The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America with Shawn Rochester

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good evening fellow students Hofstra faculty and how I guess my name is will Davis president of the xiphoid chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity incorporated and a member of the class of 2020 it gives me great honor to welcome you to the signature event the black tax I'm extremely excited about tonight's presentation which was made possible due to the collaborative effort with the Cultural Center Sean D Rochester is the CEO of good Stewart LLC and the founder of PhD enterprises and the idea institute these organizations provide financial education and advisory services to consumers increase the president's presence of black employees and enterprise and US public and private sectors payroll and supply chains and facilitate commerce between the black business community across the African Diaspora and on the African continent Sean Rochester is also an author and sought-after speaker who has spoken on Wall Street in Silicon Valley at leading universities and the United Nations about the staggering financial cost of discrimination against black people in America and a new economic framework to help create the millions of jobs and businesses that are missing in the black community Sean Rochester has a Bachelor of Science and chemical engineering from the University of Rochester and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business he is the author of the black tax the cost of being black in America and soon-to-be-released CPR for the Soul which I was just talking about how to give yourself a 20% raise eliminate your debt and leave an inheritance for your children's children well thank you again for coming out and without further ado please help me welcome Sean Rochester to stage thank you for that wonderful introduction thank you guys for being here this evening I think it says a lot about you as individuals and as a group very excited to spend this evening with you so my name is Sean Rochester and I've written this book called the black tax the cost of being black in America and in the book I talk about the financial cost of discrimination against black people now normally when we talk about discrimination we talk about it from the perspective of the injustice or the immorality associated with it I wanted to look at things a little differently I wanted to look at what is the financial cost associated and more importantly what does research say that those costs are so the books broken into three parts the first part talks about what I call the present black tax the financial impact of discrimination in markets that are critical to wealth accumulation in general and african-americans in particular so we're talking about real estate we're talking about automotive the financing and insurance that go along with that we're talking about online commerce and the job search high-end careers capital raising for businesses etc the second part of the book I talk about the historical cost of discrimination where I do a look back from the time of slavery up until the present and in the portion of the book I kind of summarize where we are economically and then proposed framework that can help to address these issues this framework is called PhD and PhD stands for purchase hire and deposit in ways that create jobs and create businesses and expand businesses in the black community why is this of particular importance because one we're missing about six million jobs across the broader black community in America we're missing about 1.4 million businesses with employees so while there are about 2.6 million black businesses in the country only about 4% of those businesses about a hundred nine thousand actually have employees and that 4% drives almost 70% of all revenues that is driven by black enterprise and employ almost a million people so those businesses are super critical and will only have about a hundred nine thousand of them and we're missing about 1.4 million and then collectively our collective balance sheets we're missing about or over a trillion dollars of network these are these are massive problems right and it's the case with massive problems it's really important that we get like a lot of people at the table to work on but what we will often notice is that it's very difficult to work with folks who a don't see the problem or B think you're the problem if you would only fix you then we would be great right and I'm we've heard these platitudes you know black folks are really just not trying hard enough and quite frankly that has more to do with getting ahead than anything that's associated with discrimination you know six and ten Americans believe that over that you may have heard that you know black folks have the same opportunities or even better quite frankly than anybody else to get ahead another six and ten Americans believe that or you may have heard listen quite frankly black people use racism as an excuse for failure the failure is mine I refuse to take responsibility for my actions and I wind up blaming everybody else I'm not the only person who's been discriminated against we're not the only people who had a difficult time in the country but other people have managed to progress in substantial ways and we haven't seven and ten Americans believe that not a challenge with this is if this is the thinking and that thinking is going to be reflected in the strategies and the programs that are put in place to address major economic issues within our communities and as always really effective problem-solving requires two really critical things the first is empathy the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes to understand their path and how they got there any other portion is understanding which is using knowledge and information and facts in effective ways to uplift your fellow man and one of the things that's easy to observe is that these are two things that seem to be in short supply in this day and age I wanted to share a quote with you from our bure tine Stein and he said this in an address that he did to the National Urban League in 1946 and he said listen we must make every effort to ensure that the past injustice violence and economic discrimination that is the black tax will be made known to the people the taboo let's not talk about it must be broken so in that spirit let's talk about and the portion of it that I want to address tonight is this how is it that after 400 years over 40 million African Americans only owned about 2% of us well either we are colossally and consistently inept or there is something else happening in the environment that we need to take a closer look at so we're gonna take a closer look at that environment so the first thing we're gonna need to do is kind of go back in time go back to the time of slavery we won't go into detail about what transpired is in tombs written on that but we're gonna do is look at things from an economic perspective right when of course things I want you to understand is that slavery by definition is a 100 percent tax on your labor it means that nothing that you produce is yours you are not even yours now there's many things that we could never price or value from that time you could never price or value what it is to be a woman and to never have control over your body over the entirety of your life you can never price what it is to be a man and to be unable to protect your spouse or your daughter or your mother so on and so forth or to ever be able to reap the fruits of your labor but one of the things that you can value is the cost of the labor extracted from those people over 250 years about a quarter of millennia millions of people and economics economists have tried to do that some put the number at up to 24 trillion others put it as high as ninety seven trillion let's say that the truth is somewhere in the middle we could be talking about as high as fifty trillion dollars right it's a massive number it's an extraordinary number and even if you've never seen that number before you take your time to digest it that's not the only thing that we can price from that period because if we kind of fast forward to 1860 you've got four million people in bondage they are the most liquid asset in the country they represent 50 percent of all value in the south and if you're old there's a price and if you're young there's a price and if you're able-bodied there's a price and if you're not there's a price and if you're male or female there's a price people were traded on open markets so if you look at what is the value of those folks it turns out that the value is so large that economists say you have to measure it in terms of GDP national income or net wealth that's how large it is so if you look at it from a net wealth standpoint we're talking about fifteen point five trillion they say yourself Shaun how you come up with fifteen point five trillion right so national wealth is roughly eighty five trillion dollars the United States economists put the value of black people held in bondage between sixteen and twenty percent of national wealth you put it on an equivalent basis of what it would be today so 16 to 20 percent is about 14 to 17 trillion dollars of today's equivalent take an average of those you're at 15 if you measured it from a GDP standpoint national income they say it's between one and two years of national income right so if you looked at that it's about twenty-eight point five trillion how do you come up with that number well national income is about 19 trillion a year so you're talking about between 19 and 38 trillion you take an average between the two you're at twenty-eight point five so if you value it from a net income standpoint sixteen if you look at it from a net income standpoint you're close to 29 if you look at it from wealth standpoint it's almost sixteen if you took an average of those two things which we do when we're making valuations you're talking about twenty-two trillion dollars in today's equipment the point here is that no matter how you look at this you're talking about massive hard to conceive numbers in size and scope so let's talk a little bit about the economic implication of that right so if you look at the 45 million African Americans today their net worth and told us about 1.5 trillion dollars about 1.5 so we just established that if you value those 4 million slaves in 1860 in today's equivalent we're talking about 22 trillion so what does that imply it implies that 4 million slaves a hundred and fifty two years ago was worth fifteen times more to the country at forty five million African Americans today those are the numbers and the fact pattern so in terms of slavery we could say up to fifty trillion dollars now you can say listen I knew it was bad I didn't know it was that bad however while it was a tragic period it did come to an end right and it came to an end a long time ago and it's been plenty of time since then to accumulate resources right so you know you can't pin it all on on that period you could say yeah I hear I hear what you're saying you know let's let's talk about that a little bit right because what we have to remember is that people were emancipated they left bondage with no capital no resources in 1870 African Americans owned about 0.17% of us well it's effectively nothing right now there was some talk about providing land right and a mule that's the 40 acres of new we all heard about that right that of course never happened there is something that did happen that's called the Homestead Act and we're gonna kind of look at those two things real quick and kind of talk about the implication of it so if you think about 40 acres and a mule a great question to ask is well what would that be worth today right you got four million people in bondage you talked about 40 acres and a mule quick math puts out at 160 million acres right it's really hard to conceive what that is I once looked at some land with a group of friends of about 400 acres 400 acres you need to go up in a helicopter 160 million hard to concede right you think about what would that be worth today well like the average price of an acre is you know it's between 3,000 $20 and you can go as high as six thousand three hundred and fifty which means on a high end that's about a trillion dollars it's what that would be worth in today's equivalent and we'll be generating about ninety billion dollars a year you check on summers right so substantial on the one hand is substantial right on the other hand it's only about two percent of what was actually extracted from those people and their forefathers and not even 2 percent as startup resources was allowed to happen but there is something that actually did happen right in 1862 Congress passed this law Homestead Act and because of this law they would proceed to distribute about 246 million acres to 1.5 million white families right so if you look at that from the same kind of valuation methodology you're talking about 1.6 trillion dollars of total already equivalent about a million dollars a family on the high end now listen I'm all about hard-working bootstraps but a million dollars I'm hella boots cracks right so how did it work the way it worked was this you know people had the opportunity to claim you maybe up to 160 acres and if you were able to claim it and you stayed on it for five years that's the set part the homestead right then you could take possession of it after the five years now here's something else to to note so that means you know you could be an immigrant coming from another country you have a chance to clean this land and if you did you took possession of it after five years but the other thing that happened after five years is you could naturalize as a citizen that's about how long it took so you could come here literally with nothing but the shirt on your back and in five years being an extraordinary financial position now researchers say that there are about up to 93 million white Americans and direct beneficiaries of this direct beneficiaries not tertiary not secondary not kind of sort of some way related direct of a massive you know government giveaway right so in terms of the potential of land that would have been distributed you're talking about on the high end about a trillion dollars that was denied right but at the same time 1.6 trillion dollars worth of value was distributed important to know so if we fast forward a couple of years from 1860 you know we get to the point where is you have the civil war is happening and then has happened and the context is this you know the southern economy is devastated right the global cotton market is devastated the land confiscated in the Civil War from the south by the north is given back to them and they have a massive demand for cheap abundant labor I'm gonna pause there I just fast-forward through like a lot of really important stuff right but I'm gonna just highlight a couple really key things we get understand so the global cotton market is a big deal it's the first global industry is the equivalent of oil today right slaves in the south and bondage people produced that cotton that cotton represented 61% of exports from the US and it was 80 percent of the global cotton market you just can't beat free labor you're about 20 million people around the world employee in that industry in some way or form about a million of those lose their jobs with the civil war any emancipation these people it's a big deal it affects India and Egypt and Russia and Japan and Europe all kinds of different places and the world is crying out like what is America gonna do to put her newly freed people back to soap you tree and a solution for that is this thing called Jim Crow now Jim Crow is an amazingly nondescript name for something it's kind of like the Shawn Rochester period not done right so what what is the Jim Crow period Jim Crow is basically a system of laws and customs that are reinforced with an extraordinary level of violence to impose a 100 percent tax on a sharecroppers labor I know what you're thinking Shawn you sound a little hyperbolic 100 percent tax on those people's labor I know they were poor but they had something I'm like listen I hear you I hear you I'll let you decide if it's a hundred percent tax right we'll keep going so so what what's sharecropping and how does it work basically those large you know mega plantations were broken into smaller Lots black families would then settle on those Lots they would agree to plant and cultivate cash crops at the end of the season they would bring those crops to market and then they would share in a portion of the crops right so sharecropping here's a challenge it's an it was an actual contract the terms and conditions of which were set by the small white farmer something that's very important to remember is that these people have effectively no wealth and that the crop does not come tomorrow the crop comes at the end of the season or at the end of the year and between now and then that white farmer has got to provide you with the seeds and the tools and the fertilizer and your clothes and your food and your housing everything for that entire year at rates as high as 70 percent per annum and in some cases if you fell ill and could not do your work they can outsource it to someone else and then charge it to you so effectively what is happening there is that white farmer sets your cost structure or your expenses right now at the end of the season when you bring the crops to market well you need to understand is the small white farmer is the market he tells you what your crops are worked which means that he sets your revenue or your income and if someone controls your revenue and they control your expenses by definition that means they control your profit I think you see where I'm going with this hundred percent tax right now if you are fortunate your it will be zero if you are unfortunate because they don't want you to go to someone else who's more generous than your profit will be negative which means you open and they will roll that into what you owe them for the next year and at least a perpetual debt servitude now I am very well aware what you're thinking right now and what you're thinking right now is Shawn that's a bad deal I'm not going to take that you like apples you like them apples and I'm with you on that it's a bad deal but here's the problem if you don't take that deal they got a law for that and those laws say that if you cannot prove that you are landowner and you cannot prove that you are gainfully employed you will be charged with a criminal offense and put in a state or county jail now you can be like all right well I didn't know that part so I'll sign a contract but you know what I'm just not gonna do the work a problem with that that they got a law for that and those laws are called contract enforcement laws because you signed an employment and if you break that they can charge you with a criminal offense and put you in a stay or county jail now some of you might be thinking look I didn't realize that either but this Rama dude I'm gonna sit in jail they're gonna feed me three square meals a day and when they get tired of that they can let me out cuz I'm not doing it it's a bad deal and they got something for that and that's called convict Lisa which means that they will lease you back to the very same small white farmer that you did not want to work for or to a private corporation and if you take that deal is one thing I want you to understand there is one aspect of convict leasing that you could argue is even worse than slavery just this one which is that while a slave owner will kill you and will beat you within an inch of your life they would prefer to have you around for another 10 15 or 20 years to maximize their return on their endless they have what's known as a interest in your residual back right under contract leasing there is no such interest I care not about you 10 years from now I care about you only for the terms which you are working for me six months eight months 18 months 24 months that is it and under those conditions you have mortality rates that are approaching 50 percent which means you have a one in two chance of death associated the other thing you have to realize is as as horrible as it sounds it's incredibly profitable you're a small white farmer you can afford a whole slave those are expensive you go rent one and a fraction the cost treatment hirevue on it's incredibly lucrative in 1914 the state of Alabama 20% of their revenues were coming from convict leasing alone and what's what's interesting about this is this isn't a bad three or five year period this isn't a bad decade that we went through this thing lasted for 75 years and over the course of that time four thousand black people were lynched this is that we know of right that's publicly executed by your fellow American it is the equivalent of one black person being executed per week seventy-five years under those conditions you will get the hint your family will get the hint your community will get the hint nobody's been prosecuted for these things so I think you see where the hundred percent tax on the labor is coming from and if it is a hundred percent tax on the labor that means that by definition it is slavery which is why they call it slavery by another name now if during the period of actual legal bondage fifty trillion was extracted for those folks and now they extended that another 75 years was about a third of the time you can argue that another fifteen trillion was extracted from these people and what you have to remember is that Wow there were four million black people in the fields in 1860 1930 five you still had four million black people in the fields value being extracted under these conditions so let's let's think about the implication of that that means that upon emancipation you know white slave holding power structure loss 22 trillion dollars equivalent today's dollars gone but then over the next 75 years they would proceed to claw back 15 trillion from the descendants of these newly freed people how does one accumulate wealth under these circumstances Jim Crow period so now you could say listen wow that was significant and that was that's I didn't know that right what would I look what I do know is that you know what not everybody was in under Jim Crow some people got an education wev Du Bois went to Harvard right so some people got education so let's let's talk about education I was saying yeah you're you're right education is the great equalizer we call it in today's parlance no human capital development snazzy name right associated with that but here's the problem is that upon emancipation the white planter class was interested in cheap abundant labor they were not interested in public education now small white farmers were absolutely interested in the creation and expansion of public education for their children as they should be newly free people were absolutely interested in the creation and expansion of public education for themselves and their children as they should be why planters not so much they educated their children privately but what they did need was a support of the small white farmer so they agreed to expand public education but that they would divert resources from black children to white children so WDB du Bois says that in the 40 years since emancipation Negro taxes and the Negro share of income from indirect taxes and endowments have fully repaid white investment in Negroes education that's how little on net was invested right in 1914 a gentleman by the name of William H Baldwin was the president of something called a general education board you can think of that as the Department of Education at the federal level he said the South needed Negroes educated so they they could be the best possible laborers and that with the right kind of education they grows will willingly work menial jobs and open up this will open up opportunities for southern rights to work more expert labor this is a person who's responsible for education right for for the descendants of military people by 1917 there are about 64 public high schools across the entire south not in a County not in a state cell right not a whole lot of investment in human capital development most of the schools in a K through 12 system are built and owned by black people so it's a form of double taxation now if you in New York City in 1920 they are investing per child about 50 times more than a black child is receiving in South Carolina under segregation 50 times more what I want you to understand about that and at the time New York City is about ninety seven point something percent white it's not nearly as diverse as you conceive it now what that means is that you could come from another country to this country you know by Ellis Island if you stayed in New York while you came with with no resources you were going into a system that was investing 50 times more in you and your children they are human capital development and a black child was getting in South Carolina whose parents had been here and and people before him had been here for hundreds of years right just a massive difference in the south for every dollar invested in a black child you have five to eight invested to educate a white child not a rocket science you view that with your children one's going to be a proper one's going Harvard right black teachers in the south and being paid twenty-five to thirty four percent on the dollar of what white teachers are being paid tough to accumulate wealth under those situations why students are receiving 50 percent more years of education by the time they're 25 massive differential and investment in human capital it is so substantial that researchers say listen if you had just invested in the children the same just keep all the discrimination and stuff in the marketplace just invested in the children say that could have cut income gap by up to 50% just doing that just doing what the law actually said so when you start talking about this happening across millions of children for up to 90 years in a generation you're talking about over six hundred billion dollars of financial impact and across that period of time you're talking about up to three trillion dollars so there is a cost to discrimination now you can say listen I hear you however however back in the day you didn't really need a education we all have a story about a grandfather or great-grandfather enough family that had a fifth-grade level education a terrific work ethic got a home raise the family did well we all have experiences like that so you didn't really need an education so all you needed was really hard work and purchasing of all you could have done really well what will happen there and I think that's a really great point and we could talk a little bit about that because housing is the great wealth builder it absolutely is for everyone in particular and for african-americans for everyone in general for african-americans in particular right because about 64% of the net worth of the typical African American family is associated with real estate is critically important it's actually really important to the country is it's the American Dream is home ownership the government invested heavily in helping Americans achieve that green dream I think that's a wonderful and terrific and noble thing it is a massive reason why you have such a large middle class they invested about a hundred and twenty billion dollars you know back in the day its equivalent of about a trillion dollars today here's the problem less than two percent and substantially less than two percent of any of those resources invested went to any black men right so I'm sure you guys have heard about you know FHA and redlining right I won't go into a lot of detail about that but the federal government invests the invented the mortgage as we know it right and what they did was they just guaranteed the payments that lowered the risk and allowed banks to take lower deposits and to spread out the payment over up to 30 years right it allowed millions of people to purchase a home that they could otherwise never afford right only problem is that they refused to guarantee loans for african-americans and absolutely for african-americans who wanted to live in white communities they were afraid of what they called neighborhood stability now you can say well I'll just talk to the bank directly the bank also refused or the banks also refused to lend to to african-americans you can say well I'll talk to the Builder we'll work it out builders also refused and the banks and the builders had another problem which is that the federal government wouldn't guarantee their loans if they didn't reviews and then you can say I'm gonna talk to the realtor to work it out they'll help me find something fortunately Realtors will say agents refused to participate in these transactions maybe say listen well we'll just talk to our fellow American or work it out right person a person and unfortunately residents sign covenants amongst themselves that said if you ever sell from this community that you will sell to a person who is no Caucasian or a European descent so you've got a complete phalanx right I guess I look that sounds super duper qualitative I would say you're right the data is in the book but what I can say quite definitively is that less than 1% of all mortgages issued in the United States of America between 1930 and 1960 went to black people there's no greater wealth builder there's nothing more important less than 1% now you can say look I get it and one thing the thing about it you can't get a mortgage it doesn't mean that you don't want a home you still want the American Dream so what people start to do is they turn to the private markets under something called contract sales and private markets are unregulated so what happens it is more in these markets is you don't have to do appraisals so homes are being sold at like 2 X the value on top of that is astronomical interest rates but that's not even the worst part the worst part is that you don't build equity in the house as you make your payments let me explain to you what I mean by that let's say we make an agreement I'm gonna purchase the home from you and that I'm gonna make 100 installment payments before I take ownership of it right and I make 99 of those payments and I miss the 100 what it allows you to do is to keep all 99 payments to keep my down payment to take back the house to evict me and to resell the house to someone else you earn no equity in the house and you are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of those homes credit contract how do people accumulate wealth under these circumstances now you can say look it's a terrible period you know you can buckle down and just you know work your best and save your money right in the place where you're renting and kind of wait for some of this craziness the blow over you know what I mean but here's the problem with that we're talking about a time at which you have many millions of people fleeing the sell and being forced into these corralled areas that they call urban ghettos gâteau means involuntary by the way connotation what happens when the demand for space is going up and the amount of space is not going up the price of the space goes up right so it turns out that in those impoverished urban ghetto communities the rent is more than 50% higher and outside of those communities you can't even save money in there how does one accumulate wealth under these circumstances and if you say look just work hard you know economists have looked at labor market discrimination and some would put that number it and 1.6 trillion those are 1983 dollars if you look at today's equivalent we're talking about over four trillion dollars so extremely difficult to earn and to retain income under these circumstances so this helps to explain why you know white Americans born between 1943 and 1951 my mother's born in 1946 would go on to accumulate 11 times more wealth than a black American born in that same period a lot of people think that's strictly a matter of hard work just want to provide a little bit of context around that now so when you talk about housing and labor market you see the numbers are staggering I'm not gonna have time to kind of go through the New Deal or the GI Bill which is over a trillion dollars injected into the economy I won't have time to talk about the interstate highway investment which is pushing over six billion dollars in today's equivalent right and they ran many of these highways through black communities by the way thriving black communities and I won't have enough time to talk about kind of post-civil rights till now but all of that is covered in the book which you will get before so where are we now you know the black community has 1.5 trillion dollars less in revenue and we otherwise should build it to our portion of the population a trillion of that is associated with business income five hundred and twenty billion associated with personal income right we talked about the missing net worth we talked about six million jobs and 1.4 million businesses with employees that are missing get a sense of how it's been difficult to invest in those things and we're trapped in in this thing that I call like a 2% economic framework now when I was doing research for the book this number 2% kept coming up again and again and again and again and it turned out that it this area is really critical to wealth accumulation we seem to be hovering around 2% representation so less than 2 percent of corporate supply-chain spend is spent on black enterprise less than 2% of government supply chains been dismantle brac Enterprise less than 2 percent of african-americans spend right so we do a horrible job of spending businesses spending money on our own businesses and then when you think about really high growth high-paying occupations whether it's in the tech sector or it's in Silicon Valley or it's you know management that you know in a financial industry so on and so forth a representation tends to be around 2% think about STEM careers tends to be around you know 2% black doctors 2% of male black males so on and so forth that goes on there's a couple pages I dedicate just to to the occurrence of these things in terms of our deposits in in banks we less than 2% it's in black financial enterprises actually if you look at the US banking system only four dollars out of every 10,000 dollars in the banking system is in a black bag it's just simply not enough capital in those banks that provide the loan so deposits meant to provide the capital for businesses less than two percent of SBA loans goes to black enterprise it's actually a lot less than per se so all of this provides a really negative impact depressive impact on job creation and business development in in the black community so you can get a real sense of how is it that after all this time we're only at a point of accumulating about two percent of u.s. one right one things I want to talk about really quickly is what was lost that's the cost to black people right but what was lost by the country from not taking advantage of fully integrating black talent and excellence into the economy and I want to look at it from an innovation standpoint right so that period from 18 you know 70 to 1945 that we talked about that Jim Crow period that's also the heart of the Industrial Revolution you have 2.5 million patents are created during that period of time we're talking about telephones lightbulbs and semiconductors and airplanes and automobiles transistors that the things that are fundamental for the growth of our economy right now all created during that time how many patents were created by African Americans on that time black people seven hundred and twenty six millions and millions and millions what's the opportunity cost of that so why is this important you know Samuel courtoom famille University says that a constant flow of new patents innovation can generate a constant rate of economic growth it's super critical to the growth and expansion of economies the Brookings Institute was talked about the impact of unequal access to education the capital development depriving the innovation system of the number of people that otherwise otherwise might be making or commercializing important discoveries right it's a big deal and given that talent generally forms follows like a normal distribution like 70% of people tend to be in the middle right average to good 15% and to be awesome I called them the ultra brilliant we all like to think we're in that category 15% are very much below average so one of the things to think about is what was the size of that ultra brilliant population over the course at that time right in 1870 you talking about 730,000 black people 1900 talking about 1.3 million 1930 you're talking about almost 1.8 million in 1950 you're talking about 2.3 million what would these folks are doing in 1870 Cheryl what would these folks doing in 1900 sure very few got the education that we all talk about what would these folks doing in 1930 you got still have four million people in the fields during this time 1950 1948 only 1.6 percent of African Americans have a college degree what is happening to this ultra brilliant talent and if it had been put to use in the innovation system what we would be looking at and not using them is called misallocation we'd be looking at another 280,000 Matins that's directly proportional to economic growth and development right no innovation no America as we know it you're talking about over 2 trillion dollars in national income that we don't have now year over year you're talking about over nine trillion dollars and networks that we don't have now now a researcher from University of Michigan State University did a really interesting study she asked this I thought was a profound question which is what would have happened to innovation if white Americans had experienced the level of trauma that black Americans experienced when a general period so a really profound question and her research says that 40% of the patents would have never been created you don't do discoveries in in trouble you need time and space the focus right 40% of the past has a million patents which of these things would be infected by that telephones and lightbulbs and photocopiers movies and transistors and so on and so forth what would be the economic impact in terms of revenue you're talking about seven trillion dollars of revenue but a country at risk over 30 trillion dollars in net wealth right having talented people involved in the innovation process is super critical that's why all you guys are here you're going to be working on that in some way shape or form right and we're all going to be the better for it so you know the the point that I wanted to make there is that the costs are substantial it's just not a matter of people now working hard right I want us to have some context this isn't Hollywood where you parachute in if it were you you would have had some kind of different outcome that's not how I was designed to work and there's not just costs to African Americans which were massive and hard to conceive there's also cost to the whole country for what was done and continues to be done and I kind of you know and with this quote which was from it was given at the United Nations by Emperor Silesia Haile Selassie in 1963 he said a basis for racial discrimination has been economic right and it's with economics that these evils will be overcome right so with that said let's kind of stop here and talk about what some of the economic solutions could be and answer some of your questions thank you very much [Applause] yes a Fred Davis class of 81 here University also a member of Phi Fraternity incorporated so what you said is phenomenal first of all I mean just incredible and I did read the book but do you believe in wealth redistribution so that what had happened to the black community and at least in portion we be rectified and if you do in what way should that happen so the question is do you believe in wealth distribution and in the impact that it will have and in what way should it be done that's a profound question right so the short version is yes right it's a necessary it's a very necessary component right the sec the other question is in what way should it be done and before we go to that way what I'm trying to do is increase the quality of discourse so we can evolve from why are we having this conversation to what can we do about this then we can start to talk about the most effective ways to address this right so I mean let me talk about a couple different things in speaking to this question what I proposed and advocate as the immediate start now solution is this framework that I call PhD right and PhD is very simplest as the purchase higher deposit in ways that create jobs and businesses in the black community I'll tell you why I say black communities specifically right so when you start talking about purchase that component of it that's what we spend as consumers and we have full discretion over that and if you start with just with just african-american we do a particularly poor job of doing business with our own enterprises right I think we're at 2% which means we have 98% isn't the last time I checked 98% was excellent or excellent and not doing business with each other that's not a winning strategy right so it's a shifting that spend for the purpose of creating jobs but it's not just African Americans it's anyone else who who believes in economic development and the creation of jobs to solve problems that's an individual level that's your consumer spend a corporate level at a government level at an organizational level institution that's your supply chain spent all organizations have to buy products and services to achieve their strategic imperatives whatever they they happen to be right you're talking about the federal government six hundred billion dollars right you know corporations it's it's a massive amount less than two percent of any of that is being spent a lot like enterprise right small changes in a span can create enormous amounts of job-creating opportunities across like the black community and the idea here is very specifically like if you want to show a lie ship and support this that any other do it with your money and your economics the organization the institution the government so on and so forth should do that right so powerful net benefit the other portion is the higher piece of it which is that we should be properly reflected on a payroll of corporations in general and government right as well particularly those corporations that benefit quite dramatically from our patronage right how you show solidary support whatnot is by how much of your payroll is actually going to the communities that are sowing and seeding into you it creates jobs is super super critical and then you have deposits which is banks your job is to provide as lending provide credit right it's primarily business lending right and then it's also consumer lending and and in Black Enterprise doesn't have enough deposits to provide that in that name right and that's super super critical and there is significant discrimination according to research in the lending that's happening now and historically from majority banks and that's putting capital negative capital pressures on banks so PhD is a really important part of that and that's what we can do now you don't need any government program so you get that change right you just share with people what matters to you don't just kind of write a check to a non-profit keep doing it double down on it but don't do that if you control a fifteen million dollar supply chain do business with enterprise that creates jobs families are based on the ability to feed now and have something left over for the future and communities of milled up of families there's no more powerful thing that can be done and to create jobs and businesses in the black community in particular that that has to be done the second thing I'll say is if you fast forward it and just did the redistribution right now let's go that's just fast forward straight to it right what would happen is there will be a massive stimulus for the rest of the economy people are so caught up in their kind of bigoted thinking that they don't even realize that it all flows out we're not been allowed to create about the infrastructure to retain it you're gonna buy cars gonna buy all kinds of different things we don't we don't own those those things and we're not properly reflected on your payroll supply chain so so most of that benefit goes to someone else so you want to do folks right put this in place and then also advocate for that yes oh um hi my name is Nia Arrington Seward I'm from the Kappa Phi chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated here on campus and my question to you is um we're all college-age students we're getting ready to graduate as our economic future and legacy what is your advice to black students who are getting ready to start businesses and want to go out there and do something different but the racial discrimination based on economics that's it that's a great question it's a big question right so I'll take a stab at that I would say there's there's a there's there's a number of things that that you need to do part of it is we all make enormous mistakes when we graduate from university right black white you know kind of kinda different black I mean doesn't have the ability to absorb those mistakes right and so one of the things that you have to do but we all have to do is you have to maximize your ability to retain income you guys going to graduate with great jobs into a society that values looking well but not being well financially right you got to have a budget you got to have a plan you got to know what your free cash flow is and then you've got to allocate that cash flow in ways that increases the assets that you have and puts you in a maximum position to maximize the resources that you will have when you when you retire 56% of I think of you know entrepreneurs or self-funding right like this is what I'm trying to explain to people right and so we don't have these generational things coming so the income that we're getting you're getting you're gonna have to make sure that you have a plan you have a budget you're maximizing your cash flow you're minimizing that be maximizing all investment retirement investment opportunities super super super critical got to be done no cash flow no conversation we're done here right the other thing is applying PhD ap she is very simple when possible where possible utilize high quality black products and services right who's your who's your realtor me who's gonna be a financial person who's gonna be your insurance person is gonna be a doctor dentist so on and so forth these are accountant clearly right these are super critical high-paying jobs and services they're never going anywhere they're gonna be here we support families in a phenomenal way and we do not utilize these things as a people I think it's it puts us in a really bad situation to not be doing what we would want other people to do right so those are the those are two things that I would say and the third thing is I would encourage you to encourage others to do the same that's how you show solidarity support ally ship whatever the word is that people want to express now I'll give you a quick example how I think about things and how a phd mindset works right I'm sure you guys remember a couple I think two two or three summers ago you had a rash of massive police shootings right with the murder of unarmed you know black men and women and you had a lot of serd solidarity in New York City I think you got like 25,000 people marching up and down like this Avenue it was a beautiful thing like arm and arm it was a wonderful thing to behold you know anything and people saw that you know what I saw I saw three billion dollars anger and out a nickel of that was gonna be spent the day after that to create jobs and businesses and expand those businesses that's that's what we what we need to do right to sort of invent some of these problems so that's that's what I would say in a short time that I have speaking of cash flow yeah actually first and foremost thank you for the brothers as a chapter for having this event and having you share brother brother Rochester and keep onward and upward for those brothers that are in the room speaking of cash flow I've been in insurance and financial services for the past eighteen years and get a lot of opposition because I believe that insurance specifically permanent insurance is a cornerstone for for building wealth especially as a way to close the racial wealth gap that exists so when you talk about PhD and I'm and I'm totally you know I'm totally open to that and I'm looking forward to reading the book but when you when when it comes to insurance products and that as a solution potential solution to close the gap I get a lot of opposition you know by term and invest the rest what are your thoughts around that in terms of building wealth through insurance products yeah so we'll get into the specifics right of term kind of versus permanent I'll just talk about insurance in general right insurance is what is what I call the what if I don't make it when right because what I talked about was putting it putting together a plan for you will be here in the future right and that you will be able to leave a financial legacy for your children but insurance is a super critical part of that which is what if what if I don't make it for whatever reasons that that needs to be in place many many many people do not have that in place that's a that's just an education that needs to happen you know it's what I call personal financial management this stuff isn't taught in schools it's not taught in our churches it not taught in like k12 right and because of a lot of historical trauma financial trauma that we've been through we don't have a critical mass of that knowledge and information and our families and communities to be able to pass it on so so you do need to have a specific investment in helping people understand the importance of these things right so that that's it the insurance in general the secondary issue that you have to be concerned with and cognizant of is that you know I didn't talk about it in this presentation I talked about it in the book right which is the bias levels in America extremely high against African Americans right and you can look at the studies from Harvard and Stanford Chicago all this kind of stuff right it goes from high here really high and and and African Americans have that same bias against themselves right so if you look at like the unconscious bias it's it's it's almost 8 and 10 like 75 ish percent right which is which is a significant problem we have that bias against ourselves so the other problem is and our bias tends to show up in commerce we'll help each other in all kinds of different ways but we don't really do business with each other right you'll sit at the church next to this person and and you'll do business with everyone else and that's that's also part of what's kind of going in in the mix right and one of the things that I want to encourage and address is if we want to solve these big problems let's do it economically let's do it by facilitating business and commerce and you and others like you should be part of the pool of service providers that we are using and that we're looking at that we're not doing right now we can talk like I've run all kinds of calculations and a bunch of different things I can tell you how many jobs were created if we use black realtors plus all of the support professionals that go along with the closing process is actually quite significant and as that's got to be a super important part of the process right so it doesn't get into like you know the one product versus another right but many people don't even have and many people think of stuff like 401ks retirement vehicle doesn't expense right like it that's a must-have right so there's education process that has to go along with it yes hey brother please stay still uh I known Isabella I actually brought him into the shaft my name is Alan Bess I'm actually alumni here in 1995 I am a brother of our file fraternity incorporated brother thank you very much for taking your time out and bring this information to us today thank you um one thing that you had up there was the Homestead Act yeah and you stated that if every family could have gotten back a million dollars and we can actually overcome this uh past discrimination that we had my correct well what I stated was the equivalent value of today's dollars of those distributions per family was equivalent of million dollars that's a hell of a start and and I'm sure with everyone in this room we played the lotto and we was hoping that we had that yeah 1.6 billion or at least we had that 1 million dollars that was gonna be taxed anyway right but you know we went through the past from like the 1800s all the way up and if we as people say how we going to catch up missus is this kind of a statement not a question I want you to to comment on later on but if we actually look at ourselves as the past that will be helping the future how can we take and say well how can we make that child or that or that family have that million dollars and I believe that that brother right there has the answer the rule life insurance something that if for God forsake you go or you can you have a child you know I'm gonna let him because we had a conversation I know you know what I'm going to but if you have a child and as soon as that child is born and has a social security number you get him a whole life insurance and you pay you don't actually go out there and you don't have the BMW but you have a Honda and maybe you pay over a certain period of time you know young lady said well what do I do when I get out of college you're gonna be creating your life you're gonna have a family sooner or later you're gonna be creating something that's going forward if you just pay a little bit towards that insurance for that child or or someone's you know once they get that social security number I promise you when they're standing here my age they'll be a million you know through that insurance that they have that whole life insurance that they have and it goes into the fact that of you can take money off of that and you can pay for that education if if you know in it without anyone dying without anyone dying we haven't even talked about the the qualities of life of death where they'll actually receive another million dollars on top of that you know they can be multimillionaires if you die or if they die you know regardless of the fact that um you know this is something like that I looked at the Homestead Act and I said well this can actually catch us up and if people knew about this it could kind of catch yourself to where it has to be you know um I did it in the late years and and I did it for my children and I'm not saying it million is it not for me because I tell you I did it but if I decided to have another child tomorrow that child will be a millionaire by the time they're 21 through insurance and no taxes how do you feel about that rub I'm a proponent of both ad and all of the above I don't think there is a silver bullet I think that is an important pillar right and creating wealth with everything else what we have to do like I have a engineering strategy type of background so I'm always designing for the outcomes that I want right so you got a you got to put something together to get to that outcome you have to understand like the frame that's that's happening here right so if you start thinking like between ages of 25 and 55 prime working 35% up until 2014 a black male earned zero income somebody has to fund that right yeah right so here here's the thing we haven't done a deep dive on the solutions the reason we haven't done that is there's no point in that if people don't see a problem that is where we are you're trying to solve a problem that other people don't recognize what they think it's your problem if it's your problem but I'll have to pay for it what I have to suffer do it what I have to sacrifice as far as I can see you did this to yourself and you've been free and you've been this and you've been that and when will you be able to stand on your own and this is positioned again and again and again and people see not prepared to speak to it in a quantitative way they speak to it in an emotional way let me break something to you nobody cares on your people they don't care about your feelings they care about your skillset they care about your ability to add value and that's that they can get past their conscious or subconscious bias which we have not gotten into all of these things are part of the problem right it is a multi variant solution it can be solved right and it's having people at the table who recognize the problem and are talking about what are the ways in which we can do this there programs that work now that are underfunded there are programs that haven't been put in place that could be put in place right so the first step for me is to help people have the same fact pattern right so are slaves a long time ago it's not that big a deal okay before you get the information sounds perfectly sensible after you have the information tough statement to make right now we can start working through what some of these problems are right we haven't talked about the the device that goes into how work product is evaluated for like attorneys these are the highest level kind of capability we haven't talked about the differential and what black doctors made to the white doctors everything accounted for except race but we haven't talked about the billions of dollars that actually are showing up in attacks today right now how that could be a little evey ated because those things can fund a lot of the stuff that we're talking about so this is like a multi-part discussion that we need to have and and so I'm with you chomping at the bit to solve it right and but we can work on that once we got people rowing in the same direction right and there's a lot of people to get the information that have impact and authority that's really large that can be very helpful they can be accelerators and catalysts the very things that you're talking about but we can talk further yes okay I'm Brenda I am I real estate investment and I also work the local government here and that's like mm-hmm your book is seems familiar is similar to something that's employed Anderson's book and I want your opinion are you familiar with that dr. Claude Anderson yes I and also with my property investing I deal with a large circle of black people that make very well money but they kind of leave the community and then the great money that they make leaves their pockets because they keep searching for something more and more which they feel is better but they're wet their wealth leaves their pockets so yep what is your opinion on that and your opinion with dr. Claude Anderson and also with Pawan omits what do you think I'm familiar with dr. Edison one of my fraternity brothers told me about him when I was an undergrad I read his book I was like wow right or for sure what is different about my book is as I go into detail on the financial cost and implication it's a thin book and it'll be a quick read because I don't talk about things that I can't substantiate with research and data right and to my knowledge and to everybody else I talk to nobody's done that before it's a particularly unique and profound read and it's designed to paradigm shift to change minds because I ultimately want to change actions in terms of you know what like what you're observing with you know wealthy African Americans kind of moving out of community that's a much larger macro economic problem that we could we could talk about right what what we he has to remember is the structure of that was created in what I just walked through right like the communities that we live in we did not create we did not architect we did not design we've made it home but that's not what our homes should be right people are moving to places where the resources are more substantial all right where you have great jobs and industry and economic opportunities you have great schools this is no place where that thought that continuum like doesn't exist the problem the double is this multiple problems here right the the first thing is as people leave because their money is not in black financial institutions the capital is leaving with them the money was any institution if the capital wouldn't be leaving with them it would still be available right so that's part of the reason study and PhD if you're not doing that you're not gonna circulate anything right so you know how people talk about the velocity of money how it stays in communities for different times the people that we admire most right like our our Jewish brothers and sisters our Asian brothers systems or Latino brothers and sisters they do PhD I'm just giving it a name that's what we admire right I mean they spend and deposit right and hire in ways that create jobs and businesses in their community as they should we don't there's structural reasons why that's the case we're prevented from doing that and we live in with that legacy now and we're trying to to turn that around people generally move to where economic conditions are better and unfortunately economic conditions were typically better outside of black communities that were kind of made for us in in the community that were made for us in this country and what I'm trying to do is reverse that process right we have a massive jobs problem and when you don't have jobs you don't have income like this families are based on the ability for you to earn he said think uncover curtain costs and and have something left for the future when those things are hollowed out see like we didn't get a chance to really talk through how we got here from like the 40s 50s and 60s to show all this stuff where it would be much clearer then we have to talk about how do you get people to come back and what's the process you know for doing that so it's I won't be able to answer that and kind of go into it because I would have to go through a bunch of other stuff but we can talk offline more about that I know my name is Andrew I learned a lot today so much you know I have heard constantly it seems the thing that makes this the comp most complicated to me it's the money people people's money they touch their money and even in a black community or any community if you've ever if you go to Flushing you know where if you go to a store you know you're putting money in whose hand even in Queens even in Queens I go to a store that's selling stuff from my culture right and there's no way around where I go into a store and I know it's owned by that person you know and it's essentially even a Jamaican store then it's not owned by them it's not owned by you know some so finding where to reinvest the money even if that is my intention is its own problem and its own complication that I kind of don't see an answer to but then with the age of the internet and everything going now yep to another I can't see you know where do you fix that problem as well like where does the money not hemorrhage right so we stop bleeding even though you change the mind what happens to the mind when you can't find a place right I was something that into what do I do now I get it right like I get it I got it I want to do what you're saying how do I do it because these businesses and enterprises so on and so forth are not around you're providing services but they're not owned by us right so again I go back to this like ph.d framework part of what we all need to be aware of is the African Americans have well over a hundred billion dollars deposited in banks across the country very little of that is in you know black financial institutions who tend to lend to African Americans are far less discriminatory framework so the moving of your deposits into these institutions to capitalize them to provide the loan you need money to start a business right now studies have been done that say that the current black business is the current ones right now require up to about nine trillion dollars of additional credit that is what they're saying that they need they're not getting right and almost eight out of ten of them say that if they had access to credit they would hire so moving a small portion of our money into those banks could provide the capital to be able to lend to far more businesses so they can actually have the resources start the businesses that you're looking for we can do that our friends allies corporations companies so on and so forth can do that it's a critical step right the other piece of what I think you talked about was identifying where these businesses are and there's a lot of people working on that right you've got you know the black communities and they're trying to utilize social media in the digital age to identify where all these businesses are so that we can can spend on them and that needs to be done as well so here's the thing I want us to start right we're not trying to boil the ocean and we're not trying to eat the whole elephant today you got to start with when possible where possible what can I do and the first thing that we can do is is the resources that we control when possible we are possible use use black talent you increase demand for them my goal is to increase the man where there oversubscribed and they have to hire right every job affects a family every family affects a community so on so forth it has to start there you cannot we cannot as a people be asking all these questions and maintain a 98% non spend on our own businesses that's a non-starter right so where you buy your car when you get your car mater so you have total control over doing that I buy my car from a black dealer dealers have terrific jobs it's a really critical important thing right I try to use you know black realtors I don't want to pay any of these fees but I have to I said to make sure that families are eating if that's the case doctors dentists so on and so forth right these are things that we have you no control over that we should try to do decided by braces for the kids I don't want to I don't wanna spend money on braces right they're really expensive I looked across my whole state I couldn't I didn't know where you know there was like a black orthodontist I had no idea but I did it back at the envelope and I figured he's probably spending about 1.6 million dollars on that think about how many businesses that are not existing right how many families community churches so on and so forth that are not there so let's just we take a you know one step at a time which is what do we do with our own resources and then how do we encourage others to do it and how do we show institutions and corporations that this is the way to do it don't just put us in a commercial make sure we're on your supply chain make sure that we're on your payroll make sure you're putting money in our institutions everything else is just symbolic and it's a shiny object we got to be careful of shiny objects good evening everyone Coates thank you brother Rochester for attending being at this event tonight Michael Cote Salazar's Eyefinity chapter president left Hofstra 2007 and part of the Alumni Association so I just want to thank everyone for being here and I'll talk more surely about some things but I just wanted to get to my I had a couple of questions brother Rochester it's kind of three questions and you could answer them at a high level yeah and then I know you talk much a PhD methodology but my first question is one how can I personally just sweep my own sport meaning I have friends and you know that are very successful so how do we bring consciousness to someone who's one of our friends who's a person of color and they go to Harvard they come out they work at a big firm goldman sachs Cravath Swaine and Moore in making 200k and then they kind of just go out in the abyss anyone in the consciousness meeting like how do we make them realize spend black and hire black because I see that too many times you know someone never is successful and it's like things are going well for them and it kind of just get lost in the abyss and forget about everything we just spoke about well so that's one a subset of that is even people who work in key positions how do I bring our consciousness to them for example I know someone works at a pretty prestigious law firm top three law firm law firms worth 1 billion dollars their head of diversity and to them it's just a job but I'm like you're in a key position probably to hire do really good because you can't do have a budget and that budget could impact as you said black owned businesses and also it could hire people so that's kind of just one question the second question would be how do we get past the subconscious bias cuz I do notice that and that is usually I've been speaking to people about that recently and they kind of look at me like huh what are you talking about and I'm like it's real because when you you know you get support you know for example we did a run and the run was it was to raise those scholarship funds for people of color especially here at Hofstra University and you know we knocked on the door saying hey listen you know brothers and sisters we need your support and then they don't show up and to the degree that we expect and then there are some other organizations that we did very little promotion to and they came out and I was just like wow we can't even get our own people out it's kind of said it's very sad you know because you know you've been promoting to them and and they just don't show up the third question totally unrelated to question 1 & 2 is this is supplies spending I noticed I work at Mitchell Titus which is the largest minority-owned accounting firm in the country and you know I always read these glamorous articles and say coca-cola spent two billion dollars in my dirty supply chain and MWBE companies and I'm like okay what companies if the article never really breaks down how that spend is and I'm not sure if it's public information but I never kind of see it trickled down to some of these some of our organizations it maybe it does I'm not at the high-level meetings but I work on numerous accounts so I don't I don't know we see this bed cook down so I kind of could use I can use common sense to say wait a minute they just spent two billion and we are the largest minority controlled firm accounting firm III really don't see the revenue so what's up so with that third question is how can we be more actively involved in knowing or holding these companies accountable versus just glossing over an article saying oh they spent two trillion and forgetting about it first and bring a consciousness the same wait a minute what did they spend the two trillion on right and who benefited right so so that's a lot to hold it in short-term memory right I'm gonna boil the first two questions down to this you would like to see different actions right but actions follow thinking so what you have to do is change their perspective which is what I'm trying to do with this with this conversation right so you know I need you in whatever way and everybody else here whatever way possible to amplify the message the great thing about like like me and being an author is like people buy many copies of this by like 10 20 copies look they give it to everybody right very few authors can say that kind of thing because they're like just read this first and then let's kind of talk again you want people to see a problem as they don't see first just recognize that they don't see it right and now work on how do you give them to see it how do you have the conversation how do you get them in the room because they don't they don't they don't they don't see a problem right so and you know having dialogues have these conversations I'll be happy to come in and talk to them all kinds of people and the response generally is people didn't know this stuff how they gonna know it you got the same curriculum as everybody else you know it's not in it you go to church maybe you do also worship someplace right it's not in it it's not in case we 12 it's not there it's not something that that is kind of socialized in our community so people don't know but they know a lot of stuff other things that they're told and they believe that and you have to have a counterbalance so how do you amplify the message how do you buy the book share it right share the talks your main book clubs organizations so on and so forth because we keep asking people to have conversations on race what kind of conversation are you gonna have when you have two uneducated talking today Lee informed me the same level of fact pattern to talk about it so people can have understanding and empathy and then they will start to act differently well the easy way if you identify the ones that are interested in acting differently the other question that you're talking about the mine already spend as a is a bigger discussion firstly you said mwb minority and one of the things that I say everywhere that I go is that minority does not mean black I hate to be 100% clear on that minority does not mean but right now let me give you some examples of this so if you look at it from like a supply chain spend people will say listen I want to create jobs and businesses and I want to do things that are necessary to you know uplift various communities so what I'm gonna do is we're gonna invest and do more business with women entrepreneurs the women business owners I think that's dope I think it's fantastic if they should double triple quadruple down on that it's critical and it's necessary right women who own businesses generate about 1.2 trillion dollars to an almost fantastic if you ask yourself how much of that is from black women is less than 2 percent and I'm interested in how much revenue is going to black women so what that means is for every hundred all you invest in that it's not into the $99 that assistant would see it that's why you you really have to be specific right even in the language that we use minority and diversity and inclusion in these things with generally euphemisms will not white male you know what's important to understand when you say not white male you're talking about 90 percent of people on planet earth it's incredibly nonspecific how do you address specific problems in the least specific way possible if you say listen let's let's do this by investing and our Latino brothers and sisters I think this don't double triple quadruple down on it make it happen how much revenue today drive who wants their own have employees it's about three hundred and eighty billion dollars a year ask yourself how much of that is from black people who identified themselves as Latino it's less than 2% again it's not until the ninety nine dot you do it with our Asian brothers and sisters they they generate you know six hundred billion dollars right a year right and their businesses by definition is there's no black ownership there so when you look at that total amount of spend that's happening to minority right this about nine percent of that is going to Black Enterprise if you put women in it is four percent that's what I did I'll tell you what the black numbers are because they're abysmal it's much easier to talk about minority numbers and that's okay like people are well-meaning and they're trying to do good and all that kind of different stuff what I'm saying is if you want to affect positively and profoundly in a black community you're gonna have to be specific because the resources don't get to our enterprises and that is the fact of the matter right that's the detail and people who are responsible for these programs don't know this you know what I mean but for everybody else the layperson says wow that when they hear minority to thinking black they think in black people living it up boy would you say to Billy knows very little that is going to black enterprises right that the data supports it unequivocally and then you guys see it empirically so okay uh first thank you for a very powerful presentation that was really quite good I've been arguing your basic thesis your the basic tenets of your presentation for years with people of in a one political persuasion or another and and you get yeah you know depending upon you know whether people are a little bit more liberal or less a a basic sympathy towards yes you know we want to do something or maybe a little bit less so it at one time or another maybe that might have been a primitive action or something of that nature but in in the past through the years we've seen an ascendance of the far right to a position of political power they tend to be less interested in historical economic arguments and indeed less interested in arguments period and on top of that racist so you get this kind of a situation where as for the last 4050 years there's been to one extent or another a basic sympathy as to yes we need to do something now there's a hardening on the part of the political power structure to almost we want to do nothing and maybe we we even want to go backwards so how does your basic approach change to what you're putting forward here in this kind of a situation the the approach just said change because the aim is to expose people to really import information and context that they can juxtapose with their decision making there are some people who have chosen to be impervious to facts and information I don't spend my time on those people right because for every moment that I'm spending with them I'm not spending a moment on someone who's interested in open and having you know an important dialogue what we have to remember that while that group is small they're extremely well capitalized and in an in a capitalist society small groups can have a really big impact but the other thing is that there is a lot of sympathy to their positions right explicit and implicit sympathies a lot of people feel like you know black folks in particular minorities in general and and Latinos coming to the country or live in high on the hog and I've been living that way for a long long time and it's got a it's got a come to an end they from their perspective their home that they your grandfather bought they did that strictly with hard work government subsidization doesn't even come into that not possible to put down a hundred percent on that home seventy percent on that home or 50 percent on at home if the government didn't underwrite that right they're not even aware of that anything else of that of that narrative how would they be most people generally or not like my goal is to affect people that are open to discussion and conversation to say wow I never knew that because it does really affect a lot of people it doesn't have to affect everyone that's the beauty of this you don't need everyone and we're not trying to boil the ocean here we're trying to move with the people who are interested in moving now to give them some context and perspective right because they can say okay how can I do it as an individual how can I do it with my company you know 60% of small businesses or 50% of all people employed right in America that's vast that's dominated by white Americans right sixty percent of all small businesses owned by white Americans at zero black employees not one right you can expect a lot of change if people say okay I see the problem and I want in my small way to be able to impact that so if I can do that by hiring this company or that company hey I need the service anyway I'll do that as opposed to that company's unqualified and you're forcing me to do it it's just a different kind of perspective but I'm not interested in spending time with the intransigent right it's just you you'll burn out all your your energy right doing that let's work with the people who are interested in moving now now we're open to the conversation we'll open the data open to context you can't say the environment doesn't matter you can't say it's because people are lazy you can't say because a long time ago you can't say any of those things in the face of that information and for the people for whom that matters let's work with them and figure out how we can make a really good impact that's fine that's my thought I I just want to say thank you for your presentation thank it's before I came in I definitely knew nothing about the subject and you definitely changed my mind about it that's just why I won't say first of all thank you second thing on to ask who was in your presentation you stated that Europeans who immigrated and came through Ellis Island more capital was invested in them through their education than black Americans absolutely however my quest what would have been like for a black immigrant who immigrated at that time would more would there be more money invested into their education than a black American so they circumvented that through the to the immigration laws they had laws that were extraordinarily they would limit the number of people who could immigrate to the country by a percentage of the folks that were currently here foreign-born folks that were currently here so the the the if you think how many Ghanians were here in the early 1900's not many a small percentage of that would be allowed to come in it was just a very clever creative way to ensure that you don't have immigration from African or black you know countries into the US so they circumvented even having that problem and if they came in to to New York City and they were allowed to go to those schools they were presumably get better education but you also have to understand that the level of explicit hostile animosity towards like people were still being killed right back in back in those days the Bronx Zoo yeah Bronx Zoo had like black people on display in the zoo during those times if people are still trying to figure out if black people has souls like this is this a reason why we don't kind of talk about this stuff and a lot of that thinking is what affected people's ability to like come together work together live together play together do all the kind of things that we could have otherwise have done you know and is unpacking some of that stuff is what we have to what we have to do now thank you very much thank you very much that the that's the last question all right all right thanks I'm Michael Cote I'm the society chapter president thank you for attending today and thank you for your powerful delivery and information brother Sean Rochester we greatly appreciate it um it was dynamite and uh definitely gonna echo everything we learned today to the people that we see hopefully people to our left the people to our rights and most importantly the people in our family because that's where it starts you definitely want to start with your own porch first and then hopefully it spreads like wildfire at this time I would like to give an award to brother Sean Rochester for your dedication and contributions to our community I will make a difference thank you for being a part of our legacy today and tomorrow thank you on behalf of zaza chapter we want to give you this award everyone

Channel: Hofstra University

Views: 512,798

Rating: 4.7002563 out of 5

Keywords: Hofstra, University, Shawn Rochester, The Black Tax

Id: lchuk0f-_6Y

Length: 101min 38sec (6098 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 26 2018