Keep on riding with us as we continue to broadcast the balance and defend the discourse from these hip hop weekly studios. Welcome back to Civic Cipher. I'm your host, Ramsy's job. He is Ramsy's jah. I am q Ward. Thank you well once again tuning into Civic Cipher. Yes and uh, we are still riding along with Diane Post the lawyer, extraordinary activist.
Standing ovation. But every time you save her frame, my whole being wakes up and I go to push the button for all the you know what I mean, the pomp and circumstances to get that together. Yes, we'll be if just for Diane when you talking, Yeah, we'll do that.
Stick around.
We're going to talk about a restrictive covenant bill because we need to learn about this. This will affect not just us, but you as well, potentially if we are not empowered. We're also going to be discussing affirmative action attacks from the Supreme Court, DEI attacks, et cetera, and critically what we can do to take power back from elected officials.
So stay tuned for all that and much more.
But first and foremost, we are going to be discussing Baba becoming a better ally ba BA and Diane has provided us a list of books to pay attention to if you haven't read them, or if you haven't read all of them.
So the floor is yours.
Well, I just mentioned these because when I was in Civics and high school, we were told we had to read these books. We discussed them, and we were told in my high school freshman high school Civics class, question authority, question your government, question authority. That's not what we're taught today, but that is exactly what the Boomers were taught, and that's why we were such a bunch of radical miniacs,
and some of us still are. Okay, So the books Animal Farm it was one nineteen eighty four, absolutely vital. It became one of the best selling books recently, again because it's so relevant to today. Big Brother, Fahrenheit four fifty one, and that's the book burning one we got, you know, all.
The book be fantasy fiction once upon the back again, Yeah, so much anymore.
Remember the business about the history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. It just goes around and around here we are so some of those and this is oh and then Saint Clair Lewis it can't happen here. This is less famous of a book, but it should be. It also became famous again recently because it says it all, yeah, because it can't happen here. It's about a fascist takeover, showing exactly how it can happen here. And then Rachel Maddow just released it, you know, a few months ago, her
new book called pre Quill and what it is. It's about the fascist movement and the Nazi movement in the United States in the nineteen thirties, which is terrifying. But we need to know this so that we can understand what's happening today and how to respond to what's happening today.
Listen, listen.
If you are listening on the radio, which you should do, and you didn't get to write all those down, go to our website Civic scipher dot com. You can download the audio, play that part back and get that book list because it'll get you all the way together. Okay, So thank you very much for that, And I think now we need to.
This discuss the restrictive Covenant bill.
So I'm gonna go back one second to your list that you had there before of the reparations. You are aware that slave owners were paid reparations. Yes, they were paid reparations, while the slaves themselves were not. In the In the UK, it took them one hundred years to pay off the loan that they gave to pay the slave owners, and in Haiti was bankrupted and kept poor for two hundred years because they had to pay back
France for the for the slaves. Yeah, exactly, So add that on to your list, because that is shocking when you're talking to white people and you say, well, you know, why should blacks get reparations because whites did white scout reparations intense It is disgusting. I had no idea, so I had to put that in there. Please, all right, Restrictive covenant Belka. There is such a thing as the Uniform Law Commission. This Uniform Law Commission is nation wide
and they come up with exactly what it says. Uniform was that they try to pass everywherewhere. Right now, there are eight states that have restrictive covenant bills and about twelve cities. And what it is is going back to redlining, when there used to be on the deeds of property a provision that said you may never rent or sell this property to mine I actually looked it up when I started on this process. My deed says to anyone other than a Caucasian, my deed says this for my
house in writing. So many of them said that, but they more likely would say to a Negro, a Jew, or an Asian. This is very common all over the country, and this was part of the red lining to keep blacks out of places we didn't want blacks to be living. Right, So this is called the restrictive covenant. So on your property deed is a covenant or an agreement that it is restricted to be sold to or rented to certain people.
All right, So how this all happened? Well, So the Uniform Law Commission is we had been working on this because the eight different states that already have these laws were all different ways of doing it, and some worked and some didn't, and some were better than others, et cetera. And then the twelve cities that have it all had different ways of doing it. So what they try to do is take all of these examples and come up with the best possible law that could be for everybody. Yeah,
make it quote uniform unquote. So that has now been adopted by the National Uniform Law Commission and Arizona hopefully we'll be the first stay capacit. We were already had a working group, a stakeholder group to work on this. We didn't even know about this, we found out about it, So we were already working on this for the state legislatur. And so then we've continued and we have a great
stakeholder group. We have Republicans, Democrats, we have government officials, we have home hoas you know, we have individual homeowners. We have the Black lawyers, we have the Jewish lawyers, we have Asian groups, we have all of the groups that were impacted by this on our stakeholder and the people that are going to be impacted by it. So the bill's been introduced here in Arizona, the model bill that is applicable across the country. So the bill has
been introduced here by a Republican and a Democrat. So bills will not pass in Arizona unless you get a Republican sponsor, Okay, and we did. And he's a real estate agent, so he knows about his thing, and he's the chair of the committee that we hope it goes to. It has a good chance of passing and in our stakeholder group. Like I said, you know, the county recorders are not opposed to it, the hoas are not opposed to it, the Land Title Association people are not opposed
to it. So we've got everybody on board with it. So we're really hoping to pass it. So this is something that nationwide people should be looking at in their own communities. They can do it by city or you can it's better, of course to do it statewide, but if you can't.
You can do it.
So for our listeners who may not be legally sophisticated, what is the benefit of having this passed in their community.
So to get a little history on it, in nineteen forty eight, the US Supreme Court said you cannot enforce these covenants. So there was such a covenant and somebody sold their house to a black person and the neighbors tried to stop them, and the court said, well, we can't stop you from doing it.
Now.
Remember forty eight, I was a year old, so we can't stop you from doing it. But because it is discriminatory, federal courts cannot participate in enforcing it. So it totally weakened them, but it didn't make them go Away stopped it, and they kept on until nineteen sixty eight. So most of the housing developments, suburbs, big thing here, suburbs built before nineteen sixty eight have these restrictive covenants in there.
Why do they have them? Because people wanted him and even though they weren't actually enforceable, they wanted him in there because who knew that they weren't enforceable but the few lawyers, right, I mean, not everybody knew this. So in nineteen sixty eight, when the Housing Fair Anything Law was passed, it prohibited them. So from nineteen sixty eight on, you may not put them in there. So that's the question we get asked all the time, Well why bother them?
I mean, why bother They're not enforceable. But the point is this, how this all started in Arizona, was a new professor came to U of A. He was a geography dude. He bought a condo. He looks at the deed as he did what I didn't even know as a lawyer, he read every bit of it and there it was and it said you cannot rent to vendor sell to a negro. His spouse was black. So he went to the real estate agent and fit and the
real estate said, oh, never mind. You know it's it's not enforceable, but I don't care if it's enforceable or not. This is a mark of slavery. Remember the thirteenth Amendment. It said we're going to do away with the badges of slavery. This is a badge of slavery. This is a story of the discriminatory history in this country, and we are not going to continue it. So he actually came to the NAACP and said, can you do this law? So that's how it got started, and we did it.
Okay.
So that's where we are. So the people working on our group that have written books about this, there's books written about it. Carol Rose is Americus professor lawyer U of A, and she's written books about this. There's the whole psychological part of it. You know that it has an impact on people. It has an impact on their behaviors and their feelings and their opinions.
You know, certainly does with us.
Right.
So, I mean when you were saying about how this it was to say so and so bought so and so I was going to make a joke, but then I thought, really, wasn't probably very funny. But you know, well that makes me feel bad as a white person, because that's the whole thing. Four little white people feel bad about something that happened to a thousand years ago. Well, how about black people feeling bad about what's happening today. You know that's not allowed.
And you know, on top of that, it feels bad to read that a baby was a slave, you know, and I have to read that every day, and so you know, I know that to be fair is we recognize that there's all types that listen to the show. This is hard content to deal with. And we you and I we come into this room every week, eyes wide open, just out and we jump into this pit, yes and way through it all. And we're brave enough to do that. And we're not better or worse than
anyone else. And when we bring up these points that, you know, it'd be one thing if I'm talking to a white person for them to feel bad about that having been what they inherited. But to those people, I say, imagine what it feels like reading that about your ancestors, Like, yeah, this is this is my start. I didn't come on the Mayflower. I didn't come you know I wasn't you know, I came in chains, you know, like what worth is your life with value?
But the answer to I feel bad is then do something fixed boom, Then take in action and do something.
You know, this is important to say. I want to say this because you know, we do a show that has a clock and time runs out, and this needs to be said where other people can hear it. I have become grossly disenfranchised and discouraged with the political climate of our country and what is going on with our leaders and our legislators. And the sad part is I
don't often enough get to hear voices like Diane. This is why we celebrate you so much, because we can easily forget that you exist exist, that people that think like you exist, because we get amplification of the other side on every network that my television has. Even those who used to be centered or left leaning are starting
to now all sound the same and it's terrifying. My family has started to look at places where you know, black people have expat and moved from this country to go live elsewhere, because it's starting to feel scary and
dangerous here. So you forget that there are people in this country, who have a heart and who have no how and who are learned and who are organized, and who are taking steps to give us a better place to live, you know, and we're talking about I know, we're going to be talking about you know, affirmative action and DEI and just you know, control taking control back
from our government here coming up. And if I'm a live out to segue to those topics, Yes, our Supreme Court was stacked very heavily by the last president, very intentionally, and they are now attempting to do things that will make them the all unilateral power, where we no longer have to be consulted in, where Congress no longer has
a say soul. How terrifying is that for someone like yourself, who understands it a lot better than a layman like me, to see that our political leaders are exploiting their power to take control and put their constituents under their thumb.
Well, let me give you a little positive on that. The Supreme Court has no power, but what we give it. They don't have an army, they don't have any way to enforce their rulings except that we believe them. So in some ways they are legless. You know, they're supposed to be three legs of the government, right, the legislative, the judicial, and the pizza, you know, the executive and so they but they don't have any leg because they got nobody but the executive or the Congress to enforce
what they say. Let me give you an example. I'm sure you all know the dread Scott decision, right Well, I just finished writing a two part thing on how the Supreme Court has worked to undermine the first reconstruction and the second reconstruction, and they have. There was only a short period of time under the the one court where I've got his name, where Brown versus Board of Education happened during that twenty years there when good cases happened in the Supreme Court leaned on the side of
African Americans. There's only that time. All the rest of the time they have tried to destroy whatever was done for African Americans in this country. But after the dread Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court said black people have no rights which white people have to pay any attention to, and they cannot vote, they cannot do anything, they can't be citizens, They'll never be anything. Right, Abraham Lincoln and the rest of them ignored them. They just
ignored them. So that's what you do. You ignore the Supreme Court with the rulings about DEEI and affirmative action, they're just being ignored. Rather than stopping it, we're just shifting. When you meet a mountain, what do you do? You go over it, or you go around it, or you go through it. You do one of the three things.
So we're just going around it. So instead of saying, Okay, we're going to go and recruit black kids, we're going to say, Okay, we're going to go to an economically vulnerable community, or we're going to go to a rural community, or we're going to look for kids who have talent in this or that or the other. There are I mean, there's all kinds of trainings that I've received and documents that I've read about how to get around this. You just go around them and you double down.
You know what.
I want to take this moment to shout out of all people, Mark Cuban, because I read something this might have been yesterday.
Those that know I do a show.
We do a show for the Black Information Network, We do the Daily Podcast, and we covered well I didn't cover this story, but I read it and it was in Box Business Journal or whatever. But Mark Cuban was doing that very thing.
Yep.
Yeah, and he's actually they're trying to suggest that he might get in trouble for that, but he seems to not really care.
I mean, the hiring of Cynthia Marshall made that clear that the first black female CEO in the history of the NBA was hired by Mark Cuban. Yep. So he's actively doing that.
Don't just go around it.
It's not just that an idea for him. He's he's it's kinetic.
And what Lincoln did back then after the Judge's cop decision was and in the North, not just Lincoln, but other states in the North, they gave blacks a right to vote. They ran for office, and they got into office, and they just treated them as if that decision had never happened. And that's what we need to do. It's the same thing with abortion. So they say, well, I don't need one, but you know I can't have an abortion. You just go ahead and do it anyway, you find
another way to do it. Women have always had abortions and they always will have abortions. One way or another. So the Supreme Court isn't really all that powerful. Now, you know, there are many moves to increase the numbers of people on the Supreme Court. So that's one thing, of course, if the er if you tried that and it didn't work, but that doesn't mean it can't ever work.
But there seem to be corporations and organizations that were waiting for the Supreme Court to do something like that, to give them permission, yes, to be racist again.
Absolutely absolutely, well. You do know, down at the legislature, not only in the United States, not only in Arizona, but around the country, bills are being introduced by the Republican Party to prohibit banks, financial institutions, and anybody who contracts with the state using social scores social or environmental scores as a determinant of whether to give loans or you know, how big of a loan or whatever. Those quote social or environmental scores are things that we've developed
over years to see how how decent is the corporation. Basically, you know, are they hiring you know, child labor and prison labor and following the environmental rules and you know that sort of thing, and then their score is higher and higher, so in fact, those companies do better financially than the ones who are dirty companies. But yet the state must have prohibit anybody from contracting with those companies because they don't want the DEI scores. But they're not going to win this battle.
They want to pretend that there's a meritocracy right, there is welfare and the best people will come out on top. And we know that that's just not.
The game, absolutely not the game.
One of the things I think to your point, Q, one of the things that I think further illuminates that is when we did the the what was it, the skewed Monopoly, yes, the warped Monopoly example, where in short, we started a game of monopoly, and Q and I got to go first, and you, our listener, had to wait a few turns while we made our purchases. We got two hundred dollars, well exactly, and then but after we after we went around the board four times or whatever,
we call that period slavery. You could participate, but you could only collect one hundred dollars from passing go.
You could not buy any property. Blah blah blah.
That was your reality for the first three turns around the board. And then after that then you were able to get you know what is it community chess and those sorts of things.
And then.
We decided, okay, so what we can do now is play the game fair, right, meaning you can do everything that we can do. You can get two hundred dollars when you can roll with both dice, right, will you win that game? If we have already been going around building wealth, we own all the properties, all the houses, we own all the railroads, everything like that. Now we say you can play the game fair, will you win?
Do you even have a chance of being competitive? And of course the answer isn't it no. But if we put in, if we build in to the game that maybe you can roll twice in a row for however long, or maybe you can we'll start you off with a few houses, or maybe we'll you know whatever, whatever elements will inject into the game to make you a minimum competitive. Would you prefer that or would you prefer to play
the game fair? And I know that your answer would be I would prefer to have some sort of restorative justice so that I can at least be competitive here that I think that that sums it up.
And people would think that we were ridiculous if we argued against it.
Right, you guys clearly started the game four moves ahead of put right.
Absolutely, But yet it's fair for me to start now after my legs have been untied and my arms have been untied. Now I can race you.
Oh right, sure, so silly.
And I want to mention one thing too about the suffirmative action issue in the Supreme Board case. Yes, it started way back in the seventies. And this started as a positive case. Now when you talk about allies, how allies can think they're doing good and it turns out bad. But sometimes that happens, you know. And it was a case of white people saying, well, we are discriminated against because you won't rent to blacks in this building. So I lose out living in a multicultural system because you
won't rent blacks. Well, they won the case, and they said the fourteenth Amendment did apply to whites. Well that's the problem today. That's the problem today because the Fourteenth Amendment wasn't made for whites. They didn't need an amendment to freedom of slavery. They weren't it slaveow.
Well, listen, we're going to have to yeah, yeah.
For two years.
Yeah yeah, regularity yeah, fit us in whenever you can.
You know, each one of these things we could break out and have full on we could conversations about. And I think that not only would we be empowered here on the show, but I think that our listeners would be more empowered.
Of course, I have a fantastic idea is that we should go live with her?
Yeah, yeah, we should. We should, So let's uh plan for that next time.
What does that mean? Explain later.
We'll explain it last, but we'll go live.
But for now, we'd like to thank you all for tuning in once again to civic sicher hoimih host ramses job.
You know, he is Ramsays and I'm his brother, and if you have a problem with him, you have a problem with me. And I've been talking to him, I've been doing pushing us so I'm ready to hit these streets. No, I'm joking. We appreciate you guys more than you know. We tried to laugh and smile as often as we can on this show because unfortunately a lot of the things that we have to cover our tough yeah, and
you guys help us through it. Hearing Diane talk today gave me some energy and some rejuvenation that I needed because I started to become very discouraged with the goings on in our country. So thank Diane, thank you so much.
Yeah, and if you missed out on any part of the show, do us a favorite.
Hit the website civicsacer.
Dot com and download or hit the podcast or whatever prescribe to Shared Life.
I promise