Most Americans are in agreement: 2020 is nobody’s favorite year. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only sickened 11 million Americans and killed a quarter of a million. Its wreaked financial havoc and ruined livelihoods across the country, as we’ve shut down schools and much of our economy trying to stem deaths and illness.
While many have managed to hang on to their jobs, albeit with much more difficult conditions, millions are unemployed and teetering on the edge of homelessness. And bearing the brunt of illness, deaths, unemployment, and economic catastrophe, are low-income Black families, especially in households headed by women, who nationwide have taken the biggest job hits.
People everywhere are fatigued and pulling for shreds of hope, and it doesn’t seem like an end’s in sight until COVID is under control. But in Atlanta, Run the Jewels rapper, businessman, and lifelong activist, Killer Mike is thinking ahead.
He has lent his voice to Greenwood, a newly launched digital bank that aims to serve the underserved–low-income and young Black and Latinx customers the traditional banking industry has overlooked. His theory: “America is better when the Black economy is better.” Greenwood, of course, takes the name of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, community once known as Black Wall Street. Killer Mike asserts that Tulsa would be a more affluent community today if Greenwood hadn’t been destroyed by racial violence nearly a hundred years ago. But today, he sees, America can start putting down seeds for a stronger economy, by understanding and investing in what former Atlanta mayor and UN Ambassador Andrew Young calls “the bottom of the pyramid.”
This article from Vanity Fair discusses the old Greenwood and outlines the new Greenwood’s vision of a better American economy, starting now.
-Maude
November 18, 2020
Keep reading about Race in America here, under Issues.