Let's all be real folks. But the investments aren't only about making profit—the company also invests in people and in the development of South Africa, both through partnerships with the firms it invests in and through its own mentorship programme, which currently provides individual mentoring and support to 66 young black professionals.
And while the wealth gap is a major factor, research is also showing that even in households with similar financial resources, home equity does not translate equally into start-up capital for Black and white homeowners. Blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, the median household had only 59 cents for every dollar of income in the white household, and African Americans were three times more likely to live in poverty than whites.
Inahsi and Uncle Funky's Daughter are some other Black-owned curly hair product lines I like. The SBA backed $210 million in loans to African American owned small businesses across the 8 Southeastern states last fiscal year. Create more African American owned businesses.
I polled various Black community online spaces to see if they have had to hide their identity — company name, branding, marketing — in order to build their businesses. Some organizations that provide
black owned business listings also go out of their way to help their members secure financing to realize their dreams.
Supporting some of the 2.6 million black-owned businesses in the U.S. is a way for non-black people to show true allyship, says Mullen, rather than just saying they support Black Lives Matter or another movement. Just like any other trade association, most black business directory listing organizations that provide information on the Internet work to do several things.
Here in Detroit the only business that are still predominately Black owned are the hair salons and barber shops. At the same time in the South, African-American laborers transformed the 1889 Edison Phonograph machine into the "Jukebox," the first tool for the wide scale distribution and appropriation of independent black music.
But make no mistake, this only happens if Black-owned businesses are supported on a wider scale, not just by a few people. The most damaging inappropriate behavior faced by African-Americans is Community Division. Only 6 percent of the $16.9 billion Federal Highway Administration contract funding was given to disadvantaged businesses owned by minorities, women, veterans and the disabled.