factor in shutting him down.

He said, “The Empowerment Experiment . . . made people aware of the lack of support for Black-owned businesses and aware that there was a Black-owned fresh market. What people chose to do with that remains to be seen.”

Then Karriem said something that encapsulated his—and our—experience. He suggested that being highlighted as a Black-owned business might have hurt Farmers Best.

“If you're under the radar,” he said, “then maybe you won't get that belief from customers that the other guy's ice is colder than yours.”

What happened to Karriem still keeps me up at night. The whole episode highlights one of the most enduring problems of this odyssey: I was enraged at the people I wanted to empower. I hated the people I wanted to help the most. That love-hate dynamic made me want to slap or spit on somebody, to burn something to the ground—and this lasted a long, long time. When it finally started to dissipate, it morphed into cynicism, which is debilitating when you're trying to sustain a movement and instill hope.

I almost felt as if Karriem's closing, the PBFs' rejection, and the overall Black divisiveness were signs from God that we were not meant to win this fight. I came to this bizarre conclusion that we Blacks suffer from a paralyzing psychosis brought on by a cancer, and that cancer is not the leakage, nor is the racism or the exploitation at the hands of other ethnic groups who had raided our neighborhoods and industries. We were the cancer. We were sick, poisoned, dying, and choosing to ignore the symptoms.

I learned that it was going to take a lot more than a fantastic store and a dynamic entrepreneur to shake my peoples' paralysis, to cure the cancer. And I couldn't stop myself from coming to another conclusion: Farmers Best was everything EE could be and everything we in the Black community would never be.

Although the Farmer's Best closing knocked us on our rear ends, we were getting signals that we had at least piqued people's interest. The e-mails, T-shirt orders, and registrations kept coming—between the website and the Facebook group, about eight thousand official EE members by August—and so did speaking requests. We received awards from or invitations to partner with several key organizations—from the United American Progress Association, a grassroots organization based on Chicago's South Side, to the NAACP, National Urban League, and National Black Chamber of Commerce.

Throughout this time we were reevaluating our media strategy, which had been focused on getting as much national, mainstream media exposure as possible, sometimes at the expense of neglecting smaller Black outlets. Our PR firm had to focus on paying clients, and it was not doing much in terms of promoting our story. So other media's coverage triggered most of the media we got, and that made us think we may have been spending too much time explaining and defending instead of sharing and inspiring. Educating outsiders who wanted to understand the issues was important, but we wanted to spark real change, and nothing
was going to change unless Black people were inspired to act. The result was that we altered our media strategy: We would focus our efforts on predominantly Black outlets.

Which was why meeting Doug Banks, one of the most popular Black radio hosts on the air, was so invigorating.

We crossed paths a few weeks after my June speech at Friendship-West Church, when I attended the National Urban League Conference in Chicago. Apart from being a radio giant, Banks is an author and public speaker, though he is definitely not your typical talking head. He presents a full-bodied, nuanced portrayal of the issues and believes in intelligent conversation—as much as can be achieved on a radio call-in show, anyway. In other words, he's smart, articulate, and takes seriously his role as cohost of the nationally syndicated radio show,
The Ride with Doug and Dede
. Because of all that, people view him as a leader in our community.

When I told him about The Empowerment Experiment, I could almost see the wheels clicking. That happened with lots of people. And, like lots of people, he said he supported the project 100 percent. What made Doug different was that he immediately took action, inviting us to be on the show, which airs in the all-important 2–6 p.m. weekday time slot. We set it up for August 18, a Tuesday. John and I were ecstatic. Every day on the show Doug submits a topic for discussion on “The Adult Conversation,” and folks call in. We thought Doug and Dede would interview us for the standard few minutes, which is what happened with most of our other media appearances. Instead, they called us at home and kept us on the show for an unprecedented three hours. The topic was “Should Black People Do More to Support Black Businesses?”

We got our answer in a hurry: no bleeping way.

While John and I passed a phone back and forth between us (there was better reception if we didn't use separate receivers), we were subjected to an audio lashing. Only one caller supported self-help economics and pledged to do more to spend his money at local, Black businesses. The rest tore apart the ideals behind our mission, usually by recounting a story about a disappointing experience at a Black business and then swearing off ever patronizing one again.

“Yeah, every time I go to my Black Popeye's, they don't have chicken,” the typical caller would say, “or I have to wait ten minutes for my food.”

Someone said they were cheated at a Black-owned business; another claimed the customers at the establishment scared her; a third said the owners did. A caller complained that the Black-owned stores didn't look like Wal-Mart. “Bottom line,” another critic pronounced, “is that Black businesses are always dirty, and the prices are too high. Black people are just greedy.”

And then there was my all-time favorite: The Black folks who want credit for trying to buy Black once, ten years ago, and having an unsatisfactory experience, which leads them to dismiss the entire race as being incompetent business people. This old saw invariably triggers one of my loud, crazy-lady laughs.

We'd gotten some of these reactions before, of course, so we were prepared with data about leakage, stories about encounters with high-quality, Black-owned businesses, and our suggestion to support only reputable Black businesses as a way to lower unemployment, strengthen the tax base, improve schools, and provide good role models. We told the onetime buy-Black shoppers to keep trying, that even Sam Walton started as a small-time retailer who needed customers from the community.

I remember asking the Popeye's caller whether he knew if the place was really Black-owned. “I bet you it's not,” I said. “Have you ever considered who the owner is and what kind of service and quality he'd deliver to a Popeye's in one of those nicer neighborhoods on the North Side?”

To another skeptic I said, “But doesn't it bother you that all your hard-earned money is sending everyone else's kids to college, and our kids are the least educated and most likely to go to jail?”

Doug and Dede kept up the same approach, trying to steer the conversation back to the bigger issues, but the critical calls kept flowing. We were back in the quicksand and sinking fast.

“Guys,” an exasperated Dede said at one point, “why are y'all spending so much time talking about why we can't do this instead of why we should?”

The very next caller ranted about how Black people have no respect for each other like we used to and that's why our businesses fail.

“Welcome to my life,” I told Doug during a break.

“Mrs. Anderson,” he said, “I really did not think it would be this way. I'm so sorry.”

We finished “The Adult Conversation” feeling like we'd been shoved onto the sidewalk after being roughed up in an alley for three hours. That beating reinforced another lesson: the myth that “The Black Community” is a monolithic, unified culture moving to the same beat, almost like a single-minded church parish. The cult of Black—we all still vote Democratic, right? But what surprised me was just how divisive we could be. Has it gotten this bad? Do Black folks hate each other that much? Are we that narrow-minded and ignorant?

Maybe The Empowerment Experiment was doomed to fail. On the one hand, we had angry Whites calling us racist, and on the other, we had Blacks tearing into us for a number of reasons, saying we were ignorant for believing that Black-owned businesses were competitive with White-owned ones—or could ever be. It was our own Perfect Storm.

In my despair I reached out to Dr. Juliet Walker, who, as the only female member of our Executive Advisory Team, had become a mother figure to me. She said Black divisiveness must be viewed in the context of what is known as “crabs in the bucket” or “crabs in a barrel.” The story is that Booker T. Washington formally coined the phrase and used it in one of his lectures to point out how Blacks were holding each other back. Picture a bucket of crabs. None of the crustaceans will allow the others to climb out. Any time a single crab attempts to get out, the rest pull the lone crab back down. This was one of the theories we were trying to examine in The Empowerment Experiment.

Booker T. may have coined it, but the phrase, used most often to describe the plight of our businesses, has been around for about as long as Africans have been Americans. Lately, Black folks have used it—mistakenly, I believe—in reference to commentators and intellectuals, like Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, who publicly criticize President Obama. It's not that Smiley and West expect to be president, the misguided thinking goes; instead, it's that President Obama was making it out of the bucket, so they will attack the president, pulling him back in because he is Black
and successful and that bothers them, and doing so benefits them personally in the form of more listeners, viewers, and readers.