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Resurrecting Black Business in America
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18406 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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9 / 1990 |
3,227 Words |
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John Sibley Butler
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Growing emphasis is being placed around the country on the importance of business enterprise for black Americans. Some argue that business activity is important for a group because it brings a sense of dignity and economic stability to individuals and communities. Others say that blacks need to emphasize business enterprise in order to compete with recent immigrant groups that are reviving economic activities in black neighborhoods. Koreans, Vietnamese, Haitians, and Cubans are taking once-boarded-up and decaying storefronts and breathing economic life into them.
Dry statistics tell the story. The growth of enterprises owned by minorities during this century has been great. Census data indicate that by 1977 they had grown to more than 560,000, with more than $26 billion in gross receipts (money earned). While this represents only 5.7 percent of the total number of enterprises in America and only 3.5 percent of the gross receipts, the number of minority-owned firms by 1977 represented a 30.7 percent increase since 1972. During the same period, their gross receipts grew by 68.5 percent.
The data also show a wide variation in the performance of different minority groups in terms of increases in receipts, over the years. During the period between 1972 and 1977, Asian-Americans reported the largest gain in receipts, 97 percent. This was followed by people of Spanish descent (75 percent) and black Americans (48 percent). More recent data reflect the same trends.
Given these trends and the economic conditions of some black communities in America, people have begun to wonder about black entrepreneurship. What is the state of black business in America, they ask, and what can be done to improve it?
To evaluate the state of black enterprises today, one must understand the historical movement of enterprise in America and black America's relationship to it. It is also important to understand that blacks have one of the first and strongest entrepreneurial traditions in the country, a historical fact that is buried under a blanket of uninformed concepts. Because of this, we must not talk about the creation of black businesses but rather about the resurrection of a forgotten tradition and of the self-help values that created it. To understand whether we are today, we must address changes in the black community, the impact of the ideas of black leadership, and the efforts to re-create the spirit of enterprise among black Americans.
One of the most interesting statistics about American enterprise is that every census taken from 1870 to 1980 shows that people who own their enterprises are more likely to be foreign born. One can certainly understand that in an earlier era, when most of the country was foreign-born. But the pattern persists and more than likely will be reflected in the 1990 census data. But this is also true of other countries today, such as England, and it has been a general pattern throughout the centuries. In the late 1800s, Max Weber, in his influential work titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of capitalism, noted that religious or national minorities were more likely to be driven into entrepreneurial or economic activity because they were excluded from certain jobs or service to the state. He added that in earlier times this had been true of Poles in Russia, Huguenots in France, Quakers and Nonconformists in England, and Jews. In other words, foreigners are more likely to be “outsiders.” Sometimes they
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