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Unfortunately Troy this does not surprise me. We've had this discussion before. Black people have a defeated mentality in business. For us, it's all or nothing. We have no working concept of understanding how helping other people helps all of us. I know i always revert to sneaker talk, but that's my bread and butter and my experiences there highlight many of the issues in trying to rebuild the Black book market and improving the culture. What we think is that giving shine to someone else will direct attention away from ourselves. In other words, allowing aalbc to post on our site about a topic we are addressing will remove people from our site. In a simplistic person/business mind this seems true. But let's analyze in terms of restaurants for clarity. Recently an Applebee's Restaurant opened right next door to the Happy Mexican Restaurant. It would seem that the Happy Mexican would be upset about this. The actual fact is that Applebee's can only hold so many people and those people going to Applebee's would probably have never gone to the Happy Mexican. However because Applebee's is often overcrowded, those people who were looking to go to Applebee's can simply move their party of people next door. The Happy Mexican is now being introduced to a customer that may have never considered them as an option. Competition increases traffic. Once traffic increases, people begin to patronize the other places near that new restaurant. This is what Black businesses don't understand. They see more people as a threat. Where white people actually like the idea of more businesses in an area because it will generate more traffic. Consider this, I recently started looking for a building to open an art gallery. I went to the one area of town and spoke with the businesses in the area and each one of them got excited by the prospect of a new business opening. One of those locations was an art gallery that is right next door to where I'm looking. They were the most vocal about me getting the space. Out business savvy and understanding is so low it's not even funny. This is why Black websites don't have ads for other sites on their site. They think it will take people away from the site. That is a very simple way of thinking. It lacks any real understanding of how businesses thrive when there are other successful businesses around them. The same works for the internet. I have had an aalbc.com link on my site since before I ever signed up to start chatting on this message board. I understand that this makes my site a lot more interactive and a source for information across the web. You are very right, we have a looooooooong way to go. In sneaker terms I explained to a lot of "sneakerheads" that if they simply supported a new sneaker line, instead of blindly giving their money to Nike, there could be a ton of new millionaires a year in the sneaker industry. This will never happen though. That's unfortunate.

The re-cycled African diaspora is manifested in fast running, in beaded, colored hair extension, in regal stylish garb, in the griot of Rap, in belicose tribal warfare, in line-dancing and throbbing percussion, all in a testament to its Agrarian roots. Its Mercantile ones? Not so much. The concrete jungle remains cloistered and full of suspicion...