Civic Cipher 020522 A Numbers-Based Understanding of the Black Experience (Part 2)

better ally. So we're talking about this gentleman, Dan Price Seattle at Dan Price Seattle on Twitter and and for today's Baba become a better ally, I would like for you to follow him, subscribe to his feed, even if

you don't want to follow him, review it. You'll see that these sources are well documented and you'll be able to you know, it's just one of those rabbit holes that you might want to plug into if you want to become a better ally, if you want to become a better brother or sister to you know, people who don't look like you this is the way to do it. But he's not the only one. There's another person I'm

a big fan of. His name is Brian Stevenson, and he is the person behind the movie Just Mercy starring Jamie Fox and Michael B. Jordan. But I've known Brian Stevenson for a very very long time. I got put on him in like twenty twelve or something because of a Ted talk. I love this guy, and you can follow him at EJI Underscore o RG EJI standing for Equal Justice Initiative, which is his initiative. If you know inmate rights and sent and you know the criminal justice

system is more your thing. You know, Dan Price, of course is more about economics and business and that sort of stuff. But Brian Stevenson eji dot org. Be sure to check him out if you know the criminal justice system is something you need to learn about. A group I follow on Facebook that I really wish more people knew about is called Audit. The Audit and what they do is they monitor police interactions and they'll take the video and they'll have a lawyer or some educated person

examine what's happening during the interactions. And it's just a great way to get educated so that we know what's happening and we can I think that's the best way to support the police is by knowing what it is they should be doing. And I will leave you with a name, Janeelliott dot com. Even if you don't really plug in, she's someone that you need to know about and that is how you can become a better ally.

Now back to Dan Price, I feel like I want to get some thoughts from UQ before we jump back in. How are you feeling so far?

that way for those people. No, they absolutely did not. This system was very intentionally put into place to have these outcomes. And when you're hearing all of this information through that lens, it hits you a little bit different.

it helps illustrate your point. A person asked, I get that the GOP does not want CRT critical race theory to be taught in schools, but can you tell me what CRT really is? And the answer is my pleasure. Critical race theory was developed by a largely African American group of law professors starting in the nineteen seventies when they noticed that the elimination of racist laws didn't actually

do much to make the justice system less racist. The theory part is that systems and institutions set up prior to the elimination of racist laws still maintain those racist origins and are why the legal system still has racist outcomes, such as the fact that black people are less likely to have charges dropped before trial than white people. It's something you might study in a postgraduate law program, assuming you're working with one of the dozen or so professors

that are actually working in that area. As such, you won't study it in law school, university, and especially not in high school or elementary school. It would like it would be like trying to teach topography in math class. You need a lot more math than you'll ever be able to learn in high school to even begin to try to understand it. Now, what people try to say is critical race theory, like teaching about racism in America,

is actually what is known as American history. Children in elementary school and high school aren't being taught that now because people who actually did those bad things are often still alive and don't want people to know what bad things they did. One of the problems is that slavery is taught as the history of black people and not

the history of white people. So I think it was important to read that because again it illustrates that there are systems that are set up where even if you change the laws, the system, the mechanism creates these outcomes, and it's reinforced subtly in the minds of some people, but also in the framework of society, like subtle conditioning and then more formal institutions elsewhere. You know, we talk about them all the time, you know, and I don't.

I'm learning to not bully the police because I don't believe that two wrongs make a right, and I do recognize the human beings in the uniforms, but I will forever remain critical of the institution as long as that institution ends lives needlessly, pretty much as long as you're carrying guns, because that feels a little like, all right, well, just in case I need to end the life today, go ahead, qu you jump in.

They've made it scary, attached it to everything having anything to do with segments of American history like slavery, and scared people into thinking our kids shouldn't learn about this, even though, as you just pointed out, they're not one and the same. You guys don't want us to teach our kids' American history is what it is. But if you said that out loud, people would think you were ridiculous.

So you have to brand it as critical race theory, knowing that hundreds of millions of people have no idea what that means. Make it a scary term, just like socialism because a lot of people don't know what that means either. But if I can make it scary and give it a somewhat permanent negative connotation, I can dog with a large groups of people using these scary terms

and get the outcomes that I want. So it's just interesting to hear you read that definition, because I'm sure there are people listening to this show that heard that definition the first time today, but have heard critical race theory said one hundred times before.

They have a lot of people thinking that we are the enemy. It's the wildest thing, yo. We the only thing that we asked for is equality and never revenge. Never in any circle have I ever heard that we need to get revenge. No, we need to get equality. We need to get equity, we need to get a fair shot, we need to you know, we need what this thing is promise to its citizens.

and says, oh, poor black people. I'm white, so I'm going to save them as opposed to, Hey, look this doesn't look right. I respect black people and brown people there. They're thinkers. They're They're not just rappers and singers and you know all that dancers, their thinkers, you know, their leaders, their politicians, everything that, everything that anyone else is. So we will figure out what it is that they need for their communities by asking them and then empower them

to take such action. Right. So not I'm going to step in and get all the shine and the glory, but I'm going to empower them. So this is the difference between what would be known as a white savior

and a good person an Ally. There you go an ally, And before anybody comes at me telling me, why did you do a whole show on this white savior, I don't think that this guy is at no point that I in my research for today's show, that I see him insert himself into some circumstances where a black person's voice would have carried further, or a black person's actions

would have meant more, or anything like that. He is a businessman who is speaking to corporate interests and economics in a space where most of the people that are observing what he's doing and finding out what works look like him. I call that an ally and if you have a problem with that, then you can come see me. But I implore you be careful with that one. I don't. And that's oh man, I wish that everybody just kind of knew that we're all of us. We're all trying

to get there together. We don't need to tear each other down if we get it wrong, you know, not just us, anyone. If you get it wrong, talk to us to tear it down. Anyway. I'll get back to it. So his next slide, he says, oh, let me give you a little bit more history. So his his slides

are a little bit about not just about race. This stream of consciousness has a lot to do with race, but he's also talking about you know, teachers and education, healthcare, you know workers' rights, you know quality of life of course, economics, you know business, all that sort of stuff, and standing up for the underdog, like he says, so recently put up a post that said, eighteen years ago today, I started my company, Gravity Payments. I was nineteen years old.

And just excuse me, just trying to survive. We now have over two hundred employees, over fifty million dollars a year in revenue, pay everyone a living wage again seventy thousand dollars minimum wage at his company, and have never had one layoff, he says, My secret great employees, CEOs don't matter, workers do. I think that that better identifies who he is as a person. And this thing we're

talking about today is one facet of that. He hasn't built his whole identity around, you know, anything like rescuing black folks, and even that I take issue with it, because if someone did, that was their life's mission. I don't think that's the worst thing in the world. I do get that some people take issue, and I guess I can understand why, But I don't have a problem with that.

it was to ultimately big themselves up. If the outcomes are still righteous, thank you think we had an issue Just to give you guys full transparency when we started to change society and hashtag lunchbag more specifically one of our flagship programs. It's a social media program, hence the name hashtag lunch bag, and we got a lot of pushback from people saying, hey, get the cameras out of those people's faces.

Those people still got food and meals that they wouldn't have gotten and we're talking millions of people.

can I help? You know? There was nothing talking to those people, no show like this in this space, in the radio space on these stations that was doing that, and so we created this. But again, the conclusion the outcomes is more important than anything. And so people come at us, you know, because you know, black people listen to the show as well, and some folks take issue, and that's okay because we don't know everything. But as long as the tone is good and positive, then we'll

all get there. Man, it's a very difficult job to do, but I love you all. It doesn't matter who you are, what color you're from, or what color where you're from, or anything like that. My job is to love you, and I'm gonna do my best for you. All right, let's get back to these slides, all right, I'm gonna burn through a few of these first. Black owned businesses get three percent of all business loans. Black people own one percent of all stocks. Black people own four percent

of legal cannabis businesses under one percent of fortune. Five hundred CEOs are black women. Scooter startup Bird, you know those little scooters in every city. Scooter Startup Bird got more funding than all black women upstarts combined in twenty twenty. In nineteen fifty, black men made fifty one cents for every one dollar white men made. Now fifty one since, So that means it has not changed. Americans think black people have ninety percent of the wealth while white people do.

Or sorry, americans think black people have ninety percent of the wealth white people do. So Americans think black people have ninety percent of the wealth of white folks, it's actually ten percent. Black homeowners are still five times more likely to be in old redlined areas fifty years after redlining was outlawed. That is why you need critical race theory that you see the legal implications of a system that was outlawed and what are the long term implications

of it? How do systems continually affect you know, these communities after the laws have been passed and changed and so forth. That is where critical race theory comes into play. No one in elementary school is going to learn about this, and if they did, they wouldn't look at themselves like, oh, my gosh, I'm a bad person. Oh woe is me? You know, at least that's my take on it. All right, I'll move on. Black Americans are three times more likely than white people to be killed by the.

I'll continue. Distributions from corporate stock buybacks and dividends in the last fifteen years benefited white people seventy two times more than black people. Black owned small businesses were three times less likely than white owned businesses to get a PPP bill out. Minimum wage workers are twice as likely to be black than white. All right, thirty seven percent of black families have zero dollars in net worth. I'll say that one more time. Thirty seven percent of black

families have no net worth. That is zero dollars, and that's twice the rate of white families. Under the post World War two GI bill, point one percent of homes went to black military vets. Point one not one percent, and ninety nine percent went to everyone else. Point one went.

kids is eight hundred and eight dollars. So the numbers sixty three, eight hundred and thirty eight versus eight hundred and eight, so it's over sixty three thousand more dollars. And it's not even that that the amount is important, it's just it's nothing. So gross network. Yeah, that's crazy, And we talked. We talked, I think it was last week, we talked about how having money in the house affects

the brain development for babies. If if a mother who's just given birth, a postpartum I think that's what it's called, or freshly birthed, you know, seed in the house man, their brain develops better when there's fiscal resources. This is like a scientific thing we talked about on a previous show. Feel free to hit the websites cif E, cipher dot com and download it and then our last light here. From nineteen thirty to nineteen sixty, one percent of all

mortgages were issued to black people. Today, homelanders are eighty percent more likely to reject a black person's application than a white person with the same finances. And finally, black millennials net worth is fifty two percent lower and their parents at this same age once again. Oh you know what before we go about thirty seconds Q. Any final thoughts.

some creativity along the way. Now the way black history fact Sidney Poortier. He died earlier this year at age ninety four, and I will be reading a bit from CNN dot com in their article on that, they wrote, after you passed Portier overcame an impoverished background in the Bahamas and softened his thick Island Accent, a rise to the top of his profession at a time when prominent

roles for black actors were rare. He won the Oscar for nineteen sixty threes Lilies of the Field, in which he played an itinerant laborer who helps a group of white nuns build the chapel. Many of his best known films explored racial tensions as Americans were grappling with social

changes wrought by the Civil Rights Movement. In nineteen sixty seven alone, he appeared as a Philadelphia detective fighting bigotry in smalltown, Mississippi in In the Heat of the Night and a doctor who wins over his white f Beyonce's skeptical parents in Guests Who's Coming to Dinner? That's the one I know him for. Quartier's movies struggled for distribution in the South that makes sense, and his choice of roles was limited to what white run studios would produce.

Racial tableaus, for example, precluded him for most romantic parts, but his dignified roles helped audiences in the fifties and sixties envisioned black people not just as servants, but as doctors, teachers, and detectives. We got a good one for today. At the same time, as the lone black leading man in

nineteen sixties Hollywood, he came under tremendous scrutiny. He was too often held as a noble symbol of his race, and endured criticism from some black people who said he had betrayed them by taking sanitized roles and pandering to whites. It's hard to please everyone, but I do understand. You know, black folks, you know people that had been hurt. My people been hurt so much that to be critical of everything it makes sense. So I just bark. I'm not mad.

If you guys want to be critical of me, that's okay. It's been an enormous responsibility, Poortier told Oprah Winfrey in two thousand and I accepted it, and I lived in a way that showed how I respected that responsibility. I had to in order for others to come behind me. There were certain things I had to do. As a

young actor, he overcame enormous challenges. The youngest of seven children, Sydney Poitier, was born several months premature in Miami on February twentieth, nineteen twenty seven, so tiny he could fit in his father's hand. His parents were tomato farmers who often traveled to and from Florida and the Bahamas. He was not expected to live. His mother consulted a palm reader who assuaged her fears. The lady took her hand and started speaking to my mother. Don't worry about your son.

You will survive, Fortier told CBS News in twenty thirteen. And these were her words. She said, he will walk with kings. When he was fifteen, Potier's parents sent him from the Bahamas to live with an older brother than Miami, where they figured they would have better opportunities. Portier didn't like Miami, and soon he headed up north to New York, where he tried his hand at acting. It did not

go well at first. With limited schooling, he had trouble reading a script, but he got a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant, where a fortuitous encounter changed his life. An elderly waiter took an interest in the teen and spent nights after work reading the newspaper with him to improve his comprehension, grammar and punctuation. Fat Man. Every night the place closed, everyone's gone, and he sat there with me week after week after week, Portier told CBS News,

and he told me about punctuations. He told me what dots were and what dots mean between these two words and all that stuff. Soon after, Portier landed work with the American Negro Theater, where he took acting lessons soft in his Bahaman accent and landed a stage role as an understudy to Harry Belafonte. This led to roles on Broadway and eventually caught the attention of Hollywood. Portier's first movie was nineteen fifties No Way Out Out No I Can Never Say noir film, in which he played a

young doctor who must treat a racist patient. That led to increasingly prominent roles as a revered in the apartheid drama Cry The Beloved Country, a troubled student in Blackboard Jungle, and an escape prisoner in The Defiant Ones, in which he and Tony Curtis were shackled together and forced to get along to survive. With that nineteen fifty eight film, Poitier became the first black man to be nominated for an Oscar, but for a dark skinned actor. In the

nineteen fifties, finding complex roles was difficult. Quote blacks were so new in Hollywood, there was almost no frame of reference for us except as stereotypical, one dimensional carriers. Poitier told Winfrey, I had in mind what was expected of me, not just what other blacks expected, but what my mother and father expected, and what I expected of myself. Early on, Potier made a conscious decision to reach roles that weren't consistent with his values or that reflected badly upon his race.

He told Winfrey that, as a struggling young actor, he turned down a role that paid seven hundred and fifty dollars a week because he didn't like the character a janitor who didn't respond after thugs killed his daughter and threw her body on his lawn. Quote I cannot imagine playing that part. So I said to myself, that's not the kind of work I want. And quote, oh oh sorry, that's not the kind of work I want. And told my agent that I couldn't play the role. Quote Quotier said.

He said, why can't you play it? There's nothing derogatory about it in racial terms, and I said, I can't do it. He never understood, and we don't get to talk about all his activism that he did we don't get to talk about all the criticism that he received from both sides, you know, white folks and black folks. He mentioned, you know, the sanitation of his characters. But you know, if you want to find out more about his awards, about everything, it's just a rich story here.

Please just seeing in dot com you can read the whole thing for yourself. It just really gives you an idea of what he had to go through and might even paint a slight picture. I mean, we could make the case of the sort of things that we have to go through here on this show. Now, qute you think, yeah, absolutely, we have to play this game too. Where we have we can't be too much. And you know, I think our hearts are in the right place. We want to educate people. We want to love people. I think that

that's and we want people to love each other. And we're in a position to do something. We have the skill set, we have the platform, so this is what we're doing with it. I mean, we could be making money and you know, listening to music and all that sort of stuff, you know, and hanging out backstage, you know, but those days are over. We have a more meaningful journey at this point. So so yeah, if you want to find out more, just check out seeing in dot Com Sydney Poitier.

and it literally is because of you all. So thank you guys so much for your support, Thank you for caring. Thank you for letting things that might not affect you directly mean something to you and allowing those things to be important.

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