There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm bridgetad and this is there Are No Girls on the Internet. Fearless Fund is a black woman led venture capital firm that offers investment,
financial support, and mentorship to black women owned businesses. But they're under attack for providing this support for traditionally marginalized entrepreneurs because Edward Blum, the professional hangar at the heart of the Supreme Court's legal challenge against affirmative Action, is suing them for what he says is racial discrimination. Now, this could set a precedent that completely changes the landscape for entrepreneurs. And there are so many different podcasts and
influencers who talk about tech and startups and entrepreneurship. It's a really credit spase. But if I'm being honest, I haven't really seen a ton of folks talking about this hugely important case. Everyone in entrepreneurship should be talking about this, not just black women, all of us because it could impact all of us. I joined my friends Samantha and Annie at the podcast Stuff's Mom Never told you to
explain what I mean? And stay tuned because we'll be hearing from some of the folks at the center of this case. Later this season, the man who brought us the legal challenge that struck down affirmative action earlier this summer is back, and this time he is coming for
grants and the fellowships that support marginalized people. So you all probably recall that earlier this summer, back in June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, ruling that race can no longer play a part in college admissions.
Notably, the decision just applied to race.
It did not apply to gender or things like legacy status or donor status being considered in the college admissions process. Separately, some colleges, like Harvard have signaled that they might start reexamining the role that things like legacy status plays in college admissions in light of that Supreme Court ruling.
Do you all remember this?
I remember when the ruling was struck down, how big it felt, especially being a big Supreme Court ruling. About a year after the after row was struck down, it felt like, you know, one big torrent of rain and then another big torrent of rain.
To continue your metaphor.
Anie, Yes, good metaphor, nicely done.
Yes, Yeah, No, it definitely did, because that was at the end of the Supreme Court session and there had just been a lot of I mean, it turned out to be true, but a lot of fear around like what will they do?
Right?
It just made like all.
Of these decisions in one day.
In one day. Yeah, you know, it's odd because I was absolutely alive, and I think, like talking about trying to get into school and having this whole conversation when I'm a firmative action was coming into debate to begin with, and to see it like this, I'm not gonna lie. I'm gonna be very transparent here as growing up in a white household who are very conservative, not around any marginalized groups outside of me who they rescued and put that in air quotes out of like a marginalized a
bad situation. Seeing what they were saying was feded into me and being like, yeah, I absolutely agree that I should not get I don't want to be given a special spot because of my race. I want to earn it. Like I said that out loud to my family before I started college, in any of that, not understanding what it really was. And I truly believe my parents believe that I don't think my siblings believe that because they're they are educated and they'd understand. But I truly believe
that because that was what was fed into me. So I have this real, like ugh itck feeling about this whole action because the face of the suit was an Asian man who was bitter, bitter little baby that I feel like so many ways about it, and then coming into college on my own and then understanding what it truly was and realizing, oh, yeah, that stuff that I spewed out as a kid was actual white supremacy coming out of my mouth because I was trying to impress
my white family and being fed a bunch of lies. So it was it felt like so gross to know that I was manipulated like that at my young age, at my young age. Also that I think, I don't know how old this student is. I guess he was trying to get into college, so I guess maybe around the same time. And then coming into this now that I'm like, oh my god, what have we done, essentially like with allowing these types of lies to perpetuate and not looking at the true statistics behind these actual numbers
and why affirmative action was and is necessary. But again, because of that rhetoric being around, it wasn't surprising that it was undone because it was truly hanging on by a thread because of those types of lies. But yeah, I have like this ache and like mourning in guilt, guilt by association and guilt by like past actions that I'm like, oh my god, what is this? Like part of what I was spewing is part of the reason
this is undone. Of course, the bigger picture is again white supremacists and their power that they wanted to play and the overall arcing like who was doing the main grab and trying to make sure that what marginalized people stay down and stay unable to get to any of these places because they do not have the connections essentially just all connections, not even money anymore, but connections, And it's just disgusting. So yeah, I have very strong feelings.
Yeah, I first of all, thank you for sharing that, and I can kind of identify.
I know how you feel.
I don't think that you need to have guilt for having felt that way, because, first of all, we live in a society where it's so easy to pit marginalize people against each other in service of upholding white supremacy, like that is a tried and true method that bad actors and people interested in upholding white supremacy engaged for a very long time. And so the reason they do it is because it's effective, and so it's not surprising
that it will be effective on you, a young person. Also, the way that we talk about it, I think, just does not set people up to have a full understanding of the conversation. Right, So we talk so much about affirmative action, and when we talk about affirmative action, usually the face of affirmative action is a black person, right, And so we're talking about like, oh, well, do you think that black people should get a leg up in admissions processes? Of course people are not gonna agree with that.
But the reality is is that that is a myth because the Department of Labor shows that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are actually white women. That is not what the way that are, the way that we talk
about it would lead you to believe, right. And so another idea is that when we talk about admissions, so I would say this is just my opinion, but I would say that there is an outsized space given to conversations about affirmative action, which, as I said, are sort of translated through like oh black people that go the face of it, and so much less space given to things like legacy status, which I think I had a stat earlier, But it's some astronomical amount of kids in
college get there because they are their parents went to that college, or their parents are donors to that college, or some sort of a leg up. And essentially what that is is like affirmative action for rich people. Yeah, we don't even it's not even part of the conversation and certainly has not been part of the conversation the
way that affirmative action has been. So I would argue that, like, you were not given a clear picture of the issue in order to be able to like thoughtfully come up with a critique or an opinion about it, right, And I think that that has to be by design.
Right absolutely. I think in the understanding, as you were saying, is the rhetoric I was given was all anti black. Like we're going to be very very specific and call it what it was. It wasn't about anything else. It wasn't about me being a minority or like being Asian and a marginalized woman is literally they were trying to be anti black. They were staying the quiet part out loud because that's all they see. That's the big enemy that is built up against white people, which is so
disgusting and it's very prevalent. Like that's the real understanding. You need to have that whole fact and hold that conversation is this is an anti black movement, and in that it did not it did not actually help the black community that much at all. It really did not bring in, as you said, statistically black people into colleges. It was again more white women, all white women essentially.
And then again the legacy people that those are the people who are still remaining and going to colleges and still getting scholarships to get into these colleges, and still getting like loans at a reasonable interest rate, all of those things. But for some reason, they built this boogeyman, some reason we know why. But they've built a boogeyman in order to make sure that they put down a specific group of people because they're like, a, hey, this
is a battle we can win. We've always won with this exactly, let's do this.
Anti blackness is always that is a train that it's always on time. So what's interesting about what you just said is that white women, despite being the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action, are also the most likely to be against it. So, according to a twenty fourteen Cooperative Congressional Election study, nearly seventy percent of the twenty thousand, six hundred and ninety four self identified non Hispanic white women
surveyed either somewhat or strongly opposed affirmative action. Again, I think it's like one of those situations where because the way that it is framed is like, this is a program that helps black people, and if you don't think black people should be getting a leg up over you, you should not be into it, you should be against it.
That rhetoric actually ends up hurting all marginalized people, whether you're a white woman, because you know, like it's one of those dynamics where the the anti blackness becomes a way.
To get people on board.
But then that is not an accurate reflection of who the beneficiaries of programs like affirmative action actually end up being. Right, So, Annie, you were saying how Asian Americans were kind of made the face of the sort of victims of affirmative action, and that is very much by design because of this guy who is a conservative litigant named Edward Blum. I call him a litigant because that's like kind of what
he is, like a professional lawsuit bringer. He is not a lawyer himself, but he basically connects potential plaintiffs with attorneys who are willing to represent them in test cases, which he then uses to try to set legal presidents. He is the founder and sole member of an organization called Project on Fair Representation, which he found that in two thousand and five, which focuses on voting, education, contracting, employment,
racial quotas, and racial reparations. Basically, his whole thing is bringing legal challenges to strike down laws that I would argue protect non white, non straight, non men. More on this later. However, if you were to ask him, he would probably say that it's not that he wants to elevate like one race over anybody else, but that he wants all laws and all like public considerations to be
race or identity neutral. He has described his ethos like this quote, Our history has been tainted tragically by the use of race and various public and private arenas race discrimination, is odious, something the founding principles of the civil rights movement were designed to eliminate. Personally, I would say that I don't know if I buy what he is saying. It seems like an awfully convenient way to justify the fact that he keeps gutting laws that protect marginalized people.
But there you have it. That is what he says. His motivation is. He just thinks that everything should be race neutral, right. The Guardian describes him as quote a human wrecking ball on a mission to destroy the landmark achievements of the civil rights era and send the country back to a dark age of discrimination and harassment of minorities in the workplace and higher education and at the ballot box.
Mm hmm, well, I mean this is the very basis of hitting that level of if everything was fair from the beginning, great great, if everything was equal and everybody had same equity, that would be a beautiful utopia. But as we know, this land, this country, most countries that have been colonized, is not based on that level, and that it has never been about equity, has always been about who has power and those who have power. Really was like, but I love that time that was a
great time. Bay we have that again, which is like, Hm, you know, we know what you're really saying exactly.
The affirmative action ruling was not blumps rodeo. A legal challenge that he brought was what led to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. That was the Shelby County versus Holder case that he sponsored in twenty thirteen, and it led to the Supreme Court overturning a key provision in the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act. That legal challenge is when we saw the introduction of things like voter ID requirements, cutting back on early voting, eliminating same day voter registration.
All of that was because of him.
So thank you Edward Blum for ushering that into our landscape.
He's really the villainy in all.
The story on my podcast there are no girls on the Internet. We've referred to him a lot as just like a professional hater, Like he's just someone who like just like hate hate hay hate hate, like go. I don't like that hate hate hate like professional hater.
Is he does? He is? He very rich.
I think he's.
Wealthy, Like I think I think that he I've actually looked into him because I'm he's one of those figures that I find so curious. He did not come from wealth, but I think that he has wealth now and he's just interested in using that wealth and influencing those connections into creating these different legal precedents that I would say harm us.
All right, he is that evil genius because we've seen that in a lot of conservative think tanks as well as essentially right wing groups that have been building up the legal system to only help them, putting in those in law school that they know that they can pull back out, educating them and funding them to the full in order to come back out and do these types of cases, knowing that if they can do this, this is going to be the basis of how they win.
Oh yes, did you guys?
Did you all see that docuseries on the Duggers on Hulu?
No? I couldn't get to their yet.
So that's the whole thing. It's a real like Jez as you might imagine.
Sure.
One of the things they make very clear is that it's not just about like this one problematic super religious family on TV.
It is about this vast network.
Of young people who are being trained and educated and ursoll are very well connected to reach the highest levels of government and influence to make laws for all of us. So it's not enough that like their kids are homeschooled or that their kids live a certain way. They are training the next generation of political operatives and lawmakers to make sure that all of us and all of our kids live the way that they think that they should be living. So it's pretty, I guess some diabolical.
It's the word I would use.
You mentioned earlier, how when you were having conversations about college, you remember watching the first wave of the affirmative action legal challenge go down. And even if folks weren't following affirmative action very closely, they might remember Blum's earlier attempt to challenge it. So Blum had been working to challenge affirmative action since twenty thirteen, when he worked with this woman, Abigail Fisher, who was the daughter of a good friend of his, who was a white woman.
She you might umber shid red hair.
She did not get into University of Texas because her GPA was frankly mid. She sued the University of Texas at Austin in two thousand and eight after it denied her admission. She had a three point five to nine GPA as a senior, which put her just below the cutoff for a state law requiring UT to accept any graduate in the top ten percent of their high school class, so like mathematically speaking, she was not in the top
ten percent of her high school class. She felt that she should have still gotten admission because of her extracurricular activities combined with her GPA, and that she would have gotten into UT if the university had not used race as a factor in selecting its freshman class, which she argued was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
Do you all remember this? Like she was like a very like memorable.
Figure, Like I feel like when when I hear about this, I can to see this one image of her standing at a podium outside of the Supreme Court, which is like burned in my mind.
I do remember this because I remember thinking, this is the dumbest argument I've ever seen, because I'm like, girl, you didn't make it, Like even without a firmative action, you wouldn't have. You wouldn't have made it. Do you not understand how many people are struggling to get into college today because a little more access has happened, not just because of a firmative action, but like the lottery and all of those things when we had more scholarships.
I was just like, why are people listening to her? I think that was the biggest question in my head. I was like, why are we paying attention to this? Like she has no case, I think I thought.
I remember thinking like, is this an onion headbline?
Like she did.
The grades are bad and now she's I.
Think that was the beginning of like, oh, this is a Becky Sorry, Becky's in the world. That's really just whining because she couldn't get her away like that. I remember like that was the beginning of that of like, oh, sorority girl was again no no, no hate to sorority people. I'm so sorry. So you know that level like stereotype in that my daddy said that I could get in and now I'm not in.
Why So the way that y'all are reacting is exactly how I'm This is validating because I remember her being treated like kind of a joke, like her GP was like fine, but certainly at three point a lot higher than my GPA was when I was in high school, so like, I'll own that, but like you know, it's not three point five nine is not an automatic entrance to wherever you want to go to college. It's like a fine gpa.
And so I remember people calling her becky with the bad grades, and the vibe around her.
Was like she was just salty that she didn't get in, and so she was like blaming black people. And so obviously she was not a very I guess, sympathetic legal challenge to affirmative action.
So obviously Abigail's legal challenge did not work.
So Bum regrouped and made the strategic choice to make the face of affirmative action or the people being harmed by affirmative action, according to him, Asian Americans. According to an NPR article he told a gathering of the Houston Chinese Alliance in twenty fifteen, quote I needed plaintiffs.
I needed Asian plaintiffs.
MPR spoke to Hannay Lopez, a race and constitutional law scholar at Berkeley, who described this as a deliberate switch in strategy, and that the argument was no longer centered on how affirmative action impacts white people. Instead, quote, there's this move to strengthen the surface argument that this is racism against minorities.
I think it's part of the appeal.
And so I've read like Asian American activists and advocates saying that, like what he was doing was this intentional shift to make Asian Americans like a proxy stand in for white people to be like, oh no, like this can't be about racial animis because I am trying to advocate for Asian Americans. And again, I think it's a really great example of how effective a strategy it is to pit marginalized groups against one another in service of
white supremacy. Because in the and it's not like I think, since affirmative action has been struck down, we've already seen data trickle in that wasn't that long ago, but already we've seen data trickle in that suggests that, like, yeah, it's it's white people with connections. It's white legacy students who are continuing to get more slots in admissions. It's not you know, it's certainly not helping the Asian Americans
who were who brought this challenge. It's actually just opening up more slots for more rich white people, because that's how college works in the United States.
Right, And of course this play is being used by other places such as Florida doing the Asian American history in set but blacklisting African American history. And we know what that play is that that's the same type of narrative. They're like, Oh, this is working, let's try this, let's keep this going exactly.
So, I really wanted to talk about So, after on the heels of successfully getting the Supreme Court destry down Afirmative Action, what is Blum's next move?
Well, he is back after gutting affirmative Action.
His next move is going after fellowships and grant programs that support marginalized people. He is suing two corporate law firms on the grounds that they're fellowship programs that are aimed at students of color, those who identify as LGBTQ plus, and students with disabilities, exclude applicants based on race, and he is demanding that those programs be shut down. He is also suing a black venture capital firm called the Fearless Fund.
So this is kind of the meat of why I.
Wanted to bring this conversation to the table today, because he is alleging that the Fearless Fund is practicing unlawful racial discrimination. Blum claims the Fearless Fund is engaged in explicit racial exclusion by operating a grant program quote only open to black females. According to The Washington Post, the lawsuit is asked to prevent the fund from selecting its
next round of grant winners. The claim states that the firm is quote violating Section nineteen eighty one of the Civil Rights Act of eighteen sixty six, a US law barring racial bias in private contracts, by making only black women eligible in the grant competition. So yeah, he's just like coming after anything that he sees as supporting.
Non white people. The Fearless fun was launched.
In twenty nineteen by three prominent black women, Keisha Knight Pullman who you might remember as Rudy Huxtable on The Cosby Show, entrepreneur arian Simone, and corporate executive Ayana Parsons. They have a strong and impressive list of investors like Bank of America, Costco, General Mills, MasterCard, JP Morgan. They've invested in over forty businesses in the past four years, including Atlanta favorite The Slutty Vegan have y'all eaten there?
Oh yeah, it was near my house that I lived.
Yeah, Samantha was smart and went during the Super Bowl, so there was no one there.
So they are. They stay open till two am, and so when the Super Bowl lots because it's always packed out. And what we went at it still took forever. They make good food. It takes a while, but yeah, we would. I think it only been once though it is. I don't stand in lines.
It was a long line. I've never been.
But and she has expanded that business everywhere, especially in Atlanta and then Georgia. So good on her and owes a lot of property.
That wouldn't be possible without the Fearless Fund. And so the lawsuit that Blum is bringing centers on the Fearless Funds Fearless Strivers Grant Contest, which awards Black women who own small businesses twenty thousand dollars in grants and digital tools to help them grow their businesses and mentorship opportunities.
So interestingly enough, Blahma did not seek out the Fearless Fund to sue, but rather, he says that a non black woman who runs a business reached out to him via email and flagged like did you know that these black women are running a grant program that I can't be part of? And so the Washington Post reports, but the lawsuit sites three female business owners, one from New York and two from Virginia who argued that they could have benefited from the Fearless Funds grant program, but they
were ineligible because they are not black. So yeah, these non black women basically just felt like they should be entitled to this grant program that black women established for themselves to support black women.
They were like, we should have a piece of that.
That's such an interesting take because I'm like, well, you also didn't get it from every other business grant ever, So why are you choosing this like you want did you try for it? This just seems like a lazy part of like I want this one thing, I couldn't get it. I quit.
They're biased, Like yeah, I mean this is just my opinion, and but like it's so hard to not see this as like just hater vibes, like everything has to be for you, and if it's not for you, you have to shut it down. Think it goes back to what we were saying earlier about the women who benefit from affirmative action are also the ones who are the most likely to be against it. I firmly believe that there
is enough out there for all of us. And I'm an entrepreneur, right, so I know how hard the funding spaces for women, all women, but I know how hard it is for Black women, in particular as a black woman. We'll get into some of the stats in just a moment, but I believe that despite that, there is enough for everyone. Everyone will find their lane, everyone will find their people, everyone will find what they need to make what they
want happen. I believe that as like a meditation that keeps me in this work and keeps me being an entrepreneur.
But I feel like the dynamic.
That says that women need to be pit against each other, that if you're a white woman, you need to be trying to shut down a grant that is for black women, dynamic that helps anybody, right, And so I think that we all have our place, we all have our niche us enough for all of us. But that dynamic that we are enemies only serve that does not serve anybody. It doesn't serve me, it doesn't serve it, It ultimately won't serve them as either.
It just keeps us pit against.
Each other as opposed to these larger systems that are actually holding us all down.
It's such a mind play that they have to people have to go through to be like, Okay, I can't get this one thing because they say I can't have it, so that means no one should have it because I'm gonna be miserable, and so are you. Misery lift company.
We're gonna keep this mentality going and then also not look at the like here's the small thing versus the giant amount of stuff that you also can't get because you're not a rich white man, but you don't care about that thing, Like that's the one thing that's a little bit more accessible to tear someone down who other people will help you tear down with, instead of this big giant amount of cash that's just sitting here for
the white man. Like it's just is I said for the white man, like I'm a native but like, but you know, does like mind level, like how much you're willing to ignore to be like, Okay, I'm at the bottom. Who can I make lesser than me? Who can I push down further than me? So at the very least, I'm not at the very bottom. Oh my god, that's just such a mind trick.
This reminds me of when I was a little kid and my brother had this like free coupon for an ice cream from McDonald's that he got from school.
So he went to McDonald's together and he got one.
Ice cream, and I didn't have any money because we were little kids, and so they gave him his ice cream, and I got very jealous, and so I smacked it out of his hand on to the ground, and he was like, I was gonna give you a BikeE so like, because I was like, I don't want him to get something that I can't have.
It really got a flattering story.
But I was like seven years old because it's like he was going to.
Give me a bite.
So I missed out on getting my bite because I could not just let him have something that I wanted and felt entitled.
To you immediately and probably earned. I'm thinking of an accelerated reader.
What it was like. It was like a if you read X amount of books.
You've get an ice an ice cream coupon or something.
I weren't for this, but yeah, I think this is so interesting and the fact that he of course Blum had to pounce on this. I'm sure it was like a gift for him. Yeah, I must take this.
He was like, ooh, I was looking for a way to spread my hater vibes, and yeah, I'm sure that Supreme Court ruling and now this lands.
This gift lands in my inbot.
And also makes me stronger, stronger than the woman who's complaining.
Exactly, so Blum is using what he is called quote the shoe on the other foot test. The rhetorical strategy that he asked himself is if a grant program funded white male business owners wouldn't be considered fair. But that test, like you were saying, Sam, really assumes.
That we are all equal and all have equal.
Access, which the data could not paint a clearer picture about the fact that that is not happening. Black women are the fastest rising group of entrepreneurs in the country, according to the Harvard Business Review. In the US, an astounding seventeen percent of Black women are in the process of starting or running a new business. That's compared to just ten percent of white women and fifteen percent of white men. Yet despite this lead, only three percent of
women are running mature businesses. Why Well, one big reason is access to capital. Harvard Business Reviews research found that sixty one percent of Black women self fund their total startup capital. This is in spite of the fact that, in their finding, only twenty nine percent of black women entrepreneurs live in households with incomes over seventy five thousand dollars,
compared to fifty two percent of white men. This data is also combined with data suggesting that Black women are less likely to own our own homes, pick on a higher level of debt, do things like go to college, and are often like saddled with debt to go to college right, and so ultimately that leaves us saddled with more debt and having fewer personal resources and life collateral.
Black entrepreneurs typically receive less than two percent of all venture capital dollars each year, while companies led by black women receive less than one percent of all funding.
This is according to Crunchbase.
So yeah, the funding landscape is not great for Black women. Less than one percent of funding goes to us, and so the fact that we already don't get that much. That there are grants and investment funds specifically aimed at shifting those numbers just a tiny bit, like the Fearless Fund and that people are saying, no, we need to go for that too, that less than one percent that
goes to y'all that needs to go to us. Now, in twenty twenty, Pew found that just three percent of US businesses were black owned, while eighty six percent were white owned. And so, yeah, as I said, like, as an entrepreneur, this these kind of dismal numbers completely aligned with my own experiences trying to raise money for projects
that I want to do. There's just not a lot out there, and you really have to stay focused and stay positive and not really let that sort of numbers around how dismal things can be kind of get in
your head. But then on top of it, when you have people like Blum and these women that he's representing in this case to challenge these funds, to challenge what little is out there for black entrepreneurs who are women, it's hard to internalize that as anything other than they don't want us here, They don't want us to have anything, you know.
Yeah, absolutely, And it's so frustrating too, because a lot of companies like to act like they are supporting marginalized people. They are supporting black people, and they make these like outward promises and then just don't really follow through with them.
Yeah, y'all might remember or be thinking like I thought in twenty twenty, like after all the racial justice uprisings, I'm the wake of the murder of George Floyd. I thought that all these businesses and funds and grants were like going to start funding more diverse people and like having a more inclusive portfolio. While I remember all those promises too. Businesses committed three hundred and forty billion dollars between May twenty twenty and October twenty twenty two, according
to McKenzie. And The Post also reports that investment swelled in the startup world. A record five point one billion dollars in funding was allocated to black founded startups in twenty twenty one.
That sounds like a lot.
However, all of that interest and excitement and commitment pretty much eroded very quickly, with funding for black founded startups
plunging fifty percent in twenty twenty two. So remember this is all happening against the pendulum kind of swinging back the other way, where all of these corporate diversity efforts became a political lightning rod, and these employers just sort of backpedaled, right, And so I think that that's where we're at now, where in twenty twenty, people talked a lot of big games about money they were going to give and funds they were gonna give, and.
How they were gonna, you know, support inclusive people.
And startups and YadA, YadA, YadA, and all of those promises just fizzled out, right, And I think that we're sort of seeing I would argue, like a backlash to that now, where diversity and inclusion staffers are being let go. I think like recently Chick fil A just like happened to have a diversity and inclusion person on their staff, and like there was a flurry of like online protests because of that. Like just having somebody thinking about that
on staff is now a lightning rod. And so obviously in that kind of climate, these organizations are not going to be funding black women, even though they committed to it, even though it seemed like that was there was a lot of excitement around that. Like, yeah, I just think that we're in a completely different landscape than we were in twenty twenty.
I mean, This is definitely that whole level of they want good publicity but they're not going to follow through is a black square. Let me pretend like I care, and at the very least I'll be like, hey, let's tell the black people in the story like that's That's as far as their their actual actions went was putting something on Instagram that they obviously deleted soon after because they wanted to look okay for one group of people.
And I found that interesting that people are mad at Chick fil A because it's like they're anti LGBTQ plus, So that's not enough for you. They need to be racist and all of these things have tould be in LUNs enough for us to support you. You better be super super racist and super super homophobic in order for the conservatives. You can hate everyone except for white says people. If not, we're not gonna support you, even if your chicken is okay.
So it and like this is a little like unrelated, but like I think that with a lot of these people, the Chick fil A example that you just gave is a great example.
A lot of these people like just they'll.
Find anything to be aggrieved about, Like you know, I saw like Cracker Barrel was adding plant based sausage to their menu, and people were like, plant based sausage, I'm not gonna shop at Cracker Barrel and I'm never gonna go to Cracker Barrel again. And it's like, they're not taking regular sausage off the menu.
You don't have to order it.
Just because they're putting food on the menu that like someone else might like, that's not you, that's cause for upset.
And so another thing I wanted.
To say about your point, Sam, is that there's a makeup company, Tart. They got in hot water earlier this year because they were doing these brand trips that looked as if they were not being inclusive of black influencers.
That they were asking black influencers like after the fact to come and like giving them substandard accommodations and all of that, and somebody found that in twenty twenty, you know, they when they posted their black Square, this company was like, we pledged that we're going to be more inclusive and give more, do more partnerships with black and brown.
Models, and blah blah blah, and.
Then they quietly removed that from their website, but somebody found it on the wayback machine. It was like, Oh, let's gonna update on all of these like very specific commitments that you made. And it turns out that they basically just like didn't do any of that stuff. But the thing is, nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to make these commitments. You you made these commitments and just to quietly be like mm just kidding, Like that doesn't sit right with me, Like, nobody told.
You to do this. Nobody told you to post a black square. You did it. You volunteered to do it.
So when people expect a little follow through, that should be that should be a given.
Yeah, And I I think about this a lot too. We talked about this with a lot of the like what happened with blood Light, what happened with Target? And you know, then they just backtrack and make everyone angry. But is I feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding of in this case, what it's like to be a transperson.
And then when they get like a little taste of that the company, it's like, oh my god, oh never, like they can't even just for that one second, like if they get this online hate that the cause the person,
the community. They're saying they support, gets, they get it, and then they're like, nevermind, Actually, can they have that privilege that rite, that ability to step out and be like, Okay, I don't want to deal with this anymore, which I think is just very telling of ignorance and just like a oh, sure, let's do this, and then they get that hate and they're like, oh, oh never mind.
Yeah.
Backtracking that Dylan mulvaney thing that you just mentioned, the thing that I will never be over is that Dylan Mulvaney, when she left social media at the height of all of this and came back and made that video, said that nobody at bud Light even called her to be like, hey, are you all right? Like I'm seeing what's going on. I That is something that will stick with me forever.
That this brand, because she said, happened to say yes when asked to do a brand collaboration with bud Light, she was had to go dark, had to probably go into hiding, like was the target of very severe attacks, and that bud Light, the company who came to her to bring her into this, couldn't even follow up with an email when they saw all of this happening, how
quickly they abandoned her. And I feel like, if you are a brand or an institution who is working with marginalized people, if you're not going to stand by them when this stuff kind of stuff happens and when they get into situations that really like you have put them in. But by offering them this, you know, these partnerships, that's just not how.
You engage people like that.
Like, at a certain point, it's like, I understand that bud Light is a corporation, and I don't expect corporations to like care about any of us, certainly not marginalized people. But the people who run bud Lights marketing or influencer partnerships should really be taking a good hard look in the mirror because that's just like a failure of like how to be a human to each other.
Like, I like that just sticks with me.
I could not believe that she said that that nobody even ever reached out to her after they just like dropped her and never ever followed up again.
Yeah, and that's going back to your point. You know, companies are not big companies especially are not are not allies, and we shouldn't think of them that way.
But they.
If they posted the black square. If they take these stands, if they say they're going to do something, then yeah, they should absolutely be held accountable. That's just backing away and causing real harm. We were telling you a story
before we started this out of nowhere. Someone bought that up and like like making these things so politicized that just to have diversity inclusion person at your company becomes oh well, then hate, like all of this hate, like you keep saying, it's irresponsible and it's not taking into account like the reality of working with these groups.
Yeah, I think that's ultimately what these people want.
I think that they want just working with a trans woman to be a lightning rod.
She's not saying anything untoward, she's not.
Doing anything untoward, she just is because her existence is a lightning rod.
Her existence is politicized.
I think just having a DEI person just providing a grant for black women, they want that to be toxic. They want people to know that if you do that, you might be in court, you might you know, be targeted for a hate campaign. And so to just make it not something that anybody would want to risk. And these companies are so spineless that they're going along with it. It's that they're being held hostage, and they're just like, okay, well, they don't want us to.
Have the chicken sausage.
They don't want anybody who doesn't eat sausage to be bad at our restaurants.
So okay, we'll drop.
Actually, Cracker Barrel did stand by their sausage choices, I will say that. But yeah, I have been surprised by how these big, huge corporations just cowtow to people who are not serious, people who are just interested in flexing their power, their political power, for no real reason.
I mean absolutely, we see all of these things actually hurting people. They don't even want to be the face of anything. They just want to exist. Funds like Fearless fund is to exist and to help and lift up people that they know need lifting up. The same thing with Target when they had the small businesses with the LGBTQ queer content and then taking them off the shelf. We were just existing and feeling like we wanted to be the representation that no one else is willing to
look at or see or stand behind. And you literally came after them, taking away their money, taking away their existence, causing harm. Because again the mulvany thing she was just holding a beer. Yeah, she said, I like bud Light, simple, why can't she choose to do that? And that ended up being a thing of like, well, she is hurting the beer industry and she is doing these things. No, she's just existing with a product that they sent her. They're not like giving her fifty percent of the shares
of bud Light. Like that's what is happening, Like this whole level of like what people are having to do and they're having to come back and being like, instead of existing, we have to fight for our place to exist, and that's such an absurd ideal, like the fact that this has to be done.
So this is what Tony Morrison says about racism, and I think it fits to all of what you're saying. The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and you spend twenty years trying to prove that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art,
so you dredge that up. Somebody says, you have no kingdom, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing. So like that quote really speaks to what I think is happening. You know, the Fearless Fund, the stats that I just read about black women entrepreneurs and how little of the funding we get. It shows that the women who are running the Fearless Fund, they have work to do.
They have serious work to do to right.
The wrong and to bake a little more equity into the funding landscape. So they don't really have time to play around with these legal challenges. But yet here they are having to spend their money, money that could go to the funding landscape, staffing up a legal team, holding press conferences.
All of this.
It is such a distraction at a time when marginalized people have real work to be doing. Fearless Fun is fighting back. They have a beefy legal team, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Gibson Dunn, Crutcher, and Ben Crump, the attorney who represented families of George Floyd and Tyree Nichols in their civil suits over the men's killing out the hands of the police, and I feel confident like these women are like bad as women, they are not
going down without a fight. But also they shouldn't have to, right, Like they should be able to just do their work and focus on that work, and they should not have to be spending their money on these bogus legal challenges just because they want to exist, just because they want to support other black women.
And I find that again we're in this situation that black women are the ones that have to be the ones to fight, like they don't want to, they're tired, they've been doing this and now we're back again because we know there's a lot and I know there's a lot of fun specifically to women, like point blank women, and they surely didn't have to go enough after them. And I bet they were denied some of those and they're probably better at that. But yet if they didn't,
that seems silly and that seemed very targeted. Yeah, so that's very telling. But like it again, it has to be the black women that has to put up this fight in order to get anything done.
I mean, tail as old as time, right, and I think right, I'm worried about this for a couple of reasons. One is that I think that if these grants and funds that specifically are meant to boost black women entrepreneurs are deemed unconstitutional, I really don't know what the landscape is going to look like because, as I said, like already, so little of that funding goes to us in.
The first place.
But further, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it on the show today is that I don't think it's getting near the same amount of traction and attention that Blum's affirmative action challenges did. And I really think that we need to see white male and white
women and really everybody in the startup space. We need to see vcs and entrepreneurs speaking up about this, because Blum is essentially arguing that the startup space should basically just be for white people, and I think it's up to everybody in the space to push back and say, like, that is not the kind of funding space that we want, That is not the kind of startup space that we want, and to really make that really clear, like what kind of a space do we want to have for the
next generation of entrepreneurs. We want to tell them that the tiny little bit that they that might go to them.
Isn't even for them anymore. I don't think that's the space that we.
Want, right and absolutely in the same space again, this is gonna hurt white women as well and the like. If we're saying that all of this is too specific and it leads out other people of race, it's gonna hurt gender as well. So this is not even just for white people. It's gonna be for white men. We're gonna have more elon musks running running programs into the ground.
That's what we're gonna see thousand percent. And I mean kind of like what you were alluding to before, time and time again in tech, particularly when black women challenge things or.
Do things or start things, they uplift all women.
And so even if that specific program is for black women owned businesses, you're gonna tell me that a black woman who is financially supported is not going to go on to do something that's going to lift up all women and all marginalized people. Time and time again we
see that that's how it goes with black women. And so yeah, I just think that this is just this is me smacking that ice cream out of my brother's hand when I could have gotten a bit instead, I really want to see more folks in the space speaking up about this because what the Fearless Fund has done has been really great, and it's they're really like a good force in the space, and I think that they we need them.
Frankly, we need them.
We do and as a drop in the bucket, let's just be real honest, like it's it's nothing in comparison to what other people get. Essentially, it is like, wow, you really are going after the little groups for nothing, just just to make a point, and obviously to keep that little bit, as you are saying, in your pocket instead of seeing what this is actually could do for the entire humanity. Humanity is lost. I'm sorry what yeah?
Yeah, And I mean this is very important too because obviously professional litigant blow here like it's going to keep trying and if this succeeds, then it's going to make things worse for everyone except for certain people and then easier for him to win the next thing, the next thing. So yes, this is really really important, and thank you as always Bridget for bringing it to us.
Oh, thank you for having me. Everyone who's listening should go out and buy stuff. I've never told you the book.
I'd have bought it. Let's read it together.
Ya.
Yes, we're hoping to do a little crossover. We'll get to go on your show. Yes, oh, I'm so excited. But in the meantime, Bridget, where can the good listeners find you?
You can listen to my podcast there are no girls on the internet. You can find me on Instagram at Bridget Marie and DC or on Twitter at Bridget Marie. And you can find me on TikTok at Bridget makes podcasts.
Yes, and we really do. You appreciate your support with the book. We love it so much.
Thank you, Thank you having.
You on as always. Feeling is so mutual, So listeners, if you would like to contact us, you can our emails Stephania mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com. You can find us on Twitter at mom Stuff podcast or on Instagram at TikTok at stuff.
I never told you.
We have a tea public store and we yeah, we have a book. Can get it stuff We should read books dot com. Thanks as always to our super producer Christina, executive producer.
Maya, and our contributor Joey.
Thank you and thanks to you for listening Stuff on your Pertilos direction, should I heart Radio? For more podcasts in my heart Radio, you can check out the heart radio app, Apple podcast or, if you listen to your favorite shows, y