Q:What are you trying to achieve?
A: A healthier Black business community can only enhance the Black community at large.
In addition to the often quoted "by any means necessary", Malcom X said, "we cannot
become acceptable to others until we become acceptable to ourselves".
Q: Why should a business pay you to create a link when so
many free listings are available?
A: A business shouldn't pay for a listing with us if it is
satisfied with the present level and character of traffic to its website. However, if
a business desires to increase the traffic of buyers poised to do business rather than parties
merely surfing the internet, we provide an organized, efficient means to deliver them
to a business's website.
Q: Why are your listing rates so much lower than others?
A: That's simple. We answer by responding with a question. "Who makes more money, WalMart or Neiman Marcus?"
Q: Aren't you afraid of charges of racism?
A: No, some of our best friends (and suppliers)
are not Black. In all seriousness, does Pat Robertson worry about criticism
from the Gay community?
Q: Why is your text often large?
A: Because all of our site's visitors are not "20-20-20", twenty years old with 20-20 vision.
Q: Do you really believe you can make a difference?
A: Contrary to popular belief, movements
which result in real social change are never the result of a singular group decision.
Instead, they are begat by an accumulation of individuals acting upon personal
decisions which direct their individual behavior in a similar manner toward a similar goal. We are,
and encourage our site's visitors to be focused on, and responsible for, (quoting an
old song again) "the man (or woman) in the mirror".
If competent Black businesses fail to prosper, it is because we, as
individual Black consumers, have chosen that outcome. We, at BizBlack.info, have chosen our
path. We will make a difference in our own lives and the lives of those who utilize
this site to act in a ethnically responsible manner. Those who fail to look
forward to probable social consequences to the Black community of current
political and corporate mind sets will act otherwise. They are beyond
our control or concern.
Q: Aren't current models for effecting social change
sufficient?
A: At this time yes, but in our view they will
become increasingly less effective. The social, economic, and political landscape
of America is in a state of upheaval. The footings upon
which Black America has always dealt with white America are crumbling as this
is being written.
Current strategies rely heavily on the Black populace's position as the predominate
minority group in America. Numerically, if this is not already untrue, it will become untrue in the near future. The economic strength of Hispanics will, in all likelihood,
eclipse that of Black America in the not too distant future. These two occurrences
will rearrange seating at the "American bargaining table". Who will non-minority politicians
and corporations seek to satisfy first in our world of shrinking resources?
Appeals calling for atonement, reparations, etc., for slavery, Jim Crow, and
other past racial sins will increasingly be made to bodies having Hispanics and
other minority group members. How will they respond to these appeals when
neither they, nor their ancestors, had anything to do with same? Similarly,
what will the effectiveness be of such appeals when made to foreign investors increasingly
gaining control of American companies?
An easily foreseeable consequence of the foregoing is the redirection of a
portion, if not most, of the political and corporate largesse upon which many
Black institutions are now dependent.
These two inevitables beg the question, is Black America prepared for
the future on our horizon?*
