Question: what kinds of thoughts and feelings are conjured when you consider being disrespected or abused (whether verbally or otherwise)? How do you feel after having been insulted? What do you think your response would be to having been assaulted by someone you thought you could trust? By someone who had sworn to support and protect you? What would you think if the corporate entities where you spend money support the policies that seek to suppress you? These are some things that are understandably uncomfortable to think about, but it is also something that is commonly and systematically happening in our society. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow and the black code, the disproportionate imprisonment and police shootings of black men, women and children and the egregious attacks on our voting rights we have to use financial protests as leverage to achieve what we demand and deserve.  Equal rights on all levels...period.

 

Corporations and the people who control the money tend to control the government.  The government controls the state and the state controls the police.  But the very bottom line is MONEY — those who make it and those who spend it. 

 

What if we really allowed ourselves to notice and get tired and angered by the mistreatment that may sadly have become the norm for too many people of color in our communities? So the next question: To spend or not to spend? And whom do we OR whom do we NOT support with our hard earned dollars? We all too often do not have their support, their compassion,  their sympathy, their pity, their concern or their respect for us as worthy human beings, but they do understand and respect our voting power and our MONEY POWER. Let’s use our real leverage to support BLACK DOLLAR DAYS (which of course is not just for people of color but all people of every stripe).  Read up on it. Your support makes all the difference.

 

-Jeffrey M. Felton