Welcome to Black Business Month. This is the month where we celebrate black business and all of its accomplishments. I believe that while this month is built to promote black business, it should serve as a time to enlighten all of us about the trials and tribulations of what it takes to be great in America. I have seen charts that underscore how difficult it has been to be black in America. From the 200 plus years of slavery of the African American, to the 100 years of Jim Crow laws, to the almost present-day redlining of banking and housing laws that prevented blacks from owning the two things that create wealth in America:: a business loan and a home loan.
All of this has occurred and no one wants to talk about it anymore. Let me give you a real-world analogy. When I was a kid growing up in Augusta, Ga. I used to cut the grass every week until I left and went away to college. As my parents age, they now spend $100 per month to get their grass cut. For almost twenty years they saved an aggregate of that $100 monthly. That equated to over $24,000 that they acquired in savings. This same analogy applies to the free labor that blacks provided to this country for over 200 years. Imagine what that bill is in today’s numbers. So yes, America owes us a lot!
Instead of discussing this repayment or finding a way to right the wrongs it has been decided that we will no longer talk about what has made America the world’s most powerful nation. We say, let’s move on even though the white world of America has many generations of a head start.
Meanwhile, diversity is a bad word. So much so that those of us that are affected by it are beginning to drink the Kool-Aid of the great marketing job that has been done to confound the issue.
This discussion rings the loudest in perhaps the most diverse metropolitan area in all of America. That area is better known as Miami-Dade County. The population is not majority white, it is majority Hispanic. The latest figures show that Miami-Dade County is 13% White, 14.0% Black, 1% Asian, 68% Hispanic. You can walk the streets of my beloved Miami, and our people are proudly Hispanic or Black. The white community is the third minority. So, let’s say it correctly. Nationally Miami is a minority majority community and I think that is wonderful!
This is the only good thing about the political winds that are blowing today. They are providing a much-needed sympathetic view to us as minorities. The Hispanic population is beginning to embrace that we are, perhaps, one in the same. So, while this is Black Business Month our national politics has made this month colorblind for the minority-majority in Miami. Keep this up national leadership and you are going to see the strength of oppressive politics rise up.
So yes, happy Minority-Majority month.
Bill Diggs is the executive director of the Miami-Dade Economic Advocacy Trust. Log on to www.MiamiDade. gov/EconomicAdvocacyTrust for more information about the agency’s housing division.
