Racial Equality In The US Economy: What Yelp Is Doing To Help Black-Owned Businesses

Review website Yelp announced Thursday that it will launch a tool within the next two weeks to help businesses identify themselves as black-owned. The announcement comes as demonstrations take place across the United States after the death of 46-year-old African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis.

“Over the coming weeks, we will launch a new free searchable attribute that will give businesses a way to identify themselves as Black-owned, and make it easy for users to find and support Black-owned businesses on Yelp,” the company’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a blog post. “This attribute will be opt-in only as the decision to self-identify as Black-owned should rest solely with the business.”

“We’ve been inspired by the outpouring of requests for this feature from users who want to support Black businesses,” the post read. “In fact, over the last week we saw a 25x increase in the frequency of searches for Black-owned businesses across categories on Yelp compared to the same time last year.”

Individuals may want to find these businesses in order to show solidarity with the African-American community. Minority-owned businesses have also been hard-hit by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

A survey of 500 African-American and Latino business owners published in May revealed that 15% had closed permanently. One in five had applied for federal aid, with only 12% saying they had received the full amount requested.

According to the most recent census figures from 2017, there are over 2 million black-owned businesses in the U.S.

According to media company Black Enterprise, the top 100 companies owned by African-Americans employed over 71,000 people in 2018