Black Businesses Must Promote Their Core Competences, Not Their Race
- Donald V. Watkins
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on April 11, 2025
An Editorial Opinion
Since 1984, I have been advising Black-owned businesses and professionals against promoting their ethnicity above their core competencies. Rather than marketing themselves as the best service providers in their business sectors, many Black businesses and professionals pitched their blackness as a credential. This was/is a strategic mistake.
When my small black law firm set a statewide record with a $4.1 million jury verdict in a personal injury case in Alabama in 1985, we promoted our litigation expertise, not our race.
In 2000, I co-founded Alabama Bank. By 2007, Alamerica was the No. 4 bank in the nation for its asset group and return on assets (ROA). Its capitalization ratios and ROA were consistently among the best in the nation for all banks.
Alamerica Bank never played the race card to win business and never sought or needed federal bailout money to prosper. It never operated as a social experiment. It was an exercise in financial capitalism.
Despite these achievements, local White-owned media organizations refused to acknowledge that Alamerica Bank won deposits from the city of Birmingham based upon its top national rankings. They attributed the award of city business to political connections, not merit. At the time, no White-owned bank that held city deposits ranked higher than Alamerica in any fiscal soundness "stress test" category.
In 2005, my defense team set a record in American jurisprudence by winning the most felony counts (85) in a single-defendant federal criminal case (U.S. v. Richard Scrushy). In doing so, we stressed my extensive trial experience, superior litigation skills, and exceptional win-loss record in trials (214 wins v. 6 losses, as of July 2005). The White-owned media only focused on my race and the races of the jurors (7 Blacks and 5 Whites).
As a global entrepreneur who leads OxyNol Solutions, we have always stressed the company's innovative waste conversion technology and a seasoned team of top executives with experience in diverse business sectors. In this international zone of business, my race as Executive Chairman is not a factor. It is the company's technology and the high quality of our executive management team that gives OxyNol Solutions a sustained competitive advantage in the clean energy space.
In the Golden Age of Trumpism, any focus on race makes a Black-owned business and/or professional an automatic target for DEI cancellation in U.S. markets. The advice I have been giving to Black-owned businesses and professionals since 1984 is finally being heeded.
“Let your work speak for you .... and you’ll never have to say anything about yourself.” -- Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr., M.D.
My approach to business has always been simple: Find out the standard of performance in my business sectors and exceed it.
In the United States, a major problem facing Black-owned businesses is the chronic failure of cities, counties, colleges, universities, K-12 school systems, churches, and major business governed by Black officials to use their services and/or buy their goods. What is worse, there is almost no networking between and among Black-owned businesses within the U.S. Furthermore, with rare exceptions, Black consumers tend to support White-owned providers of goods and services, rather than their own. The important lessons Blacks learned from “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the early 1900s have been lost in the modern era.