“Then the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn for her because no one buys their cargo any longer…” —Revelation 18:11
“To the sellers of trees and trains and pins and pianos, we urge you to understand and to pledge with us that this Christmas shall come from our hearts and minds, not from our pocketbooks…”
—James Baldwin, urging support for a Christmas boycott
There are a million reasons for Blacks to flex their economic muscle to gain their own freedom, justice, and equality. On October 10th the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan assembled one million people of all races and faiths who have declared to the world that they want Justice, Or Else! Min. Farrakhan called for a boycott of the lucrative Christmas industry as a first step in addressing the wanton murders of Blacks by the police forces of America, as well as the other injustices that have plagued our communities for generations. All those who are serious about showing the powers-that-be our resolve are looking forward to spending nothing from “Black Friday,” November 27th, to New Year’s 2016. We refuse to purchase Christmas gifts, trees, lights, decorations, and holiday cards or patronize any online retailer. What money we do spend will be in the way of honoring Jesus and strengthening our family bonds and in support of Black businesses for necessary goods and services.
Here are TEN good reasons to Boycott Christmas—now and forevermore.
- Stop Feeding the Beast. The advent of the smart-phone has given us a clear picture of the true nature of America’s “law enforcers.” They have but one purpose—to protect the merchant class of capitalists as they fleece the rest of us. The police are not rogue: they are faithfully following a mission they were given back when they started out as “paddyrollers” during slavery—to keep Blacks from rising, by any means necessary. The Matthew 2:16 commandment, “Kill ALL boy babies,” is the job of the police, and their heightened supply of advanced military weaponry is intended for Black slaughter.
So far, in 2015, nearly 1,000 people have been killed by police. Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and countless others will not be celebrating Christmas, but their killers will. When we boycott Christmas, we stop participating in our own oppression—we stop feeding the beast. This is great news for a people who are sick of wicked police policies, rotten schools, record Black unemployment, and Black incarceration rates. When they refuse to feed white supremacy, they feed Black progress and Black self-determination! Self-defense is a Biblical commandment (Exod. 22:2). It only makes good sense to weaken the enemy by withholding that which would strengthen him—cash money. Economic withdrawal is effectively a form of economic sanctions.
- We must gain the attention of those who have contributed to our oppression, and send a clear, economic message that things have changed—we are not going to take it anymore. Black activism has never been easier. One not need throw a Molotov cocktail, or picket a store, lie down in a mall, or even join a protest organization—one merely has to NOT do something—namely, not spend. This dedicated REFUSAL to spend money within a system that depends on our spending—until that system plays fair—is the STRONGEST message that a capitalist system can possibly hear. Voting and suing do not bother the powers that be—that is their field, their court, their rules, their playbook. But they will move heaven and earth to keep your dollars flowing into their coffers—dollars that pay the police to murder our people in cold blood. When we choose to withhold our dollars, or to redirect them to a Black restaurant or Black insurance company, or to a Latino retailer or Native American bank or African cab company, the intransigent power structure must take notice. Before you know it, the boardrooms are buzzing, the politicians are summoned, and the police chiefs are given a new set of rules—the same rulebook used in white and Jewish neighborhoods. Our holiday shopping is key for retailers, with sales in November and December—a massive $620 billion—accounting for as much as 50 percent of annual revenue. Using the hashtag #NotOneDime, Black Lives Matter made deft use of social media and made headlines around the globe as they shut down whole malls on America’s busiest buying day—Black Friday. The result was devastating to a frail and impotent American economy teetering on the edge of collapse. Six million shoppers stayed home, and sales plummeted by 11% on that 4-day weekend alone. That added up to $7 billion in lost revenue, according to the National Retail Federation. THAT $7 billion sledgehammer is why Black Lives Matter is spoken of in the presidential debate. In effect, Black Lives Matter carried out Martin Luther King’s blueprint for forcing real change in the American system.
A Christmas boycott—from Grey Thursday (a.k.a. Thanksgiving) and Black Friday to New Year’s Day—can double, triple, quadruple those results, and bring the other troublemakers behind the politicians (the bankers, judges, C.E.O.s, and union officials) to the negotiating table. Flexing our economic muscle will change our current degraded reality.
- Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers did it. This Generation has the opportunity to settle the Reverend Dr. King’s unfinished business. Both civil rights leaders used Christmas boycotts to press for Black justice. NAACP leader Medgar Evers led a successful boycott of 150 downtown stores in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962. It was overwhelmingly effective and forced the white leaders to take the NAACP’s demands seriously. On his last day on earth Dr. Martin Luther King asked us to practice “economic withdrawal” as a strategy to gain our rights.
“We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, ‘God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.’”
Many say that this call to unleash Black economic power was the “final straw” that motivated his assassination.
By unified spending our strongest leaders can speak with real power to the forces of white supremacy. It was the international boycott of the white supremacist leaders of South Africa that forced an end to apartheid and released freedom fighter Nelson Mandela from prison. It is that same economic pressure by the BDS Movement (standing for boycott, divestment, and sanction) that is now forcing Israel to change its policies toward the Palestinians. Latinos (and their sympathizers/supporters) offended by the recent statements of Donald Trump are boycotting the candidate and may have contributed to his present slip in the polls.
Jesus did it. When Jesus confronted the rabbis for their wicked misdeeds, the very first thing He did was to target the merchants. In all four gospels, Jesus expels the moneychangers from the Temple, accusing them of turning the Temple into a den of thieves through their commercial activities. In effect, He called for the BOYCOTT of those merchants, even though His argument was with the chief rabbis. Why didn’t He kick over the rabbi’s lectern? Why go after the merchants? Were not they there only by permission of the rabbis? Through that very violent action Jesus was warning us of a secret relationship that exists between the leaders and the money-makers, and by targeting the latter He knew He was hitting at the very heart of the oppressors.
- Christmas is Rank Commercialism. Imagine you arrive at your own birthday party and some fat white man is sitting in the middle of the room getting all the attention, opening all your gifts. This is what Jesus watches every year—brought to him by the very people who claim to follow Him. And, of course, He wonders why the party is at least two months after His actual birthday. Jesus wasn’t born on or near December 25. Bethlehem is cold, wet, and rainy in December, so the shepherds in Luke 2:8 who were “living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night,” would have been out of their minds if they had kept their flocks outside at night at that time of year!
No, Santa, Mrs. Claus, the reindeer, the elves, Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman, and everything about them are a devious concoction created by merchants who have cynically supplanted Jesus for the sake of profits. So greedy are they that they have pushed up the shopping extravaganza they call Black Friday to what they call “Grey Thursday,” a day previously known as Thanksgiving.
The first white people in America outlawed Christmas. The Puritans complained it was “spent in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and in all Licentious Liberty…by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling…”
More than two-thirds of the people on earth DO NOT celebrate Christmas at all. Of the two billion that do, most cultures consider it a holy remembrance of the Savior and spend it in prayer, fasting, and other forms of worship. The rank commercialism that now pervades an entire season is an American phenomenon. Needless to say, there is almost nothing about Christmas that Jesus would approve of or participate in.
- God said BOYCOTT. The Bible outlaws Xmas. One may look no further than the King James Bible, Jeremiah 10:2-5, wherein God Himself denounces the pagan ritual of chopping down and decorating a tree and the worship of false idols—heathen traditions that have come to symbolize Christmas. Thus says the Lord:
Jeremiah 10:2-5: “Learn not the way of the nations, nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens because the nations are dismayed at them, for the customs of the peoples are vanity. A tree from the forest is cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman. They decorate it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move. Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good.”
- You Can’t Afford It. 15 million Americans say that when the Christmas season arrives, they still have not yet paid the debt from the last one. Each family carries an average credit card debt of $16,000; mortgage debt: $155,000; student loan debt: $32,000. The American public’s irresponsible, knee-jerk holiday money hemorrhage unduly inflates this burden on family finances. The amount spent on holiday purchases continues to grow, with each shopper now spending about $700 per person on gifts and seasonal items. Children claim a bulk of the holiday treasures at $403.26 spent on average, and studies of childrens’ letters to Santa show that guilt-driven parents give them more gifts than they actually ask for. The elves, reindeer, candy canes, and roasting chestnuts are manipulative, cynical fronts for money-grubbing merchants. After all, “He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress” (Hosea 12:7).
- Nobody wants your gifts. A Yale University study estimated that $4 billion worth of Christmas gifts are wasted every year. The gift is not wanted and will not be used. It will be re-gifted, tossed into a closet or garage, or thrown away, adding immensely to American clutter and waste. Ch-ch-ch chia pets, battery-heated socks, fish-print ties, bacon-flavored toothpaste—all are part of an entire industry targeting impulsive shoppers, spending addicts, and shopaholics. It is behavior that is encouraged under the guise of “Christmas spirit.” From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, household waste increases by more than 25%. Food waste, shopping bags, packaging, wrapping paper, bows and ribbons all add up to an additional 1 million tons a week to our landfills. In the U.S., annual trash from gift-wrap and shopping bags totals 4 million tons. An estimated 6 billion holiday cards are sold each year in the United States, enough to fill a football field 10 stories high.
- It is the perfect time to get control of our fleeing Black Dollars. According to the Urban League, a dollar circulates in Asian communities for a month, in Jewish communities approximately 20 days and white communities 17 days. How long does a dollar circulate in the Black community? 6 hours! Black American buying power is at $1.1 trillion, yet only 2 cents of every dollar Blacks spend in this country go to Black-owned businesses. Blacks make up more than 13% of the U.S. population, but only own 7% of the businesses. Of the 2 million Black businesses, only about 107,000 of them have actual employees. Such firms employ more than 920,000 people, with a total annual payroll of $23.9 billion. The other 1.9 million businesses cannot afford to hire employees—and all that is by devious design. Websites like com in Chicago and apps like BlackTradeCircle from BlackTradeLines seek to correct this distortion by compiling Black-owned business directories. These must be expanded to help give the Black, Latino, Native consumer more intelligent buying options.
- Jews Boycott. Jews have NEVER celebrated Christmas, and they have never lied to their own children about any Santa, reindeer, or elves. Jews lead all ethnic groups in every economic category, and in many areas—as in media and in Hollywood and many other fields—Jews control those industries In history, when Jews were threatened by outside forces, they used economic boycotts to attack and overcome those forces. In 1933, Jews around the world boycotted German-made goods to weaken Hitler’s Nazi movement; and in 1927, Jews boycotted the Ford Motor Company after Henry Ford published unflattering comments about Jewish power.
BONUS REASONS
- The police said to Boycott. Movie director Quentin Tarrantino recently came to New York to stand up for the victims of police shootings. He was quoted as saying, “I’m a human being with a conscience. And if you believe there’s murder going on, then you need to rise up and stand up against it. I’m here to say I’m on the side of the murdered.” Immediately, white police organizations called for a boycott of Tarrantino’s December release The Hateful Eight. It is only Black people who REFUSE to apply the political strategy of economic boycotting to “redistribute the pain,” as Dr. King has said. There are only 1.1 million police in America, yet they believed they could be most effective against their “enemies” by withholding their movie dollars. There are 40 times that number of Blacks in America. A boycott of ANYTHING by Blacks will be successful.
- Santa Claus is a lie. Jesus could not have been clearer about how to identify the devil: “When he lies, he speaks his mother tongue, because he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). When told the truth about “Santa,” most children are not disappointed that he does not exist; rather, they are staggered and bewildered when for the first time they realize that their parents—particularly their mothers—have lied and will lie to them. Parents rationalize this with a quick lesson about “white lies” and “black lies,” and degrees of deceit, and lies that are sometimes acceptable and necessary, even fun! Santa breaks the bond of trust that parents have built with their children. And it is all to uphold a fantasy where our Black children are made to look to a benevolent white man with the power to “check his list to see who is naughty or nice,” for what they want and need. Fifty-seven percent of parents say they use the “Santa’s watching” threat. Children are taught to ignore the illogic of the Santa story, which prepares them to ignore the massive contradictions of the world they inhabit—as with the 9/11 false-flag attacks. Through Santa (via their own mothers and fathers) children become accustomed to accepting the major, gigantic lies that uphold the western world. Instead, thoughtful parents might inculcate this Christmas virtue: Up with Jesus, down with Santa.
- Better deals are coming soon. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, business inventories are bursting at the seams, and rising. TVs, computers, playstations, and toaster ovens are sitting on store shelves unbought and gathering dust. Fewer orders for manufacturers spell trouble for a teetering economy—especially one that upholds the murderous policing and incarceration policies against its own dark-skinned consumers. The unity of these consumers (Black, Latino, and Native, and people of goodwill) choosing to buy intelligently can force retail prices for these goods into a steep decline, where they can be bought in bulk at wholesale prices, thus giving us a huge savings and also supplying our Black-owned retailers, who have been purposely locked out of the wholesale market. All it takes is an intelligent consumer making strategic buying decisions as a cohesive group. The wolf always waits for the sheep to be separated from the flock before they go for the kill. Since slavery, that is how white merchants have viewed the Black consumer. After all, “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf; in the morning he devours the prey, in the evening he divides the plunder” (Genesis 49:27).
- Starts discussion about Black Economics. One of the most deceptive manipulations that whites pulled on the Black civil rights movement is a strategy they called “non-economic liberalism.” That meant they would only help finance those Black leaders and organizations that advocated empowerment through voting and the courts—but never, ever economics. Most people don’t know that civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Jesse Jackson, Randall Robinson, and others strongly advocated and even led economic boycotts, but the forces of white control and Black disunity, playing on negro fears and self-hatreds, often undermined those strategies.