Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher, where our mission is to foster allyship empathy and understanding. I am your host, ramses.
Job, he is Rams's jaw. I am q Ward. You are tuned into Civic Cypher, Yes.
You are, and we are back like we never left, and I don't think that we will this week. I want you to stick around because we are going to well. Q is going to share a story of something that happened as of the day of this recording, so this is this is kind of hot off the presses, but we're going to share a little bit about the real world implications of the anti immigrant sentiment and how it has diffused throughout this country and how it has even
Q's household, and so stick around for that story. We're also going to be talking about the fires in la specifically the neighborhood of Altadena, California, and that's a historical black neighborhood there, and we're also going to be discussing ways that you can help, And of course it's important to frame that conversation properly in the in the political arena, you know, the ways people are talking about a ways people are, you know, trying to ensure that there's not
an outpouring of empathy and and there's there's no real sense of community nationally, and we're going to do our best to kind of inject a little bit of that back into the narrative because there's a lot of people that are being infected by the fires there, and we are one of the shows that is able to reach the country, and so we're going to do our best to try to shed some light on some communities that
you may have overlooked. But before we get there, we're going to start off, as ever, with some Ebony excellence, shall we I think we shall. Today's Ebny Excellence is sponsored by Actively Black. There's greatness in our DNA, visit actively black dot com and Q and I. We discussed this before and we think this is such a great idea. We are going to dedicate this week's Abney Excellence to the great Michelle Obama. So I'll share a bit the article that we have from you. This is from The Independent.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama is skipping Donald Trump's inauguration because she doesn't want to plaster on a smile for someone she fundamentally believes as a threat to American democracy, according to a report, Now, of course, Donald Trump's already been elected, and he's been president for some time now. But we're just getting to this in the way our recording schedule works, you know, we decided that we're going to go back and retroactively share this in a couple
other things. I'll continue. It was confirmed last week that she would not be attending the President of lex swearing in, but her office did not give any further explanation in its brief statement. The forty fourth president was introduced by himself and took his seat beside sorry inside the Capitol rotunda, next to his fellow former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as their wives, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also snubbed the event. Michelle Obama also missed Jimmy Carter's state funeral last week due to a scheduling conflict, although it subsequently emerged that she had been on vacation in Hawaii. And it's that sentence that I think kind of helped us decide on whether or not to include this in our ebony excellence. You know, black women in general have done enough fighting. You're not
just born to fight and die. You deserve to go on vacation in Hawaii rather than sit next to someone who would rather you didn't exist in his in his world. So shout out to missus shall Obama for leading the way even now, showing us what it means to prioritize yourself. All right, first up to I know a bit of this story, but I stopped you in the middle of the story because you know, every so often we end
up with something that kind of knocks on our own doorstep. Uh, And it's I wanted to hear this along with the listeners. And I know that I heard some of it. But you know you had something happened to you earlier today, the day we're recording, and you know it started all the way up at the White House. So you know, share a bit about your day, and then I'll let everyone know when the point where where I listened up to. So, yeah, it's part of this story.
Won't be new to listeners that have been with us for some time. I'm very very vocal and very very outward with my disdain for our newly elected president and what I've learned over the last ten years is that not all the people that I know, love, care about, and commune with agree with me when it comes to him. The interesting thing about the way that I learned that, though, is that they reach out to me to apologize for, defend, and make excuses for him. I don't go to them
to preach my disdain for him. They come to me to tell me all the reasons why I shouldn't feel how I feel about them. And it's always been very confusing to me because it's always been very clear who he is and who he aims to hurt. He's never pretended to be an ally, and that's the thing that bothers me the most about, not just him, but the people I know who defend him. It's not like they're being tricked. He's never pretended to be anyone other than
who he is. So you don't like it's not even there's no veneer, there's nothing that you have to see through. There's no cloak, there's no act, there's no costume. He shows up as a sexist, racist, bigoted person, and that should be enough, I think for most of the people that we know and care about to agree that he's not good, except he's somehow figured out a way to
have people still like give him bail. And I've always argued I always start with my kids, you know, when he ran for president the first time around, and Ramsen and I live in Arizona for most of our lives. This has been a Republican state post pandemic. I think was one of the few times, if ever, that the state didn't show up at the polls and help elect a Republican leader. And I live downtown in the city
that I live in. The largest polling location is across the street from my house, and I got to hear people chant build that wall while holding my half Mexican baby. And I always try to take the story there because it should be the most easy thing for someone to understand, even if you were gonna make it in your mind, okay, for one person to not like that guy, the black guy with half Mexican kids, you think would be the one where you would like. Okay, I like him, but
I understand why he doesn't. And for people who are in my life personally, and again, people who are listen to our show, you got to hear me in almost tears and ramses in a heidened level of frustration, talk about my son being kicked and called the N word at school. Yeah, emboldened by the Trump effect, for people to stop being so polite, for people to wear their racism like a jacket, like a cloak, like a cape, and be super racist and be blatant racist and aggressive racist.
And again back then, I pushed back against people that I know and care about, saying, yeah, I'm glad people are finally admitting how they really feel and saying what they really think in private.
And I'm like, why.
What they think and doing private has no impact on your life at all? What they do in because society, for a large amount of time required them to pretend, even if just pretend, to be decent people in public, to be polite, to be respectaful, and to be less dangerous to you and your people. And we saw something coming back then. And then he got voted out, and I honestly thought, briefly, Okay, that's done, that's over. But
he never really went away. And then he started being in the news all the time for being in court, for having all these criminal and civil charges against him and losing all these criminal and civil cases and you know,
teflon Don showed that nothing can stop him. He all the way up on his remy Ma and Fat Joe back in the election cycle, won the presidency again, and as I spoke up against him while he was running and after he won, kind of just venting my frustration and my disappointment with my fellow Americans and US as a nation just bending the knee to this criminal, this crook,
this con man. Once again, people in my dms preaching the word of Donald J. Trump and telling me all the reasons why I shouldn't be upset and how it's going to help the economy and all this nonsense. And my plea months ago when we learned he was going to be the president again, was what happens when he keeps his word. When he decidedly puts a cross hair on all brown people. I won't say black and brown, I'll just say brown, because all of us are brown.
When he puts the target on us, then what because my kid, just like Rams's kid, just like most of my friend's children. If in a group of black people look like black people, but in a group of every race racially andguous, if you put my son in a room full of Cuban children. He'll look like a Cuban kid, Mexican, Haitian, Colombian, Dominican, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Eritrean.
Yeah, only serrenemies.
I could go on.
Yeah, only seven percent of the world is white, so you know what I mean.
I could go on, And we are somehow, so we're so pure and we're so us that we've separated ourselves from Haitians when they said they were eating pets, from Africans, when they told them to go back to their s whole countries, from Mexicans when they called them criminals infiltrating our borders to commit crimes and rape our women and sell drugs. From all these marginalized groups us, we had the nerve to sit this one out as if it
doesn't eventually land back on our doorsteps. And I wake up today, and because I work in news and around just works and news, we get more news alerts than you could possibly imagine. It's part of the gig. When we got this job, we signed up for a service, and we get thousands of updates and headlines. That's part of how we decide what we're going to talk about when we crack these microphones for you, and of course
the one that stood out to me the most. At about seven o'clock this morning, Trump authorizes ICE to target courthouses, schools, and churches. Once upon a time, those locations, those places, those buildings had some sovereignty, they had some sacred nature to them. Law enforcement wouldn't violate people praying to their God, children learning, and people doing their jobs in our judicial system.
But Donald Trump's a pig, and he doesn't care about decorum or anything that was in place before he got there, if he didn't create it. It's bad, especially things that protect anyone, because if a law was created to protect someone, that means that people weren't being kind to those people in the first place, so we had to create a law to protect him. Trump wants to make sure they're no longer protected. Whoever they are, whoever we are, as
how we should feel. But we've done a great job of othering other cultures, other religions, people with different sexual orientation, people with different hairstyles and different skin colors, people who subscribe to a different way of dressing themselves. So when I saw schools on the list, my greatest fear started to bear fruit that followed up by a message that said the Arizona GOP signs a bill stating that they
will cooperate with Donald Trump's federal immigration practices. And then I got a text message that said MESA Public Schools and I didn't even read the rest of the message. I grabbed my jacket, I grabbed my car keys, I got in my car. I went to my kids school, and when the principal saw me there, her face had the exact like we didn't even have to speak. She looked at me, I looked at her, and both of
our faces said, Yeah, they've come home to roost. This is now something that we have to deal with with our children today, not months from now, not further down the mine, right now. And I had to sit and come up with a plan for my five and seven year old to not have to fall victims to a law enforcement raid at their school, because those people are so disgusting that not even our children are sacred. But we knew that already when mass school shootings didn't lead
to any type of actual gun reform. We knew that already when even white kids getting shot up at school didn't lead to even a serious conversation about gun reform. We knew that already, so make the targets of our hate and our lack of care, and our lack of empathy and our lack of humanity are lack of humanity.
I'm sorry, Brown people, and we absolutely don't care. So to my black people who may have frowned when they heard that my children are half Mexican, you think your brown baby sitting next to my brown baby is going to be the one they decide not to mess with, not to check for documentation, not to check to see if mammy and daddy are Haitian or Cuban or Puerto Rican or Mexican or Colombian or Brazilian or Nigerian or
from Ghana. You think that's where they'll stop. Because of course, all racist people who would dare enforce this type of law and raid an elementary school, of course they know how to look at your kid and tell what country their great grandparents are from. Right, every fear I had. As soon as he took his oath, he put into action the president they elected. Because I won't even say you, if you listen into this show, you likely didn't put
a target on my family's back. As soon as he was back in office, and now maybe you understand why you'll never see a flattering or even what you consider to be a fair post about him on my page. I consider it very fair because it's true. But you think I should give them the benefit of the doubt, and I never will.
Well, I think it makes sense if, like you said, if now you live in a world as of today where ice agents can raid your children's schools and take them and I mean we've seen this movie before. You know they end up in cages somewhere near the border because of.
Their displaced and unable to find their families, Like imagine your five year old, Imagine your five year old daughter in a cage.
I want to say something here. There's because you know, the status of your children is different than the status of my children. You know my children are half Mexican as well. But there's there's a reality to Donald Trump's promises and now his actions that affect people and affect community in a way, especially in these border states where we live, that people nationally may not consider because the worry that you have doesn't just stop at your house,
It extends to your community. And then that worry overlaps with the worry of other people in our collective community. And there are people that we know that have been on this show, that that have paid taxes, that have they love this country, They've done they've done everything right. And because you know, paperwork takes too long, or the process is too expensive, or whatever the reasons are, not everybody has the mobility and the access that you might think.
But you know, I've moved here when I was two years old. I literally know no one in the country I came from. This is my home, this is everything that I've ever known. And you know, you know, I've had to work too. You know, I've been afraid of
this my whole life. And now he's tripling down. Instead of making a path way that's easier for me to instead of streamlining the process so I can get everything I need to not have to live in the margins of society, He's going to send me to a place I never I don't have any memory of, and I lose my life here and all my friends and everything
I've ever known. And for a lot of people, the humanity of that is lost on them because they're like, well, Donald Trump said, these are all criminals, and he's only going after the bad ones and so forth. Nope, there's ICE agents now empowered. Not Donald Trump. Donald Trump's not knocking on our doors. But there are people who get to flex their racist muscles now.
There are people who are ICE agents just because they get to do this.
Oh yeah, and if you don't live in a border state, you might not know about that.
And the idea that only the undocumented or only the illegals are only the bad ones. Like, tell me the last time you saw a child with a shirt that set illegal on it. Tell me the last time you saw a child with their permanent resident card or their birth certificate or they're whatever on a medallion around there. They intentionally don't do that type of They don't go to that level of scrutiny when they show up. Who do I think doesn't belong here?
That's how it works. Remember SB ten seventy here in Arizona, where they just could pull people over and stop people because they looked like they might be illegal. And we push back on that out those of us that are
like kind of of an activist tradition. But Arizona has long been plagued by racist border patrol agents and policies and The truth is is that even if none of the bad stuff, the worst stuff that could happen, even if none of it ever happens, you do understand now, hopefully a little bit more, why having a person like that in the highest office of the land makes your day to day life, if wildly uncomfortable, because you now have to live under that threat because you were born
here versus there. You know, I was born in California and Q was born in Michigan. But circumstances of our birth do not determine the caliber of men that we are, even if you were born here.
Though, to put an end to birthright citizenship something else he said on day one, like this is how he came out of the gate. Let me harm and remove protections for as many people as possible that are not just like me. And it's pretty disgusting, man, And this is my reality. Now I have to stress about what could happen every day as long as he's president.
Well, I thank you for sharing that. I know that that makes you a little bit more vulnerable, butppreciate you telling the whole story.