Keep on riding with us as we continue to broadcast the balance and defend the discourse from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. Welcome back to Civic Cipher. I am still your host, Ramsey's Ja.
He is still your host, ramses Ja.
I am q Ward and you are hopefully tuned in again to Civic Cipher.
And we love that.
Don't we stick around because we are hanging out with a couple of guests that we think highly of. We have DJ and Kaija on the phone. DJ's president of the Black Student Union at the University of Arizona and Kaija there's an activist working closely with the Department of African American Student Affairs. And we're having a conversation about, you know, sort of the DEI rollbacks and the threats of you know, defunding these institutions if they continue to
support marginalized communities. And we're also going to have a conversation as part of the show about the other side, what are some arguments against DEI that people think are valid and hopefully trying to address those concerns. But before we get there, it's time to Baba become a better ally Baba and today's Baba is we're going to talk about Grassroots Law dot org. I'm going to share a bit from their website. This is in their own words, so this is not my words. This is in their
own words, directly from their website. How do we stop the devastating impacts of police violence and mass incarceration in America? This is our policy plan to do just that. It is a living document that can be improved upon. It was written with support and guidance from a dozen leading policy experts, activists, and impacted families. White supremacy, bigotry, greed, and corruption are at the center of police violence and
mass incarceration. But these systems are complex, deeply entrenched, and took hundreds of years and millions of laws and policies to create. Dismantling them and replacing them with something imaginative and redemptive will be the work of our lives. But together,
step by step, we can do this. Grassroots Law Project is a five oh one c four nonprofit organization that primarily focuses on education and advocacy related to criminal legal systems and people impacted by police violence and mass incarceration. Now there's a separate organization called Grassroots Law pack. This is a federal political committee. It primarily helps elect or endorse candidates through a variety of activities aimed at influencing
the outcome of elections. And you can do you can learn more about these and also donate to both, and you can find them at.
Grassroots Law dot org.
And you know, right now, in between elections, this isn't you know, election season in this country. Now's the time when we get prepared for the next election, not two weeks out, not two months out now, and we're talking midterms, and we're talking, of course the federal election, which is some years away. But now's the time that you take these steps. So again, check out more at Grassroots Law dot org and you know, be prepared to share what
you got. Let's get it together, all right, Okay, what's wrong with DEI?
So here's what happened. Now.
Q knows this, but I haven't run this by him because you know, this is we're going to go through this together. I came across something on the internet. I won't say which website, I won't, you know whatever, but I did come across something and I will credit the author of it that kind of illuminates the other side right, because around here we've famously seen the benefits of DEI, we can see them in practice, and we can see, at least in theory, where it aims to go in
the future. Even if it's not yet perfect, it's not inconsistent with the aim of affirmative action, and it addresses many of the same issues, the same foundational issues that have resulted in you know, higher incarceration rates for black and brown communities and uh, you know, healthcare outcomes and housing discrimination, and you know, uh in unequal employment opportunities and and n n an Right, it's a long list.
So I come across this in a format that we could use on the show that kind of explains at least one of the arguments against DEI, and I'm going to share that right now. So the author of this is Matthew Bates, and he writes, you know, why is di I so destructive? And then he goes on to say this, when it comes to the field of education, the E and the I parts of d I are the most destructive. The E stands for equity. That replaced equality as the mantra in education about ten to fifteen
years ago. With equity, the focus was on equal treatment. Sorry with equality, the focus was on equal treatment. With equity, the focus is on equal outcomes. Ultimately you end up with pow like And then he is going to list these policies. Number one, grading for equity, which forces teachers
to factor empathy into their formative assessment of students. So if there's one hundred question test and a student only gets fifty questions correct, but that student has challenges outside of school, like parents who live in poverty, the teacher is expected to give that student bonus points so their grade is more equitable to their peers who do not live in poverty. The next point he makes is fifty percent floor for grades, which is exactly what it sounds like.
A student can turn in zero percent work and still get a fifty percent grade. The idea is that they won't dig themselves into such a hole that they can that they just give up. The next one says elimination of honors programs all right, because the demographics and those programs aren't reflective of the demographics of the.
Community as a whole.
The high flyers have their wings clipped, so they fly at the same level as everyone else. Sucks for the high flyers, though, The next one he says is lacks discipline policies, usually called something like restorative justice. So that's kind of a jab that he's taking, which result in an explosion of behavior problems with students, which is directly
responsible for the current teacher shortage. There are more than enough certified teachers in this country, there just aren't enough who are willing to put up with the behavior problems in schools. Many school districts have no suspensions policies in place now for equity reasons.
A lack of.
Suspensions just means the troublemakers stay in the classroom more and then lowered standards for graduation, leading to inflated graduation rates. This in turn leads to students taking out loans for college under the false assumption that they're prepared for college. College has also had to increase their remedial course offerings for new students and also cheapens the value of high school diploma for everyone when literally any student can get one.
This is how you end up with this, And he has a graph, and then he goes on to say the ipart of dei, which is inclusion, has been around in education since late seventies when people talk about the inclusion education, they're usually talking about putting students with special needs in regular classroom. This actually isn't a big deal as long as those students don't significant increase the teacher's
workload or cause major disruptions but their classmates. All of that is usually possible if schools have the proper resources.
Which they usually don't.
In fact, one of the main purposes of inclusion these days is to save the district money from hiring special education teachers. The actual result of inclusion in schools is usually more like students with major behavioral issues being allowed to disrupt their classmates. It's not just the students who cannot stop talking or wandering the room while the teacher is trying to teach. It's also the students who trash
the classrooms. It is not uncommon now in many public schools for teachers to have aid tell all to the other students to leave the room because a student with behavioral problems is in crisis and trashing classroom. And then there's a photo of a trash classroom. All right, last little bit. Teachers being overwhelmed with unrealistic expectations for their
students with special needs. Every student of special needs has something called an IEP plan or five or four plan, which is legally binding forms which say exactly what teachers are supposed to do for that one student. Have five students with special needs in your class of thirty students, good luck with the other twenty five students getting any of the teacher's attention.
No one really cares about the D part.
Of d I when it comes to education, except the politicians and others in positions of power who like pictures of diverse groups of students for their websites and social media. If you're the only kid in a wheelchair at your public school, congrats, you're going to find your way into a lot of the district's pictures. Okay, so sorry that
took a while. But you know, for people that are on that side, of course, uh, they get exactly what they want to serve as cover for how they how they really feel, in our opinion, they really feel like, okay, we don't want I mean, look at look at it, you know, look at the once once white folks get enough money, generally speaking, and put their kids into private schools. Right now, you could argue that these private schools are well and not just white wild all people do this.
You know a lot of people do this. But you could argue that the education is better there, right, but you ultimately end up with a less diverse group of people because resources, fiscal resources often kind of follow that racial line in this country. So when it comes to DEIH, when you associate black students with criminality, behavior problems, this, that,
and the third. And you have seen what happens with successful people, how they kind of remove their their students from the equation and they're around peers that look like them and come from the same you know, pool that they come from. DEI is sort of a threat to you there, even if it's just a matter of look, I live in a neighborhood where there's not a lot of black people, and to have a more diverse population invites more of the criminal elements or the unfavorable elements.
Right now, I do want to make a point before I let you go, que because I know I see you, I see you wanting to get in. I do want to say that this response to DEI is primarily about education.
It's actually it's only about education.
It has nothing to do with what DEI, in my estimation was intended to remedy, which is bringing some insight and creating some opportunities for those in the in.
The in the workforce. Right.
So to kind of take DEI and say DEI is wrong because it is imperfect in this one setting feels like a weird argument, because you know that's de I was not for school. Schools are based on the population, so forth, and so on, right, affirmative action, You could argue it so forth and so on, But he's talking
about DEI here. The other part of this that I want to say before you go is that as far as you know, when it comes to these these outcomes, right, he says that d I has been around for ten to fifteen years, and my estimation, d I has been around considerably less than that. It's been around for about five. Right, d I has to have time to grow, time to make mistakes, time to perfective, if indeed, that is what we're going for.
And what I look.
At is the intention here, and he said it himself, The intention here is to shape outcomes.
Right.
The intention is not to clip wings or all this other stuff that I believe to be no nonsense. So we could break all that down. I'm I'll let you go first, Q, because I could talk this whole thing up. But if you have an idea and you're rolling it out on a country wide level and you have mistakes, the mistakes might be visible very early on, but you don't abandon it. You stay true to the mission, and
you refine it along the way. The Black people didn't automatically get into the position that we're in because somebody said something and then five years later we were just like that in perpetuity. No, this has been refined and readdressed, and legislated and refined again over hundreds of years, right, And so I would imagine that it would take some refining to get all the kinks worked out. So I'll let you go before I break this guy down any further.
Go ahead, you.
He does a really interesting thing here. I enjoy it when I notice it because it makes me laugh, But then I remember that most people don't notice it, and then I get very upset. I'm sure that crimes happen in this country at the same time that the wind is blowing, but a report doesn't come out the next day that says wind blowing causes crime. Yep, And there is an intentional correlation of information here that it just spits back at an audience that wants to receive it
that way. Yes, blaming DEI for these outcomes that have nothing to do with it. The biggest problem that we have collectively right now is that we've watched the other side co op DEI and turn it into a bad word, and when they use it the way that they intend, we end up making an argument against their intended version of the word instead.
Of what it was created for. Yes, exactly, I e.
Someone called Jackie Robinson a DEI higher a few weeks ago, and we got really upset and argued that he wasn't. And I got really upset because he absolutely was. There was no place for black baseball players at the time, so DEI Initiatives had to create an opportunity for him. And then we saw, oh, he's better than everybody else. But DEI the way that it was intended, absolutely created
an opportunity where it didn't exist for Jackie Robinson. But because they've co opted DEI and made it a bad word, we think because they want to frame it as anti meritocracy, and we're like, well, Jackie deserved a chance and was better, so he wasn't a dei higher and then we end up having an argument against their meaning of something that
they took from us, like they keep doing. So it was really interesting listening to that, Like I chuckled right, and I'd love to have been sitting across the table waiting for the young man to finish explaining to me all these things that he just correlated with no actual causation. And you just when it's in that form, you don't get to rebuttal you don't get to respond. You have to receive all of his findings.
At once, and then with.
The period at the end, and then he turns his paper in and he runs away, and the audience that wants to feel how he feels I have everything that they need, and then we q ward ramses Jah, Kaija and DJ have to just listen to it. And then we can't get our lick back because he's gone and his side of the room stood up and gave it a round of applause. So it's quite silly we don't have enough show to respond to that.
Well, you're not wrong, because the actual breakdown, like they do list little bit of stuff and it creates so much work for us, right, and it's intellectually dishonest.
Intellectually dishones Thank you, you make a mistake there that was on purpose.
Yep, absolutely. But here's the thing I got call it five minutes. I'm gonna do my best to give some context to some of the things that this person says, so that at least you know that there's valid explanations for all of this. First off, as I mentioned, what we're dealing with is trying to reshape outcomes. So DEI is de initiatives, affirmative action initiatives. That is simply one thing that can be done to bring everyone where they
should be. Okay, there are other forms of restorative justice that in theory would work in concert with DEI initiatives that would bring about the systemic changes that we want, you know, long term systemic changes. And with that in mind, it takes a long time. Doesn't take five years. It takes a long time. Things need to be refined and we have to be committed as a society to the outcomes.
Right.
And DEI is kind of like a brand inch. It is not the root. You know, if you want to talk about the root of the problem, we can talk about redlining. If you want to talk about the root of the problem. We can talk about, you know, the legacy of Jim Crow. We can talk about the unfair dissemination of the GI Bill. We can talk about really wealth inequality in this country and how black people have
been robbed and denied they're just due. Even starting at zero, I'm not even talking forty acres in starting at zero and pulling ourselves up as a people from our bootstraps. The amount of times we were going to do a way black history back about Freedman's Bank and how they were robbed by you know, white people. You know what I'm saying.
We could talk about any number.
Of we could talk about Black Wall Street or any copycat version of that around the country, where black wealth has been created and then through legal or illegal means, it has just been denied from them. And then we can talk about how it was the government and the people both working to make this happen repeatedly. As I mentioned redlining, that is a huge one, right, and so when you look at that, and then you look at the way that this country looks at black people, black
children versus white children. We've had this conversation on the show before Q where if a black child misbehaves, his behavior is considered criminal and he needs punishment. If a white child misbehaves, then that child needs medication and to go to a doctor. And you know, there's a different view of it, right, And so what this individual doing here writing this letter, Matthew Bates, he's kind of adopting that mentality where he because I can read through the lines,
you know what I mean. We don't want these students in the class disrupting the classroom. Okay, okay, fair enough, right, But when we talk about, okay, let's work on outcomes.
They're doing or they're attempting at least to do their part.
The schools are right, the schools are attempting to do their part based on this example. But if the schools are underfunded because of the legacy of redlining and the legacy of this country, let's just call it what it is, then there are underfunded schools with less resources, where the students don't perform as well, where they are understaffed, where behavioral problems go undiagnosed.
Where where where where? Right?
And then and these are valid, These are things that actually happen. They start young the same way they do with all human beings, but this group doesn't have the resources that that group does.
And when you.
Compare this group to that group only based on the outcomes, then you're gonna look at this group like, Okay, they're criminal, they just blah blah blah. I don't want them in the classroom with these other students because we're going to clip their wings and we're gonna do this. And so the mentality shift is again it's well, I won't even
want to call it a mentality shift. The argument is intellectually dishonest, and it's based on I don't like to use the word when I know people are going to react to it in a way that is that is like dismissive. But it's racist, you know what I mean? And they and a lot of times racist people don't know that that's what they're being because they would they think to themself like I would never do that. Like this guy himself says at the end of this writing, he says, no one cares about the d part of
DEI like, nobody cares about the diversity. Diversity is fine, right, That's what he's effectually saying here. But for some people, they don't realize how ingrained the racism is, how ingrained the thinking is.
And I.
Think that this is the sort of thing that requires, you know, for people that don't know around the country
listening to this conversation with MEANQ. For people that don't know, I implore you to take a look at both sides of this conversation, because you know, with UH, with DJ and Kaiji on the line, I'm sorry that we didn't really get to lean into any more questions here, but there are real students who are impacted by this line of thinking, and they support this line of thinking when it comes up elsewhere in policy or wherever else, and
then real students are affected by it. And these are students that have resources right now and they're under attack.
Now.
Before we before we get to the next part, do us a favor, YouTube drop, any social media, any website, anything like that that people can do to UH to support you, DJ, you first, and we got like ten seconds, so just real quick.
Yeah, So there's two organizations that I want to plug. It's the you of A ASA page. It's aa S a underscore u of A, and the Black Student Union. You have a underscore Black Student Union are lower case one one word.
I would say going through those look going through those Instagram tags as well to support our w g R, c APASA NASA. Those are other cultural centers on this campus are we infected as well as like our African studies, but you can find all of them through Africas.
Okay, fantastic and we're gonna leave it right here, So thank you for tuning into this episode of Civic Cipher.
Please, you know, help us out.
You know we can't do everything on this show, so we've given you the resources check it out. You can, of course, if you missed any part of the show, hit the website Civiccipher dot com download this in any previous episode just to get what you've missed. We're all in this together and we're doing our part as broadcasters. You can find me on all social media at Ramsey's job.
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All right, Peace,