Visibility Has Never Been Neutral
Black Business Month is not a hashtag to me. It’s a history lesson, a professional reality, and often a complicated feeling, all at once. I’ve been running a Black-owned business in one form or another since 1996, back when visibility meant a business card and a good reputation, not a follower count.This week I launched www.VysyonsCommunications.com, the first website for my business, built during a rebrand that also brought me onto Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, and Substack for the first time as Vysyons. The timing has me thinking about all of this more than usual.
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There is a version of visibility that looks like success from the outside and functions as surveillance from the inside. Black business owners of a certain generation know this without being told. You learn early that being seen and being supported are not the same thing, and that attracting attention is not the same thing as attracting the right kind.
Black Business Month itself is proof of that distinction. It wasn’t founded to be a hashtag. Historian John William Templeton and engineer Frederick E. Jordan Sr. created it in 2004 to push policy, not just raise awareness, for the millions of Black-owned businesses navigating a system that still treats their existence as something to be proven rather than assumed. Recognition and policy change are not the same achievement. A month built to demand the second shouldn’t settle for just the first, and twenty-two years in, I don’t think we should.
When I started Vysyons Communications, I had self-taught skills, a computer, a printer, a landline phone, and clients who found me through word of mouth because I had done good work for someone they trusted. No investors, no internet presence to build on, no college or business school network to tap. That’s how it worked back then for a lot of us. The infrastructure that exists now, the programs, the certifications, most of that either didn’t exist yet or wasn’t accessible in any practical way. Visibility got built one relationship at a time.
What strategic communications could have done for Black-owned businesses then, and what it can do now, isn’t complicated in theory. Help someone articulate what their business does and why it matters. Help them reach the people who actually need to hear it. Help them build the kind of credibility that white-owned businesses are often granted on sight, the benefit of the doubt nobody hands you automatically when you’re Black and running something. That part of the theory holds for any business. What’s different for us is the terrain it has to work on, and it has never been level.
The terrain for Black-owned businesses has always included additional variables.
The credibility tax.
The extra documentation, the additional proof of concept, the need to establish legitimacy that comparable white-owned businesses are extended by default. When I studied Small Business Development at Tulane alongside my Public Relations degree, the case studies assumed a level of access my future clients would rarely have, a warm introduction to a lender, a family member who’d already built something, a network that vouched for you before you walked in the room. I chose that minor on purpose, because I kept watching small Black businesses launch with a great idea and a real hustle and still stall out. Not for lack of talent or trying, but for lack of the unglamorous back-office knowledge and connections that nobody had handed them. That gap is still the first thing I look for in a new client relationship.
The visibility paradox.
More visibility doesn’t automatically mean more support, and less visibility doesn’t mean safety. In the early 2000s I managed social media for a few live bands, starting on MySpace and moving to Facebook as that platform took hold. The reach expanded fast, from the NJ and NY music circuit out to other cities, other states, other countries. Opportunities followed. But the follower counts didn’t land evenly across the members, and that unevenness created problems that went well beyond online metric. People showed up differently to fan engagement, to venues, to each other. The music didn’t change. The relationship did. It came to a head with a fight on stage at the main venue within a couple of months they split into two separate bands. The more engaged member kept working with me. The other one didn’t, and I don’t think he ever fully understood that the work had not just the posts, but relationships with the fans, the venues, the promoters, none of which shows up in a follower count at all.
The network gap.
The informal systems through which opportunities, referrals, and funding actually move have always been harder to access when you don’t already have a seat at the table where those conversations happen. This isn’t an old problem in new language. Crunchbase reported this year that Black-founded startups had their strongest funding quarter since 2022, and researchers were quick to name what still holds them back. It isn’t pitch quality. It’s access to networks, relationships, and the early introductions that happen before a formal pitch is ever made. The dollar figures move. The bottleneck doesn’t.
Strategic communications doesn’t erase the credibility tax, the visibility paradox, or the network gap. It gives you better tools to work inside them. A narrative that answers the extra scrutiny before it’s even asked. Messaging aimed at the people who can actually open a door, not a generic professional audience that was never going to hire you anyway. Visibility in the rooms that matter, not just visibility for its own sake. And the discipline to tell your own story before somebody else, a search result, an assumption, a stereotype, tells it for you first.
That last one matters more than people realize. One of the things thirty years in this field has taught me is that the organizations and individuals who lose control of their narrative usually don’t do so because of a crisis. They lose it gradually, through the accumulation of small silences: things left unexplained, stories left untold, opportunities to communicate skipped because there wasn’t time or it didn’t feel urgent. By the time it feels urgent, the narrative has already been written by someone else.
Black Business Month is a good time to ask: what is your current narrative, and did you write it? Or has it been assembled from your LinkedIn profile, your about page, and whatever a search turns up? Those things tell a story. The question is whether it’s the one you would choose to tell.
I built www.VysyonsCommunications.com this year partly to answer that question for my own business, before I ever ask a client to answer it for theirs.
Next issue is August 18, and I’m writing something for the students and early-career people who reach out asking how to get into communications. The letter I wish someone had handed me when I was starting out.
CLOSING TAKEAWAY
The goal is being understood, by the right people, in the right context, on your own terms. Visibility is just the door.
WORTH NOTING
If you’re a Black business owner looking for programming, community, and support this month, the U.S. Black Chambers is a real, established place to start. Also worth your time: Maggie Anderson’s book Our Black Year, which documents a year of exclusively supporting Black-owned businesses and what she found.