Calls to ‘buy black’ are boosting businesses

Lists of places to patronize have gone viral on social media.

Following weeks of protests, the fight for racial justice has taken on many forms. Among them are calls for consumers to “Buy Black.”

Lists of coffee shops, eateries and retailers to patronize have gone viral on Twitter and Instagram. Official Black Wall Street, an app that curates black-owned retailers, got 8,000 downloads and more than 30,000 Instagram followers just last week.

Between February and April, 41% of black businesses shut their doors for good, compared to 17% of white businesses, a paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found. Black and Latino entrepreneurs receive only 1% of startup funding, and many black business-owners didn’t initially qualify or receive government assistance during the pandemic.

“There remains an economic divide between black and white America,” Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland said at an oversight hearing Wednesday on the Paycheck Protection Program. Cardin, the top Democrat on the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee, said he’s pushing the Trump administration to provide more data to ensure black-owned small businesses are not getting left behind.

“A lot of black founders knew that (the coronavirus) could potentially seal their fate,” said Amira Rasool, who runs a retailer that sells luxury apparel from African designers. “They could potentially be put out of business, and not because they didn’t have a great product or because something was wrong with the way they ran their business. Everybody knows that when it rains in certain areas, it pours in others.”

Rasool, who launched her company in 2018, was in the process of raising capital before the pandemic hit. Sales slowed and the 24-yearold entrepreneur considered taking on a second job. Then a week into the protests, her fate started to change.

“My phone kept going off,” she said. It was her Shopify account alerting her to incoming orders. In the last week, she’s seen seven times her usual sales. The company’s Instagram followers doubled to 10,000 in just a week.

“This has the potential to save a lot of companies that would have not made it through the effects of the pandemic,” Rasool said.

It’s not the first time there have been calls to Buy Black, but previous attempts haven’t had as much reach outside of the black community, business owners say. This time, people like Justin Ohadi, who is white, are “consciously deciding to go to black businesses more,” he said.

Black retailers hope buying habits stick this time. “I don’t want this to be a moment in time when people just do certain things and then in a couple months time, or six months time or a year’s time, people have forgotten about us again,” said Carly Cushnie, who runs a luxury apparel brand.

DIWANG VALDEZ / THE NEW YORK TIMES 2019 At businesses such as Just Add Honey in Atlanta, entrepreneurs in the Buy Black movement are creating marketplaces that pool black-owned brands in one space.