What Impedes Development Of Large Black-Owned Businesses In U.S.

Taking an elementary point of view, below are five [5] impediments to a successful multi-state Black-owned business.

1. Perplexing priorities: the “slave mentality” and a self-inflicted wound mean blacks have an overly vested interest in white-owned businesses, particularly their luxury goods and services. However, that mentality has spanned over recent decades into other ethnic communities, mostly of Asian descent. Black culture has failed to fully exploit its wealth and business innovations. The old saying “making everybody else rich” is often an idiom used behind closed doors by blacks to describe other blacks who don’t support black-owned businesses.

2. Access to adequate capital: This is essential in that without having enough cash infusion at the outset of starting any business, it could mean the difference between failure and success.

3. “Black-owned” has its drawbacks: Historically, blacks have been consumers and tax-payers, not owners of anything. So, when the dynamic began to change following the development of reconstruction and a paradigm shift in the early 20th century, it seems the weight of racist Jim Crow laws and desegregation [the latter having aided in diluting the interdependent-cultural consumer base] caused black businesses to stumble or flame out altogether.

4. Infrastructure: Black-owned businesses lack significant infrastructure for the production, branding, and promotion of their goods and services.

5. Advertisement reach and frequency: The mainstream media has contributed to the suffocation of black-owned businesses by 1) systematically degrading their goods and services and 2) failing to recognize the many that do exist. They are decades-old practices born from a racist past.