Since the beginning of the 21st century, the black American community go through the same cycle regarding economic ups and down. Brothas and sistas get a job paying decent wages and start acting high and mighty. Brothas and sistas start businesses and start hyping themselves up a little more than necessary. Everybody smiling and acting better than while things going well.

But then after the 2001 economic crisis after 9/11, the 2008 economic crisis after the mortgage crisis, it’s time to start laying off people and stop providing loans to small businesses. Guess who get hit the hardest? All those showboating African-Americans at the job are the first to get thrown out on the streets and their businesses have dried up.

These same black folks lose their homes, cannot find a new job and spent their six months of savings – I seen this same cycle over 20 years, cats working corporate at an executive level acting special, then we see them get cut from the job and they standing in the unemployment line like the rest of our people trying to get some benefits to keep the lights on.

We have to stop this vicious economic cycle that we as black people have to admit is our own fault for not building up long-term resilient economic infrastructure. What we do instead is always trying to chase a fast dollar or “get the bag” or whatever. Let’s talk about what we need to do to stop this cycle now that we know COVID-19 fallout is about to hit us our community economically once again.

What Our People Always Do

I see it over and over since the beginning of the century – the economy picks up and brothas and sistas are being hired for decent jobs and get into good positions and pay. And some of us get opportunities to start businesses and buy homes and lease commercial real estate with low-interest loans and terms. Things are looking good.

But guess what we do as a people when things are looking good?

Flaunt and Flash Wealth. We want to show others in the black community we arrived and we made it and no one can tell us nothing now we got that good job. Or we want to be in that garbage Black Enterprise magazine bragging about our new startup venture knowing we cannot compete against our Asian counterparts if they want to take our hustle from us.

We Invest Selfishly. We want to brag about investing in commodities instead of our communities. We start talking about buying stocks, buying cryptocurrencies and talk about how much we made investing in this and that. What we don’t do is start buying up assets within our own communities or create businesses that solve major needs or pipelines in our community because supply chain logistics is so boring to the black person that want to brag about investing in Google stock instead.

We Leave Our Communities. When we get a little money, the first thing we think about is getting out of the hood and live among people in outlying areas who don’t care about our culture and lifestyle encroaching in their gated communities. We move into these areas and want to talk about how good of a home we got but ignore we are driving 55 minutes each way to work and back in traffic jams when we had only a 20-minute clean commute in our hood to work. And we get these big mortgages on that house in the suburbs when we could have stayed in the house back in the hood that would have been paid off by now.

We Start Lightweight Businesses. It is annoying the past 20 years I got to see some 20-year old so-called black entrepreneur smiling talking about they doing real-estate and they are “virtual net-worth millionaires” or they peddling some stuff that is really something they white label from an OEM in China. Fake black tech entrepreneurs be creating stuff they learned from a college computer class instead of creating true scalable stuff that can grow – notice these cats over and over release “apps” that they cannot maintain and upgrade.

Overall, once we get a little money we like to act like a fool out here in the global economy instead of shore up solid spaces and infrastructure.

What Always Happen

When our people be acting like they riding on cloud nine, we see something show up that devastate everything. Whether it is the 9/11 market crash, the housing crisis of 2008 and now the COVID-19 crisis – it’s time for markets to start cutting costs and scaling back and guess who is the first to get let go? You guess it – the non-essential symbolism of diversity black Americans who did little or nothing to create something solid while the going was good.

It is not complicated and I see it over and over – black people are let go and the good ol boy and white privilege system look after their own. If their cousin got laid off, a brotha or sista going to lose that job and their cousin going to get that job. And our people going to have a hard time or basically shut out of getting any job because people going to look after their own first. And we as black folks don’t own anything – spent all our time acting like we on some better than stuff.

As a result, we see news of our people losing their nice homes, we see the brothas walking around the street living off women who have savings in the bank, we see the cute women who was acting cute at work now working at the strip clubs trying to make ends meet. Then we got our own people trying to scam desperate people with “hustle opportunities” peddling books and seminars. But ain’t no one going anywhere special because we don’t own anything to build anything worthwhile upon.

Look, we seen what was happening – people selling themselves through escort ads, teenagers are being trafficked in motels, people turning to drugs and crime and scams and eventually get caught up and marginalized through the justice system. People who had good jobs start faking normal and no one in the black community is trying to reach out to fake tech cornball like Tristan Walker to get help/advice in tech as a black person, guess who they start trying to contact? Yeah, they start trying to contact Ed Dunn, the person they ignored when things were going well and they all was fronting on a brotha who was really about this and our people.

How to End This Cycle

We have to figure out how to break this repeating bad cycle among our people where we get a little money, act a fool, economy collapse and we collapse as a people and how do we stop this. Here are the things we got to do first and foremost.

Spend Smarter. We need to focus on vintage/resale buying within our own community, creating markets to perform these kinds of trades. The good thing is the young generation of brothas and sistas have smarten up and adopting these practices.

Focus on Virtualization. We don’t need to invest in physical assets to drive the economy in our community. We can create virtual business models focus on information to drive logistics, delivery, inventory, demand and supply within our own community at the micro-economic level. That’s where the real money and infrastructure at.

Shut Down the Charlatans. There is no logical reason to listen to a “black guru” in the global economy – listen to the people who is doing the real work and look past their ethnicity and look at what you need to know to get it done.  This is the dumbest thing the black community doing now that need to stop, following these “black guru” clowns out here.

Invest Where You Are Now. Stop running from the hood and stay and build it up. Fight the negative clowns holding our community back. We need to build economic centers within our community where we can do trades and have a backup plan when everybody turn against us, we have our own community to thrive upon. Stop running!

Overall, our community need to shore up the land and assets we got and turn everything we got now into economic assets. We got to have something to fall back on.  

What We Need to Do Now

You know, there is a good silver lining in all of this with this upcoming crisis with the COVID-19 that is going to impact our black community. That good news is we have been working on a platform over here for several years and it is ready to roll, especially to our own black communities.

This platform is designed to create virtual business models that drive logistics, markets and tokenization and shared resources for businesses to run daily operations. So the real cats who saw what was going on all these years put in real work to prepare the black community in 2020. That’s the good news but no thanks to the black community who been chasing BS instead of supporting the real ones out there.

Again, with this COVID-19 crisis some of yall going to lose yall jobs going to lose your business due to people don’t have money to spend on your little novelty business model. You simply don’t own anything or have leverage and at the mercy of other people. Some of yall don’t know how bad black folks who were doing good went down fast to outright marginalization in these past crisis events. I’ve seen just last year black people over 50 who once held directors and executive positions happy they found a simple job at a corporation to start paying off bills again.

Let me be very frank here – what’s going to happen this COVID-19 created an opportunity for me and the people I’m dealing with great opportunities to create virtualized business models to run everything from mobile-first logistics and membership and more modeling within our communities and other urban communities because COVID-19 going to make peope do business remotely from their phone or desktop – this is a good windfall opportunity for us.

But all of yall chasing these cats on YouTube believing whatever they talking about, chasing these so-called gurus talking about flipping homes, keep talking about getting the bag – all of yall going to get the crisis you deserve in this upcoming economic situation that is developing into what appears to another structured marginalization of our people. I just hope our people get smart this time around instead of repeat the same economic tragedy.