“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”
In late April, the Los Angeles Lakers returned a 4.6 million loan they received from the Paycheck Protection Program, a program put in place to help small businesses get through the Covid-19 shutdown. I’m sure you just formed a twisted facial expression... like WTF the Lakers need a bag for?! It wasn’t a mistake. They applied for it, qualified for it, and once they learned the 349 billion for the program had been depleted, they returned it. That and public scrutiny, all was right with the world and we moved on, except something was very wrong. Multiple companies that did not need the assistance applied and received loans. What this did was keep loans away from small businesses that really needed it! CBS reported 40% of black businesses will close due to the pandemic and in the scramble to reallocate the funds there just won’t be enough time to save them.
In 2019, the unemployment rate for Africans Americans was 6.1 that’s 1.6 times the national average of 3.7… Now we’re getting into some scary numbers here! Feel free to throw on Mos Def’s “Mathematics “for proper motivation. Now during this pandemic, the black unemployment rate ballooned to 16.8%. So not only are black people being killed disproportionately by Covid-19, but they’re also being ravaged economically, and the fucking police keep killing us.
While I’ve watched in awe at how many companies now recognize that Black Lives Matter and want to celebrate Juneteenth, I can’t help but to call bullshit on all the press releases. It’s time for America to put its money where its mouth is because if you recognize Juneteenth, surely you recognize it’s time for reparations and not this H.R. 40 nonsense which is clearly not about giving black people an economic seat at America’s table. Oprah’s wealth is not yours or mine. The black rapper, actor, and athlete are not the litmus test for black wealth. The average white family’s net worth is $171,000 in America which is nearly ten times more than the $17,150 net worth of the average black family. Freedman’s Saving Bank, Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the G.I. Bill, the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act, exemption and redlining, have gotten us here. Race and economics are not strange bedfellows in America. They’re one in the same. So, when Stephon “Captain Jack” Jackson says we don’t need basketball right now, as much as it hurts to say, I must agree. He’s right and I must question, did we ever?
“Where dem dollas at”