Free Our Black Year by Maggie Anderson Page A

addicted to, and John was dying without his bagels. I missed my sundried tomatoes, feta and boursin cheese, and ahi tuna. Sometimes the store did not have skim milk or specialty foods for kids. And we couldn’t always depend on it for basic personal hygiene or cleaning products, like toothpaste, baby wash, bubble bath, deodorant soap, bathroom cleaner, or detergent and especially pull-ups—a problem I never had at my local Dominick’s or Jewel.
    These cold realities—that buying from businesses in Black neighborhoods doesn’t necessarily work, that so few Black-owned businesses actually exist, and that even competitive Black-owned establishments have shortcomings—became clear in the early days of The Ebony Experiment. Uncovering the reasons why would take longer.

Chapter 3
    Leakage
    T HE FORMAL TERM FOR WHAT’S HAPPENING IN BLACK neighborhoods is “leakage.” I wasn’t familiar with the word—except in the context of diapers and roofs—until days before we embarked on The Ebony Experiment, when I met with Gus Tucker, director of the Chicago Urban League’s Entrepreneurship Center. I conveyed to him the details of a recent instance in which we’d been accused of being racist. He said that we needed to make people understand that the central concern in empowering struggling Black neighborhoods wasn’t as simple as choosing to support Black businesses over non-Black ones. Rather, it was about stanching the rapid exit of dollars—and much needed economic power—from these communities.
    His statement prompted me to do some research of my own. One of the first things I uncovered was a report from 2004 showing that for every $100 flowing into an average underserved Black community, about $95 leaves, either by being spent at local businesses owned by “outsiders” or at businesses outside the community. I read about the Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, located in the area known as Greenwood. At the beginning of the twentieth century, because of segregation, these residents had virtually no contact with the city’s White community yet still generated vibrant wealth. In those days a dollar would remain in the community for up to three years before circulating
elsewhere—as opposed to the few hours it now remains in a Black neighborhood.
    Just as illuminating was a radio piece produced in 2009 by WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s National Public Radio outlet, that examined retail leakage in thirty Chicago neighborhoods. Its findings: “Thirty neighborhoods have more than 50 percent retail leakage. Of those, 20 are on the South Side. Almost all are majority-Black neighborhoods. In 2007, residents in these neighborhoods spent a collective $3.8 billion outside of their own South Side communities.”
    And in a book about Anacostia, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, DC, author Michael H. Shuman notes that in 1998 the total income of all households there was $370 million a year. Where were all those dollars going?
    â€œMost of this money quickly departs in the hands of landlords, business owners, and bankers who live in more upscale parts of town,” Shuman writes. “The principal affliction of poor communities in the United States is not the absence of money, but its systematic exit.”
    Like many Blacks aware of economic disparities between us and everyone else, John and I were familiar with the oft-cited statistic that only 5 percent of the money spent in Black communities stayed there. I thought I would need only a few minutes of online research to verify that number, but I soon realized that little information exists about the economy of Black neighborhoods. There is a flood of data about problems in the Black community related to health, education, crime, drugs, unemployment, and poverty, but there is nothing about the fact that outsiders own most of the thriving businesses in Black neighborhoods. I found a couple of