![]() ![]() Quite simply, the racist soap dispenser was created by a homogenous group of product developers who sat around the table and designed a soap dispenser, a useful metaphor for how the economy overall has been constructed. How was this racist soap dispenser created, and how did it make its way into the bathrooms of a major international hotel chain without testing this product with people of diverse skin pigmentation? The white-centered nature of science and technology is replicated across the US, including the ways in which we think about capital and access to capital. This experience reminds us that even goods and services in the economy are white centered and white dominated. ![]() The only way for the man to trigger the soap dispensing process was for him to cover his hand with a white paper towel. This viral video featured a Black hotel guest who was attending DragonCon in Atlanta trying to get soap from an automatic soap dispenser, but the soap dispenser could not read non-white skin pigmentations. Some readers might remember a moment in 2015, when the story of “ the Racist Soap Dispenser” went viral. In the US, diversity is celebrated in theory, but the practice is often quite different. And we view the world from a very different lens than mainstream US society. We are a Lakota community of about 18,800 people living on 4,267 square miles, including the small 5,000-person town of Eagle Butte, and are a sovereign nation. I am a citizen and enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux nation. At the end of the day, that’s why we do what we do. How does one describe the role of a Native community development financial institution (CDFI)? I sometimes say that our job at Four Bands Community Fund, the CDFI where I have worked for the past decade, is not so much about economic development, but nation building. ![]()
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