Member-only story

Why we should all support Black Pound Day

Black Pound Day promotes spending with black businesses. And everyone, including non-blacks, should get behind it

ALaw
4 min readJun 27, 2020

Black Pound Day is a powerful initiative created by artist and DJ, Swiss. It encourages a monthly day of spending in the black community and the championing of black owned businesses. Yet the drivers for Black Pound Day, and why it’s necessary, need to be realised to understand why it’s so important.

When we consider the tools of oppression against a community, capitalism is often one of the most effective vehicles in achieving that. Denying financial freedom and self sufficiency to a community, while consolidating the economic strength within a ruling class, has been an effective means of leveraging control throughout history. For the black diaspora, this has been a common tale.

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash

If the power of economic freedom for the black community was ever doubted, one only has to look at Black Wall Street and its fate via the Tulsa race riot in 1921.

Black Wall Street was a self reliant and self contained black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It included banks, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, cinemas and all the other amenities that a community requires. Consequently, the community was a bastion of black economic…

--

--

Responses (1)