Monthlyish emails with realistic suggestions on better aligning your money and your personal values
Today let's discuss the Black Dollar Index. During the racial reckoning in 2020, a group of Black professionals with expertise in healthcare, consumer packaged goods, media, finance, politics, and consulting got together and formed the Black Dollar Initiative. The idea was that this consumer advocacy group could unify the one and a half trillion dollars spent annually by Black Americans for racial equity. This group wants to hold corporations responsible to its Black employees, consumers and communities. And it wants to empower Black consumers to be able to shop with more information about the companies we are patronizing.
Tune in today to learn how the Black Dollar Index scores are calculated and how they might inform your own decisions as a consumer.
The Black Dollar Index
Welcome to Progressive Pockets! I go by GG, that’s short for Genet Gimja. This show is all about trying to get better alignment between our politics, our beliefs, our societal values and what we’re doing with our money on a daily basis.
I want to share a tool called the Black Dollar Index today. I was at a conference and was talking to Steven Hughes, he is a financial therapist and Money Reiki practitioner and he was telling me about how he uses this tool to screen the companies he shops and invests with. Very interesting.
You can find it at black dollar index dot com and it is very interesting. During the racial reckoning in 2020, a group of Black professionals with expertise in healthcare, consumer packaged goods, media, finance, politics, and consulting got together and formed the Black Dollar Initiative. The idea was that this consumer advocacy group could unify the one and a half trillion dollars spent annually by Black Americans for racial equity. So this group wants to hold corporations responsible to its Black employees, consumers and communities. And it wants to empower Black consumers to be able to shop with more information about the companies we are patronizing.
The methodology behind the Black Dollar Index is 80% quantitative and 20% qualitative. So the quantitative measures are the
% Black Employees (US)
% Black Leadership Team
% Black Management (US)
% Black Board Of Directors
Black CEO (Y/N)
And the qualitative measures are:
Known Negative Racial Claims (Last 5 Years)
Known Significant Investment in Black Initiatives (Last 5 Years)
Supplier Diversity Program
Diversity & Inclusion Initiative
The workforce data is public information sourced from the corporation’s website.
Undisclosed data qualifies as a 0%. So there is also a penalty for companies not being open about their progress on creating a staff that reflects the country.
Workforce data is measured against the 13.4% Black population in the US (2019 Census)
So how do these, what is this 9 factors, how do they roll up into actual ratings.
I was able to find about 100 ratings, 105 to be specific. I think the easiest way to search the site is to click on Ratings and then control F to find the company you are interested in. I think that works a little better than the actual search box.
The scale goes from 0 to 100, with a higher number being better.
And let’s look at the oil and gas companies that are rated.
BP scored a 12
Marathon Petroleum scored a 20
Exxon scored a 28
Chevron scored a 51
Let’s look at Exxon. They scored the 28. I’ll go through the 9 factors they build the scores from:
% Black Employees (US) Unknown. They don’t have public data on that.
% Black Leadership Team Unknown
% Black Management (US) Unknown.
% Black Board Of Directors 20%
Black CEO (Y/N) No
Known Negative Racial Claims (Last 5 Years) YES. Exxon pumped toxins into a Black community 17 years after a civil rights complaint was filed.
Known Significant Investment in Black Initiatives (Last 5 Years) Yes. They sponsored a Smithsonian exhibition on the green book.
Supplier Diversity Program Yes
Diversity & Inclusion Initiative Yes
All of that is rolling up into a score of 28.
I was interested to see which company had the highest rating on the Black Dollar Index. Do you want to try and guess? Was it Airbnb? Was it verizon? TGI Friday’s? UPS? Allstate? Clorox?
TGIF’s has a 0 y’all! I think that’s the only 0 that I saw. No information whatsoever on the diversity of their employees, no Black CEO, no supplier diversity program, no DEI program, no significant investments in Black initiatives for the past 5 years. And they do have known negative racial claims in the last 5 years.
UPS 92. Their workforce is 24% Black. 25% of corporate leadership is Black. 20% of the Board of Directors is Black. 15% of the senior level leaders are Black. They do support Black initiatives out in the community. THey do have a supplier diversity program. And a DEI program. They do have a known negative racial claim in the last 5 years. A large group of employees sued for allowing discrimination at work. And they don’t have a Black CEO.
I was not surprised that UPS has a 24% Black employee base. I might have guessed even higher from the consumer facing staff that I’ve met in the past. But I didn’t know that a quarter of their corporate leadership is Black and that a fifth of the Board of directors is Black and 15% of the senior level leaders are Black. Very interesting. I don’t think that having Black leadership means you won’t experience anti-black racism at your job as a Black employee and perhaps the lawsuit from the 19 employees is an example of that, I don’t know, but I still do think that diversity at all levels of the companies is still critical and should be measured and should be made public. It’s not a magic cure but it is a part of the equation.
Right behind UPS is Allstate with a score of 90. They have a workforce that is 18% Black. 12% of their corporate leadership is Black. 17% of their Board of Directors. 14% of the senior level is Black. They have a supplier diversity program. They have a DEI initiative. They are investing in Black initiatives, they’ve joined with the Tom Joyner Foundation to support HBCUs. They don’t have a Black CEO and they do have a known negative racial claim in the last 5 years.
Clorox was close behind at a score of 80. I’ll include a link to the Black Dollar Index so you can pore over this site too.
I’d love to hear what you think of this resource and how you think you could use it.
To recap, here’s what we covered today:
If you have a few more minutes, I want to suggest another episode that you might enjoy:
Episode 65 Celebrating Black Philanthropy, that is a Black History Month episode that seems to be popular year round. I hope you enjoy that.
Let’s end with a quote:
This one comes from Toni Morrison.
“When you get these jobs you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
Let’s talk again soon!
