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Proposed: A nationwide Black boycott of Independence Day 2020

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As if the upheaval and unease of a virus radically redefining everyday normalcy were not enough, the trauma and turmoil triggered by the mass public witness to the callous, reckless and sadistic killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police and private citizens has ignited indignation and an outrage—among Blacks and non-Blacks alike—that has been nothing less than seismic in its impact.

Yet, even as chaos and curfews run their course, Black citizens of the United States have been presented with a momentous opportunity. Quite simply, the time again has arrived—has, in fact, been far too long overdue—to economically empower Black anti-racism.

Here, a brief review of the ABCs of this renewed possibility is in order. A) The United States is capitalist country. In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge made the famous and frequently misquoted statement that “The chief business of the American people is business.” On the street where I live, this sentiment got an equally memorable translation: “Money talks and bulls##t walks.” B) Black citizens of the U.S. in the year 2020 have an undeniable instinctive understanding and lived experience that their fundamental humanity and selfhood are regarded as inferior and negatively by “other” untold numbers of non-Blacks. If Black lives did not so often hang in the balance, the complications that can result from just ordinarily “Doing Anything While Black” would almost be darkly comical. C) The Black citizenry of the U.S. generates an annual collective wealth of over $1.2 trillion, of which several hundred billion dollars is discretionary capital, or what is otherwise referred to as “disposable income,” money that Black people freely and voluntarily spend as they choose.

Now, the common sense of these ABCs logically proceeds to the letter D in which Black citizens—mindful of America’s abiding and prevailing ethos, its entrenched and intractable racism and the system-shaking potential of Black dollars—sequester and leverage a significant portion of their collective wealth in order to forcefully speak to their grievances in the language that American power best understands. But, alas, it is at this dreaded letter D that Black thought and action short circuits and misfires.

Volumes have been and can yet be written to explore and explain this phenomenon, a mere summary of which amounting to a scholarly treatise. While that is not the intent here, a few key points require unpacking. First and foremost, the subject of Black economic empowerment has, for several generations, been warily looked upon as a lethal high voltage electrified third rail of Black public discourse. Beyond broad, weightless generalities and platitudes about “pooling our money” and investing in and supporting Black businesses, established and widely recognized Black leaders and spokespersons offer little to nothing in the way of substantive, sustained guidance and encouragement.

The Black economic empowerment enterprise has struggled to stride forward from the fringes of the Black body politic to secure a central position alongside the conventional organizing and objectives of the mainstream movement for Black advancement. Moreover, the centering of discipline and steadfast determination in Black control of Black dollars has been stymied by the mischaracterizing of the effort as “extremist.” Add to this the widely held perception that establishing and maintaining this control will demand the adoption of unsexy, burdensome values like unselfishness and self-sacrifice, thrift, frugality and delayed gratification—qualities at odds with the programming of instant, all you can eat, shop till you drop America.

And, still, a monumental opportunity for the Black population of the U.S. glows ever more golden. It has resounded from the tragic roll call of Black lives lost to the pandemic. It has emerged from quarantine and the necessary suspension of non-essential commerce. And it roils and rumbles around the rallies across this country to bring an end to systemic injustice, inequity and indecency.

By now, one must certainly wonder what exactly this golden opportunity might be. Here is what I propose: a Nationwide Black Boycott of Independence Day 2020. This means the mass Black non-participation in spending, preparing for and celebrating the Fourth of July.

Consider this: In Los Angeles County and Southern California alone, Black folks simply bypassing the purchase of fireworks would carve away several hundred thousand, if not a few million, dollars from the $13 million that Californians will shell out. Ramp this up across the country and, from this category alone, the tally of Black wealth held apart from the mainstream revenue flow would easily reach a robust eight-figure total. This, I contend, is wholly achievable. After all, in the aftermath of massive layoffs and claims for unemployment benefits, the unprecedented scale of small businesses shuttering, the deepening anxiety over the staggering percentage of Black deaths from what is likely just the first wave of COVID-19 this year and the unceasing endangerment of Black lives by those pledged to protect and serve, what Black person in his or her right mind—even if they feel they have the financial wherewithal—is going to engage in the boneheaded idiocy of watching their money go up in colored smoke?

Conscious and conscientious Black citizens, having acclimated themselves to the “make do” mindset imposed by the widespread shutdown of the U.S. economy, will surely recognize other products and services they can comfortably do without, comforted all the more by the thought of all the cash they have kept in their purses and wallets. It is entirely plausible that after conducting a scrupulous inventory of needs versus wants, the latter could be massively shrunk to the degree that, accounting only for the Fourth of July, Black citizens could generate a hefty net windfall in the high hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the strategic withholding of Black dollars from the U.S. economy is but one side of a virtuous circle of Black economic activism. The other half of the circle involves the tactical redirection of this withheld Black capital into an independent fund dedicated to furthering Black economic empowerment.

The entity that I envision as the repository for the fund would be called The National Economic Empowerment Directive (NEED) Trust. Admittedly, the establishment of The NEED Trust is a heavier lift than mounting a nationwide Black boycott, but the creation of the former shares some of the same fateful advantages as the latter. First, The NEED Trust enters the marketplace of ideas at a critical moment of heretofore unimagined togetherness in the experience of Black existential angst. Irrespective of Black individuals’ differing and diverse stations in life, there is a bone-deep apprehension among the Black citizenry of the U.S. that we had better stay ready so we don’t have to get ready because our very survival seems to be at stake.

Second, unlike Black men and women of the Baby Boom and, before them, the so-called Greatest Generation, Blacks who identify as Millennials, Gen X and so on have internalized less of the debilitating suspicion of their peers, especially when it comes to novel financial instruments like crowdfunding and cryptocurrency.

And third, these younger generations of Black citizens, scuffling along in the gig economy or languishing in low wage, dead end nine-to-fives, or saddled with seemingly insurmountable student loan debt and sharing living space and expenses with two or three roommates, have scarcely a clue how or if they will be able to buy a home or a new car, start families or put away savings for retirement if, in fact, they can even foresee the prospect of retiring. Needless to say, The NEED Trust and the nationwide Black boycott that would seed the fund, will be a financial force multiplier, the exponential growth of which rebounding to the individual and collective benefit of its contributors.

However, despite the exquisite timeliness and exuberant promise of the Black economic empowerment agenda’s reemergence, the full bloom of its arrival is accompanied by some unavoidably thorny issues. Briefly turning back to the aforementioned ABCs and the short circuit and misfire of Black thought and action to logically proceed to D, the tenacious root of the problem is deeply embedded in the unyielding fact that the U.S. government and American institutions have no moral, ethical or ideological investment in teaching or reminding Black boys and girls and men and women of the rich, rewarding history of Black economic activism.

Thus, while the average Black middle schooler can probably recite a sketchy summary of the 1955 Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott, he or she likely knows nothing about the successful Baton Rouge, La. bus boycott two years earlier. They would not have been taught that, beginning in 1929 (the start of the American Great Depression), Black student groups and grass root organizations launched a successful multi-year, multi-state boycott campaign against the A&P grocery store chain, with the rallying slogan “Buy Where You Can Work”—as well as its corollary “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.” And it’s a safe bet that they, their parents and grandparents know nothing about William Monroe Trotter, a Black newspaper editor and firebrand orator from Boston, Mass. who, in 1915, spearheaded a vigorous and galvanizing nationwide protest and boycott movement to ban the screening of D. W. Griffith’s blatantly racist motion picture “Birth of a Nation.”

Even the successful Civil Rights-era strike and boycott campaign of 400 Black female hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina in 1969 would likely be little known outside the region except for having been documented in the film “I Am Somebody.” (Both “I Am Somebody” and the PBS documentary on William Monroe Trotter titled “Birth of a Movement” are available through online streaming services.)

Drilling down further, here is the crux of the dilemma: The corporate powers-that-be behind, before and beneath political power in the U.S. have this country’s citizens, Blacks and non-Blacks alike, exactly where they want us—and where they intend to keep us. Whites and other non-Blacks, warped by privilege and a sense of entitlement on the one hand and twisted by monkey see, monkey do materialism on the other, may be perfectly content to consume their way through a sleepwalking existence calculated and contrived on Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Blacks, by contrast, subjected over the past three months to the severely indiscriminate ravages of the coronavirus and the all too viciously discriminating recurrences of pathological policing, can ill-afford the luxury of such delusion.

BLACK DOLLARS MATTER! NO JUSTICE, NO PROFIT!! These need to be companion—dare I say commanding—principles and prescriptions dictating how Black citizens of the U.S. leverage Black capital in attaining empowered agency for the fulfillment of our greatest human potential.

BLACK DOLLARS MATTER! NO JUSTICE, NO PROFIT!! These need to be the audacious, uncompromising exhortations that quake the air whenever Black folks take to the streets demanding what is overdue.

BLACK DOLLARS MATTER! NO JUSTICE, NO PROFIT!! These seven words need to be the seven steps from the potential to the actual, as a reawakened Black citizenry unveils a secret hiding in plain sight: We don’t have to wait until we become entrepreneurially adept, or until we build bustling, thriving Black business sectors across the country in order to be economically impactful—we have all we need RIGHT NOW to economically energize and enable our individual and collective betterment. Reflect on this: In 1925, when President Calvin Coolidge made his pronouncement about business and the American people, the presiding policy insofar as Black participation in the economy was concerned was that we were predestined to occupy one of two groups: the exploited or the excluded. And yet, four years later (at the start of the Depression), a Black student group—among whose members was a young college man named Thurgood Marshall—was successfully coordinating the tactical withholding of Black dollars from a grocery store chain until it hired Black store clerks. Although it’s next to impossible to find exact figures, the aggregate wealth of the Black population of the United States in 1929 was miniscule in comparison to the $1.5 trillion projected for 2021. And keep in mind that when you subtract necessary expenditures (mortgage, rent, food, child care, tuition, taxes, health insurance, etc.), you’re still left with an aggregate amount of Black “disposable” dollars in the range of approximately $500 billion.

If The NEED Trust could attract but 10% or $50 billion annually from this discretionary capital, it would manage a fund equivalent to the gross national product of a small- to mid-size, technologically developed First World country. The significance of this cannot be overstated; seldom, if ever, has there been a circumstance where a people living in a country where they justifiably feel they are opposed, oppressed, under-valued, under assault and terrorized possess a magnitude of discretionary capital capable of causing tectonic disruption of that country’s inhumane, hypocritical and apathetic economic, political and socio-cultural status quo.

As expressed in an interview several years ago, the solution put forth by hip hop artist, activist and entrepreneur Michael Render (a.k.a. Killer Mike) could not be more simple and straightforward: “The way that you don’t tolerate things [systemic bias, institutional unfairness] under capitalism is to attack the money.”

Having by now hopefully aroused enthusiasm for the aim of economically empowering Black anti-racism, I would be remiss if I did not forthrightly address the rogue elephant in the room. For whenever the discussion of Black monetary unity and mobilization is taken up, it quickly gets bogged down over questions of control and accountability. Who’s going to collect the money, who’s going to manage it, where will it be kept safe and secure and who will determine the specific objectives of its dispensation and/or reinvestment? On the face of it, these are all valid questions. However, more often than not, this line of inquiry devolves into sour recollections of failed, fruitless or fraudulent undertakings that left participants bitter and skittish.

As so often is the case, when one excavates and examines these failures, they invariably are due to unprofessionalism and lack of expertise, inadequate research and planning, warring egos competing for dominance and the outsized need to be seen and acknowledged as the one responsible for whatever publicity, support and success a project may garner. Here, then, in an unabashed swing for the fences, is my “dream team” advisory board for The NEED Trust: John Rogers, Founder, Ariel Capital Management; Kevin Cohee, Chairman/CEO, One United Bank; Cheryl Grace, senior vice president of U.S. Strategic Community Alliances & Consumer Engagement, Nielsen; Wayne-Kent A. Bradshaw, president/CEO, Broadway Federal Savings; Geoffrey Canada, founder, Harlem Children’s Zone; Willie Brown, former California State Assemblyman; Earvin “Magic” Johnson, business executive; and Issa Rae, actress and entrepreneur. And the Honorary Chairperson of the Board is to be Former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Obviously, as a Californian I am most familiar with the principled, professional, accomplished Black men and women in my region, and the majority of my choices are indicative of that. But there are undoubtedly equally credible and creditable candidates all over the country; and even if those that I have listed here were unwilling or unable to be involved, each of them is sure to be however many degrees of separation from someone just as capable for whom this is a mission she or he was made for.

And while I have my envisioneering headset on, here are a few economic empowerment initiatives The NEED Trust would act on: providing Black farmers with legal and financial assistance to keep their land and acquire more; assisting Black independent truckers and trucking companies to grow and adapt their fleets to operate in the impending automated transportation field moving Black farmers’ livestock and produce along to redesigned post-pandemic processing and distribution facilities; investing in replicating the innovative Harlem Children’s Zone model in urban centers throughout the country, with the inclusion of grade level appropriate curricula on Black personal finance and a comprehensive history of Black economic activism; mentoring up-and-coming Black technology entrepreneurs and providing them an incubator where their start-ups can get a leg up; and, in Flint, Michigan, funding a “cluster study” research project where single-family homes would receive a free water purification system and the effects on factors from physical to financial health would be monitored. (To see proven technology, go online to Dean Kamen’s Water Purifier/The Future is Now.)

But, ultimately, the primary overarching accomplishment of the Nationwide Black Boycott of Independence Day 2020 and the creation of the NEED Trust is the resolute demonstration of Black citizens’ rationality and discernment in coming to grips with what walks—and talks—in America.

In a 2009 TED talk, British advertising and marketing guru Rory Sutherland nonchalantly tossed off a comment that succinctly encapsulates the economic philosophy of not only the fad-addled, consumption-crazed United States but the entirety of the Western world and most of the rest of the world that is coming up: “Saving is merely consumerism needlessly postponed.” However, when this assertion is juxtaposed with the statement from the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. that, “Race-based economic inequality is the founding economic principle of this country,” Black citizens must reconcile themselves to the reality that the okey doke is not an option.

As the Fourth of July approaches and pandemic restrictions ease, many Black citizens may balk at the idea of denying themselves the same good time that they feel non-Blacks will be enjoying; and there is no small number of Black folks who are committed to the notion—and will strenuously argue—that they, too, sing America. To this, I would simply respond with the question, “At this moment, is what you would raise your voice in song about America not drowned in the deadening echo of all that you have to hang your head and lament?”

BLACK DOLLARS MATTER! NO JUSTICE, NO PROFIT!! To Black citizens “in the know” who are prepared to “walk the talk” and put some skin in the game, I salute you and share an insight of ennobling clarity, courtesy of Herbie Hancock: “The more you challenge yourself to muster up the courage, the more that uncertainty becomes your ally.” As for myself, I intend to heed the advice of Earth, Wind and Fire to keep my “head to the sky” and, with equanimity in my heart and eyes wide open, survey the expanse of a star-spangled night soon to come.

mostmike.mpj@gmail.com

DISCLAIMER: The beliefs and viewpoints expressed in opinion pieces, letters to the editor, by columnists and/or contributing writers are not necessarily those of OurWeekly.

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