When Michael first told me about this new blog, I was a bit skeptical about my ability/willingness to become a contributor. Didn't really know what I wanted to say, and wasn't really sure that anybody really wanted to hear it. But I spend most of my time everyday working on my own economic development or that of my clients. It is a subject near and dear to my heart, and one that I have studied extensively. I'm a law school graduate and I have been a business owner and/or self-employed for over 15 years. I currently offer services in business development, business management, and tax and financial consultation.
I make no claims to fame here of being any kind of expert, historian, guru, etc. I have done many things in my lifetime, had several successful endeavors, and several spectacular setbacks, and the entire process has contributed to who I am and how I think today. We've all got the same resume from that standpoint, and with that said I hope and future conversation will not devolve into a discussion about what qualifies any of us to express our ideas. I say this upfront because one of the things that I find most troubling in discussions about economic development is the predisposition of many people (especially Black people, who I tend to interact with most often), to discount any information that doesn't come from an exalted source. In other words, if I'm not a millionaire, how can I presume to tell you what you should be doing. One of the biggest fallacies with this line of thinking is that it presumes that a wealthy person could in fact teach you do do what they did, when in fact most wealthy people inherited their wealth or their avenue to achieve wealth, and inheritance can't be taught.
So rather than just throwing my personal ideas out there, I thought it might be more productive to begin with a critique of some other peoples ideas. I get the feeling that I will probably ask more questions than I will offer solutions on this blog. I realize the focus of this blog is solutions, but I am absolutely certain that if you are not sure about the question, then your solutions will not accurately solve the problem. Just like the math you learned in elementary school, you have to have an understanding of the problem before you can begin to craft a solution.
To that end I'd like to begin a discussion and review of "Black Economics -Solutions for Economic and Community Empowerment" by Jawanza Kunjufu. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. I was fortunate to pick up a used copy for $1 this weekend at a street festival. Funny how things work out like that. To keep the conversation manageable, I will review and comment on one or two chapters each post and see if and how the comments flow.Chapter One discusses our present state of affairs and Chapter Two reviews our history, beginning with the first agricultural civilization in the Nile river valley. The first thing in "Black Economics" that catches my eye is the question "if negroes were brought to this country for one reason and that reason was to work, and the reason no longer exists today, what will ultimately become of a people who are no longer needed?" Some estimates place African American unemployment at 30% and as high as 70% for teenagers. That number typically will not include those people who have become so disillusioned with their job prospects that they no longer even look for work. The majority of these unemployed are Black men, and there is a statistical correlation between the rise of unemployment and the decline of the nuclear family and Black fathers living in the home in the Black community.
Kunjufu states that "the African American community is more like a colony than a community". I personally have been trying to get someone to identify to me a functioning African American community currently existing in the U.S. and have yet to get a reasonable response. Perhaps such a thing exists, though I sincerely doubt it, but the typical characteristics of a colony certainly persists in those areas where Blacks make up the majority of the population. Low per capita income, high birth rates, small/weak middle class, economy dependent on external markets, major export is labor, most land and businesses owned by Foreigners, and Limited indigenous entrepreneurship are hallmarks of many if not all of America's chocolate cities.
The book cites current statistics that tend to show little or no progress for the overall community, and often show a decline in economic indicators as compared to the majority population or more recent voluntary immigrant populations. More than 1/3 of African Americans live below the poverty line, and that line is set so low that even families making twice the poverty level amount are in many cases little better off than those who are counted as poor. And yet the yearly income of the African American community is $550 - $600 BILLION each year. Of course Black people spend over 90% of that income outside of the Black businesses, so they give us the money and we give it right back to them.
And we are indeed consuming, as the majority of that income is spent rather than invested, and even worse, spent somewhere other than Black businesses. There is a graphic illustration of this if you just look at the advertisers of the two biggest Black magazines, Essence and Ebony. In any given Essence there may be about 50 full page ads, of which less than 10% will be Black owned businesses. Ebony has less than 5%. These numbers speak to the reality that we are not conduction businesses at the right level and until we do, we will be at the mercy of those who are conducting business the right way. Big Black businesses like Essence and Ebony are going to deal with whoever is doing enough business to be able to afford to advertise with them. These are two Black Enterprise 100 entities that can not or will not put racial solidarity over their bottom line, which is why you see few if any Black companies with major advertising in these magazines.
Kunjufu also goes into a discussion about land ownership, although later he will decry capitalism and land ownership as one of the major problems with the construct of monopolistic capitalism. It is a simple basic fact that there is not enough land to go around, and it follows logically that if land ownership is a prerequisite of economic success, there will be more people standing on the outside looking in, because there isn't enough land to even consider an equitable distribution of ownership. There needs to be an alternative thought process applied to how we approach land use. We'll get to that later.
The discussion of the history of Black economics is a history lesson that we should all be aware of, so I'll not rehash it. Suffice it to say that we did things differently in the "good old days". But we must understand that we are living in a different world than that of the pre-pyramid Nile Valley civilizations. We can learn some things from that history, but we would be foolish to think we can regress back to an agrarian society at this late stage of the game. The history of Black economics contains numerous examples of individual Black people and even a few Black collectives that managed to learn the capitalist game and survive the System of Racism/White Supremacy to achieve economic success. Unfortunately many of those successes don't translate to the generational wealth and nation building that other groups manage to accomplish. There are structural issues that have an effect on this, but it is essential that in our current day planning we understand that achieving economic success that last only one or two generations is not really that much of an achievement. Economic success that only creates an icon, a shining example of what we should aspire to, is also an exercise in futility. Yes we have a Black woman billionaire (or is it two of them now), but how is that furthering the nation building and economic progress of the Black collective? It isn't really because that was never a fundamental part of those individuals' plans. If we don't plan for it, then it will not happen that way.
Are we really so naive to think that we can show an individual with $1,000 to burn how he/she can become an energy magnate, or a communications giant, or make inroads in any of the monopolistic industries in which we currently have little or no ownership interests? Is our goal here to simply throw out suggestions in isolation? To me that's just treading the same water that we have been up to our necks in since Africans first came to America. Are our solutions really going to address our situation, or will they be phyrric victories that ultimately keep us from solving the true problems? If we create 100 Black millionaires in the same mold as the majority of our current crop of Black millionaires, have we truly done anything to be proud of? Are we simply looking for better ways to get a bigger piece of the sinking ship of imperialism and monopolistic capitalism that has been the scourge of R/WS and will ultimately be it's downfall?
|