The Power We're Told We Don't Have
"Nothing ever comes to one that is worth having except as a result of hard work." Booker T. Washington
When I was eighteen years old I got my first car. I was determined to get my license and to own a vehicle, because I wanted to be different from my mother, who could not drive and never owned a car in her life. At eighteen I bought a Ford Mustang, a four speed, and I learned to drive a stick on that very car. That blue Mustang meant the world to me. In many ways it was the beginning of the rest of my life. It took me out of New Brunswick, north into New York, south to Philadelphia, down through Delaware and Maryland. It was the thing that set me free.
It was a Ford. Today you could not get me to drive a Ford if someone handed me the keys and the title for nothing. Somewhere between that blue Mustang and now, my aspirations changed, and I changed with them. I wanted a BMW. So did the people around me. The cars in our driveways went from Ford and Chevrolet and Cadillac to Lexus and Mercedes and BMW, and none of us called a meeting about it. We just moved our money.
That is the thread I want to pull this week. What our money does when we move it, and what it says about a power we are constantly told we do not have.
The Story They Tell About Us
There is a story the world tells about us, and I have heard it my whole life. It says American Black people are the poorest, the most dependent, the least consequential piece of the American economy. A community to be spoken about, marketed to, studied, but not a force. That story travels. You can hear a version of it abroad, where American Blacks are imagined as a permanent underclass with nothing to offer but struggle.
Look around the world and the story falls apart.
The buying power of Black Americans is estimated at more than two trillion dollars, and it has grown two and a half times over since the year 2000. That is not a rounding error in the American economy. It is larger than the entire economy of most nations on earth. And it is not passive money. Surveys of Black consumers find that more than two out of three of us will walk away from a brand that does not align with what we value. We are not only spenders. We are a community that spends with intention, and that is a different and more dangerous thing for any company that forgets it.
The culture tells the same story. Hip hop, born in the Bronx among Black American young people with nothing but genius and a turntable, is now a fifteen to sixteen billion dollar industry and the most consumed music on the planet, replicated everywhere from Seoul to Sao Paulo. Black American music is now counted among America’s leading cultural exports, a pillar of the country’s soft power abroad. Our beauty spending anchors a market that every major brand chases, nearly ten billion dollars in a single year on beauty alone. Our style sets the runways. Our movements for justice have crossed oceans and lit fires in London and Brazil and Australia.
So let me say plainly what the numbers say. The world runs, in no small part, on what Black America makes and what Black America buys. The power is not in question. What is in question is what we get back for it.
The Dollar Has Teeth
If anyone doubts that our dollar carries weight, look at what happened to Target.
In January of 2025, Target announced it was rolling back its diversity commitments, the programs meant to hire us, promote us, and stock the shelves with businesses built by us. The community answered the only way a community can. We stopped shopping there. And the retreat that Target thought would protect it did the opposite.
Target’s sales fell. In the first quarter of 2025 its net sales dropped to twenty three point eight billion dollars, down from twenty four point five billion the year before, missing every projection Wall Street had set. Its comparable sales fell close to four percent, with store sales down almost six. Foot traffic dropped month after month, as much as nine percent in a single month, while competitors who kept their commitments gained ground. And this is the part I want you to hold onto. Target’s own chief executive stood on an earnings call and named the backlash to the diversity rollback as one of the reasons the company was bleeding. He could not separate it cleanly from the tariffs and the cautious consumer. He only knew it was real.
That is the power we are told we do not have, showing its teeth in the plain language of a balance sheet. We closed our wallets and a corporation the size of Target felt it in its bones. So the question was never whether the Black dollar has power. The question, the one this whole essay is walking toward, is why an institution built on that same dollar returns so little of it to us.
Party With a Purpose
Which brings me to Essence.
For most of us the magazine faded from the coffee table long ago. What remained was the festival, held every July in New Orleans, the largest annual gathering of Black women and Black culture in the country. It draws as many as half a million people. It is our homecoming, our reunion, our marketplace, and it runs almost entirely on us. Our attendance. Our spending. Our music. Our culture. The festival calls itself the party with a purpose, and the purpose, we were told, was economic.
The dollars are not small. By the accounting of Essence’s own leadership, the festival has driven more than four billion dollars into New Orleans across three decades. A Dillard University study estimated that a single recent festival generated roughly three hundred forty five million dollars for the city in one weekend. For a Black woman selling body scrubs or edge control or lip color, Essence weekend is what one vendor called her Black Friday, the weekend she earns the capital she lives on all year. When we show up, an entire city runs at capacity. Hotels sell out months ahead. Restaurants fill. That is our money, our bodies, our culture, converting into somebody’s revenue in real time.
Now look at what came back to the community that generates all of it.
What Comes Back
Early in 2026, public records told a story that did not match the party.
Essence, through its parent company, owed the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans more than four hundred thousand dollars from the 2025 festival, over sixty percent of its charges for the convention center space, long past the thirty-day deadline to pay. A fifty-thousand-dollar payment brought it down, but the balance sat there past due. Reports also said local vendors were still waiting to be paid for their work on the festival, and cited a claim that one local production company was owed more than a million dollars, a figure the company’s owners dispute, so I hold it loosely. The convention center debt, though, is a matter of record.
Sit with the arithmetic. A festival that moves hundreds of millions of dollars, that has poured billions into one city over thirty years, that fills every hotel and restaurant downtown, could not, or would not, pay a four hundred-thousand-dollar bill to the very city that hosts it. And at the same time, Essence was going to the Louisiana legislature to ask for a larger public subsidy, taxpayer money, to help fund the next festival. The 2026 event was already set to receive at least one point seven million dollars in public money. It takes in our dollars by the hundreds of millions, asks the public for more, and leaves the local bill unpaid.
The Louisiana House Appropriations Committee chairman, Jack McFarland, said the obvious thing, that an event which does not pay its bills after receiving public funding has a problem, no matter which event it is. He was right, and he did not even need to be Black to see it.
The Debate We Started Having
The year 2025 was when many of us began to say out loud what we had been feeling. That an institution built by and for American Black women, the descendants of the slaves who built this country, had drifted from us. That the festival’s frame had widened toward a broader, pan African celebration, and that we were being moved to the edge of a room we built. The ownership itself sharpened the question. Essence passed in 2018 to Richelieu Dennis, a successful entrepreneur who is Liberian-born, an immigrant, not a descendant of American slavery. The Kenyan-born Caroline Wanga, who had previously served as Target’s chief diversity officer, was named to lead the company’s parent venture soon after.
I want to be precise, because there is a version of this conversation I will not join. Some of the loudest voices slid into open hostility toward African immigrants, and that is not my argument and I want no part of it. My argument is not about whether anyone is Black enough. It is about lineage, ownership, and accountability. It is about who an institution was built for, who owns it now, and who it answers to when the money is counted. When American dollars are gathered by the hundreds of millions and the local bills go unpaid, and when there is a sense that resources and orientation flow toward other shores while the community that fills the seats is treated as a given, those are fair questions to ask. They are questions about stewardship, not about anyone’s right to belong.
By 2026 that feeling had organized into a boycott. It drew on more than one grievance, a Louisiana voting rights ruling, the anger over Target still appearing as a sponsor, the complaint that the whole thing had gone too corporate, and the lineage grievance I am tracing here. I will be honest about what the boycott did and did not do. The festival did not collapse. It still drew crowds and still moved hundreds of millions of dollars. The full verdict on the boycott is not in, and I am not going to tell you a satisfying story that the numbers do not yet support. What I will tell you is that the boycott was a righteous instinct, the same instinct that made Target bleed, and that the deeper reckoning it points to is real whether or not one July weekend proves it.
What We Are Left With
I loved that blue Mustang. It carried me into my own life. And I walked away from Ford anyway, quietly, on my own schedule, certain my leaving would be felt. Sometimes it is felt. Ask Target. The lesson of Target is that our leaving is felt, powerfully, when we mean it and when we move together.
So here is the question I am left holding. If the Black American dollar is strong enough to bend a corporation the size of Target, strong enough to build a global culture the world imitates and monetizes, strong enough to pour four billion dollars into one city over thirty years, then what would it take to build an institution that answers to us, and only us? An institution that pays its own bills, in the community that fills its seats, because that community is not its afterthought but its owner?
I think we already know the answer, and I think we have been circling it for years without saying it. The answer is that we stop waiting for institutions built on our backs to finally turn around and reinvest in us, and we build our own. We keep the dollar. We keep the culture that dollar creates. We keep the reunion, the marketplace, the homecoming, and we hold the deed to it ourselves. The power was never the thing we lacked. We have been told we do not have it precisely because someone else has been living off of it. The task in front of us is not to prove the power exists. Target proved that. The task is to stop lending it out, and start building with it at home.
