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The economic downturn wrought by the coronavirus pandemic has battered the business sector.
Shutdowns and financial turmoil have forced businesses as a whole to take stock of strategies to deal with plummeting revenue, mounting debt and layoffs.
Everyone has felt the fallout but none more than Black business owners.
For them, the pandemic has forced a reckoning that reverberates with familiar historical and racial narratives.
As retail stores, shops and restaurants churn slowly back to life, Black business owners are taking stock of a devastation they say is intricately linked to the African-American experience in this country.
“We are at a disadvantage. It’s the system, the structure,” said Patricia Robinson, owner of Evolve Training and Development, a small Harrisburg-based company that focuses on training young people to become business owners.
“Black-owned businesses tend to take the biggest hits when something like this happens. We are already climbing a steep hill to even be competitive. We are already behind the eight ball then you tack on a pandemic that shuts you down and it makes things difficult.”
The disparity has little to do with know-how, talent or skill.
Rather, at its core is the confluence of historical factors such as racial segregation and economic disinvestment that have framed the narrative for Blacks in this country across every arena.
Economic indicators – both regional and national – point to the staggeringly disproportionate impact that the pandemic has had on Black-owned businesses.
The National Bureau of Economic Research last month reported that 3.3 million businesses were forced to shut down in April. The number of Black-owned businesses shrank 41 percent, from 1.1 million to 640,000.
The full scope of the toll on Black businesses nationally and in Pennsylvania is still not fully known, given that the pandemic is still wielding its impact on the economy. But early studies point to significant differences in the experience of white-owned businesses versus Black-owned businesses.
In the midst of the nationwide lockdowns this spring, for instance, Black-owned businesses were more likely to be shuttered than white-owned counterparts, according to a study out of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The study found that in April more than 40 percent of Black businesses were closed, compared to only 17 percent of white-owned counterparts.
Moreover, government data shows that Black businesses overwhelmingly were left out of the $2 trillion emergency rescue measure released by Washington in April.
Black business owners say that the reason the pandemic has disproportionately hurt their interests is the…
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