Maggie and John Anderson, a highly educated and middle-class couple, are launching the Ebony Experiment on January 1, 2009, aimed at reaching multiple social and economic conclusions by shopping with exclusively Black-owned businesses for the entire year.
Teamed with experts such as Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, Steven Rogers, Dr. Michael Bennett, and Walidah Bennett, the goal is to not only support growing Black-owned businesses in an effort to encourage budding entrepreneurs, but also show:
that average individuals and families can generate significant economic growth in the Black community if they were to commit to purchasing from Black–owned businesses and professionals.
In what will be an obvious difficult task, as there are very few, if any, Black-owned utility companies or media providers, the Ebony Experiment website does provide a way for those interested to submit their information and work with the Andersons’ to achieve this lofty goal.
Technically speaking, the landing site is a mixture of Flash and tabular HTML. Even with the current national exposure, the Ebony Experiment website does not rank number 1 when Googling ‘Ebony Experiment’, leading me to believe that someone is slipping on their SEO work. The website was designed by LabUSA.com, and it would be a real shame if that was not a Black-owned design firm.
Inevitably, as with Blackbird, the comments are plentiful about the purpose and ‘real meaning’ of solely supporting Black-owned businesses and franchises. In fact, the 15+ pages of ‘If I did this with White-only businesses’ on the Sun Times attest to that. While Angela did a nice job of bringing the analytical argument to the mainstream via TechCrunch, the root of those questions and that issue are much more complicated. You can read my full take on that over at YBPGuide.com.
I do await the results of the Ebony Experiment with much optimism, however.



By Fredric Mitchell | Mon, Dec 22, 2008 1:55 pm