New Year’s resolutions often involve giving up something bad for you: cigarettes, alcohol, junk food.
John & Maggie Anderson decided to give up crackers, pledging to “only support black owned businesses.” They’ve even hired a public relations firm and created a website (ebonyexperiment.com) suggesting other African-Americans do the same.
The Andersons claim they’re just trying to help their ‘community.’ But admit that they sometimes have to travel miles out of their way in order to find black owned businesses. In other words, when they say community they don’t mean their neighborhood, they mean the ‘black’ community.
The racism should be obvious even to Al Sharpton (but it’s probably not).
To see just how racist ‘buying black’ is all you need to do is listen to the way in which supporters defend it. Deborah Gabriel, a writer for americanchronicle.com, claims this isn’t “racism in reverse” (implying blacks can’t be racist) and that “Just because there is no public declaration does not mean than many whites do not ‘buy white’ on a routine basis. It is simply because whiteness is invisible within the mainstream of everyday life and is so universalised that it goes unnoticed.” And here I thought I was shopping at Walmart for the low low prices. And James Clingman (frostillustrated.com) had the following epiphany: “Black folks did not invent nor do we practice racism; we only react to it. For this effort to be characterized as racist is short-sighted, ignorant, incendiary and disingenuous.”
Unfortunately, this mentality exists within much, not all, but much of the black community. Believing they are incapable of racism because the do not have the so-called-power. Well there is nothing empowering about playing the victim.
