Neighborhoods that are poor and majority black or minority are targeted for profit and death. Disadvantaged neighborhoods are targeted for profit by corporations and businesses offering access to subpar and unhealthy foods and products. Compared to neighborhoods with higher household incomes, poor communities have more access to fast food, junk food, liquor, and alcohol. The youth are targeted through sugary drinks, junk snacks, and candy flavored nicotine products to keep them coming back for more.
Poor communities typically do not have zoning protection. Lack of zoning protection allow these businesses and their products to saturate black communities. Junk restaurants, liquor and convenience stores are placed on multiple corners and within walking distance of homes. Close proximity allow for easy access to products designed to generate disease. Diseases such as obesity, cancer, liver and kidney failures, addiction, and diabetes. They promote their products with advertisements specific to certain zip codes. They use stereotyped language, music, symbolism, and signage designed to draw minorities in to buy more.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to resist their tactics. It is convenient to stop at a drive-thru for fried processed foods designed for a long shelf life and offering little to no health benefits. It’s easy for black teens to buy chips, flavored vapes, and sugary neon colored drinks labeled by their color at a cheap price. These corner “convenience” stores make it easy for women to purchase questionable meat from them. It’s too easy to drown the stress of being black using their malt liquor products.
These corporations and vendors are already in our communities. However, it is our money keeping them in operation which allows more to come into our neighborhoods because they can calculate the profits gained from us. By giving in, black communities are funding not only the wealth of these companies, but the destruction of black lives through poor health and early death from disease. Black communities must grow, cook and eat less processed and healthier foods for long-term physical and mental health.