Our Black Year (8 page)

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 business
man
,” 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

T
HE 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 uncovered 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: