President Trump sparks small business growth

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Olatiwa Karade, a 19-year-old in Orange, N.J., has created her own line of sweatshirts with pro-black political slogans on them. Her company and Etsy shop, SplendidRainCo, sells “clothing for the modern activist.”

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Karade told Dazed that her designs were influenced by the current political climate in the United States following the election of Donald Trump.

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“The current political climate, my coming of age as a young black woman and my personal experiences with racial discrimination really nudged me to do something,” Karade said. “Digging through my clothes to find something to wear to Afropunk Brooklyn 2017, I decided on a politically charged T-shirt my mother had handed down to me. I loved how I felt wearing it, with my ideas and beliefs proudly on display and desperately wanted more. Thus, the sweaters were born!”

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“I was a heavy Bernie Sanders supporter,” she says. “So we were at odds, completely, with Trump supporters, and everything they said was just so invalidating of my life and experiences as a Black woman. It was frustrating, of course, and it makes you angry. But on the other side, I was dealing with very liberal, white people who loved Bernie, who were all for Democratic socialism, but when he would speak about police brutality, Sandra Bland, or all the things that were going on in the Black community, then all of a sudden they were [saying things like] all lives matter, or that we can’t move forward if we don’t all work together. And I was like, we’re not working together if you’re silencing us.”

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