In 2008, Maggie Anderson was doing pretty well. She had a successful career in business consulting, a loving husband and two lovely daughters, a nice house in a trendy Chicago suburb, and attended the same church as the Obamas*. But looking around at her mostly white neighbors, she couldn't shake the guilty feeling that she'd left the black community behind. A simple solution, she decided, would be to spend more money in the impoverished neighborhoods on Chicago's West Side. "The whole point," she said, "was, 'You know what, we care about the West Side. We need to help those people, those are our people, and we need to do what we can to make a difference there.' So we thought, instead of buying groceries here in Oak Park we could go buy groceries on the West Side. And it was not that simple at all."
The problem, Anderson realized, was that most businesses in predominantly black neighborhoods weren't owned by African Americans; most of the money spent in those concerns would leave the community come closing time. So she persuaded her family to embark on a far more challenging mission: For a full year, they would attempt to spend their cash exclusively at black-owned businesses.
The ensuing adventure, dubbed The Empowerment Experiment and chronicled in Anderson's book Our Black Year (coauthored by Chicago Tribune reporter Ted Gregory), took them from gritty corner stores at the epicenter of urban decay to Texas megachurches to the boardrooms of the nation's most powerful trade organizations. By the end, the Andersons emerged from the maw of racial-economic inequality with powerful insights into how black Americans might better wield their collective $913 billion buying power to improve their communities. I spoke with Anderson, whose book comes out this week, about the backlash she encountered, economic segregation in the black community, and the near-impossibility of finding black-made products at Walmart.
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