The Global Hood Part 1

Like he wanted to show me something. And we drove down this street called Lyndell, and the wealth gap was startling. It was like Beverly Hills mansions. I mean, these are like multimillion dollar homes on one side of the street and literally across the street County Housing Section eight hood. And it was so jolting because it was like, it's literally across the street. I mean, you saw in real

life redlining. I just can't shake that image. But it feels on purpose, but you really don't want to say nothing because either the data is so freakishly overwhelming You're like I don't even know where to start to try

to like make it make sense. You'd have to back up so many steps where it's like this is a lifetime of experiences and knowledge and information that like I don't even know where to jump in the waters or the other way around, and where you're like, I just it just feels like it, but I can't really tell you what it is. Yeah, right there, that's today, Except it did do some homework for you. I did gather

some receipts. Now, granted, this is only a thirty minute show and people have given their entire lives to understanding what I'm trying to explain to you, So take that for what it's worth. But when you look around own hoods, you know, for colloquial and just how consistently with very few variations, it just kind of seems like there's a lot of the same problems, a lot of the same

people in situations. And whether you're talking Louisiana, l a Hell, you might even be talking you know, the Sticks of Oklahoma. You're just like, how are we all drawing the similar conclusions about why we're here, how we got here, and ways to get out? At the same time, man, you're looking I know, I hear between the black and Latino neighborhoods. You just like, this can't be a coincidence. I'm about this feel purposeful. But if you suggest that, oh, you're

just complaining, You're you're being a victim. It feels the same globally, I want to talk about the noble South. Look, politics, y'all, how is so little right now? Politics? Y'all? So Trump talked about ship whole countries, you know, Latin American, Central American immigration, destabled governments, coups, cartels, nigga. Why that's the global hood? People always asking like why when y'all just gonna get your stuff together? I mean, the same thing

they say about our hoods. I want to unpack that today. Let me say some stuff about to jump man. First of all, this isn't a hit piece about capitalism, although capitalism needs to really be critiqued because it's mostly responsible for this imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, it's kind of it's kind of why we are where we are. It's also not some like Marxist stand or this like determinism that is saying that it will always be this way because social status are static. A matter of fact, is a big

difference between a class system and a caste system. When we're talking about class that has to do with socioeconomics and the different systems you use to form those classes. They are up for critique. And like I've said before, capitalism is a moral it's not concerning morals at all. It's concerned with markets, product supply chains. It's numbers. Now, of course, there are many people that are much smarter

than me that disagree with that take. But the angle I'm coming from is how you do capitalism, what you value, how it's done is where I get to say you're a monster or not. But uniquely in America, well not uniquely in America, but in just most like G seven

capitalistic countries. Like the idea that which is what we're really going to handle heavily in this show, the idea that the American dream, the meritocracy, myth that if you just work hard, you succeed, and if you're not succeeding, it's because you're not working hard enough or you just gave up early, which is oftentimes the lens that most objectors to some of the issues I'm gonna bring up with say it's like, well, everybody got you just gotta

work hard. Everybody had it hard. Just just keep at it, you know, it's the dream. Just do the work to complaining about well, I'm gonna try to make a case that even doing the work is still couched in a system of laws and government that verifiably prefers certain people over others. And this is how you get a hood. Now, many people have studied, specifically in America, what makes a hood of hood? How we got here, and why it

just don't seem like collectively things can change. You may see individual changes, some individual families, individual people make find their way out, But why as a collective do we still have this wealth gap that tend to fall on racial and ethnic lines. And remember I said in You Wasn't Outside episode, and a lot of times people have suggestions, but their suggestions suggests that they're really not a part of the culture. They're assuming certain things about how our

system works. You're assuming certain things about capitalism as a concept. But some experts would argue that capitalism in its inception and it's designed, is built upon a working class, which now we're getting into Marxist ideas where it's like the wealth doesn't work you, you can't attain it unless you have a working force that you don't have to pay a lot. Therefore, the wealthy are incentivized to make sure that there is no upward mobility of the working masses.

Now again getting into Marxist views that is in some places very legitimate, you know, but I'm not the type of person like I'm a smorges Borg of theory, Like I'm I'm gonna eat from every table, you know what I'm saying, And I'm gonna spit out the bones after they say in the church, true to meet, spit out the bones. You know what I'm saying. When somebody say something, that part of that might be like, Yo, that's money, that's spout. On the rest of that is like, oh, nigga,

you bug it. That's bullshit. You spit out the bullshit. Anyway, some would argue again that you need a poor because we don't have poor, then you have no workers. In the whole capitalism falls. That's one view. The easy way to think about this is like, Yo, how did America become a superpower so fast, faster than any other country? Well, Nikki, we didn't pay the workers for a whole hundred and fifty years, and we didn't toil to land n we stole it, So I mean it's kind of a head start.

Of course, capitalism gonna work like this if you don't pay the workers didn't. Again, it's a hundred percent profit, right. But it's also this idea that specifically how things fall among racial lines. It's this idea that there is something

inherently inferior about black and brown people. Why can't y'all get your ship together, which we could say goes all the way back to doctrine of discovery, you know, and this idea of waging war, bringing the savage masses under the control of the crown and the Cross and somehow noble. So if you since they're somewhat less than human, not exactly image bearers, waging war against us is not a crime. It's not murdered because they're not necessarily image but there's

actually doing them a favor. So it's this this horrible route. If you believe this, when you look across the table or across the park at a group of just kids, loud black kids, you know, and you make your assumptions about what their future is, what they desires, it might be coming from a lens, a determinism, lens that believes

that there's just something inherently wrong with it. Therefore you're probably gonna have super racist views about Thus, the problem of the hood is the same problem of the nations for which we all come from. Something just wrong with us.

And one of those racist views that come out is like this, like white man's burden, that like, it's your job to elevate as the civilized communities, to elevate the uncivilized by giving them the joys of labor, of an honest day's pay, and if they just don't take to it, it's like we'll kick rocks. We gave you all a chance. These are remarkably bad takes. Or you have the more obvious take, which is send them back to Africa. You know what I'm saying, that the the full Nazi joint.

You know what I'm saying. You could go hold You could go a hold white supremacist Nazi and just be like, well, they're monkeys, they're savages, their beasts of prey, they'll never get better. They should we shouldn't even live among them.

You could do that. That's obvious racism. But anyway, let's do some history here about how we even got to what some of us have identified as the hood, and then we're gonna go from there and talk about what we mean by the global South and how the COVID response actually really exacerbates this issue that we're dealing with. You already, let's ride, okay, So here we go. We gotta go away far back, and I'm talking like the

end of slavery. Back during reconstruction era, some of y'all may have heard of the phrase called sharecropping, which was essentially like this idea. I don't know if y'all know. This is a side note that after the slaves were freed, there was reparations paid. It was just paid to the owners, to the slave owners for a loss of revenue. Can

you believe that they got reparations? The owners got reparations anyway, what they had to do was for for share cropping was like break up these big old land plots and now newly freed slaves who really didn't have nowhere to go. And it's not like the ending of slavery and racism, dug, but the owners would these big old plots of land, would break these plots of land into like subdivisions because it's not like they can afford to have these big

old plots because now you ain't got nobody to work them. Right. So, but it's not like they was going to give up ownership of the land. You're crazy well that you work the land, but it's not slaves had any capital. So for the seed, for the tools, you could work there. You could work this land or whatever you grow there,

but you got to pay the owner. Again, you don't own the land, and you gotta pay the owner of the land for all the tools, all the stuff that you need to be able to have a functioning farm. The thing is, you never really get out of debt. You never actually turn a profit because a you have to eat the fojiro it raised and then whatever is left you have to pay for seed, and you gotta go back to master to paycs who ain't mass and

no more. He's just now becomes you are a member of the system of capitalism where you're not the widget anymore. And now you're just a member of it. And this is how it works. So they just kept kept black people in debt to this day. Some black folks was like, I'm not doing this. And then there was what's called the Great Migration. This is where we in droves left the South, filling up Chicago, Detroit, you know, d C. And just all over the rest of America. Who was like, look, man,

ain't no point in staying here. A lot of black people, I don't know if y'all noticed, were cowboys, actually of the American Frontier cowboys, the cowboy that y'all all picture in moviescent what was black? Because it was a freeman's job and you ain't hand the owners. You was out all day just driving cattle from Texas up to Colorado to train station up there. It was great for a freed slave. Are you kidding me? This is the best. Also, here go another freebee. One of my favorite moments in

history was this time because right after this happened. Get this, we started electing black officials all over municipalities and cities all over the South. Because there's so many of us, we started electing our own nigga. We was winning. And then guess what happened? Then called the black codes, the voter rights, the Pole Texas voter i D, the voter registrations.

All these things started happening. That's why now when we're talking about voter rights, it's reminiscent it is because we was winning election and these white people was like, no, we can't have that. And that was the birth of Jim Crow. Oh I'm giving your game. Look, look, look what I'm saying is on paper. If you work the system, the system works. We elected the people that was like invested in our commune because it was more of us. We voted, and what did they do tried to stop

us and it worked. So the next time you start thinking about all this stuff about like hindering voting nigga, because it works. Now back to the Great Migration. We all ran into We're not ran, but we all moved up into different areas, the Great Migration up north and some of us went west. The problem was those were all filled with white people already, and those white people already had stratified classes. There was wealthy that was working

and it was poor white people. Now, we talked about this before, about like the union busters and the Pinkerton's and Carnegie and the steel workers unions. When um, these poor white people stood up for their for their rights, and the owners of these companies, these steel companies just decided to hire freed slaves to come work for them. Just this this reignited a huge class war kind of turned to pour against each other because at least if

you pour in white, you ain't a nigger. Though it's kind of like the low key what we're kind of saying right here, you know, Shad's rebellion, Divide and conquer, you feel me? So, so that's kind of happening right now. Then eventually these white people was like, we don't want to live around niggers. You heard me, right, And then there was a thing called white flight. This is the

birth of the suburbs. These beautiful communities, the leave it to Beaver's perfectly manicured lawns, and these planned communities, and these planned communities had laws, and these planned communities that had laws and neighborhood associations. One of those laws is called redlining, and the name of it is pretty literal. You would take a map, put it on the wall

at the city. You would draw a line around certain neighborhoods and say, just essentially, zoning laws do not permit unsightly things that bring down property value, i e. A power plant, a black family, Jewish family, a landfill, a Latin family. How could they do that? Well? Because they was the law. Now, guys were talking fifties and sixties,

this is not that long ago. There were things built into neighborhood associations that said, when you move into this neighbors in Los Angeles, when you move into this neighborhood, the only condition about whether when you sell this house is that you can't sell to a black or Jewish family. There was law like you you're not allowed. There were banks that decided purposefully they would not give bank loans to black families two brown families, So they locked us

out of the suburbs on purpose. And even if they just think about this from a practical standpoint, let's just say you stayed in the city and you use U was working on the on the on the Detroit Still Mill factory. You know what I'm saying. You've been there forever, as black dude been there forever. Let's just say he's better qualified than every white boy up in that mug. Do you think you'll get promoted to manager? Of course not, Well why not, we'll practically speaking, because these white boys

won't listen to you. It's not gonna they're not gonna listen to you. So what's left is when all of industry. When all the jobs, when all the upward mobility for housing is taken and placed in a certain place, all that's left is what becomes our inner cities. And we all know what idle hands do, we all know what lack of opportunity do. And then what happens is you start criminalizing being poor. What do I mean by that? I'm glad you asked what it means to criminalize being poor,

because most crimes in the inner city are crimes, are survival. Now, I know we got murder rates. I know this gang like obviously, the things called hood politics, I'm not look every nick and jail ain't Nelson Mandelas. So you know what I'm saying, That's not what I'm saying. Is the hood absolutely filled with in fightings, corruption, uh, extortion, horrible problems that we inflict on each other. Absolutely, it's not

at all what I'm saying. Are there people who have absolutely done all kinds of interventions to try to stop that things, the you know, anti anti gang marches and and after school programs. Again, I'm a product of some of them interventions. I'm a product of hood gang interventions from other gang members who cared about me. And said

there's a better way to live. I'm not saying we ain't got problems, But what I'm saying is you have to understand really how sinister, purposeful, or built baked into the laws are these things that keep poor communities poor. You know that schools are funded by property tax, which comes from property values. So when the property value drops, then the taxes for the school's drop, which means you

have underfunded schools. We'll just send your kids to private school to where to a city we've been red lined out of you build generational wealth? Well, how can you build generational wealth if we wasn't allowed into the wealth system until maybe sixty years ago. Have you heard of the Homestead Act? You know what I'm talking about when I say the Homestead Act. Well, Homestead Act was kind of like this after the Civil War. You know, we

had this great frontier that was empty and broke. We handled money, but we have all this farmable land and everybody stuck in densely populated cities. So the government had this idea of saying, well, why don't we why don't we add these housing subsidies for families who would be willing to move. Now, when I say families. You know what I mean. Right, we're talking white people, but they're looking for families that are willing to move out into the Great Plains and start a farm. Now, if you

don't know how to farm, it's all good. The governmental training, they'll pay for you to get training. You got any equipment, it's all good. Government will give you the equipment. This government handout, y'all. That sounds like bootstrapping to you. No, So this is the e t hunted. So if you got one of them hand outs a hundred years later, these the same people, these descendants, are the same people that are looking at people in the hood like why

you need government handouts? Why are you always asking the government to help you? I'm like, what the government help y'all just a hundred years ago? Because it is how capitalism works. You gotta you gotta prime to pump. You know what I'm saying. As a z f d R would say, sorry, I invoked f DR anyway, So the formation kind of happens like this. Now, what else is something that's very normal in the city is over policing. Now, I'm gonna pull some data here from the Human Rights

Watch uh dot org over policing. Check this out. Let me quote this for you. What we found in the data is that black people are subjected to physical force, including stunned guns, police, dog bites, pepper spray, punches, and kicks at the rate of two points seven times the time of white people. Some neighborhoods with larger populations of black people and poor people experience police stops more than ten times the rate of predominantly white or wealthier neighborhoods.

What we're trying to say is it feels more like an overseer because because prisons are privatized, because war on drugs, we talked about that before. The eighteen and one law used to be a hundred of one law. What's the eighteen and one law. What it says is one ounce of crack gives you the same amount of jail time as eighteen ounces of cocaine and thede the same thing. It's this one is cut with vega zoda. One exists in the hood, the other exists in wealthy places. There's

also a lot of money being made. This is what I mean by criminalizing being poor. There's a lot of money to be made. Now I'm gonna drop into Tulsa right now. Really, you could drop into any hood, USA, but we're gonna drop into Tulsa again. I'm looking at the Human Rights Watch. Check this out. How is the issue of finds and fees play a role in this system?

Follow me now. One of the really horrible things I discovered is that Tulsa, the county it's in, and the state of Oklahoma raise money to pay their court system and their government agencies largely through fines and court costs that are imposed on those arrested and those who have to go to court. And it's a huge amount of money. It's an abusive practice that is very common throughout the US.

Most arresting citations in Tulsa are relatively minor crimes. If you get ticketed for speeding or running a stop sign, you get these fees and fines. Poor people who are cited and arrested the most often can't afford to pay, so the court will issue an arrest warrant. Almost fort of arrests made by the Tulsa Department are just warrant arrests, and a large percentage of those are for failure to pay court debt. So you just you just couldn't afford it, So now you got a record. Court costs was the

third most common booking charge in the county jail. I'm gonna say that again. Court costs was the third most common booking charge in the county jail. People can't get out of debt. The court is predominantly in poor black communities. I spoke with people who kept getting arrested for failure to pay it, would miss work and lose their jobs. I spoke to a man who couldn't retire because he had to make payments. The debt just keeps piling on. Already,

don't make enough. I get a speeding ticket like everybody else. You charge me this enormous amount to do this, or I gotta miss it. I gotta go to court to try to fight it. I go to day to go to court to try to fight it. I just missed the day of work. I can't afford the court fees. Now you're gonna throw me in jail because I can't afford it. Right, So now I'm missing more work, which means I'll never be able to afford it. Uh, y'all know why Eric Garner died because he sold loose cigarette. Lucy,

it's a one, he sold one cigarette. He dead. Being poor as a crime in a lot of places in our country. Watto because there's a lot of money to be made, and you could keep hitting that lick because we could never get out now again. Like I said before, there are obvious exceptions to this rule. I am a product of it. I am part of a swing family. My family was the one that in my lifetime we went from hood to suburb. My parents went back to school. They was like three or four jobs between them. We

all kicked in. I helped out. I had to pay some of the bills in our house. I had to pay. I paid part of the phone bill. I remember this. One day my mother sat me down and we was kind of doing all right. She she wrote down, I was mad about some basketball camp, and she wrote down, uh or she told me to write down. Split this paper in half, right down, this list of numbers on one side, and this list of numbers on the other side. And then she asked me what I noticed about these

two lists. And I saw that one was three hundred dollars three dollars less than the other one. She says, son, I make three hundred dollars less than I need every month. This is why you can't go to no damn basketball camp. You just and we we got out, YO said. We weren't living above our means. We were living as best as we could. But you get locked in these things, things like predatory loans, like those payday loans and stuff like that, charging y'all seventy nine interest. You lock people

in because it's a continual source of money. And if you ever get out of that, then guess what. Now I'm competing with these people in the job market. Now I'm competing with these people in the housing market. Right. It's just the system incentivizes, just by how the numbers work,

to keep the hood the hood. Now, there are a lot of people who in the black and brown community who have looked looked over to the Jewish community in the sense that like they keep their money within their own community, that money passes around the Jewish community, at least in California, or at least in l A dollars dollars circulate their community four and five and six and seven and eight times before it leaves their community. What

do I mean by that? They they only use their own cleaners, their own car dealerships, their own schools, they their own lawyers, their own dentists, they own doctors. They go to a doctor that's from neighood, right, So the money stays in there and they were able to accumulate wealth. Now that's because they made a conscious decision to do it. And how nigga, Because they was facing the same ship from the Holocaust and all that, Nigga, they had to figure it out. They was like, we had to fair

out with you. So a lot of people in the black and brown community was like, yo, we need to

do the same, keep the money within our owns. People like jay Z, people like uh My Dog Chase Infinite over at har Rum Coffee and la Mer park I was actually on Taviss Miley Show for the Black Information Network UH which broadcasts on radio broadcast, and learned parks like we gotta keep it in our community because if we don't anybody praying for us, anybody looking for us, if you don't own the land that your businesses is

sitting on, then nigga, you just share cropping like follow me. Look, look, look the new flex where music is to own your masters. You need to own these tracks, you need to own these albums because if not Nika, you nothing but an ox. You would just it's just an auction block. We will never get no better. All you're doing, all they're doing is making money off our work. We just stay where we are, keeping venting ship. But you stay there because they get your own the land. It's share cropping all

over again. Man, I'm getting, I'm getting, I'm getting real hole tep on you all today. Look. According to the Survey of Consumer Finance data, the median black family has twenty will four thousand, one hundred dollars in wealth. This is just twelve point seven percent of the hundred and eighty nine thousand, one hundred dollars in wealth owned by a typical white family. The media and Latino family is thirty six thousand, fifty owns just nineteen only one percent

of the wealth of the median white family. Listen, we don't own the ship. We see all of our talent, all of our resources, all of our abilities leave our communities. Right You ask any black TikTok influencer, TikTok creative, they y'all making money off our dances. This continues to happen because the system incentivizes us to either play just as dirty,

or just stay where we are. So we come up with stuff like ghetto fabulous comes up and stuff like you know what I'm saying, which is an old phrase. But like how we flex, it's not like we don't know what we're talking about. It's not like we're not smart enough to do these things. It's not like we don't work hard. The meritocracy thing is a myth. You're

telling me. You're telling me that toughest nails Latino man get up before all of us in mode five lawns before me, and you have drank off first cup of coffee. You're telling me he ain't working hard. You're telling me that lady that that that if you happen to come into a high rise building, you happen to be staying at some sort of hotel. You're telling me that Latina lady up there cleaning everyhow. You're telling me she ain't working hard. Come on, fam, it's more to it, it's

more to it. What's the basis, what's our hope? Well, some people have some suggestions. Now, let me blow your mind right here. All this stuff is exacerbated and made even more clear by the COVID response, which is gonna lead us into us talking about the global South, which apparently this show is getting real long, so it's gonna have to be a part two. But follow me here.

This is from inequality dot org. It's about inequality. Uh. The early vaccine data shows that racial groups most at risk of the virus are not receiving the most shots. According to the data from twenty three states analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation, black infection and death rates are significantly higher than their vaccine rates. Louisian that has the widest gap, with black death rates twenty six percent points

higher than black vaccination dates. The digital divide is one factor in the racial vaccine gap, since the lack of internet access makes it more difficult to secure appointments. NPR found that in many areas, vaccine sites are located outside of Black and Latino community surveys also indicate higher rates of vaccine hesitancy among people of color due to a long history of racial medical mistreatment, but the hesitancy has declined as the vaccine has rolled out. Now what are

they talking about. They're talking about the Tuskegee experiment. I'm not even gonna let you. I'm not even gonna give y'all that y'all need to go look that up as to why black people is like, I ain't taking that shot. Now, let's get back to it. COVID nineteen pandemic has forced many workers into remote and telework office telework as offices have closed around the country, but not everyone has the

same abit need to work from home. Most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data on this are from two thousand seventeen through eighteen. These pre pandemic figures indicate that only nineteen point seven percent of black and sixteen point two percent of Latino people work in jobs in which they are able to tell a work, compared to twenty nine point nine percent of white and thirty seven point zero

percent of Asian workers. This gap, combined with research documenting that black and Latino people now make up a disproportionate number of those jobs deemed essential, explains why people of color have been exposed to a greater virus risk. What I'm trying to say is how interlocking systems work. When you put one thing in place, the rest of these dominoes fall into place. And I can't say that there's some big villains sitting around a board like like like,

you know, like an evil Avengers. But can I say, But I can't say when you put the thing together, it just kind of feel on purpose because of how interlocking systems work. But that's critical race theory, so I'm not allowed to talk about that now. Also, according to inequality dot org, some of these things kind of happen because of just hiring inequalities and hiring quit and inequalities

come from implicit bias. So, according to inequality dot org, racial discrimination in many forms, including education, hiring, and pay practices, contribute to the persistent earning gaps. As of the last quarter of the median white worker made sent more than the typical black worker in thirties six percent more than the media and Latino worker, according to the BLS data.

The COVID nineteen pandemic again drastically raised unemployment in America, but that impact has not been felt across all racial groups. In December, as the recovery of the summer months started to fade, unemployment rate was nine point nine percent for Blacks and nine point three percent for Latinos, compared to six point zero percent of Whites and five point nine percent of Asians. In these rates, only count for those who are actively seeking work, leaving out those who have

just given up on finding jobs. So to put it all together, you got a exiting and blocking out of nicer areas because of property value. Your property value drops, which means your property taxes are low, which means you

now have failing schools. You couple this with the war on drugs, and couple it with over policing, right, and then you couple it with densely populations and without the lack of opportunity, because opportunity, because of implicit bias, which may have came all the way back to the founding of our country, makes us believe that people that are darker are just inferior. You put all that together and systemically allow for laws that undergird these racist views. You

make a hood. And of course I am not a determinist, because I am again the product of someone who is found their way out. I've said it in the song Somehow to School the Prison Pipeline miss this. Now next week I'm gonna take this same motif and I'm gonna show you what I mean by the global South. We used to call that the third World, but what COVID response has shown us is uh y'all treating this like a hood it should do seem on purpose her politics, y'all.

This mug was recorded and edited by Me Propaganda right here in East low'st boil Heights, Los Angeles. Y'all can follow me at prop hip Hop on all the socials. You can follow the Hood Politics pot itself at Hood Politics Pod, where we'll be trying to make takes on stuff that aren't really big enough for a whole episode, but definitely needs a little bit of clarity. This mug was scored, edited, mixed, and mastered by the one and only Headlights. Y'all, go follow my dog, Matt Outswelski. I

still don't know how to say his name. I'm glad he changed it the Headlights. Follow him on his socials at Headlights Underscore music sick. I'm telling you hear all these new other fly tracks this spool be making and the theme music was done by the one and only Gold Tips Gold Tips DJ Seawan Pete. Y'all remember every time you check in, if you understand the Hood, you could understand politics. Shouts to I heart media from making this happen.