Support the Rev-elution by contributing at: Cash App, $CMizzou, or Venmo, @Carl-Kenney-1
My friend Nia Wilson, AdeToyesi Ibijoke AdeBanjo on Facebook, asked an important question. “So, when are we going to talk about the Black institutions that were built during a time when racial hatred cost our ancestors their lives?”
Wilson’s question stirred a bunch of thoughts about my family’s business.
My grandpa was a pimp in Harlem, New York. Harry Warwick left my mama and her 11 siblings in Bunceton, Missouri after grandma died during my mama’s childbirth. He returned years later and was arrested and found guilty twice for murder. James Kenney, my other grandpa, supported his wife and nine children by farming and selling moonshine in McBaine and Rocheport, Missouri.
Finding ways to survive comes with being Black in America. The common ways to make ends meet are limited by rules created to keep Black people in places to maintain white privilege. Growing up, my daddy worked as a custodian at Shelter Insurance Company. Back then it was called M.F.A. The name changed as the company grew, but daddy mopped floors until I graduated from college. He took a second job mopping floors at an elementary school because the pay wasn’t enough.
Watching my daddy plow through days gave me a vision of what I didn’t want to do for a living. My grandpas and my daddy were trapped in a life of doing just enough to provide for their families. I seemed stuck in between a life of crime and mopping floors with little thought about what would happen if I got married with children.
It was the cruel season of the Vietnam conflict. The images on television conjured deep thoughts of a deeper divide that war couldn’t fix. I was just old enough to be inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream. I was more captivated by Malcolm X and his call for liberation - “by any means necessary”. Their deaths blocked my imagination, fostering fears of perpetual disappointment.
Everything I wanted came with a price. My daddy couldn’t afford the cost of my dreams. The emotional scars were worse than reality. I was told an education would propel me away from my fractured imagination. It cost too much. Would it be worth it given the limits lingering in my head? Money for tuition. Money for books and supplies. Scholarships were offered to help, but fear trapped me in a vicious circle of perceived disappointment.
I kept thinking of the family business. I could sale drugs to make a living. It would help minimize the gap between me and my white peers. It was the lesson of Black Exploitation movies. Survival for a Black man required functioning within an alternative Black economic system. Everyone needs a hustle – bootleg video and audio tapes sold at the barbershop, mama’s cakes and pies, haircuts and hairdos styled in a back room, rent parties or a liquor house with fried chicken and fish sandwiches sold to people playing cards while listening to soul music.
Many hustles are illegal. Pushing weed and deejaying were my side hustles. I wasn’t alone in building a street drug business to fulfill my version of the Black American dream. I wanted a lifestyle of the rich and famous. My desire for more was rooted in the Horatio Alger myth, the one about a white boy who becomes wealthy through hard work. The real cause of his success was an accident that worked to his advantage.
One thing was clear, you can’t get rich by marketing a business for white people.
Virtually everyone in my family had a side hustle. My cousin Peewee collected garbage for families outside the city pick up area. Doodle Bug, Cornbread, Gerad and me cut grass in the Spring and Summer, raked leaves in the Fall and shoveled snow during the winter season. Mama handcrafted hats and Raggedy Ann dolls before opening a seamstress business.
Black people call it a hustle because it’s what you do in addition to other things you do to make a living. It’s a part of Black culture going back to as long as my family records take me. Many Black women washed and ironed the clothes of white people. We are the children of mamas who cleaned houses because there was no other work for Black women. We call it a hustle, but these are businesses.
It all points to another layer to the impact of racism. To survive as a Black person living in America, it often takes a hustle. These hustles feed an alternative Black economic system driven by illegal businesses. It’s a system brewed within a culture intent on cultivating generations of business owners. Black people aren’t limited by minimum wage pay. They deserve more. They need more. They demand more, but Black people will do whatever it takes when the system fails to provide equal opportunity.
While others weren’t paying attention, Black people have been building side hustles to confront America’s horrific economic gap. Black people continue to earn less than white people. It may take generations to catch up. In the meantime, Black people depend on side hustles to build their version of the American dream.
I call that pro-business.
No comments:
Post a Comment