Our Black Year by Maggie Anderson Page A

was complicated. But we were sure it started with a couple of brilliant and committed academics. We had those in our friends Walidah and Michael Bennett. Walidah is a sociology professor; Michael is an economist and an expert in urban planning, development, and financing. Early on, they’d explained the basic steps: Create a research design and then shop it to corporations, universities, and foundations for funding. According to the Bennetts, with the right team those first steps could be done rather easily. And we had an awesome team.
    These were the giddy days, when almost everyone we talked to about EE acted like we had just shown them the business plan for Google. Their reactions made us feel as if we were creating the next NAACP or setting in motion Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. People were honored to help in exchange for the privilege of being part of the inner circle.
    Then we met with the Bennetts to discuss the project. The soaring, nonstop jet to Black Nirvana started hitting turbulence. In retrospect, that was a healthy thing.
    They were supportive and, as African Americans and academics, understood the need. But they were also realistic. First, they expressed concern about how the study would play out. Among other things, they asked us what we were going to prove—a question that, I’m embarrassed to say, somewhat stumped me at the time. I remember Walidah stating, “One family does not a study make.”
    Then Michael said one of the most discouraging things we’d heard since we’d started the planning process—and perhaps one of the most valuable statements as well.
    â€œThere is no way you are going to do this,” he said, adding that never before had such a study on the potential economic impact of buying Black been tried. “This is going to be much harder than you think.”

    In the end Michael agreed to help us with the research design at no cost, which was very reassuring. Leading the study, however, would understandably come with a fee. We were grateful for the assistance. But I also remember feeling a little irritated, almost as if our friends lacked the vision to see how this endeavor was going to take on a life of its own. Now I know the reason I felt that irritation: The truth hurts.
    About this time, in September and October 2008, we started sharing our idea with a wider circle of relatives and friends. It was easy to get people stirred up about the potential for large-scale economic empowerment, recycling our wealth, enhancing our neighborhoods, demanding more respect from big business for our consumer dollars, and reclaiming our community from folks who take our money and treat us with disrespect. It was much harder to inspire excitement about actually going into poor Black communities and patronizing struggling businesses. Our friends were far more enthusiastic about those larger, nobler concepts than about doing the grunt work to make them a reality. Some of them voiced a complaint that we would hear ad nauseam throughout the next year: We’ve tried patronizing Black-owned businesses and they are awful. We let that one go.
    John’s dad told us he was worried about our safety, which made me a little uptight. Our safety? What’s he talking about? He explained his concern that people would view our experiment as racist. We had given that issue some thought and figured we could counter the contention by explaining that this was an academic exercise and no different from the practices of other ethnic groups. John’s dad sighed and shook his head when I told him that, as if to say, You poor thing. You just don’t know what it is really like out there.
    Then came more sobering news from Michael Bennett. He would run the study for $120,000. Wow . After we got over the sticker shock, I reworked our budget to include that number. Our major expenses were paying for the study as well as hiring a public relations firm and a website