0820_AUG Comstock's Magazine 0820 August | Page 28

ECONOMIC JUSTICE
t was May 31, and protests rang
out across the United States demanding
justice after the murder
of George Floyd by a white police
officer in Minneapolis, as three
other officers stood by and did
nothing. The country, already reeling
from COVID-19, had reached a boiling
point. That night, Rob Brown was in his
barbershop on Valley Hi Drive in south
Sacramento waiting. He didn’t board
up the shop. He didn’t put any Black
Lives Matter signs in his windows to
inform outsiders of his allegiance. He
locked up the printer and computers,
and he stood guard.
“Black folks know me,” he says weeks
later. “I knew that if they were from Sacramento,
they wouldn’t harm my stuff.
But what made me paranoid was hearing
that people were coming from out of
town, pulling up in trucks and vans. Not
the marchers. Outsiders in the crowd.”
Another Look Beauty & Barber
Salon had been forced to shut down
since March 16 during the coronavirus
pandemic, marked as a nonessential
business. Brown and his wife, Tracy
Brown, who runs the hair salon in the
adjacent suite, managed to get by the
first month and a half. But relief didn’t
look like it was coming for months, and
he was starting to panic.
“It was disrespectful to put us on the
same level as gyms,” says Brown, who
went through 1,500 hours of training at
barber college, which includes lessons
on health and safety. “A dentist can stay
open and put his hands in my mouth,
but I can’t stand behind somebody and
cut their hair.”
The dire reality of Black-owned
businesses in America has been exposed
in recent months. As the Washington
Post reported, the Black-white
economic divide has barely changed
since 1968. But the pandemic put the
racial disparity on full display. Not
only have Black Americans suffered
more from COVID-19 infections and
deaths, but evidence from the Stanford
Institute for Economic Policy Research
shows that Black-owned businesses
were hit the hardest due to the shutdown,
experiencing a 41 percent loss of
business owners this spring. Not only
that, but Black business owners barely
got a whiff of the government loans to
help weather the economic storm. Only
about 12 percent of Black and Latinx
small business owners received the federal
funds they requested, and almost
two-thirds received no assistance, the
findings revealed.
The City of Sacramento announced
a $1 million pool for emergency relief
for small businesses. Of the 101 loans
granted, only a handful went to Blackowned
small businesses. Brown, who
also runs the Mixed Institute of Cosmetology
& Barber School, wasn’t one
of them. And on May 31, just days after
reopening and as protests against police
brutality and systemic racism took
over the streets, Brown found himself
caught between supporting the cause
Rob and Tracy Brown own Another Look Beauty
& Barber Salon in south Sacramento. They didn’t
qualify for a Paycheck Protection Program loan
because, technically, they don’t have employees.
PHOTO BY FRED GREAVES
and protecting his shop. In the end, nobody
broke into his barbershop, and all
the protests he saw were peaceful. But
he admits that line between fighting for
justice and staying on the right side of
the law is a tricky one to walk. One felony,
he says, can change a person’s life
forever. But this tightrope act is nothing
new to Black business owners trying to
survive in a nation built on racism and
economic injustice.
“I’m 48 years old, I’ve done my
share of getting out there,” Brown
says. “These young people have some
fire. A young gentleman came into the
shop, and he was shot in the eye and
the leg with a rubber bullet. College
student. The kid’s been coming to
our shop forever. He said, ‘I don’t
even know what to do.’ I didn’t want
anybody to affect my business, but I
understand people are angry.”
28 comstocksmag.com | August 2020