They’ll Be BLACK Around

A Black response to the Great White Grift.

(Photo by Envato)

Let me tell you what I know for sure.

They will be back. And when they come back, they will be BLACK around.

Black-talking, Black-marketing, Black-imaging, Black-everything-but-actually-Black-investing. Rolling up in our churches, our HBCUs, our cookouts and our culture (uninvited, mind you) with a deck of slides and a budget line called “multicultural engagement.” Hiring a charismatic Black face, giving them a title with “community engagement” in it, and parading them around like proof of life. And we, the most courted, the most copied and the most consumed-from people in this country, will have to decide (one more time) whether we are going to fall for the okie-doke.

I am using the word “Black” on purpose. They have built an entire grift around our cool, our cadence, our color and our loyalty. So if they want to be Black around us, fine. Let us be intentional about being BLACK around ourselves.

White corporate America’s relationship to Black folks has been consistent. They still see us as a commodity whose purpose is to generate wealth for them. When we no longer serve that purpose, our interests are discarded. I call it the Great White Grift. And I want to tell it through the lens of The Wiz.

The Wizard Was Never Real

You remember the story. Dorothy and her crew walk a long road to the Emerald City because they believe the great and powerful Wiz has what they are missing. And when they finally pull back the curtain? There is no wizard. Just a small, scared, ordinary man with a microphone, a smoke machine and a brand. The whole Emerald City was a stage set, designed to keep them walking down a road that would never deliver them home.

Not every corporation is a wizard. There are companies that have actually invested, hired and shown up in good political weather and bad. This essay is not about them. This essay is about serial offenders. The ones that paved their yellow brick roads with our cool, our cadence, our culture and our cash. We made their boots fly, their sodas iconic, their networks into empires. And the moment we got close enough to the door to ask for our share, they tore the road up behind us. Don’t worry…they will be BLACK around as long as it is profitable. That is the whole grift in one line.

Cadillac, FedEx, Target and Them

The cleanest historical example is Cadillac. In 1934, sales had crashed and the brand was about to be discontinued by General Motors. Cadillac quietly lifted its internal ban on Black sales and started courting middle-class Black professionals with cash to spend. Sales jumped within a year. We saved the brand. We made it BLACK cool. We made it the most-referenced car in the entire history of Black music. Decades later, Cadillac leaned all the way in: the “Audacity of Blackness” film and the “Black Future” Escalade campaign. “We see you and celebrate you,” Cadillac told us, “not just during a month, but every day.”

Then came 2025. GM quietly stripped “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from its annual SEC 10-K investor filing. No press release. No statement. They just deleted the language, the way you scrub a phone before you sell it. Even saying the word “diversity” in a legal disclosure was now a liability. And this is not the first time. During the 2009 restructuring, GM cut its Black-owned dealership base by more than half. A whole generation of Black auto wealth, gone in one corporate restructuring.

That is one company, across 90 years, running the same play.

And then there is FedEx. Headquartered in Memphis, a Black-majority American city. In eight months, Tennessee dismantled four institutions of Memphis self-governance: federal agents and the National Guard deployed in September, the Memphis-Shelby County schools takeover, HB 483’s attack on the Shelby County district attorney, and the May 7 congressional map that carves Memphis into three districts. FedEx Corporate PAC has given approximately $1.9 million to Tennessee state lawmakers since 2009. The company has not said one word. FedEx bought the politicians. The politicians drew the Jim Crow map. The bill has come due in the very city that built FedEx into what it is.

FedEx is far from alone. McDonald’s, where we hold a significant share of the customer base, ended its DEI goals and cut its chief diversity officer role. Walmart killed its $100 million Racial Equity Center. Target broke its $2 billion pledge to Black-owned businesses (we are still boycotting them as I write this). Meta gutted the DEI function that Black creators built Reels on. PepsiCo, the company Black consumers literally saved in the 1940s, walked away. Amazon ran the same script.

Let’s be honest about what this looks like in plain terms. We are out here working hard in these streets, holding down households on half a paycheck. Then we hand our hard-earned money right back to the same companies that flatter us, style us up, post us on Instagram and take the bag. They have been playing us like a good con artist plays their exploited victims. Studying our wounds to know exactly where to press, learning our hopes to know exactly what to promise. Employment is the floor, not the ceiling. Slavery had 100% employment. The real questions are: Who owns? Who decides? Whose generational wealth is being built?

Behind the Curtain

Black exploitation has never been a consequence of corporate greed. It has always been the strategy.

The same companies right now lining up to build ballrooms for Trump and donating to inaugural funds are the same companies that will come knocking on Black America’s door the moment their bottom line drops.

Fortune 1000 companies pledged $340 billion toward racial equity between 2020 and 2022. Five years later, the majority of that money never reached our communities.

The consumer market shrinks. Boards get nervous. Somebody pulls up a chart showing that Black consumer spending is the most resilient segment in the American economy. The “multicultural strategy” deck comes back out of the drawer. The same executives who were dismantling DEI six months earlier suddenly want to “re-engage authentic communities.” New scholarship announcement. New supplier diversity press release. New Super Bowl spot with a Black director and a Black-coded song. Same playbook. New paint. We saw it after the 1930s, after the 1970s, after 2008. We will see it again. And these Black-targeted campaigns, when they emerge from a downturn, are not value propositions. They are closer to usury. A predatory loan dressed up as a love letter.

Maya Angelou said, When you know better, you do better. That is the entire purpose of this essay. I am not writing it so we can be angry. I am writing it so we can turn our anger into righteous indignation and a real strategy to build Black wealth and redirect our dollars.

America Has Always Had a Grand Wizard

In 1912, W.E.B. Du Bois left the Socialist Party to endorse Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat who promised to deal fairly with Black people. Black folks helped put him in. Within six months, Wilson’s administration began segregating the federal government. The Post Office, which employed the majority of Black federal workers, was fully segregated by the end of 1913. Black workers were demoted, reassigned or fired. Economists Abhay Aneja and Guo Xu later documented in The Quarterly Journal of Economics that Wilson’s segregation widened the Black-white earnings gap for generations of Black workers and their descendants.

Wilson was a wizard, too. He had a manifesto. He had a deal. The moment he got what he needed, he showed Black America the door. Scholars and historians have noted that the language of the current federal DEI rollback is a near-direct echo of Wilson’s 1913 playbook. Same script. Different actors. Same target. Wilson was the wizard then. Trump is the wizard now. The curtain is the same.

“You Can’t Win”

There is a moment in The Wiz that does not get talked about enough. Michael Jackson, playing the Scarecrow, is up on his pole being tormented by crows. Every voice that ever told him he had nothing to offer. And he sings, with that Michael Jackson ache, “You can’t win. You can’t break even. And you can’t get out of the game.”

That is the song that has been sung over Black America for a hundred years. Median Black household wealth is $44,890. Median white household wealth is $285,010. White households hold more than six times the wealth of Black households. And the dollar-value gap has widened, not closed, since 2019. The crows are eating from the field. But the Scarecrow gets down off the pole anyway. He sings the song, and then he gets down anyway. That is the invitation in this essay. We do not have to keep believing the song.

What We Can Do: A Brand New Day

I did not write this essay so we could feel hopeless. I wrote it so we could see the play and prepare ourselves to respond differently this time.

Last Thanksgiving we ran a strategic test. The We Ain’t Buying It! campaign, which I designed and led through Black Voters Matter Fund and 228 partner organizations, generated 40 million digital views, collected 40,000 pledges and got a USA Today op-ed. And we did not just call for a boycott. We built the redirect. The BLAPP app saw substantial download increases. Progressive directories like Little Blue Cart drove traffic to Black-owned and values-aligned small businesses. The dollars did not just leave. They went somewhere better.

Five days of pressure produced that. Now imagine the full strategic playbook applied with 365 days of consciousness behind it. Here are seven concrete things we can do, starting today.

1. Build accountability infrastructure at every level. The Black Wall Street Ticker, built by Charles Walker through Friends of the Movement Global, tracks corporate behavior and consumer spending in real time so we can vote with our wallets daily. We Ain’t Buying It! is partnering on infrastructure for both boycotts and buycotts. And our Black mayors, county commissioners, council members and state legislators have a role nobody else can play. Why are we keeping municipal deposits in banks with no accountability to our communities? Why are we awarding contracts to vendors who couldn’t name a Black-owned subcontractor on a bet? We need a Community Investment Index at every level, used as a screen for who gets public business. Direct dollars toward companies that show up for us, not just punish the ones that don’t.

2. Sign on to Fix It, FedEx. This is the live test of everything in this essay. Tennessee carved up Memphis. FedEx funded the lawmakers who did it and stayed silent while it happened. The Fix It, FedEx Coalition is demanding five public commitments: opposition to the new map, the MSCS takeover and HB 483; a written PAC commitment of no contributions to the legislators who passed them; $10 million for get out the vote campaigns and voter education in the redrawn districts; a standing policy against state preemption of municipal authority; and an annual democracy report. Sign the petition. Share it. Hold them to it.

3. Shift the ask from representation to equity. This is the big one. Companies should no longer be asked just to hire Black people or feature us in ads. They should be asked to give our communities structural stakes: ownership, profit participation, supplier contracts, board seats and community investment that persists beyond the news cycle. We have already seen what equity looks like. In 1990, Earl Graves Sr., the late publisher of Black Enterprise, and Magic Johnson partnered with Pepsi-Cola to acquire the Washington, D.C., bottling franchise for $60 million. Graves held over 65%; Johnson held over 30%. They built it into the largest minority-controlled Pepsi franchise in the country. That is equity. (Pepsi later bought back the operations in 1999, which is exactly why equity deals must be structurally protected. I am laying out the specific terms (ownership percentages, governance structures, exit clauses, multiyear commitments) in a follow-up piece on my Substack, Spirit, Song & Soul.) A photo-op is not equity. A pledge is not equity. Equity is equity. If they want our money, they have to share the upside.

4. Build the redirect before the boycott. Every targeted company needs a named, vetted Black-owned alternative ready to go. Without a redirect, boycotts just shuffle Black dollars from one corporation to its competitor. The blueprint already exists. Daymond John watched Timberland and other major brands profit off Black consumers while distancing themselves from urban culture. So Daymond did not waste time trying to partner with brands that did not want him. He built FUBU. For Us, By Us. A $40 budget, sewn in his mama’s house in Hollis, Queens. Within a few years FUBU was doing $350 million in annual sales and went on to gross over $6 billion globally. Watch the play. Recognize it. Then build your own. And we cannot just buy Black for the sake of buying Black. The standard is community-aligned ownership: businesses that hire from the community, keep dollars circulating, and create community ownership opportunities.

5. Build Black-owned with structural protection. Building Black is not enough. We have to defend what we build. When Prudential and the major white insurers refused to write policies for Black customers in the late 1800s, John Merrick (a formerly enslaved barbershop owner) founded North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance in Durham in 1898, and Alonzo Herndon (also formerly enslaved, also a barber) founded Atlanta Life Insurance in 1905. By 1946, the Black-owned insurance industry was writing $700 million in policies, funding Black banks, hospitals, colleges, and the early NAACP, and turning Durham into “the Black Wall Street of America.” Then once they proved the market was profitable, white insurers came back, headhunted their best agents and competed them out of the market they built. We have built market-shifting institutions across every industry where corporate America refused to serve us. We can do it again. But this time we must build with the legal protections, cooperative structures and community ownership that make our institutions impossible to dismantle. That is the work in front of us now.

6. Black corporate professionals: Don’t be Evillene’s workers. In The Wiz, the Wicked Witch Evillene bellows from her throne, “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news!” That line ought to be hanging over every diversity office in corporate America. Sister, brother in the corner office: I see you, and I am asking with love. Tell the truth in your meetings. Document the rollbacks. Whisper to the Black press. Fund the organizers on the outside. Refuse the panel that asks you to defend the indefensible. Your community needs you to do the opposite of what they hired you to do. Bring us the bad news. We will know what to do with it. (When Dorothy threw the bucket of water, Evillene melted, and the workers started singing “Brand New Day.” Be that somebody. Or tell Dorothy where the bucket is.)

7. Rewire the rhetoric of “the bag.” Too many of our songs tell us that being about the bag means buying more, drinking more, wearing more. Giving our money to companies that turned around and sold our fly back to us at a markup. That is not getting the bag. That is being the bag. Being about the bag means owning it, investing it, multiplying it, passing it down. Read the labels. Check the index. Spend with intention. The grift only works on us when we are asleep at the register.

Seven moves. Not a wish list. A work order.

If You Believe

When I was the valedictorian of my sixth-grade class in Selma, I sang Lena Horne’s version of “If You Believe” from The Wiz. I did not understand at the time why auntie and them got so still when I sang it. I know now.

That song is not a lullaby. It is a thesis. It is the song Glinda sings to Dorothy at the end, when Dorothy is finally ready to go home but doesn’t know how. You had the power all along.

We are not powerless consumers waiting for corporations to develop a conscience. Black consumers’ spending power has grown 2.4 times since 2000 to $2.1 trillion, according to Nielsen. We are the cultural ignition switch for everything from hip-hop to high fashion. The wizard was never real. The only real power in this story has been ours all along. So they will be Black around. They will always be Black around. The grift requires it. The question is whether, this time, we will be BLACK around for us.

That little girl in Selma did not know yet that the song she was singing was a sermon.

She does now.

If you believe within your heart, you’ll know.

We had the power all along.