You know, these online trolls and comments have been getting to me, and it's time we did something about it. Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios, ID like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher.
I am your host, Ramsey's job.
He is Ram's job. I am his personal security. So if he's that fed up, then we got something to talk about.
But you can call me.
Que indeed, stick around. We have a lot to talk about today. The fact of the matter is that we have adopted a more aggressive social media strategy in recent months and been posting more frequently.
You know, we're radio guys.
We do radio, and so social media has just kind of always been something that's supplemented what we've done. Well, now we've had to kind of lean into it a bit more, and along with that comes trolls and people that,
you know, try to pick on us. But the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people who raised some talking points that are sort of age old talking points from the far right, if I'm being honest, and some of them are indeed white supremacist, and so what we're gonna do is hopefully have the conversations in the studio today so that you can hear our rebuttals and use them in your own travels, in your own journey as you encounter racism or anti black
sentiment or anti anything sentiment, We're going to have the conversations that I believe will help you on your way. We've probably been more frustrated by it than we hope that you are, but because we get inundated with it. But the fact of the matter is that we recognize that it can be frustrating for anybody and everybody, and it's when these things come together that we can actually
do something about it. So we're going to take the time to day to do that and foremost, like we always do it, this time, we are going to discuss some Ebony Excellence.
Show.
We show Today's Abney Excellence is sponsored by Major Threats for innovative fashionable sportswear. Check major Threats dot com. All right, I'm gonna read from NPR and this is a cool story. It's about a a man, a black man, who was a mechanic and later in life became a doctor. He realized his lifelong dream and I just thought it was really special. So he's our Ebony Excellence example today. Carl Alanbe's professional trajectory could be reduced to the plot of
a feel good movie, skimming over the details. His story is of a once poor boy from the wrong side of Cleveland who went from fixing cars to fixing people, from mechanic to medical doctor, and technically all of that is correct. Alan b did go from owning an auto repair shop almost straight out of high school, recently starting his first job as an emergency room attending physician at
Cleveland Clinics Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. But the more accurate truth is that in this case, alan Be's social and economic mobility, the kind that embodies the soul called American dream, was of the tortoise versus hair variety. It stretched out over decades. High school graduation came and went with little fanfear, though by then Allenbe was living on his own and had picked up a job as
at an auto part store. It was there he learned about cars, and he would often pick up small repair jobs that he worked on at a shop across the street. In the beginning, he rented a portion of the space, but eventually he had enough business to buy the place. It was nineteen taking community college classes unearthed a desire
he held since seeing Denzel Washington play a doctor. He eventually transferred into a program at Cleveland State University that guaranteed him a spot at Northeast Ohio Medical University, and he did well. Just I want to let you know, I'm reading pretty fast. So in between there he grew up and raised a family, all that.
Sort of stuff.
He graduated Summa cum lade with a bachelor's in science by twenty fifteen, and he started medical school, and then he graduated from medical school at age forty seven, and now he is again at his residency at Cleveland Clinic ACRON at fifty one. So shout out to Carl Allen Beech any excellence if I ever heard of it.
Okay, So here's what we're gonna do.
We're going to go through our social media and pick out some of the comments that deserver response. It deserve is a strong word, but that deserver response that you
could benefit from hearing. Right, Some of these comments that we get are We get a lot of comments because of the hashtags we use, and a lot of the people are very angry people, right, And so we get a lot of trolls, a lot of people that are just spewing really hateful stuff and not really trying to understand or really espouse kind of the intent of what we're trying to say in our posts. But the fact of the matter is that some of these talking points,
they exist, and we know that they exist. They're like zombies. They'll never die and if we encounter them. The fact is that there's a good chance that you encounter them in your in your travels, in your own life.
And so.
Let's start with a post that we put up recently. Q actually posted this where he was talking about lawsuits settlements and how police lawsuits are settled by the citizens, taxpayers, You and I. Right, So Q is making his point, and then the comments are.
Pretty ugly.
We're being honest. So let's grab one. So here's one says Wow, another pseudo science sorry, another pseudo sophisticated black guy with Obenian glasses with the same take about.
The police.
For this. I think that when people are trying to insult us and there's nothing else to their conversation, it shows.
That they're ill equipped to engage. Right.
So a lot of times, and these are lessons you would think I wouldn't already, but I'm learning this right now.
It's an interesting point that you bring up, because it's not they don't counter what we're saying, right, They don't provide data that's contrary to what we're saying. They don't they don't even start an argument right with regard to what we're saying. A lot of the times they're just attacking how we look and pseudo sophisticated. Is interesting. I was presenting myself the way that I do every day
out in the world. I wasn't attempting to appear or be sophisticated, just talking about how I feel and pointing out in truth that the citizens of the country and local municipality civil suits, the taxpayers money goes towards settling those lawsuits, absolutely not the pockets of those officers or their departments directly.
It comes from the taxpayers.
And I think that something that's just factual like that eliciting such a strong response from somebody, it shows that a lot of these people are dead set on just being angry. Okay, so bear that in mind. I want to switch gears here to another post. This post is about the Fearless Fund. Another post from Q. And the Fearless Fund is a fund and correct me if I'm wrong. Q. It's a fund that's designed to fund business ventures.
By black women or minority women.
Minority women.
Okay, thank you.
So immediately the affirmative action conversation comes into play, and so a lot of the comments reflect that anti affirmative So let's grab one of these comments here. Okay, affirmative action is racist. It was a good thing.
It was abolished. Okay, I put thanks for sharing.
Deciding to live your life as a victim will never allow anyone to rise above. This is another kind of zombie that will never die because they always think they were victims. Nothing should be granted or given based on race. That's racism. Okay, Let's let's take this comment for a second. Nothing should be granted or given based on race in
a vacuum, all things being equal, That's absolutely true. When you take out of when you take history out of the equation, when you take the effects and legacy of the government sanctioned discrimination that we have as a people have experienced in this country out of the equation, then yes,
a comment like that is one hundred percent valid. But the fact of the matter is that we have started well behind the starting point, and we are compared to sort of the standard, if you will, the white standard. Will call it the white standard, the standard that white people have. So why are why are black people making this much money when white people are making this much money? Why are black outcomes this when white people's outcomes are this right, So this is this white people are the
standard that we're compared to. Right, And without the context of how we ended up there, you can make a statement like, oh, yeah, affirmative action is racist because you know you're you're that there's that's almost like delusion. It doesn't account for the reality of the situation that affirmative action was intended to accelerate the healing and the recovery of black people and not meant to give black people an advantage over white people. That's not a real thing.
That's that's also not what it did. Absolutely not, affirmative action at no point gave black people an advantage over anyone else. It just allowed black people to be considered for opportunities where they normally would not have.
Even been considered.
They didn't get to take cuts or jump in front of people. It just got someone to look at their application to.
It's so funny how that works, because again, a lot of these a lot of these people, they don't know that, and they they end up kind of coming ei their face with these really strange and hurtful responses, and it's almost like they feel like they have them all high grounds, so they're not trying to learn anything whatsoever.
And in most of those cases, even that high ground is born from pseudo education, if you will. They're parroting or borrowing talking points that they saw on a meme or that they heard on a talk show, or that they saw scrolling the timeline before they got to our video. It affirmed how they felt, and they just said it louder, as if it was an original thought, as if they'd
studied or done some research at all. And they get to adopt that aggressive position from a position and of you know, having the moral high ground, or or feeling that they are actually the ones being oppressed, or you know, I've heard them say things like reverse racism, when not only do the outcomes and the data show that there's no such thing. We've never had the advantage or been able to disadvantage another group of people because they were.
A certain racewise.
So it just it's it's it's it's always been really interesting that they say things like play the victim. Right, if you're if you're bothering no one and somebody walks up to you and assaults you, expressing that you were hurt, it's not you playing the victim.
Nor is leaning into it. Well, how about let me not say it this way? When you use it to explain your current standing, that is not playing the victim either. It's context.
Right.
So I think that's the dividing line for people that kind of feel that way. If I can, if I can make a connection between what happened and where I'm standing right now, that's not playing the victim.
That's again just telling telling my story.
And if I continue to let it limit me, then perhaps that's playing the victim. But I've never seen that reality for black people. I've seen black people be as resilient as any human being I've ever seen, you know, and in the face of a country that hates the black people have been here since slavery. That means we've went through Jim Crow, we went through Black Codes, we went through all those lynchings, all those massacres.
That there of course, were some black people here pre slavery.
Sure, and let me flip this, a lot of black people were victims.
How about that?
Yeah, a lot of black we're actual victims. They're not alive anymore. And you know, all of these things that are passed down, like wealth, opportunities and how those things shape life today, it's just something that that black people don't have. So again, to compare black people to white people. When a lot of these things have passed down, a lot of anti black sentiments still affects black people in
different parts of the country. You cannot divorce the history from our current reality because the history has created our current reality. And so again, there's no victimhood here. It's just factual. And I could again that's what we do on the shows. We outline actly where things are connected and what we can do to kind of help shape the future for ourselves. I want to I want to touch on another post that we have here. I put a post up and this is a white gentleman. He's
on a on a podcast. It's just a video that I put up, and he says, what are the most what are the five most dangerous US cities? According to Forbes and the guy says, well, let me start with Chicago, and then the host says, Chicago's not even the top fifteen.
Right.
So again, this this video is meant to show that depending on where you get your news, you might be misinformed the.
Most.
The five most dangerous cities are I believe number one is Saint Louis, number two is Mobile, Alabama, Number three is Birmingham, Alabama, number four is Baltimore, Maryland, and number five is Memphis, Tennessee. Right, Chicago's not even there. But Chicago is a common talking point for far right conservatives who try to say, well, you don't really value black life because look at Chicago.
Chicago is the token black on black crime, right right city whenever they try to make that point, and I've heard a lot of black people use Chicago to back that position on that argument. Right, I'm not going out to march when the police kill us, because that's our lives have more value than that. You guys don't say anything when the black kid kills the black kid in Chicago.
It's Chicago's the city, they say, every time, every time, and again. It just goes to show how narratives get chronicled and how depending on where you get your news, you can be given a falsehood that becomes your reality. And there's people in the comments here that will not let go of Chicago at all. Right, they still like it's just like their brain is fixated on Chicago. But again for the people who really feel like, hey, you shouldn't protest the police if you don't protest what's going
on in Chicago. Right for those people that say that, I say, if a black person kills a black person in Chicago, there is at least the chance that there will be justice and there will be consequence.
Let me do you one better. But when a black person kills a black person in Chicago and the police know who that person is, they go to jail.
One of the time they get found.
Please hear that caveat If the police know who did it, like if they have them on videotape, and then they arrest them, that person is charged and in almost every case convicted and then sentenced in a way that makes
sense of you having killed someone. The problem is when said black person is murdered by law enforcement, and even when it's on camera and we know who did it, sometimes no charges are even brought because there's a justification for it, qualified immunity, feared for their life, etc. And even when caught and on tape and convicted, they are sentenced in a way that doesn't really match the crime they're being convicted of. Those are the differences that we
try to highlight. Of course, there's value in the life no matter who took it, but there's also accountability when that person, specifically in these cases, is caught on camera and is not a member of law enforcement. Accountability is what we're talking about.
People.
We're not trying to say that it never happens otherwise, just that when it happens otherwise and someone is caught, charged, convicted, they are sentenced in a way that makes sense for having ended someone's life. That is typically not the case when it comes to law enforcement.
All right, So.
You remember, for those that listened to the show, you remember we did a piece where there was an officer was laughing at the death of a woman who was killed while crossing the street when another police officer was speeding to respond to a call the accidentally hit her right So the subsequent officer was recalling arriving on the scene to investigate the initial officer that hit the woman and he was recorded on his bodycam video kind of laughing at her and saying that they should cut a
check for eleven thousand dollars and you know.
She was low value, that sort of stuff.
So we talked about that, and we took a clip from this show and we put it on our social media as a teaser, like, here's what to look forward to. So funnily enough, here's a comment forty seven black people shot over a weekend in Chicago. Where's this same energy? So they're comparing us talking about a police officer laughing at a victim and expressing how little worth she has. Yeah, and they're comparing that to the people shot in Chicago. Again,
there's no connection there whatsoever. But this comment says, forty seven people shot over a weekend in Chicago, where's the same energy? Why is it when one white race soldier does something, there's outrage, but you'll see it happening in your community or other communities, and its crickets.
Okay, So.
Let me help people out with this one, because this one is kind of a weird one and I think that will will probably be very harm So.
There is a degree of.
Individual responsibility that factors into every single human being's life, right, It's absolutely true. Some people are born with gifts, some people are born with talents, some people are born with attributes and skills or an aptitude toward a certain thing, and other people are not.
Right.
This is just kind of the way things go, and it is up to the individual to do whatever they're going to do with those gifts and skills. We don't talk about individual responsibility on this show because we deal with data, right, and data shows that there are certain groups of people doing better than other groups of people. Now, we operate under the premise that all human beings in all groups have equal capacity to be borne, brilliant, talented, etc.
It doesn't matter what color you are. If you can sing, you can sing, it doesn't matter you know whatever. We talk about brilliant black minds. We talk about brilliant black everything on this show because we exist well. When you look at the data, it tends to favor one group of people over pretty much everyone else, almost always, and so for us, we try to deal with the systemic issues that we believe are resulting in those outcomes. This is what many people who have come before us try
to do. We are in no way removing individual responsibilities. No one who's ever said that once this thing happens, all black people are going to be fine. Okay, there's still individual responsibility goes into every single human story on this planet, and we are dealing with the systemic issues so that more of us can break through and we're not subjugated and relegated to the margins of society.