Every time I turn the radio on, a song is playing that tells me that it’s cool to buy expensive cognacs, drugs, overly priced cars or clothing. What is so cool about wasting money? Nothing!
This capitalistic society that we live in convinces us, through celebrities, radio and television, that being in debt is okay, and that buying stuff that you don’t need is good because it stimulates the economy. Businesses even spend millions of dollars in ads to convince people to waste their money on fictitious deals like Black Friday.
In a capitalistic society, your money is power. Therefore, you shouldn’t be so quick to give it away because it leaves you powerless.
In a recent article by Kimberly Amadeo titled “What is Black Friday,” she states that 92 million people shopped on Black Friday last year. Black folks are lined up outside of Wal-Mart like everyone else, waiting to give our power away to yet another corporation. We spend all of our money the holiday weekend padding the pockets of Sam Walton’s children, yet the African-American unemployment rate is high.
Some black scholars associate the high black unemployment rate with the lack of black-owned businesses. If more of us owned our own businesses, we would have the power to hire and support our own instead of asking the government or someone else to do it.
For example, Jackie Robinson was a great breakthrough for our culture, but it eventually hurt our communities by giving away our ownership and power. The Negro Leagues employed many African Americans, and the integration of baseball killed the Negro League, leaving many black folks unemployed. We then had to start lobbying for jobs within the integrated MLB because we no longer had any ownership or hiring power.
We have to get that type of Negro League power back as a culture. The younger generation of black men has the power to change today’s current dilemma by becoming financially literate and making conscious decisions to become business owners and job creators instead of workers for someone else.
The days of carrying your lunch pail to work and retiring after 30 years is a thing of the past. I met a guy at the Ram’s football game not long ago who told me that he had worked for Boeing since 1992 and had received a pink slip that previous Friday stating that he was being laid off. He said at the age of 55 it is almost impossible to find a job making the same money that he had been making for the last 21 years.
Situations like that are becoming common today in America. Now is the time to learn how to save and invest, as opposed to spend and waste, your money so you can be like Sam Walton’s heirs and not the guy at the Rams game.
