Book Review: Our Black Year
Feb. 18th, 2015 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebI saw Maggie Anderson's and Ted Gregory's Our Black Year in the library and it reminded me of Black Like Me about a White guy who dressed up like a Black guy in the segregated south which of course was not that fun but highly educational.
The subtitle of this book is One Family's Quest to Buy Black in America's Racially Divided Economy. This Black couple observed that a lot more money flows out of the Black community than into it, they realized they were part of the problem, and so they challenged themselves to buy only from Black-owned businesses as much as possible for a year.
Unlike No Impact Man's project, this did turn out to be as hard as it sounds. Although they did find some new businesses they loved, and some of them were even still open at the end of the year, mostly it was just rough. They were afraid to go into some places and they had real trouble finding some things.
The most heart breaking story was about a grocery store they found. They found exactly one decent Black-owned grocery store in all of Chicago. A guy had opened it in a lower-income Black neighborhood to give back to the neighborhood, and the authors of the book actually helped promote his store around the city and even nationally. He was a great guy and did fun things like have barbecue pits available in the parking lots during certain holidays. But he went out of business because he couldn't get many customers. "He suggested that being highlighted as a Black-owned business might have hurt [his store]."
For example, back when it was still open, one lady coming out of the dollar store next door said, "You know that place ain't Black-owned. No way is that big store Black. I ain't stupid. Did you hear that on the radio? That it's Black? ... I'm not giving them crackuhs a dime of my money." The author wrote a whole chapter called "The Trouble Is Us" about anti-Black racism in Blacks.
That store owner did everything right, and it still couldn't work. That really pisses me off.
I can't really recommend the book because it's mostly about the author planning for the experiment to become part of a huge fabulous movement before they had even started trying it out themselves and even as they were facing disappointments and stresses. And then getting disillusioned but still insisting on making a big, famous movement.
But I can recommend trying to aim some of your money toward causes you care about because you might discover cool things you wouldn't have known about otherwise.
The subtitle of this book is One Family's Quest to Buy Black in America's Racially Divided Economy. This Black couple observed that a lot more money flows out of the Black community than into it, they realized they were part of the problem, and so they challenged themselves to buy only from Black-owned businesses as much as possible for a year.
Unlike No Impact Man's project, this did turn out to be as hard as it sounds. Although they did find some new businesses they loved, and some of them were even still open at the end of the year, mostly it was just rough. They were afraid to go into some places and they had real trouble finding some things.
The most heart breaking story was about a grocery store they found. They found exactly one decent Black-owned grocery store in all of Chicago. A guy had opened it in a lower-income Black neighborhood to give back to the neighborhood, and the authors of the book actually helped promote his store around the city and even nationally. He was a great guy and did fun things like have barbecue pits available in the parking lots during certain holidays. But he went out of business because he couldn't get many customers. "He suggested that being highlighted as a Black-owned business might have hurt [his store]."
For example, back when it was still open, one lady coming out of the dollar store next door said, "You know that place ain't Black-owned. No way is that big store Black. I ain't stupid. Did you hear that on the radio? That it's Black? ... I'm not giving them crackuhs a dime of my money." The author wrote a whole chapter called "The Trouble Is Us" about anti-Black racism in Blacks.
That store owner did everything right, and it still couldn't work. That really pisses me off.
I can't really recommend the book because it's mostly about the author planning for the experiment to become part of a huge fabulous movement before they had even started trying it out themselves and even as they were facing disappointments and stresses. And then getting disillusioned but still insisting on making a big, famous movement.
But I can recommend trying to aim some of your money toward causes you care about because you might discover cool things you wouldn't have known about otherwise.
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on 2015-02-19 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-02-19 03:52 pm (UTC)I've read that microlenders (to poor people in third-world countries) charge super high interest rates, too. I had thought this was an awesome way to donate money because they get the money back to re-lend. But a friend of mine prefers Give Directly, a charity which does the same kind of thing but without requiring repayment.