The Devil You Know by Charles M. Blow

Author:Charles M. Blow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Black density wouldn’t prove beneficial only for political reasons. Black people also need to reunite to combine purchasing power, brainpower, and cultural power. Our dispersal has exposed us to exploitation, for which density could be curative.

Black people are heavy users of social media, particularly as an instrument for activism. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that Black people, more than others, value social media as a way to amplify lesser-covered stories, to get involved with issues, to find others who share their views, to give voice to underrepresented voices, and to achieve political goals.26 But, not only are there no Black CEOs at the major tech companies, there are only a handful of Black executives, and the percentage of minorities employed by most of them is abysmal. According to a 2018 analysis by Recode, Microsoft, Intel, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google, Black people represented less than 4 percent of their total workforces.27 When Adweek published its 2018 Power List of “100 cutting-edge marketers, media CEOs, brand champions and tech titans,” there wasn’t a single Black person on it.28

The majority of players in the National Football League (the most profitable sports league in America) and the National Basketball Association are Black, 65 percent and 75 percent respectively29—however, as of October 2020, there isn’t a single Black owner of an NFL team, and only one Black owner of an NBA one, Michael Jordan. The NFL just, in 2020, saw its first Black president of a team, with the appointment of Jason Wright by the Washington Football Team.30 These leagues generate billions of dollars in revenue, and only a portion redounds to the athletes and almost none to the Black communities that nurtured them.

Furthermore, historically Black colleges and universities, which still produce nearly a quarter of all Black graduates with an undergraduate degree,31 receive little of the benefit from these athletes’ talents. Instead that Black talent draws billions of dollars of revenue to overwhelmingly white schools and media groups. The NCAA, television networks, and Division I schools—almost all majority white—make billions of dollars off of these athletes.

As Jemele Hill points out in The Atlantic:

Bringing elite athletic talent back to Black colleges would have potent downstream effects. It would boost HBCU revenues and endowments; stimulate the economy of the black communities in which many of these schools are embedded; amplify the power of black coaches, who are often excluded from prominent positions at predominantly white institutions; and bring the benefits of black labor back to black people.32

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