This was a phase that I remember hearing a lot of during the 80′s and 90′s. I can remember how my friends and I used to talk with great pride the importance of supporting one another in the field of business and entrepreneurship. As I became older, reality began to settle in for me.
When my Dad would see a business that was owned by a fellow African-American, he would (on most occasions) do his part to support that business by buying something from them – even if he did not need it. He was just glad to see US having our own. As time went on, I then remember my dad slowly becoming frustrated with most of the business dealings that he had with other African-Americans. I remember him complaining about things such as the quality of the work, people not showing up when they were supposed to (when he would call them to ask them why they were late, they would get mad at him), poor customer service, etc. The biggest complaint that I remember my Dad had was high cost. It got to the point in our household that anytime someone would offer some kind of service to our household, one of the first questions we would ask would be “are they black?” I cannot begin to tell you all the time, money, and most importantly, friends that have been lost all because of bad business experiences.
The sad thing about all of this was that our success rate of good business relations among other people groups has been (in most cases) much higher than that of African-Americans. Please understand, when my family would do business with fellow African-Americans, we always held them to the same standard that we would with any other business (show up when you say you will, don’t get an attitude when I question your service, charge a competitive market price). In other words, if a brotha was just starting out, we did not expect him to operate on the level of Donald Trump, nor did we expect a hook-up. In fact, if the brotha did a good job, we would give him a little extra.
When the time came, I moved from my old neighborhood to the ATL. For the seven years that I lived there, I pretty much saw the same thing that I described earlier what my dad experienced , except that it was on a much broader scale (being that I was in Atlanta — the nation’s black capital).
When I think about small businesses that have the full support of the community, I can’t help but not to think of the Asian community. The entrepreneurial spirit that this people group have goes a lot deeper than a 4-year college degree. Entrepreneurship is very synonymous with the Asian culture. In fact, it has been that way for thousands of years. Usually, by the time an Asian child is able to talk, they are already learning the family business. This is not the case most of the time for African-Americans. Unless we are fortunate enough to have an entrepreneur in our immediate family, the skills that are needed to succeed in starting a business usually rely solely on a,college education. This, I believe, contributes to why many small black-owned businesses do not experience the longevity that Asian or other race-owned businesses experience.
There are many black-owned businesses out there that are successful, and have been that way for years. But unfortunately, I see them as the exception instead of the norm. To this day, I still see the same bad characteristics in many black-owned businesses that I saw growing up (again, I stress that my expectation is no different then when I go to a white-owned business)
For me, now I am at the point where depending on the type of business, if the business is black-owned, I will steer far away from it. This is something I really hate to do, but business is business.
—What do YOU think about what I said about this topic? I know that this is a very touchy one for US, but I know that I am not the only one that has seen this. Please share your thoughts on this. I am really interested on what you have to say on this.
