Building wealth and redistributing economic power is an essential way for the Black community to take action against social injustice. And now, one magical Black woman has made it easier to support black-owned businesses with a new Google Chrome extension.
BuyBlack provides online shoppers with black-owned alternatives to their favorite retail sites. Once installed, a solidarity fist will pop up in the corner of your browser, which then expands into a drop down list of sites from Black-owned companies with similar product offerings.
App creator Angie Coleman said her goal was to make it easier for those who want to support Black-owned businesses to locate them.
“When people are asked to buy black, a lot of what we hear is that no one knows where to find these black-owned businesses,” the 26-year-old CodeHS account manager told HuffPo.
“It’s similar to conversations around Silicon Valley about hiring black people and how ― out of 46 million black people in the U.S. alone – they just can’t seem to find black entrepreneurs that are qualified. I didn’t want anyone to have that problem, so I made a list.”
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BuyBlack currently lists more than 300 Black-owned businesses. Coleman hopes to continue growing the list and cites celebrities like Solange Knowles and her personal struggle to find quality Black-made products as her motivation for creating the extension.
“If the government isn’t going to pay reparations for hundreds of years of unpaid labor that built this nation, then black people need to start supporting each other,” she said. “Hopefully this will empower other groups to support our ideas and businesses as well.”
With the buying power of the Black community projected to hit $1.2 trillion in 2016, spreading the wealth within our own communities has never been more important. Download BuyBlack for Google Chrome here.