We don’t think you fight fire with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.

Fred Hampton probably has some good ideas if you look into his stuff.

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"we can and have done better" with historical leaders and movements beloved by their community as examples. "be like malcolm" still works for many black boomers. also it can be an educational moment yay

(dont worry this is not a cracker opinion)

This is tough. Maybe @neera_tanden can opine?

Seriously, though, this is a tough issue. I HATE when minorities or women who own businesses use the “entrepreneur” rhetoric, and act like every random white jackass business owner.

On the other hand, I tend to be a bit of a :LIB: and as long as we have the current system in place, we should redistribute capital away from white people, and white males in particular.

I do think it’s good to support minority owned businesses when possible, but I think there is also a responsibility for us as consumers to make sure employees are paid a living wage and have decent working conditions. If minority owned businesses have known issues in that regard, then we should boycott just as we would white owned businesses. I think the key here as a political movement is to have a place where employees can complain about their employer that is visible to their customers. Like normalize leaving Yelp or Google reviews about your experience - positive or negative. These are just as important in deciding who you want to give your money to as consumer reviews.

There’s also a lot of friction between Asian owned businesses and black patrons, which kind of came to a flashpoint earlier this year. Lots of twitter discourse on that if you’re interested. So it’s not a black and white issue, no pun intended.

Idk if that helps with this conversation at all, but if someone starts a business, puts on a Bluetooth ear thingy and starts acting like a jackass, whether they are Killer Mike, some Italian steakhouse owner in NYC, or a Burmese refugee, they are a jackass.

I also wouldn’t look at it as “putting funds back in the community” that has little to do with this and frankly, a lot of minority owned business that white people who are trying to be woke would support are NOT in disadvantaged communities. In other words, these minority business owners wouldn’t get Kopmala’s student loan forgiveness.

Small business doesn't mean much, semantically. It applies to very different businesses with different extremities of exploitation and class conflict. It groups a small-time business with no employees, like a partnership at a food stall or salon with a corporation with 50 employees where the owners get rich just from owning the means of production. I think that should factor into how you appreciate the role that BIPOC businesses play in the community.

A black landlord can be just as big a piece of shit fucking up the community as a white one and their role is, intrinsically, extremely exploitative if they're making money off of tenants. They might call themselves a local investor or some shit and will probably have a company to shield them from liability. They might even have employees like property managers, people they exploit to exploit tenants.

On the other hand, someone who just wants to start their own restaurant, pays their employees well, has good working conditions, etc... I mean, it's still capitalism and fundamentally exploitative, but having POC-friendly spaces owned by POCs is better than someone from outside the community owning the same space and doing their usual crap. I'm not going to organize around it, but I'm also not going to go out of my way to crap on it, and if there is a choice between patronizing a shop like that vs. one that's more typically exploitative, I'll go to the former.

Though to be clear, this is extremely minor compared to building actual community resiliency. Housing security, food security, good schools, freedom from incarceration, getting rid of organized crime (read: ending the drug war) are all far more beneficial struggles. If you want to add enterprise, co-ops are always an option that is less exploitative as well - there's no need to laud a BIPOC "entrepreneur".

There's a good example of the "small group of exploiters within that minority group" dynamic in the book Evicted by sociologist Matthew Desmond. This excerpt will give you some of the flavor: he describes a black landlord ("Sherrena" -- not her real name) who grinds down her poor black tenants as hard as any landlord would. It's a great antidote to the suggestion that a black landlord is good for black communities, not just the landlord individually. It's also an example of how a black landlord isn't getting more money in black communities at all -- at best, it's just redistributing money from poor black people to a now-rich black person.

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