Back When Sears Made Black Customers a Priority

In this week’s New York Times Race/Related section, Lauretta Charlton gets Cornell University professor Louis Hyman’s take on the effect that the original Sears marketing strategy had on the lives of African-Americans across the country. Sears, Roebuck and Company distributed its catalog in hopes of granting access to new economic territory to Americans of all colors. With this access to a much more competitive market with far lower prices on items of all kinds, African-Americans far and wide took the chance to negate the power of Jim Crow laws that had hitherto denied them equitable access to such goods.

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Tech’s Whiteness Is the Problem. Are We the Solution?

By Amy L. Alexander, The Root Last week, Twitter said it was “pausing” to reconsider the process by which it bestows the blue checkmark denoting accounts that had been “verified,” and on Wednesday the company announced it was yanking the designation from some users who occupy the neo-Nazi or nationalist bucket of grassroots white activism.…

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