By Teri Williams
Contributing Columnist
Black America has been a victim of deficit-based narratives for hundreds of years. Simply stated, we should no longer tolerate being underestimated and dehumanized.
Recently, we were confronted with a debate comment about immigrants taking “Black jobs.” There’s no such thing as a Black job. There are no racial qualifications for any job.
Clearly the comment was not meant to focus on professional jobs, scientific jobs, entrepreneurship or more specifically, banking jobs. Yet, despite our many accomplishments, there remains this narrative that Black Americans are less than others, whose menial jobs must be protected.
This deficit-based narrative takes a psychological toll on our community, leading to internalized racism, mental health challenges and lower self-esteem. It needs to stop.
An organization called BMe Community developed asset framing which is a narrative model that focuses on people’s strengths and aspirations, rather than their challenges and deficits. It’s the opposite of deficit-based narratives, which often start with problems, stereotypes or misconceptions.
Asset framing aims to humanize people, invest in people for their continued benefit to society, focus on places, conditions, systems or solutions; and connect current state to historical reason.
Using asset framing, here is what we need the world to know and what we need to know about ourselves.
Black Americans have made significant accomplishments given we have only been “legally free” for 60 years, when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. Only since then could we legally live and work without discrimination, after 250 years of enslavement and 100 years of Jim Crow.
According to CNBC, Black American spending power reached a record $1.6 trillion in 2021.
According to Brookings, in 2021, the number of Black-owned employer businesses increased by 14.3% (roughly 20,000 businesses) to a total of 161,031 employer businesses — the largest annual increase since the release of the first Business Survey in 2017. And our businesses are in these sectors: professional, scientific and technical services (comprising 14% of all Black-owned businesses); administrative and support and waste management and remediation services (8%); transportation and warehousing (8%); retail trade (6%) and construction (6%).
According to the U.S. Census, Black Americans have made significant progress in educational attainment, with 28% having a college degree, up from 19% in 2011, after hundreds of years of it being illegal for us to get any education at all. And historically Black colleges and universities produce almost 20% of Black college graduates, according to UNCF, despite representing only 3% of U.S. college students and operating with unequal funding.
These are just some of the statistics of our assets. Is there more work to be done? Absolutely. Can we rest on our laurels? Absolutely not.
However, we also can no longer tolerate messages that only focus on our challenges. Simply stated, we’re better than that. Much better.
Teri Williams is the president and chief operating officer of One United Bank, the largest Black-owned bank in the United States.
