Ok. I've been looking at this thread since it was posted yesterday and swore I would stay out of it but I can't.
******Disclaimer: I just re-read the Autobiography of Malcolm X for the first time in 20 years and the first time as an adult so some of my views are colored by my recent reading*****
As a people, we have allowed people of other races to monopolize our neighborhoods, our communities and our economic power. These non-black business owners come into our neigborhoods, sell products marketed towards blacks, and then go home to their neighborhoods and like another poster said sending their sons and daughters to Ivy league schools. When the generation before us began to fight for their civil rights, they were so worried about a seat on the bus and a seat at a lunch counter (which are important) but, we never created a black status quo.
The problem with integration, is there is no integration without assimilation. As a people instead of fighting for that seat at the lunch counter, we should have opened our own diners. Instead of fighting for that seat on the bus, our people should have gone out and gotten chauffuers (sp) licenses and started our own transportation companies. The Holocaust caused the Jewish people to bond and learn and you will never see them in a situation where assimilation can allow them to be victimized en masse.
But what have we my people done? We spend billions on hair and hair products, makeup that actually matches our skin tone. And other than the black woman on the package, how much of that money went back into our own pocket? No one gives respect, you have to earn it, and as long as a Korea BSS owner can pay our people minimum wage, to make a business look like it supports our people we sit down and stfu. And honestly, as someone who's been a PJ/slash recovering weavaholic who is always falling off the wagon, hiring our people is a very recent thing and is only done in the bigger BSS at least IME.
I can tell by your postings @
sckri23, that you are in your early 20's. I say that because I have sisters in that age group and that's when the color blind society lie became really strong. Even though I'm in my late 20's (and I will keep claiming that until 12:01 on my next b-day lol), there was a stronger sense of trying to grow as a community in the early to mid nineties that your age group missed. Hip-hop had the deep artists, people wore African prints, movies about the civil rights era came out as regularly as movies about the hood, and we were coming up right behind the struggle with parents who remembered it first hand. Other pan-african people have the sense to bond as a community and come to the white man from a point of economic strengths. That's all the old boys society will ever understand. Until we as a people, as black american, learn to join our pan african brothers and sisters in creating a position of power, instead calling our people racist when they discuss taking money from a group that only hears it when you hit their pockets (why do you really think the Alabama bus boycotts worked? Because they didn't want to see us walking?), then we will always look like the weaker people.
******Diatribe over. Ya'll done made me put the phone away and pull out the laptop lol.***********
erplexed 
. Nobody is attacking you honey. I know I for one and I do this with my little sisters IRL too was just trying to make you understand that this thread at least for me is beyond shopping at a black BSS, or buying a brush straight from Korea. It's about how we as a people need to get it together and the topic will of course center around the black hair care industry on a black hair care board. Hell it's where a good chunk of my disposable income goes lol.
