re: All Baton Rouge media is racist

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The end of 2012 marked the beginning of my journey as a black business owner along with my two best friends and the sky was the limit

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We set out to accomplish incredible things at The Rouge Collection Magazine. Within days some vibrant young writers joined our team and took the opportunity to share their stories and perspective with thousands of people. They were excited about launching a black owned media platform in the city.

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Year two has come and gone and we desired to bring 12 issues of the magazine to print. We never met the budget. What we found out was that being black and in business you walk a difficult tight rope.

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I got frustrated as I saw black businesses advertise with non-black companies and wondered why they wouldn’t give us a shot. I wondered why no one wanted to buy into our dream. I knew, even with The Rouge Collection’s kinks, the potential to be great was there. Is there.

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Along the way I realized that being a black owned publication is more than just being in business. When we started, this was about trying to build something that could feed our families. There is nothing wrong with that, and it’s still our goal. However, we found out that people like our Editor-in-Chief Thelisia Davis, a Dillard University graduate, almost gave up on her goal of writing for a publication before The Rouge Collection, because job opportunities for minorities in journalism weren’t just falling out of the sky. We found out that so many other people who came to work with us had tried to work for companies locally and afar to no avail. We found out that this was a calling. That we had responded to a call to action that we didn’t even know existed before we got knee-deep into it.

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Right now in too many places around the country, people of other ethnicities are speaking to our people and giving us slanted information. Too often we aren’t celebrated for what we achieve unless we kiss up to fit into certain social groups, or play the game of a system that wasn’t designed for us to succeed in. So even though most days its hard to be a black entrepreneur, I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. I’m going to keep pressing, keep pushing to build a print budget that gives us the chance to shift the culture of black media in our market.

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