What Do Tulsa, Evanston, and Fearless Fund Have in Common? | MiniPod

or organizations. So this fearest fun issue is more than the feelest fun. I think it affects many of us and I wanted to want to hear your thoughts on what's going on with this.

One is a lawsuit against Evanston, Illinois that was brought by Judicial Watch on behalf of six people who have relatives that once lived in Evanston, and they Judicial Watch as president Tom Fitten says that Evanston's program is just a proxy for giving out money to people based on race.

We actually also want to go after programs that y'all start for yourself. So Fearless Fund is on the receiving end of this attack from the likes of Ed Bloom. And what I want to do is show how Arian Simone Reid, who runs the Fearless Fund, came out with the challenge to the Biden administration and to Congress to respond to Ed Bloom's antics.

The Fearless Fund is a nonprofit that gives twenty thousand dollars grants to black women in business because we don't see venture capital, we are not on the receiving end of those resources. So that is why they stood that up to meet a need. It is a very clear intent. It's I believe it's clearly constitutional. But again, as we talked about on our recent podcast, we know that the Supreme Court isn't just ruling on the constitutionality of a thing.

They're ruling on whether or not they like you, if they support the interests of the thing, and who is the highest paid payer. And of course I just can't even imagine what the Fearless Fund is encountering in terms of legal fees and what they would encounter if this

is allowed to continue. So yes, there needs to be legislation to establish and to protect DEI efforts throughout the country, and there absolutely should be an executive order looking at the disparities that exist in venture, in philanthropy, in wages and access to boardrooms, all of that to prove that we need the programs that are in place to protect our interest and to level the playing field.

of success of any across all race gender groupings. And I'll try to find that research while we're sitting here so I can bring it up more definitively. But I think anywhere you look, and almost across any platform, you can see the dispared impact investment, banking, leveraging, through lending, so on and so far, and the impact that it

has on black women run businesses. I think we're being set back on our back heel here when at one point folks on the left, progressive groups actually negotiated the upper hand by taking to the courts many of these issues that won us the kind of victories that we've had that have been the status quo sort of motive operandi for most of these institutions for the past thirty

forty years. And then I think, what happened, you know, Tiffan Agela, is this federalist society, this federalist society reared set of judges who have made their way not just through the local benches and the appellate courts, but into the federal benches and onto the federal Court. I think Amy Comi Berrett is one of the yielded examples of it where these justices have not become so philosophically ensconced that it isn't about as you talked about before when

we spoke about judges strict conservative conservatives. Some were strict construction of the of the law, strict construction of the law, but rather which position I ideologically agree with and which one I ideologically don't agree with. And we all ought to know we don't put judges there for ideological issues that they agree and don't agree with. They're supposed to

be there to interpret the law. When it was put into law, what were the operating modes of operandis of those who put it, who moved these pieces of legislation along, and instead, what it's yielding is very philosophical binds that come down to whether or not you are appointed by a left or a right judge, a president, and whether you're a left or right justice. And to me that it is the beginning steps of I think that the destruction of the federal system.

is Latino, just one percent identified as black. On the funding side, the same study found that white men make up more than ninety percent of venture capitalists. What Arian Simone is doing is not even trying to level the playing field. It is just to give us a fighting chance. And I have to say, you guys, I'm increasingly exhausted with it. As we're recording this, it just crossed the wars.

Our brother Roland Martin just sent this to us. The Oklahoma Supreme Court has struck down the case to award the Tulsa survivors any kind of reparations. They dismissed the Tulsa massacre lawsuit. And it just feels like we keep fighting these same battles and I don't know what comes next, but I think we're increasingly getting exhausted with asking politely to give us a fair chance, to asking directly give us a fair chance, to demanding to give us a

fair chance. And it's like America, the system while bend, and we all know what happens to things that don't bend.

You're talking about a community that was one day, and then the events of another day, which can be clearly correlated, then takes that community off of its thriving thrust into disrepaired destruction at the hands of its white residents and the Chamber of Commerce and the local government and every other institution that existed at the time, and then there too forth did nothing to heal what was, you know, a theft, a great theft, destruction and a theft, and

the fact that the court could see no reason to go back and see those those harms redressed. And I don't know what argument, because we're just hearing this tip from from from from from what you said, from what you're sharing here. I can't wait to go back and read whatever justification they put on paper. But there is no justification to be put on paper. There isn't anything that can justify that the harm was done there and the absence of a repair, no repair whatsoever.

that community. One and the same going back to Arian someone read and what she's pushing for with Fearless Fund and the idea of a commission. There was a Kerner Commission stood up. The Kerner Commission was stood up by Lyndon me Johnson in nineteen sixty seven. Otto Kerner, who was the governor of Illinois, chaired the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Let me just remind you all what

the questions were asking. It was in response to twenty three uprisings in cities throughout the country, and the conclusion of the commission was that the triggers for civil unrest were discrimination in policing practices, the justice system, consumer credit practices, inadequate housing and public assistance programs, high unemployment, and the exclusion of communities of color from the democratic process. This

was fifty seven years ago. Here we are today, in twenty twenty four, needing a redo of the Kerner Commission, needing them to tell us why the Tulsa survivors, who are almost one hundred and ten years old right, why they are not going to see justice one hundred plus years later. Why a city of that has proven that

its residents deserve reperations don't deserve those reparations. Why when we go and do it ourselves, are we still found to be breaking the law in some way, just for not even for trying to get ahead, for just trying to see over the fence the same way that you do. Like, that's the thing to me, And so we really have to evaluate what recourse we have. I think that we are in the season around the election where you all

know I believe in demands. I believe that we have to make our demands known, not just our asks about our requirements. It is not a heavy lift for President Biden to ensure that there's an executive order on the table when we couldn't get the George Floyd Justice and

Policing Bill passed. It is not a heavy lift to ask President Biden to sign an executive order establishing a commission when we can't get HR forty looked at to give Evanston, Illinois and other cities that we're pursuing similar paths, including San Francisco, some cover when people don't want to pay their debt and the city and the state and

the Feds to pay their debt. We literally have been having podcasts after podcasts when we're talking about what a waste of resources by DJ to pursue someone's application, someone who lied on an application or misspoke on an application. But you can't ensure that our unity receives justice. That is absolutely ours, Like I'm beyond and I'm just saying that this administration has the ability to review, to look over to study since apparently Andrew, it's not enough studies,

not enough money has been spent on this. There couldn't be another Pew polled, none on the disparities that exists.

it's come out is Lovecraft Country. Did you guys watch that? Oh my god, it is like the most amazing uh series. So I've given them free Avere Tulsa what incredible, I think sometimes for to connect younger generations with the atrocities that were faced. The dramatization of it and a scripted series helps bring it to life. So it wasn't a documentary, it was a scre series, but it was just an amazing, really well done series that highlighted what people went through.

Pioneering is hard, and so even the folks who did acquire property, what they went through was horrific. We wouldn't stand for it today, but we're still impacted by it today. So I share your outrage Angela and Tiffany.

wield power. There's been a tit, you know, a tossing back and forth between the left and the right almost every other election between who controls the House and the Senate. When we are in control again of the House of Representatives in the Senate, don't wait until you got two thirds majority before you move on issues and interest that

affect us. I want to see them take some leadership, pass some legislation, and at the local level, require your own local governments to institute their own disparity studies so that we can have some legs to stand on. And they want to take Evanston up, then you're going to have to take Tallahassee and Miami and you name the city out right along with it. Force the federal government to have to then weigh in because of how ubiquitous these studies then become looking at each and every community

in each and every state across the entire country. We ought to make them do some of the work here. If they want to dismantle it, you got to come at us one by one by one by one by one, and every local community has the ability institute their own despaired studies across a range of private sector and public sector impacts as it relates to race and gender.

our victory, like we deserve our victory from losing. What the mission is of the Minority Business Development Agency is to, you know, the really important work that affirmative action policy is done in this country, even though we know it needed work to lose it, to watch DEI Department after DEI Department and position get completely eviscerated, it's just really hard to continue to bear witness to this and not

be discouraged. So thank you all for carving out space, and hopefully we can think through some additional costs to action. But I think for now we are supposed to be putting up a letter. We hopefully will have that done by the time this mini pod runs, asking President Biden to sign an executive order to develop and establish a commission that would look at the dispirit experiences, impact, and probably in many ways intention on the experiences of black

folks in this country. It's time to revisit what the Kerner Commission was evaluating. It may not be an uprising where things are happening in community, but there's certainly an uprising in our souls and it needs to be addressed. And we are feeling that the pinch of it economically, educationally, and psychologically, and that needs to be evaluated and there should be some recourse. So thank you all so much. Welcome home, every welcome home, Thank you all so much

for listening. Remember to rate review subscribe and tune in to our regular episode on Thursday.