Racism or Capitalism
Racism or Capitalism that is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles. And by opposing end them. To buy black, to spend white no more, and by a purchase to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to – tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To buy, to spend; to spend, perchance to dream.
But is this dream racism or capitalism? Ay, there’s the rub.
My apologies to Shakespearean purists for my unabashed rewrite of his lyrical soliloquy. But the opening scene of act three of Hamlet seemed to fit perfectly into the opening scene of act one of “Ebony Experiment”.
The Ebony Experiment is at this point the commitment of a single upscale black couple to spend their money only in black owned businesses for a year.
The Andersons are a successful couple currently living in an upper middleclass racially mixed suburb of Chicago. Maggie Anderson grew up outside of Miami and earned an MBA and a law degree from the University of Chicago. Her husband John Anderson is a financial advisor who grew up in Detroit and holds a degree from Harvard University and an MBA from Northwestern University.
They decided the best way for them to support the black community was to make an exerted effort to spend their money exclusively in black owned businesses. They are obviously bright folks who knew their idea would be both controversial and challenging.
Maggie drives past numerous grocery stores on her 14 mile trek to Chicago to shop at a black owned grocery store. They travel even farther to get to Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood to buy vitamins from a black owned business there. They even travel to communities as far as 50 miles away to buy gasoline cards from black owned gas stations which they use to fill up their cars locally. Commitment is clearly one quality this couple is not short on.
They have hired a public relations firm to create a web site promoting the Ebony Experiment and have tapped researchers from Northwestern University to study the impact. They are even looking for financial backing to get this experiment out to the masses and see if they can take it beyond the borders of Illinois.
But as committed as they are to the challenge of even finding suitable black businesses in which to shop, they are at the same time being challenged by the slings and arrows of alleged racism.
Some respondents to their web site have gone so far as to threaten to retaliate by ceasing to do any business with black owned companies and to make every effort to avoid hiring black employees.
From what is being portrayed it appears that the Andersons don’t have the same restrictions on how they make their money as they do on how they spend it. But is what the Andersons are doing racist or is it simply capitalism at its finest? Capitalism means that the spender gets to vote with his wallet on what and where he will spend his money. Certainly there are whites that avoid going into black owned stores simply because they are black owned stores. I guess if the whites are considered racist for doing so than the Andersons must be considered racist for doing the exact same thing.
What they are doing is certainly not illegal, at least not yet. And I would have a hard time considering it to be immoral. I am a capitalist through and through and I believe capitalism provides the ultimate voting experience. The Andersons worked hard and now enjoy the fruits of their labors. If they vote to spend those fruits only at a black owned market then so be it.
But while perhaps magnanimous, how could it not be considered racist if their spending decisions are solely racially motivated with the intent to support one community at the expense of another. The Andersons say the Ebony Experiment is not racist.
Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
I guess it depends on the color of the rose.
