G2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020
never apply for financing,
because they don’t believe they
would be approved, according
to a 2019 survey of small
businesses by the Federal
Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The
Fed report also said that, on
average, Black business owners
were approved for smaller loans
than comparable White
business owners.
There’s an expression often
repeated in the Black
community: When White people
catch a cold, Black people get
pneumonia.
This colloquialism equally
applies to Black businesses
struggling to survive the
coronavirus recession — after
already being at a disadvantage
because of decades of
discrimination in lending and
other business practices.
Because of the pandemic, the
number of businesses in the
United States plummeted by
22 percent from February to
April, according to a working
paper written by Robert Fairlie,
an economics professor at the
University of California at Santa
Cruz, and circulated by the
National Bureau of Economic
Research. The drop was the
largest on record. Black
businesses were hit especially
hard, with a 41 percent drop to
640 ,000 from 1.1 million.
In two separate tests, the
nonprofit National Community
Reinvestment Coalition found
that Black people seeking small-
business loans under
coronavirus relief programs
were treated less favorably than
Whites — even when they had
stronger financial profiles.
“Lenders not only
discouraged the Black testers
from applying for a loan, but
simultaneously encouraged
similarly situated White testers
to apply for one or more loan
products,” the first NCRC report
said, noting that this
discrimination violates the
Equal Credit Opportunity Act.
The pandemic has Black
businesses fighting for their
lives. We can’t afford to lose
them.
Our neighborhoods need
business owners like Brodie,
who feel a sense of purpose —
not merely to make money but
to uplift the community. They
become stalwarts of the
community who carry on
despite the obstacles. They
make a difference that goes well
beyond their bottom lines.
Sincerely,
MichelleReaders can write to Michelle
Singletary c/o The Washington Post,
1301 K St. NW, Washington, DC- Her email address is
[email protected].
Follow her on Twitter (@SingletaryM)
or Facebook (fa cebook.com/
MichelleSingletary).
Editor: Suzanne Goldenberg • Art Director: Audrey Valbuena • Photo Editors: Bronwen Latimer and Annaliese Nurnberg • E-mail: [email protected] • T elephone: 2 02-334-9800 • Mail: The Washington Post, Sunday
Business, 1301 K St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071 • Advertising: Noelle Wainwright, 202-334-7610, [email protected]BUSINESSDilbert Scott Adams
following up will not help her
chances of getting hired. And if
she somehow made a bad
impression, hounding your
department head on her behalf
won’t do you any favors.
If your company fills its open
positions, you might ask your
boss if it’s all right to informally
let your acquaintance know a
decision has been made. But
again, that’s the employer’s
obligation — not yours.
[email protected]feel comfortable doing that, but I
want to be considerate. Am I
obligated to follow up with my
department head?
Karla: Nope. You’re not a
recruiter; you’re someone who
granted a favor for an
acquaintance. Even if she was
your best friend and you sang her
praises when making
introductions, all
communication beyond that
point is strictly between the job
seeker and the employer. YourReader 2: The wife of a friend
of my boyfriend works in the
same industry as I do and has
been looking for a job. My
department head recently
mentioned that we’re short-
staffed and asked if any of us
knew of someone to recommend.
I put the job seeker in touch with
my department head.
Weeks later, I am getting
requests through my boyfriend
to follow up at work about the
job seeker’s application. I don’tand how effectively she can
persuade your boss to take a
more hands-off role. A raise in
exchange for doing the boss’s job
would probably be out of the
question; being allowed to do
your job without his interference
would have to be its own reward.
If that seems like too many “ifs”
for too little payoff, putting out
feelers for a better opportunity at
another employer might be the
simplest solution for you,
pandemic or no.take your boss’s place. But your
organization chief might not
have the heart to fire anyone in
this market, or she may be wary
of making any move that could
be read as age discrimination
against an over- 40 manager.
(Such as, for example, attributing
his learned helplessness to age.
The Peter Principle transcends
demographics.)
Your elaborate workarounds
might even be compounding the
problem. Until his incompetence
affects her directly — say, with a
sudden mass exodus of burned-
out employees or a significant
failure on his watch — she has
little incentive to make further
effort.
But an employer that isn’t
willing to kick a bad boss out
might be willing to nudge him
upstairs.
Even if no one wants your
boss’s position, you all seem to
have figured out how to divide
his job among you already. How
might your chief react if you and
your colleagues diplomatically
presented her with (1) specific
examples of how the boss’s
mismanagement has cost the
company time, money or both,
followed by (2) a coordinated
plan to grant each of you
ownership of a separate task or
responsibility, with the bad boss’s
revised job being to sit back and
let you all make him look good?
Your chance of success with
this “soft coup” depends on how
well you and your colleagues can
organize, how receptive your
new chief executive is to
unsolicited business strategiesReader 1: I work
for an inept boss.
He is disorganized
and constantly
late for calls and
meetings. His
knowledge and
skill level are low,
his judgment is
poor and he
actually impedes
work. Everyone
on his team is frustrated and
exhausted from doing
workarounds.
When the organization got a
new chief last year, she asked us
for our thoughts about our boss.
We were hopeful she would make
changes. After a few months,
however, she told us she knows
he needs to improve, but she
doesn’t have any choice because
no one else within the
organization wants his job. She
sent him to management
training, but there has been no
improvement. He’s in his 50s, so I
don’t think he’s going to change.
Do we just accept this and
continue to work around him? In
the era of covid-19, leaving is
probably not an option. Any
words of wisdom?
Karla: A dim bulb isn’t going
to change itself. And rotating the
room around it instead is terribly
inefficient. But those seem to be
the options your chief executive
prefers over the most direct
solution.
Ironically, with covid-19,
there’s probably never been a
better opportunity to find
someone outside the
organization who would gladly
If your inept boss is dragging down team, try a ‘soft coup’ to take some of his job
Work
Advice
KARLA L.
MILLER
Dear Reader,
I’d like to share
with you why
Black businesses
matter. In
particular, I want
to tell you about
James Brodie.
Brodie, as all
his customers
called him, was
my brothers’
barber when they were growing
up. He gave them their first
haircuts. He was like so many
Black entrepreneurs who strive
for self-sufficiency, inspiring
others to build wealth through
business ownership. They are
the unsung neighborhood
heroes who sell real estate or
insurance, own beauty salons or
barbershops and run funeral
homes, corner convenience
stores, medical practices, banks,
bookstores and restaurants.
Among them are success
stories, but many Black
businesses have struggled
against discriminatory
obstacles.
On strict instructions from
my grandmother, Big Mama,
Brodie could only give my
identical twin brothers a buzz
cut, even into young adulthood.
No shaped Afros. No fades. No
high-tops. No designs etched
into their hair.
Big Mama shunned styles,
whether in a haircut or
clothing, that could be
considered “too Black.” She
wasn’t rejecting our culture; she
feared my brothers would fall
prey to racial profiling or be
denied a job simply for the
decision to wear their hair a
certain way.
Because Brodie never could
tell my brothers apart, he would
just call each one “Twin.”
Mitchell, the younger twin by
two minutes, had epilepsy, and
his frequent seizures made it
difficult for him to work. When
Mitchell was between jobs,
Brodie would cut his hair on
credit. “Pay me when you can,”
Brodie would tell him.
Once, Mitchell was
hospitalized after being hit by a
truck while riding his bike.
Brodie went to the hospital to
cut his hair for free. My
grandmother hadn’t asked him
to do it. He just knew she would
want my brother, lying in a
coma, to still look presentable.
Like so many Black
businesses, Brodie’s barbershop
doubled as a community center.
Parents would drop off their
sons and come back hours later
after they had run their
Saturday-morning errands.
Unlike in the White-owned
stores, you could stand around
in Brodie’s shop and chat or
talk “smack.” You weren’t
targeted as a potential thief
just because of the color of
your skin.
Tragically, Brodie was killed
during an attempted robbery at
his shop over the 1992
Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
He was 58. His son, Troy, who
started a jewelry business in the
back of the barbershop, says he
was comforted by the number of
Michelle
Singletary
THE COLOR
OF MONEY
economic exclusion, and the
erasure of communities where
Blacks had attained some
measure of affluence were the
customary aims of a wave of
massacres conducted by
Whites,” William Darity and
Kirsten Mullen write in “From
Here to Equality: Reparations
for Black Americans in The
Twenty-First Century.” One
example: “The horrific 1921
massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
razed the prosperous Black
Greenwood community, a so-
called ‘Black Wall Street,’ ” the
authors write.
These riots robbed Black
communities of entrepreneurial
enterprises and the jobs that
helped stabilize neighborhoods.
You might argue that these
racially motivated attacks
happened too long ago to matter
now. However, burned-down,
Black-owned businesses have
since been replaced with White-
owned predatory operations,
such as payday-loan stores that
trap Black borrowers in cycles
of debt.
Racist lending practices have
also reduced access to capital
for Black businesses.
A significant percentage of
minority-owned companiesimprisoned for vagrancy or
other trumped-up charges, they
were hired out to White
plantation owners or
businesses in a system called
convict leasing. The living and
working conditions were
deplorable. The puny wages
paid for their labor went to
state governments. This was
the beginning of the mass
incarceration of Black men,
which, like slavery, has
contributed to the emotional
and economic instability of
Black families for generations.
Black Codes blocked many
African Americans from
running businesses and kept
them from skilled trades in
which they could be their own
bosses.
Under political pressure, in
the late 19th century, Black
Codes gave way to equally
oppressive Jim Crow laws and
other discriminatory legislation
that further stunted the growth
of Black businesses.
During the early 20th
century, Black communities that
did manage to prosper —
teeming with Black-owned
businesses — became the target
of White mobs.
“Political intimidation,know, people always saying that
most Black men are not able to
hold on to a job or business. It
gives us pride to be able to walk
into a Black business and be
able to take our savings and our
money that we make and spend
it in an African American
establishment.”
But to be a Black business
owner in America means
enduring relentless racist
roadblocks.
Let’s talk about “Black Codes,”
restrictive laws in the South
that specifically targeted Blacks
after the abolition of slavery. If
Whites couldn’t enslave people,
then they wanted rules that
would limit Blacks’ legal rights.
Blacks wanted to work for
themselves. Whites still wanted
cheap labor.
The 13th Amendment in 1865
abolished slavery and
involuntary servitude — “except
as a punishment for crime
whereof the party shall have
been duly convicted.”
So vagrancy laws were
passed that criminalized
joblessness, even though
Whites were often the ones
keeping Blacks — mostly Black
men — from gainful
employment. Once Blacks wereBlack customers who shared
stories of all the things his
father had done for them. Upon
learning that one young man
couldn’t afford a tux for his
senior prom, Brodie paid for the
rental and cut his hair for free
for the event.
When Brodie died, “many of
the guys wanted to get their hair
cut for the funeral but didn’t,”
his son recalled. They felt it was
wrong, even disrespectful to
Brodie.
When I asked my brother
Michael, the older twin, what
Brodie meant to him, he told me
that a lot of Black boys and men
who didn’t have fathers looked
to Brodie as a father figure.
This gentle, 5-foot-8, brown-
skinned man — whose clippers
were almost like an extension of
his right hand — inspired
Michael to start his own
security company. For a while,
the company provided extra
income for Michael’s family in
addition to his full-time job as a
plant manager in a correctional
facility. Michael is now vice
president of security for the
Maryland Jockey Club.
“Seeing Brody as a Black
businessman went against the
stigma,” Michael said. “YouBlack businesses are fighting for their
lives. We can’t a≠ord to lose them.
ELIANA RODGERS FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTSincerely, Michelle: In a 10-part
series, Michelle Singletary gets
personal about misconceptions
involving race and inequality. Visit
wapo.st/sincerely-michelle to read
more. Up next: “Five-star” lifestyles.