Riverside, CA — The first quarter of 2025 is nearly behind us, and the roller coaster ride we on which we have been placed since the president’s inauguration rolled into multiple lows this week with not just the attempt to end the Department of Education, which will have profound impacts on our community. However, hidden in the noise and chaos of that story, was his removal of a long-standing prohibition of federal contractors to segregate employees.

It is another step in the long game of erasing, if not our being, certainly any human rights we may have, by legalizing segregated facilities, a time we long thought was past us. This is a shot across many bows. But one in particular is the need for the Black community to rediscover its sense of unity and community. Now is the time to be together and forget about the classism and colorism that quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, exists within our community based on the degrees of melanin we display.

I would disagree with some that integration is a failed experiment. I would say, however, that it did take away our focus on serving our own community. Without positing that the era of segregation was good, mostly because it was built in the Jim Crow and pre civil rights times, many Black communities thrived within their own infrastructure economically and socially. Black residents shopped and spent with Black businesses and those Black dollars stayed within the Black community. That’s how communities such as Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma (most famously known as Black Wallstreet), and Hayti, North Carolina, were built and thrived to name a couple.

We are in the midst of economic boycotts to varying degrees against some the country’s largest corporations because of their choice to state out loud that they do not need to consider diversity and representation in their business model. They essentially are saying that we will give them our money regardless of whether they invest in our or not. But in some accounts, the boycotts are having impacts on corporations like Target, who chose to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

According to Forbes, Target’s stock price is down 24%—from 137.40 on Jan. 24, the day Target cut its programs—to 104.70 on March 15. Within that time frame, the stock is down 10% from when the 40-day TargetFast.org was launched by Pastor Jamal Bryant, calling on 100,000 conscientious citizens to fast from spending any money at Target for the 40 days of Lent, beginning Wednesday, March 5.

So, the question for me is, if we can go 40 days of fasting against Target (truthfully, I have not shopped there, nor ordered an item from Amazon, since January, ahead of the official boycotts), why should we ever go back? If we consciously choose to reinvest our money into Black business, we should not stop. Let Target, Nestle, Home Depot, Walmart, etc., go on without us. We need to remind ourselves what we can do and what power we have in keeping our money in our community. Is it inconvenient? Absolutely. But sacrifice and doing the right thing often are.

One of my daughter’s favorite movies when she was young was WALL-E. It’s an animated film about a wayward robot who is trying to find a home and gets caught on a spaceship where humans live because earth has become inhabitable. Sound familiar? But the irony is that all of the humans move without actually walking or exerting any physical movement. So they are all overweight and lazy.

The reason this comes to mind is that the human’s life in the film is all about convenience over effort. As I think about the society we have moved to, we have moved to convenience over effort and morals. In my self reflection on this, I realize I am just as guilty. The COVID pandemic only exacerbated this. Amazon Prime is the big winner, but DoorDash and Grubhub also contribute to the mentality.

But now is the time for us to forego convenience and engage in FUBU. FUBU is an acronym for For Us By (Buy) Us. According to Greenwood, in 2022, the Black economy saw the dollar circulate through the Black community for a mere six hours. That’s six hours before we spent it in other communities. There is no greater time to exert economic community to strengthen our own buying power and building black wealth – Black generational wealth. Since this federal government has made it legal to segregate again, the least we can do is keep our money segregated. We need to hire Black contractors, shop at Black owned business, work together to pool our talents to create Black logistical and transportation networks so we can move money and goods within our community. We have pilots and truck drivers, computer programmers and economic geniuses; we have Black teachers and administrators, and doctors and nurses. You tell me why we need to feed our resources into communities that do not want us.

Here in the Inland Empire, we have CEEM, the Cooperative Economic Empowerment Movement. CEEM’s mission is “to establish true parity for the Black Community. It envisions a future where economic equality isn’t just an ideal, but a lived reality for everyone, regardless of race.” But CEEM also stands as a beacon of cooperative economics. It is a self-governing, democratic entity, wholly owned and operated by its members.” Can you imagine what our communities would look like if we invested into a CEEM in every community?

According to the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, Black consumers’ collective economic power is set to expand dramatically, from about $910 Billion in consumption in 2019 to $1.7 trillion (in nominal dollars) in 2030. Can we imagine the possibilities of giving this administration what it wants and segregating our money into our own community. Can we imagine creating a Black Wallstreet in every community where we live, shop and invest.

A boycott is fine. It sends a message to be sent. But a strategic realignment of resources would be the real answer. We know that the attempt is to take away any and every bit of progress we have made over the past 60 years. OK, bet. Given that the wealth of this country was generated with free, unpaid labor, and yet, it still cannot succeed without our contributions, what more evidence do we need to give it what it is asking for.