Respect Yourself...

We Need to Talk About How Asian Owned Businesses Treat Their Black Clientele
Tiffany Diane Tso

This is definitely a conversation that MUST take place, at least in the Black community. We give our dollars indiscriminately. We don't hold folks accountable for how they treat us or demand anything in return for our dollars. The Asian merchant business plan is to study our consumer habits, what we like, what we wear, what we buy, what we eat, move into our neighborhoods, sell "us" back to us at even a fraction less than Black merchants (and sadly, we support them over our own), run them out of business, disrespect us, hire none of us, get rich in our neighborhoods selling us products, often inferior products and too often from behind bullet proof glass, send their kids to US colleges to represent themselves as minorities, using strides made by Black Americans against Black Americans to displace us in academia while earning a living exploiting and displacing, disrespecting us in our neighborhoods. It's crazy...

It is the face of why I reject the term People of Color. People with skin color often share nothing more than that, skin color. Implicit in the term is a sense of allegiance, camaraderie or an experience, at least in America, between us. Such is not the case yet these persons are put in positions to represent what it means to be Black or minority in America. They know not our experience. They know not our history that gives them opportunity. They are not alone. They give cover to white America and allows her to use them and others to avoid the discussion of race, specifically as it pertains to being Black in America. That, however, is a whole other conversation...

In the meantime, the Black community must stop supporting merchants and others who value our dollar but do not respect or value us. I am a firm believer that in life, we teach folks how to treat us. We have taught the world that we don't demand respect or gratitude in exchange for our dollar. Kudos to this author, Tiffany Diane Tso, for speaking a truth. The comments to the article actually discount the notion however that it is white supremacy that feeds Asian anti-Black racism but instead suggest that they come to the US with such sentiment already embedded.

Good read. Click here for a link to the article. Check it out. Let the "difficult" conversations begin. Don't be bullied away from worthy discussions that will heal us with taunts of being painted xenophobic or the like for daring to state an opinion that some will condemn as "inciting" or "uncomfortable". For some reason, we have convinced ourselves as a society that we are not supposed to have these conversations or say or do anything that makes us uncomfortable. I totally disagree. That is not how we grow. I appreciate the author of this article. Let the conversation flow...