The MOST IMPORTANT Conversation That Needs To Be Continued (Black History Panel 2021)

[Music] thank you all so much for coming i've been uh really praying about this and i said you know what i'm gonna invite some of my people and we're gonna have a conversation about what's going on in america how we feel and so i want to dive straight into it because every everyone who watched my show for those of y'all know i just dived straight into it so we can go straight into it and i have some questions we may not make it through all of them but here goes the first question 2020 was a year to remember from racial issues cover 19 a lot of different things and i want to ask you this question what is one thing you learned from last year when it comes to us as a community when i think of blackness i think of power standing out no matter what you're faced against i'm ladonna boyd i'm the fifth generation president ceo of rh boyd publishing corporation my name is wesley smith i'm 24 years old and i'm a personal trainer in murfreesboro tennessee my name is tanisha i am in marketing what comes to mind for me is excellence i'm in yom francois i'm a mother and i'm an entrepreneur edward weston some would say pastor but that's a title my name is michael davis i'm 18 years old i am an artist and a designer of my own brand art to wear artware.com 2020 one word death lost a lot of people a lot of loved ones a lot of friends death is always around us it's a reality but it was in the forefront 2020. honestly when i think of 2020 i think beginning when i hear the word blackness i think of beauty strength power when i hear the word blackness what comes to mind is me what is one thing you learned from last year when it comes to us as a community like what is one thing in the black community you learned anybody as a black community depending on the government is something that i feel like many of us black people are not doing any longer also i have friends who have also started their own business like myself going full time as a personal trainer in july of last year once the pandemic started in march it was a risk it was eye-opening but it gave me this um this inspiration this feel this fuel that i have uh in order to succeed and just not depend on paycheck to paycheck as a as a black man um being creative thinking outside of the box not waiting hand in foot on knowledge and going to get it and owning in on it and not giving up boy y'all diving in i'm not i'm not gonna take the same direction just because 2020 was very eye-opening for me when i when i think about our community it showed me that we're not as conscious as we proclaim to be we're still very compulsive we use that word woke very fluidly and the reality is we're compulsive they can put anything on television anything happen and we quickly react to it i just think that oftentimes in order to get us to move in a direction it's not hard it's like pulling a string to get the results that any one group of people and i'm not talking race i'm talking system any one group of people in order to get my community to respond or react it is not difficult at all because we're so compulsive and i think that as a people going forward we have to use this at a greater capacity and become more conscious of what's going on around us and and the powers that are behind it i could say a whole lot there but we have to grow in that area as a people we have to grow in that area i definitely feel what you're saying and like you said woke that's a word that people use so loosely and like you said getting people to do something is just as simple as pulling a string i mean look at what happened with the toilet paper like i had never been in a situation before where i went to the grocery store and there was nothing on the shelves you know there there was meat shortages and you know all of the the vegan stuff was gone like people were just buying any and everything like why are you buying gluten-free flour like that that was very interesting to me just to be in that situation where you see this kind of stuff happening on movies and you never really imagined it happening in real life or in your lifetime but to go back to the question that you asked about what we learned in 2020 i want to play you know a different card what did the world learn about us as a people and specifically black people oh my my mind the world you know with the the black squares and all of this we're listening and all of that on instagram we've been lit like you know you want to help black businesses support black businesses make this list of you know this black owned dry cleaners this black-owned bakery this black-owned grocery store go shop here tell your friends to shop here we're allies we've been here yeah so i mean the world found out that we were lit and we've been this so yeah i know that's right say that one more time we work we've we've been leaving come on oh lord you like that lit word huh i do got a special place in my heart special places lo sis you graduated last year what is one thing you learned as a high school student who graduated in 2020 well i say in general what i learned was i can't expect anybody to advocate for myself and i learned a while ago that you can't expect somebody to understand what they don't understand and it was easy for me to attack people when they didn't understand what we go through what i go through and so when they say something that i thought was ignorant it was why would you think that why would you think that i learned quickly they don't know anything else so i learned that i can't attack people anymore and it's more education and this year just proved that even more because i had friends calling me and um saying hey can you explain this to me and asking me questions that for me i was like how could you not understand this like it's right there two plus two equals four but they didn't understand i realized that nobody's gonna get it if i don't tell them and i have to advocate for myself and i have to speak up and say what's on my mind and it's not my job to make white people comfortable that's good y'all y'all dropping some good stuff i want to go back to the question that you post you said let's flip it what did the world learn about the black community and you said they learned one that the black community is already lit we've been here i'm curious i'm gonna pose that to all of us here what what is one thing the world should have learned about us in 2020 or heck period we still have a lot going on right now let's be real they were never comfortable ooh that were never comfortable break that down i feel like not only myself after just graduating after a year how well i've seen my friend group adapt how i see my friends start talking about stocks and real estate and and and um you know all these other accessible things that you know our people didn't really have accessibility to you know uh in the generations before us everything is is so accessible knowledge is accessible you can look up anything you want to on the internet so it's like it's free at this point you know uh education you don't have to go to college just to get education you can learn pretty much anything through certifications and trades and youtube i feel like as a community you you see so many uh young you know black men and women creating their own businesses starting youtube channels whatever it may be uh we're thriving evolving our minds are being challenged some of us have taken it is that you know when you see all of this and like western was saying that being able to um adapt is important yeah just being able to just adapt all right we're lit we're never comfortable somebody got somebody up something else i think creativity is king you know because we you know our demographic is given so little but yet we're able to do so much you think of the phenomenon of you know black twitter that's what's literally gotten us through uh so much that's gone on as of recent history and just being creative being able to adapt like has what's been mentioned and just ingenuity is king as well you know again we're given the least we're able to do the most with that yeah i was gonna say we're not going anywhere yeah you know if if there's any anything that 2020 should have shown in the world because we're here we're not going anywhere it doesn't matter about who's in office it doesn't matter if you know the police treat us right or wrong black lives matter's not new that's that's been in the 1800s black lives matter was around it was just not called black lives matter they were saying we're human too yeah you understand what i'm saying and so uh but we're not going anywhere and um i think that this generation has shown the world also that we're tired of talking um you know if it means taking action that this young generation has shown that we're willing to do that as well but the latter part of 2020 has also shown that we're not the thugs i think that that has been shown as well we're not the people that that history quote-unquote american history has portrayed us to be now i purposely lock my doors when an elderly white woman walk by my car just so she can see how it feels sorry just being honest because we're not who you think we are you know going back to same thing with the media there's a narrative that has been portrayed about our people since the beginning of time that narrative has been force-fed down american throats and they believe unfortunately we believe what we see unfortunately our reality is television propaganda and because that becomes our reality we act and react based on what we think is reality and reality is it that's not the truth and so i think 2020 has shown the world that we're not going anywhere we can go there if that's where you want to go but we're saying the same thing we've always been saying we don't have to be made equal just don't take away the little bit that we do we we've always done more with less but then when we make less work then you stop that too yeah that's all we're saying to piggyback off of what you're saying um i think one thing that they should have learned is that we won't be stopped we're we're we won't be defeated and we're not scared we i mean to be black in america is to live every day in a state of fear and so when we're fighting for our life to get away from that fear we're not scared we will do what it takes and i think you definitely see that with the younger generations and a lot of the protests are going on yeah we're we're not going to be defeated they've thrown everything at us and one one form of oppression has changed into another form of oppression whether it was slavery to segregation to mass incarceration to police brutality has been here the whole time so we've seen it all it keeps changing you keep throwing stuff at us we're not we're not going anywhere and we're we're not scared we're not going to be defeated or stopped yeah yeah january i want to add something to that i i think that if they didn't know now they do that i'm good mm-hmm not because i'm black i'm good because i am good and i think that a lot of times people want to you know just like tanisha was bringing up you know i'm really great i'm really grateful for the eye-opening experiences the world has had but something tells me that this is not new if i believe the bible that tells me that nothing is new under the sun then i can look to my past to inform my future there was a time when god got tired of his enslaved children being mistreated and eventually he brought plagues upon the earth and said let my people go and i think that he's tired of the the disenfranchisement of a an entire people because of the color of their skin i think that people learn that i am smart that i um that that you don't need to do business with me because i'm black you need to do business with me because i am the best yeah that's right and there is no better option than me and some cupcakes fire yeah yeah i'm rated as one of the best cupcakes in the country in the world and and the best in tennessee and people still don't know i don't know the cupcake collection and it's like what rock have you been living under and then people want to share that and people who know that it's good because it's good want to give that to other people or want to keep it because it's a treasure and you don't want everybody to find out your secret right but i think people found out that we that there was a level of excellence and i'm gonna come to every battle with that but we were having this conversation this week uh amongst our team that um that we heard one of your friends say he said you know you want a victory but you don't want to battle mm-hmm might todd and that if you if you need if you want to win something then there's gonna gotta be a fight and i think that's just what that's just what we're dealing with and i think at the end of the day when my children go out or when my team goes out they're a reflection of me and i ask them what is your job no matter what their job is their job is to make me look good yes because i'm good and because i'm the best and i think that people learned that we're good not not because we're black no that's real that that's so real cause you're all good i mean i order a cupcakes every tuesday um do you ship i'm just going to show you guys i do [ __ ] nationwide okay yes she do okay no problem um i i want to get y'all's opinion what do you think about what happened to our capital on january 6th why are y'all looking at me i'm really saddened by the fact that people were climbing on our capitol building a police officer was chased and they were mocking our democracy and sitting in sacred places that we've elected people to be and i heard people shouting this is our house you know this is all of the people's house and i just shuddered to say had those people look like anyone else there would that would have been a massacre you have situations where you know i've raised black boys in america who understand that they have to carry themselves a certain way and and just you know while being black i'm not talking about them you know being riotous or you know you know doing anything out of the norm just just just living while being black and could never have done that disrespectful act and you have so many examples in 2020 of people losing their lives and beyond people losing their lives where where are we safe uh that that was really that was really heartbreaking to me i felt sad and frustrated angry but to be honest i already felt all of that i've been feeling that i've felt that in so many different situations i wasn't surprised so the feeling wasn't an overwhelming feeling of i'm mad at this because i'm already mad i've i've been mad but it was more like after this day nobody can tell me that white privilege doesn't exist because you saw what happened in the protest for black lives matter you've seen police officers pointing rubber bullets at children police officers punching people black lives matter protesters and then these people just walk into the capitol building everybody lost their mind about a target but they just walked casually into the capitol building you can't tell me white privilege doesn't exist it's almost like the video of the girl i can't remember what her name is but she had the dog and she called the police or she said i'm gonna call the police and tell them a black man is harassing me it was like ha y'all can't tell me you didn't say that you can't tell me that you're blind that you don't see this it's right there in front of you so after that after that day i don't really want to hear you you can't you can't tell me that white privilege doesn't exist and that's kind of how i felt like i was just looking back like wow it just validates everything that i already knew it was just validation like yeah i knew this i'm not surprised it makes me angry frustrated but i can't say i'm surprised all 2020 you saw so many different events on the news whether it was black lives matter protests or colgate 19 cases with me just looking at you know the video today and hearing it from my friend yesterday how not surprised i was but just me also thinking how injustice our system really is and how unequal we are as beings in the u.s in the united states of america and how as black people we're supposed to sit and digest that because it has happened and is now in the past and now it's a part of history and i've looked back on history i've seen the marches i've heard the stories and my grandmother was born in 1947 right after world war ii going into um uh the 60s and how the marches in in the police brutality then that's even hard to digest so just to see 60 years later and i actually went to the march on washington um this past year uh with al sharpton uh leading it in it was peaceful you know uh no rides anything like that it was just you know supporting black lives matter to going to see you know white people doing that to the capitol and i was just there so like i said it's something that we as a black community have to digest and live with yeah i bet the police showed up in white right gear when you went to the peaceful protest you know just to be blunt okay why do they want to be oppressed so bad like oppression it's not you know it's not a it's a trend like it's just like what are you so upset for you've had all of these years with things being you know an advantage to you a head start to you you've you know it's just like what what is your problem why are you acting a fool why there are definitely two different realities and it's they're just coexisting and it's sometimes hard for the others to see what's actually going on for our daily lives and i think liberty and justice for all really does not apply anymore did it ever yeah i was gonna ask like i didn't feel anything me personally oh zero no feelings no feelings wasn't upset wasn't upset wasn't sad wasn't sad it wasn't hurt um we living in this bubble like what are we expecting like let me ask y'all a question let me break it down this way break it down for the next 10 seconds everybody that's on this panel be somewhere else for the next 10 seconds just be somewhere else you can't do it you're all still sitting here i mean i still no you said in your head that means that either you went back somewhere in time memory or you placed yourself somewhere you never been imagination yeah all we have is memory and imagination either the past or something in the future you can only be here now here's the problem racism is not an individual mm-hmm racism is systematic or we call it systematic it's a system right yeah yeah and the system oppresses people we we call it racism because the system decides to oppress a specific race does that make sense makes sense so when we when we talk about racism we're talking about a system that's oppressing people now really the issue we have is classism not racism the real issue is classism what is classism economics how do i know if you just mentioned the injustice the justice system how how injustice our justice system is if you ain't got no money it's very injustice yeah if you got some money you'll find out it seemed to work out regardless of what color your skin is that's right the bible says this the love of money is the root to all evil if we consider racism evil just trace the money guarantee you'll find out that it has to do with money slavery was just an economic thing that's all it was we took black people they took black people and put them to work made them work for cheap labor economics economics so the best thing that we can do stop looking at white privilege it is white privilege you know what that you know what that comes from that comes from we talked about memory it comes from past right they don't have a choice you can't be somewhere else i can't be nothing but black i was born into the skin color i'm in they were born into the skin color there they don't have a choice come on do you understand right so by the same token that there is white privilege they also are stuck with the stigma of what was done by their their ancestors to us they can't escape that either so let me ask you a question your people before you enslaved a bunch of people murdered a bunch of people raped and killed and and and and and uh completely destroyed and annihilated a race of people your people you got one or two options you can live in the privilege of the the success that you have now yeah or you can walk around with the weight of what happened to your people which one you're going to do i'm i'm moving forward brother so when we look at white privilege don't expect anything different because if i was white what am i gonna do walk around with a noose around my neck because of what my people did come on i can't change that all i can be is who i am now if you want to deal with white privilege here's how you deal with it open up your company um deal with generational wealth figure out how to set yourself up so that the system works for you and not again i mean again going back to compulsive impulse or consciousness it's one of the two you can't change yesterday um let me let me ask y'all the question uh let me ask y'all a question that's why he passed away no no we'll call you doctor if you can control the next thought that you're gonna think don't think it you don't have control you don't even have control over your thought so if you don't have control over what you're thinking how can you control people climbing the capitol building why would you let that frustrate you you can't even control your own thoughts you being frustrated or getting mad or getting angry about somebody considering you know doing first off me personally i wasn't uh uh amazed by it in any capacity because they were allowed to do it yeah you can't even go to nashville uh courthouse and do it try it and see what happens you can't do it i don't care what color your skin is go down into the nashville courthouse and try to scale it and see what happens you're definitely not gonna do it at the white house unless you're allowed to do it if you're allowed to do it there's an agenda if there's an agenda then there's a purpose for reaction we gotta stop being so compulsive and start understanding the game that's being played now i know you know that i think that sounds like woke come on here and lit at the same time at the same time let's stay there do we as a black community truly desire success or do we want to look like success look like success oh shoot you got to learn this the hallway me being you know someone a young of age and didn't have much growing up i found myself when i did get money to spend it to actually look like money wanted to look good feel good and i guess feel successful why monetary things you didn't have it before you just see it on you know tv you just think that you know this looks nice i think i would look nice wearing this why not buy it if i have the money to do so but then realizing how unimportant monetary things really were and how unimportant they are and as a community you see it all over the media like everybody wants to buy the louis vuitton or you know the purses the bags the shoes the dresses the when all that doesn't matter you can only one wear one fit once it just sits in the closet collects dust you don't even go that many places so basically in a pandemic and me just being a personal trainer i wear jogging pants in the hoodie all the time so it's just like i mean when when you think about success why do you have to wear it when you look at a lot of white people they're not trying to go get the most expensive pair of shoes just to go to a meeting you know it's something that we spend too much time on i think a lot of people want to look like money they want to look like you know i'm balling but at the end of the day it's like you have a chanel bag you have a gucci bag but what's in it some lip gloss like what's in it and going back to the question you asked when i think about a lot of especially the younger generation you know on instagram and all of these things when people get money the first thing they do is oh i'm gonna buy a um a lambo i'm gonna buy a mercedes but is it paid for is it cash you got all these people buying cars for they you know for their girlfriends or for their boyfriends or whatever like if my man want to buy me a car please let it be in my name and please let it be paid off don't give me another bill and don't give me another bill no that's right what do you better say i think we want both i go to paycheck i go to hbcu and i see people i see black people hustling every day all the time somebody came and knocked down my door and i answered like hello i didn't know who this person was but he was like hey i have a youtube channel like went door-to-door passing out flyers but like i s about his youtube channel and i see i see black people hustling all the time i do also think we like to look like success which i don't think necessarily is a bad thing now i do think it's a problem to your point where oh you got this nice car but you get hit with a medical bill and you can't pay for it but you but you're driving this nice car though but you can't you can't pay your medical bill but i don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to look nice i like i like shoes i like clothes i like to look nice i i like to spend money on clothes but i'm only going to spend it if i have it all right so let me ask this question let's go deeper black person has a thousand dollars in their bank account i'm not talking about you i'm talking about our community okay if i give you a thousand dollars cash if i put the average person in the african-american community a thousand dollars cash they have to pay their light bill or go to the one and only beyonce concert that costs eight hundred dollars what do you think the average person is going to do it depends on the person i mean i think i think too much i think you're putting in a category right now i think you're putting black people on camera yeah i feel like average the average person that's the average person the average person may not like beyonce though you know it's just all about your preference and your taste and just going back to your previous question i think out of everybody black people deserve nice things like we have worked for 400 years you know so if we want to splurge a little bit and have comfort have nice things you know especially i'm very big on this for black women black women deserve luxury not to be broke but don't make us struggle so much to have what other people can have readily available but it's luxurious to me to lay my head down and know that nobody's going to take the one pillow i have right that's luxurious to me that's very important but it doesn't matter that that's the point and that that's what i was looking for the words to say do i want to look like i'm re like what does that mean so for me i'm in a predicament you know i don't want to be looking like i'm out here being successful so i looked at myself in the mirror and said self do you like what you see it doesn't matter what other people think or you know about what you have you know and all this kind of stuff like like you said my mother likes to say a woman of your caliber should be abc right because i i agree there's a level of luxury that i should have but i paid my dues to get that right and i'm still paying my dues because i want to level up so i looked at myself and i said self what are you doing i sold my house cause i want to be wealthy i like that and it what wealth looks like to me and being rich looks like to me doesn't look like what it looks like to you because bill gates is rich he's wealthy and last time i checked he doesn't look like it he could buy a town or a city and so i made a decision to do what nobody else wasn't willing to do i was willing to live like no one else so that later i can live like no one else and i am 46 years old and i sold my house and i gained i think a 300 increase on the value in the two years that i've been living there and i downsized from a 3 000 square feet to a studio apartment because i'm not playing i'm not playing about the legacy that i'm leaving and when i come in and i'm dripping okay mom like it's gonna be not because you think right that i have it i really am gonna have it and it's not going to matter about what anybody thinks about it and when when i decide if i should decide to don a louis vuitton it's going to have more on the inside of it than i paid to obtain it absolutely i think about priorities important too i think about priorities is as a black individual like what's important to you like do you want to just go out when you get 500 old let's say a stimulus check or unemployment checks how many of those checks people were getting in 2020. i didn't get any right but imagine let's say you you're your middle class your black middle middle-class individual you're in your 20s and you don't have any kids you probably stay in the apartment with other people and you you get 800 bills are paid but now you just got 800 dollars sitting so you have to decide what you want to spend your 800 on or if you want to save it or if you want to invest it or put it towards something that you've been working on like a business or something like it's really about your priorities i myself as soon as i get some extra cash i'm trying to invest it now or i'm trying to put it towards my business or i'm trying to uh you know set it aside for the future because you may need it it's something called like when something happens do you have any money to fall back on it's called an emergency fund right what are your other checking accounts looking like what's your savings looking like some people don't even have a bank account they got cash yeah i think that's true i think we're too quick to judge black people sometimes though thank you because thank you on one hand i don't think like i don't think that we need to keep comparing ourselves to white people so you say you know oh well what do white people do when they get money you don't see them dressing like this i don't care what what people do michelle's going to do what mckay is going to do and i and i and and i think that you can't just say oh oh this person's dressed nice they got some jordans on that you know they drive this whatever car uh they they must uh they their priorities must be must be enclosed i mean i got when i get some money i put a lot of money in my business and i got a good amount of money and most of it went into my business but the rest of that money i went to the store and i bought some nice clothes and if somebody looks at me and goes oh well she's dressed nice you know she must not whatever like she she doesn't have a car but she's dressed nice i'm gonna tell you what i did today i actually went to h m it was a 70 off sale i went and bought some clothes and i haven't done it in a long time because i actually had the chance to do so but imagine you know working for yourself not getting any paychecks no unemployment and you grinding trying to feed yourself pay your bills and it's just a blessing to have something like extra on the side so you know i'm not looking at what nobody else doing yeah you know that was just an example that i threw out there but honestly i don't care how anyone else lives their life but it's i'm always big on paying it forward it's like i always tell my friends like you know bro you know you're making this money you're doing real well are you saving i asked my friends that we talk about this stuff all the time it's about who wants to listen yeah you could like i said you could tell anybody anything but it's about what they're going to take take from it and some will someone won't i know what i'm doing though i know i'm leaving something for my generation i'm going to have a business for them to have within the family and it's not going to be taken from us so so i've been trying to chime in for a moment to say that uh in an effort to answer the question literally in the context of the question because we we it's easy to personalize it it's easy to talk about personal experience but from a community standpoint as a culture i think we do and the reason we do is because we are we equate success with material things uh because we did not have and once you in order for you to have you would have had to have become successful in order to have so as a culture i think whenever you see somebody doing those things and they feel they have to do those things it's because they are appealing to our culture our community take church for an example most of your big churches that have white pastors you don't know the pastor name but you know the church name true sure most of your big black churches you don't know the name church but you know the pastor yeah that's true why because because we're we gravitate to success of the individual in our community it's just good to see us doing well right you understand so when you when you are wearing stuff to show your success then it creates this man they're doing well or man i wish i could now the flip side of that is we do it when we're struggling we put we portray an image when we really don't have it and that's where the fault comes in at we need a balance there has to be a balance and when you look at uh white culture they don't have to do that to appeal to their people do you understand they don't have to yeah they don't have to wear a certain thing or dress a certain way in order for them to in our culture people won't even do business with you mm-hmm you have a voice based on what they appear as success if you don't have a voice if you don't have someone of an appearance of success you don't have a voice in our community they'll give you a platform an ear and a whole nine yards if you look like you're successful you don't even know what's in your bank account you'll be struggling right but because you look successful oh well he got something to say yeah yeah that's a flaw but at the same time you gotta understand it comes because in order for us to have ever had that means something of success has taken place and we gravitated towards that and how do we get to a point where it's not an either or i think that's also unfair too it's like there's the questions are always so extreme like if you get a thousand dollars what are you gonna do with this that like i think it's a little bit much and then we you know each like drag people if you will for wanting to have nice things or do nice things like i know i come from a position of privilege so i'm not that's not lost on me obviously but you know like how do we get to a position where people are actually successful and it's okay for them to splurge on themselves or spoil others or you know make sure that you're doing what you're supposed to do stay within your budget you know tithe make sure you're donating and you know investing in education but then you know on top of that like enjoy some of the the success that you've had along the way right i think my question let's go deeper with that question in last month bloomberg came out with a study that said that throughout the year of 2020 during the pandemic caucasian wealth went up black wealth went down for me i'm asking why why where's my money going that's what i'm saying where is it going how is it that uh our investments went down but theirs went up and we can't say that all white people had jobs a lot of them lost jobs too so i i guess for me what i'm asking is what are we doing in the black community to where we're always i'm not even saying that we need to be on the same level need to be equal because we can't be equal it's 13.4 of us in america so we can't have a hundred percent but what are we doing with the 13.4 percent of the income that we do have how is it that ladonna and her family are financially well but then this family over here is not financially well but when you look at them they drive a mercedes yeah yeah yeah the number one consumer of a mercedes-benz is us yeah us the number one consumer of a gucci in a louis vuitton us and they don't even advertise to us so you just so you just gave the answer and the solution in in what you just said we're the largest consumer mm-hmm right yeah right well i'm gonna ask this question okay why is it that in the black community we are always the number one consumer but we're not the number one creators so you just said it and that's where i was going with it i was going with the fact that there's consumers and creators for so long we assume success based on consumption what we drive what we wear consumption those are all consumer driven things where where genuine success lies is being the creator yeah and we and we haven't been taught how to be creators of things we've just only been taught how to be consumers i think that you know i think investment too of course we need to invest in ourselves and when i say invest in ourselves i mean our community i know a lot of them again speaking from my generation i've seen a lot especially going to hbcu my friends like so in our scholars group chat one of my friends hit up the group chat and was like do you guys do any of you guys know any black owned planner companies and somebody quick quick fast in a hurry found a list of black owned um planner companies my dad the other day sent me uh because i skateboard sent me first black woman uh own skateboard company and i've seen that recently my generation as well as myself like i make it a conscious effort like if i if i need something let me find a black owned company to support and a lot of my friends do the same thing and so i think because we are the number one consumers what happens if we take all that money that we're that we are buying other things from white people and we start buying it from black people instead i mean you said it i mean the question has been asked i feel like twice already are realistically are we trying to prove ourselves to white people and then i mean the answer is yes according to to me what you just said we're the number one consumer so it's just like we want to put on you know this appearance i think we do that to our own community really not to white people yeah we're the only community that's driven by the flashy lights and the and so we put on for our own we're not we're not putting on for for other cultures i think we're putting on for our own hip-hop i mean just you can go across the board and we do this we spend we do these things because we want to show our people we made it or we want to show our people we're successful not necessarily another culture or another community but who said you know gucci and mercedes is it or you know this is this means success or this is where when i when i make it big i'm going to go to lorraine schwartz well that's because and if you don't mind we're going to get real it's going to get heated up here for a moment but that's because marketing these companies that are ran by white people understand that we are the largest consumer so they market their products to our people and we go out and buy them to try to please and impress our own people but he just said that they don't they don't what he said they they don't advertise to us oh yes they do yeah how that's always a little tough no i'm saying when have you seen them in a african american have you seen gucci in essence yeah that's what i'm saying they're involved no no no no you're saying build their business in the black community that's totally different than marketing right right right no no product placement i mean in videos things like that you know we're constantly marketing to our our culture and on top of the question where we we spend the most but we also set the climate on what's cool in america so you you market to black people black people think it's cool everybody else thinks it's cool we just don't get credit for it like we should be the creators of luxury you know how many lux black owned luxury brands are there and how do you define luxury you know that's relative too so i think absolutely we need to focus on being creators and also being intentional about supporting you know whether it's on the different directory list or whatnot but yeah i think we've got the resources we definitely have the vision we have the taste you know the creativity a successful black man is not going to dress like bill gates because nobody would want to look like that just keeping it real you know let's be like a little bit more lit like you say like our taste is different and you know our like going back to african culture like we're more colorful we're a little bit more loud like are we more ornate and that's fine just make sure you're doing it within your budget last year gucci man cheesy gucci bragged that he had on what ten thousand dollar code whatever yeah all this money on now they didn't give him that he paid for that he bought it and also did the advertising so it wasn't them marketing it was us buying and showing off no no no no no no no i mean in order for him to even go by he had to have been marketed right and of course his name so and so forth right they may even want it it was marketed right so it's kind of you can't take that isolated situation and say okay well you know because he wore it he didn't they didn't market it to him he no he he had already been wearing gucci stuff yeah it was already been marketed but he now think about how many people look at the responses in the comments how many people say oh he got 10 000 and now how many people want to go and buy the same right and so um it's just it's a it's like an there's so much of a waking up that we have to do man as a people it's it's it's a systematic systemic situation that never stops and we keep we keep fueling it if we're the largest consumer yeah shouldn't we also have the best stuff more stuff shouldn't we own more stuff but if we're also the largest consumer then we have to be the largest supporters of our own stuff and it is only black people that will say to me that's why i don't shop at black businesses oh they say that do that you won't find a white person saying this is why i don't shop in white businesses you won't see a hispanic person saying this is why i don't shop at hispanic places you don't see an asian person saying this is why i don't shop at asian places you won't see it red or yellow that's right purple purple or gold you're only gonna see it in my community i don't know so when you get mad at me that's the reality because i didn't do something the way that you would have liked it done or you didn't understand you're gonna come and tell me about how i should run my business when you've never run one or don't understand what happened to cause the situation so not only that here's the other dilemma we have because we're talking about our community this is real real dialogue we don't want to face the truth but here's another dilemma we have we had two sisters in my community build a build the first ever black-owned supermarket literally supermarket and somebody everything you can find in your brand name supermarket was in these sister supermarkets man they was robbed so many times not not when white people robbing them they shut the whole thing down wow so even when we try to do better in our own community it's our own pe and we can do this whole economic disparity and and the reason why you know so much crime is in our community the problem is we don't value our owner we've not been taught value so when you have one issue of being the largest consumer and not supporting black business then you have the other issue of not sustaining not just from a support standpoint but from a community standpoint when it was when it was this looting and all this that's where it was happening at night in gucci it was happening at the corner store that's been in the neighborhood you understand what i'm saying forever but i think it's there to generalize i don't i don't think it's fair to generally i can't personalize no i'm not personalizing i'm just saying i don't think it's general because there there's one thing i realized going to hbcu is there are so many different black people and though university may not be racially diverse it's diverse because there's so many different types of black people so yeah you have people that are taking advantage but that's not what i see i see a lot more hope for us and i see a lot more i see i see a lot of people that are supporting black businesses and this this is me personalizing but i i'll drive 45 minutes to go to roots before i go to kim's hair plus 15 minutes away we need we need more of you but i see a lot of me uh you see a lot of you good what i love i love you so much i i have listened to you for this whole time and i am more in love with you every time you open up your mouth but you have to understand that she is a different generation from the one before me my generation is the first generation of african americans who have full access to opportunity i can do things that my parents couldn't do that's right when i opened up the cupcake collection i had to keep it a secret wow from my parents because you don't do that we go we my level of privilege was we you know you go to college you climb the corporate ladder i mean i have parents that went from b my mother was the secretary at at the company where she worked went there without a college degree and when she retired she retired with an executive offer on the table secretary to executive you climb the corporate ladder you don't go play business because people that that's not sure and then you have my children who are the first generation of african-american people as a collective with access to wealth transference as a collective so for the first time you have people who are going to receive property and businesses as a collective and what i and that's where you would reside and so therefore you see things differently because things have been passed on to you and you've seen privilege and you've seen opportunity you see things from a lens that the people before you will never be able to see so clear but guess what's going to happen with my grandchildren when they come behind you they're going to be the first generation of african-american children people as a collective with privilege and they will be able to do things that is gonna blow your mind and things that you won't understand and things you won't be able to relate to which i think is the you know is what's happening here i love your perspective i love the perspective that you bring i love your perspective i love your perspective i think it's been just like you said it's about access to what we came from and i think that the difference is is that what's on your shirt your shirt says harriet yeah and rosa shirley yeah angela and tamika that's right what are you going to do with that which has been placed on the inside of you because at the end of the day you said it very well just like you want to return on your investment and you're trying to teach us how to invest well so that we can have a return on our money god is looking for a return on his investment in us absolutely what did you do with your peace that he gave you to make sure that you left the world as a better place i love saying it like this sometimes we feel like we're buried in our own situation and in fact we don't realize that we're planting just just one little piece stood a big pocket we're just planted eggs and and eventually we're going to grow into some amazing oak tree that provides shade so i want to ask a question i want to go deeper here do you believe that the black lives matter movement is moving the black community forward and i want to start with you um i want to bring it back to what you said um you said black lives matter has been here all along and it just hasn't been called that i think it's the same thing it's a new it's a it's a new wave of revolution it's uh it's our new cry it's the same song we've been singing it's just there's a new title there's a new cry this is a new thing we're saying but it's the same song we've been singing and and actually to talk about two things that you guys said is um things are getting better every generation is a new perspective things are getting better and that's why when i said it's not okay for me i can't be okay with the things going on because things are getting better and i see i i i can be optimistic that if we keep fighting things will get better because they are things do get better but at the same time how are we still struggling with the same problems of police brutality mass incarceration and or mass incarceration excuse me um and yeah it's it's we're just continuing to fight and we have to keep fighting because then there won't be you're your grandchildren my children they they won't have a new perspective if we don't get con you're sure if if if rosa parks said oh this is what it is i'm gonna go to the back of the bus where would we be and for so many other things where will we be so it's our just we're just continuing to fight and uh it's a new title but same fight and things are getting better slowly and not in every way things are getting better but things are getting better millennials black lives matter well i'll jump in and say um i i certainly appreciate what you're saying and i love your intentionality about support and being vocal about your views and it's while the thing like i'm twice your age like and i love to see you know at such a young age that you've developed this voice that it takes people much longer often times to develop but i would say for um black lives matter like you said it's it's it's the same fight it's the same narrative it's not the same agenda because we are making some progress um but i you know i support what's being done collectively and just moving the agenda forward so that you know my kids my grandkids my great grandkids won't have the same battles that we're dealing with today they will have struggles of some sort because that's just human nature and every society every generation every culture has that so i don't know what their problems will be but i'm very happy that their problems won't be the same thing my grandparents went through or you know my great-great-grandparents or what i've even had to deal with so i certainly do um respect the movement respect what they're doing and just keep the narrative going black lives matter i feel like people have turned it into a marketing scheme or turned it into a bad word like like black lives matter is that within itself like black lives really do matter and it's not in attack against anybody else or it's not taking away from anybody else say that again but at the end of the day somebody broke it down as an example you know october is breast cancer awareness month you know they're not saying that all other cancers aren't you know as serious aren't as deadly but we just want to cause you know raise awareness for this cause right now these are the things that are happening to us these are the things that we deal with every day and we wanted to bring it to your attention but as i mentioned it kind of turned into a marketing scheme to me it's just so interesting to see the nfl with in racism at the end you know in the end zone or whatever where they make the touchdowns and it's just like y'all had the opportunity to speak up before you had the opportunity you know to be on the forefront of progressing and making change and now all of a sudden it's well you know we saw the nba do it and they didn't lose money and nothing happened to them you know over the summer so we're just gonna follow suit and put it on the back of our helmets like it's not a trend our our lives and our livelihood it's not you know something that's in this season like we're black all of the time and it matters all of the time not some of the time when i think of black lives matter not only do i think about the organization and the movement but i think about it as black people as a community and a unit i think about it being a stand an agreement of freedom and equality to continue to make change even when it feels like we're not but we have times are definitely different in so many ways but like um weston was saying it was completely different from what our ancestors had to experience literally being in the field to now you know us standing together marching for our rights as citizens in america but as black people for a system that wasn't even designed for us to make it but we still are not everyone is on the same page but we're trying you know and a lot of us are really trying to make it and not just trying but actually are and we're still trying to pull those who are not and black lives matter you know stand for integrity you know for our skin i'm biracial both of my parents were mixed but my grandfather was black and he was in the military and um i don't see myself any different than black you know i stood so strong on it in college i actually got this tattoo that i don't regret and it's on my arm and it says forever black royalty and it was a friend that i met in college and it was something that you know he stood strong on and valid on and this was something that he was you know all for you know it was his business and that was the extent of me supporting my brother and his not just movement but something that he believed very strongly about and i felt the same way so black lives matter to me means my life this my existence because the only life that i get the chance to live is black and being able to like i said earlier just digests history but now and not being being able to see the president but only have a prediction of what it may come to russia y'all in the older generation i ain't know but you're in the old one mother when y'all hear it what y'all hear what y'all see you uh you don't want me to say that i do because i i'm i'm interested i bet you we have a a [ __ ] is different from what they yeah what they said so there's two sides to when i hear black lives matter there's two sides to that um one side is to white america and it speaks to white america and that that voice says you know there were laws on the books literally laws on the books that said we were less than human in this country that we live in uh and that same country we're still saying hey just treat us like we're like any other human being regardless of the skin color that's that side that's the voice of black lives matter if you want to put two on it okay two whatever but then there's the our side of it and i think whenever we talk about our side of it we quickly dismiss our responsibility for black life and we quickly talk about their their culture their community white people black lives matter to who is my question who does black lives matter too should they only matter to white people black lives matter has to matter to us first i never forget this when the black lives matter train come rolling through our community proverbial it's not a real train by the way i saw dope boys protesting black lives matter but you sell dope to the same black community that you live in don't tell me black lives matter they don't matter to you see we don't want to take ownership of our responsibility when i go out and and and have seven baby mamas get them all pregnant and don't take none of them take care of none of them don't tell me black lives matter to you you created a black life and you don't even take care of it so surely black lives don't matter to you you ain't even supporting your own life that you created when you won't go down and spend any time at the school board meeting you won't take your lazy behind down to the voting poll and vote don't tell me black lives matter to you when you leave your neighborhood store and go spend money in another community but won't drop a dime on your own don't tell me like see we we we jump on the bandwagon cause it sounds good and it's easy to point the fingers is what i was saying earlier until we take ownership it's easy to find every excuse as to why when are we going to take care of our own community starting with our own home starting with our own responsibilities then we can see maybe we don't have to be equal maybe we can do our own but we won't we won't do that as long as black lives matter is an excuse so my question is black lives matter to who that's the tough conversation we don't want to have that in our community whenever you do that then it's all he he'll [ __ ] no he would wait people no no no no we just need to talk about what we need to do in our own community we need to address some real issues within our own community as well not not i'm not saying that white cops killing black boys don't i'm talking about okay that's one piece when the boy shooting up the neighborhood and you know who doing the killing and that police come knock on your door and feel for your own life you don't say nothing but yet people started dying in the community black life don't matter the only life that matters is yours see we got to get out of that man we got to start dealing with real issues in our community and when we do then we'll make the world pay attention to that time who does black lives matter too were you going down the same path so from your standpoint i'm in total agreement i think there's that other that other level of you know still needing to be inclusive still having that level of what ladonna's great-grandparents had an understanding of needing allies to walk along with you i'm grateful for the dave ramsey's who are willing to say this is my experience let me give it to you so that you can also have your own piece of what i got i'm grateful for people like my friend sherry deutschman who operates something called the brain trust where she saw black lives matter and said it's not gonna happen on my watch and created she's she's one of nashville's celebrated female millionaires and said i'm going to create a brain trust for other women to be able to level up their businesses so if you're making this amount of money i will come and mentor with you provided that you in each one of your little courthouse you at least have 70 percent of those members be other black women or women of color so that they too can get this knowledge and for people like my friend donald miller who said i didn't want to just donate to some black lives matter to say i did my part because i see that my business is an all-white all-male business i want to do something different i want to change the conversation let me go find some other black owners that are doing something great and let me pour into them because what are we all trying to do anyway we just trying to live that's america though believe it or not america is not what we see on tv that's a narrative there's more hey your grand your great grandfather what year what year was that greater grandfather 1896 1896 there were people like that hundreds of years ago that still exists today racism is not an individual racism is a system so if you get caught up on skin color shame on you shame on you because i've had people who are not my skin color come to my aid and i've had my own skin color not i'm not knocking down my race because i've also had my own skin color come to my a and i've had people who are not my skin color or not we're talking the difference between good and evil that ain't got that to do with no skin color so racism is a system which means until you understand what you're fighting against you can be fighting it forever trying to fight people you'll be fighting forever trying to fight people people will do you good today and the same person will stab me in the back tomorrow that's good and evil that has nothing to do with race does that make sense make sense and so what we have to do as a collective as a a community is do our part god will send whatever allies learn to love everybody i don't have problem with racist people you know why i don't cause i know who they are i have no problem if first if persons tell me they don't like me i'm happy you know why because i know who you are and i know how to deal with you i don't have a problem with that i have a problem with a person who's racist but yet they smile in my face and everything good and i don't know that they're racist and it takes an act of god to discern that you understand what i'm saying i would rather know who you are there's nothing wrong with that i'm pro my people you pro your people the only difference is i can't do nothing to affect your people so just don't do nothing to affect mine that's all and as long as you do that we're good but everybody else man ain't got time to be worried about no skin color who is and who ain't y'all listening you won't stand before god i'll say it again you will not stand before god and be able to talk about some particular race that did something to you naw man no some of the some of the biggest blessings in my life came from white people that's god using a white person the same way he uses a black one some of my some of my biggest burdens have come from black people but i love my people just the same that's individuals that's good and evil that's not race would you say the black community is thirsty for acceptance and inclusion from the white community it depends on your circumstances okay i don't care honestly like i'm not seeking acceptance because my reality is very different and like my business we work with black people right so you know i don't care about white opinion it's good to have a positive relationship if you will but i've just never had to operate and i've never worked for a white person you know i've never had that submission if you will instilled in me but again going back to what you said previously it's economic empowerment it's education you know my family's been highly educated and influential and we take pride in being able to provide employment for others and we have a large scholarship program that we have as well so we're able to give back what we have been blessed with and that's what's most important to me and i want to be able to you know make sure my kids never have to care about what others think of them who's in charge of them who's ruling their life like it doesn't matter create your own narrative and so that you know five or 10 or 15 generations down the line you know we've created our own reality so how did you say ladonna i thought we was going to argue but i guess not we're going to say we don't say it no all i know is honestly but that's what i'm saying i'm not saying this let donna want to be accepted i'm the community as a community and as a coach or do we want to be accepted i still say no say no to that because i think we have our own we have our own culture and i think we're not fighting for acceptance from them we're fighting for them to leave us alone we're fighting for them to to stop killing us we're fighting for equality you know leave us alone i see that differently oh i see that same thing i see us saying now if one of us would have did it who cares i'm not saying that we should be we should settle for whatever handouts we're given i'm not saying that what i am saying is with the fight has been such a long fight because one day we hope to be equal hmm but shouldn't we all be equal though we should be well well well let me ask you this is your bible made of equal people i'll give you time no i'll give you i let's do it with god let's go with god's eyes but jan has created these systems of inequality hold on hold on let's go with god's eyes or or in in your bible from the beginning of time was did god see everybody the same no never had he created adam he had his people and he wanted his people to not be like them he had not that not again not talking about who's better and who's worse i'm not talking about that because then we got to get into good and evil the battle is about good and evil but when we're talking about people you're not going to have equality in the sense of what we what we have been as a race fighting for we're not until he comes back we're not so why are we still the same people sis that cried unto god and he heard their cry sending a deliverer by the name of moses and brought him out of bondage those same people not even two weeks later and i'm clowning start saying we had it better when we were in egypt at least we had some fish exactly now read your bible did they let them go back into slavery yes multiple times over and over again so either either either we serve a god who understands that we are not going to always be how about how about equal means serving him and anybody who serves him we should be compatible and equal outside of that is good and evil because man's evil issue he's always wanted to be god which means he wants to rule man that will never happen equality will never happen outside of him and so as a race of people who come from god why are we looking for an evil world to be equal with it why are we trying to make sense of evil it'll never happen so when i walk out the door and i go and and and stand in line i'm expecting for somebody to treat this white lady or this white man different that's where i live and guess what it's okay you know why it's okay it has no bearing on my reality has no bearing on my success none of it you asked me this i had this conversation with you in a mentoring situation what question yeah all right i'm going to put you on the spot in a mentoring situation i told you this i said i don't waste my time teaching my son how to act around police i i remember that yep i don't teach my son how to act around white people [Music] because then i'm teaching him to do the same issue that we have now see if i do all of this teaching him about how to respond and react around white people and police it'd be a black friend of him that takes his life wow it'd be his homeboy somebody he's close to that look just like him that'll put him in the grave one day so what i do is i teach him how to be respectful to people yes how to carry himself around people how to handle conflict resolution with people because it ain't based on skin that's good now we're talking good and evil does that make sense y'all yeah yeah so so equality we can't don't don't why would you frustrate we live we love we love we live frustrated lives trying to control stuff we have no control over them we look frustrated our lives are so frustrated and upset and sad and depressed and the world coming to an end all because we're trying to control stuff we have no control over when you learn these two words that i have that's my mantra for 2021 it's okay it's okay i know that's three but technically i'm saying it's okay it's not for me though no that's fine and that's okay got your hair finished what you gonna say i don't that's not okay for me to go somewhere and some white woman be treated better than me because i'm black i'm gonna continue to fight for it and if that's what you believe that it's just gonna be what it's gonna be that's cool for you but i don't agree with that at all i'm gonna fight and as far as your question about us trying to live in a society where we're accepted by white people i could speak for my generation we don't care we don't care we just want to know that if i get stopped by the cops first of all i'm being stopped for something actually illegal and second of all i'm gonna make it home alive that's all that's what we care about but being accepted we don't care we're going to do our own thing and we're going to live our life in our blackness like you said creativity we have our creativity we have our things i don't care i have my own business i'm running my own business i'm going to do that and i'm gonna put whatever i want on my shirt my shirt is gonna say black smile and if you're a white person you don't wanna buy it that's not my problem i'm not here to be accepted by you but i will be respected and i do expect that when i come into contact with you i'm going to be respected like you said for who i am because i'm good period and it's not okay for me to just go somewhere and somebody treat me that's just okay i'm saying i'm saying don't be fussed in other words don't live in a bubble does that make sense like i'm not telling you what to think or how to feel that's okay it's okay for you to have your arm but when it frustrates you and upsets you the reality is the reality and here's what i'm trying to give you the reality of it is it shouldn't and let me tell you why because you cause you don't need it anyway you don't have to they have no control over name the worst day you ever had in life can you remember that whatever day that is just think of it just like whatever you know not necessarily the day itself but incidents that have happened that may have made it may be the worst day that you've ever had uh when my papa died okay when your papa died that's a that's a terrible day in it so did the sun rise that day it did did did the water in your house work that day we have the tendency to make our reality the reality we have the tendency to make our circumstance life you know and the reality is it's not life it's your world and you're the captain of it so don't allow anything outside you to disturb what's in you because your fault here's what the enemy knows when things are divided it loses strength when you're conflicted even in yourself there's less strength you know what you know what made her her fa her great-grandfather strong powerful is in spite of all the external he never lost the internal and he could fight the conflict internally right of the external conflict internally and face it no matter what yeah i'm sure he had frustration times and days in which we quit as a people so often because of what's going on inside and never can we affect what's going on outside because we're so conflicted inside i wouldn't say that as a people though i mean and i mean i guess i can speak for myself is that i i can i battle internally with myself on a daily basis and i'm here right now every day i get up and every day i keep going and i'm mad i'm i'm mad there's a lot to be mad about i am mad but my anger is one of the things that fuels me so you're different that's good dude in a conversation i think just for for us sitting up here we have a certain level of privilege in you know the black community yeah like i mean i'm a college graduate um you know you all are you know successful in your own right and things of that nature but sometimes i think about my friends and the people that i grew up with and just looking how how you know my life may have been different from theirs when i first started going to school i was in pre-k but i went to a white elementary school and for me that was an interesting experience because there you know i was just tanisha you know i was smart i was on you know honor roll made all a's and things of that nature and then my mom got married when i went to fourth grade and we moved and i went to a predominantly black school and at that school you know we were pizza parties fundraisers uh you know the titans would come to our school we had fall festival all of these great and amazing things and then when i got to the other school the books were tore up and you know the teachers were very different in the tone in the way that they deal with us and i i was asked the question why do you talk white and and i was like talk white like what are you talking about you know this is the way i talk and it was the first time i had experienced i can guess you say colorism or whatever the case may be you know people were looking at me because i was different or i came from you know a different experience from them like how you were saying to combat right white privilege or racism you said free enterprise or did you say start your own business or yeah ownership ownership of of of self like you know within our own culture and community what you're just saying what you just said there's variances right we're not all when sometimes you know we're raised on in a two-parent household yet we're black sometimes we're raised by a single mother yet we're black sometimes we're raised in the in the in the project you can only control and take ownership of the the lot you've been given you understand what i'm saying and and make the best of whatever you've been given whenever we look at the disparities and the inconsistencies and the the the the the challenges of this race over that race and this person over that person it takes the ownership out of it it becomes excuses it becomes reasons it becomes you know we do it within our own community well they made it because they had both mom and dad or they made it because they went to this school or got this educational they went to college we have to take ownership as a people and i think you know you know where i'm going with that but what about i i feel like that's easier said than done what about the people who've never you know really seen ownership like for me for example my family i come from a line of women who just you know most of them are single mothers most of them you know have through my eyes have settled and it's gonna take like you know this is what i have i have enough you know to pay my rent i'm gonna be in this apartment you know i'm going to live and work you know for this company for the rest of my life but like for me i don't want those things like they are great and amazing women will you have those things that they have or would you have better no i would have better but i'm just saying what about for the people who can't see past like you said free enterprise and ownership like if they don't see that for themselves how how can we you know help them yeah help them or you know it's easy for us to sit up here and say do this and do that but if they've never seen it done before or if they don't believe it for themselves as a people not i feel like a lot of the things we've been saying up here we've been speaking just for ourselves or through our situations or this is what i do i haven't y'all don't know my background like i was raised you know who i am today is not where i come from um so no i'm not saying i'm not saying hey go start a business i'm saying a solution as a community as a coach not an individual not even brought it down to individuals who have not i was speaking literally largely as a community we need to do more of self-investment ownership working on self that goes back to the black lives matter uh video that i did right yeah yeah yeah yeah taking ownership so not everybody's meant to be a business owner not everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur i'm not saying that whatever lot you've been given figure out how to make that happen and work within that lot versus using it as a crutch or an excuse as to why you can or cannot they're always there always comes somebody who says you know what i've been giving bad lemons all my life but you know what i'm gonna do i'm not gonna make lemonade and sell it i'm gonna plant lemon trees and i'm gonna figure out how to make you know lemonade for a whole generation of people just taking whatever you have and and focusing on what god has given you you none of us will stand before god and blame any race none of us will stand before god and say but god they did this he's gonna want to know what did you do with what i gave you whatever that was it doesn't matter if it was one pence two pence five pence it does not matter he expects increase with what he gave you and as a community we spend too much time talking about well i don't have and they have do with what you do have and watch god bless it but i think it's important to be oh okay oh you haven't oh boy i just have to stand up on that one what you gonna do i need to turn around yes sir so you know just listen to all y'all talking i mean you know many of you all you know don't know me and and and in life i stand big on a lot of different things but one thing i really do stand firm on is believing that and life is your choice as a human being all you know is coming into the world coming from your mother's womb and if you have faith in god then so be it i'm one of those individuals who stand firmly on god i was also someone who lost both of my parents growing up and also at a high school and at a high school that was low academically one of the worst academic schools in tennessee and bounced to multiple different homes growing up raised by my grandmother and uncle and also had four and five other siblings in the home so a lot of stuff that i see on the media and black lives matter not only is that hard to digest but just my life as a whole now and i'm just a young man you know in in at the time when i was 16 losing my mom still trying to find self and then lose my dad in college in the process of finding myself three years later covert happens black lives matter is still hitting hard and then you got history to sit on top of all of that and all i knew was to succeed after i lost my mom it just kind of clicked i had people along the way who guided me so i didn't do it alone but most importantly i had god and i continued to pray and i believed in writing down and manifesting my life even when i was in college i worked multiple different jobs and i knew the system i knew what they were doing with working all these different hours that you know uh in a specific industry and they taking all this money out your check you you you slaving for time so after working all these different jobs and you know finishing school i started my business in my head while i was in college i knew that i had a bigger i knew i didn't go through all this stuff in life just to experience the pandemic life's not over i decided to start a business that's all about training past adversity 365 is what we have to do every single day not just in a training sense but mentally physically emotionally spiritually socially as a black man and woman in the united states of america so i stand so firmly on just believing in self steve harvey says i listen to a lot of his motivation he says stop worrying about worrying about everybody else you know because you can only focus on yourself at the end of the day if you spend your whole life focusing on what happened in the past what's happening now then you will never strive and thrive to the uh uh you know the being that you're supposed to be yeah so that's my viewpoint you was about to say something um i was just gonna say that i i agree with your point about you having to take ownership of yourself and you have to you're the only one who's gonna be able to get you out of your situation you can't focus on everything that's happening to you it's more about well what are you going to do okay this is everything that happened to you but what are you going to do now however i think that sometimes when when black people tell other black people you know well you got to get yours and you you you know you got to get yours and you got to focus on you and this that and the other it's it's a great thought and it's it's true but we can't forget to remind them that you you have to help the rest of us because not to your point there are people that they don't have we all have privilege we all have a certain amount of privilege and i think being in to your you were talking about white um white privilege and it's like okay well i was born here and i was set up with this so i'm gonna i'm gonna roll with it like i'm not gonna be weighed down by what happened in the past but i think you have to be aware of where you're at who's ahead of you and who's behind you and for me it's like i'm aware that i was born into a great family and even even if my family was was going through struggles and even when they were struggling i had no idea because my parents never let me have any idea and and i went to a good school it was a majority black school and but the teachers really cared they really cared about us because i had teachers that looked like me and i i've always had my parents who always supported me so when i wanted to start my business they were like cool seed money here you go start your business i have a friend one of my best friends who has the same drive the same passion the same talent as me and has a gazillion ideas just like i do like she'll call me and say hey i have this idea to do this but she didn't she wasn't born in the same type of life that i have she loves my parents because they're so supportive of me and she doesn't have that and i'm very aware of that that i was given this and i'm gonna take care of me and i'm gonna take care of minds and but my end goal is always to give it back to those people that one may not know i mean your whole point is to teach financial literacy to black community we how can you expect us to know if nobody taught us how can you expect anybody to know something if nobody taught them so when you say you have to yes you have to take care of yours you you can't focus on you know what you don't have you can be aware of it you can be aware of what you don't have you can be aware of what you have but you also have to stress the point of going back and teaching those that don't i agree with that wholeheartedly yeah yeah i'm not disagreeing i didn't what i was saying had nothing to do with the community at large the way you fix the community is you you work on self to better you ever heard somebody say there's no int you ever heard that statement yeah there is an eye in team and guess what that is if i don't do my part i hurt the whole team yeah and so as a community when we better ourselves we better our community can't fix the can't fix the boat the hole in your boat when mind sinking if i fix the hole in my boat then i'm in a better position to then teach you or help you so i agree with you and somebody's always watching you too the things you do does not go unnoticed and and thinking about when you're talking about you know our community we should spend more time paying it forward i'm somebody that like to learn new stuff every day and you get as let's talk about the system all the way from pre-k all the way to high school college just systemized education you have all these classes to balance these uh from from um from middle school all the way up high school college and you learn i think about it as all these like multiple trades at one time so you you learn um how to balance you learn uh accountability you know you have classmates and all that um but what i mean about paying it forward is well when you learn something that's a piece of knowledge share it yeah one of my mentors told me that a couple years ago and she said always remember to pay it forward so it's like when i learn something new i mean you can only tell you can tell everyone but only some people will listen yeah uh a lot of black people are in fear to do something first and when they want to see somebody else do it to see what happens if you wait and you continue to wait then you'll never get anywhere if i waited to start my business and just procrastinated then i would not have gotten this far if i waited to uh leave my job and you know decide to pursue you know my business full-time then i wouldn't have never gotten this far if i didn't make a decision myself so if we can pay it forward more in our community then we'll have more black people owning you know real estate investing and just understanding that okay you may have a job that you work at 95 and i was also listening to this on your on your podcast you got your job working nine to five and also having something on the side that you're working towards so that nine to five won't be your entire life because like i said everything is so accessible now we have to stop complaining and making excuses about something that has already happened it's another transition how are you going to adapt in this transition are you going to get swept up under the rug or you gonna do the sweeping and i decided to sweep let's stay there uh because you said something that uh mignon but i call it mom says and then ladonna comes from that what you just said you said how do we fight white privilege how do we fight racism is by create something within the black community that generates wealth i would love to just stay right there because you all know me i'm the money guy i do a lot of research and when it comes to finances and creating generational wealth for the african-american community i have to be honest and transparent i get frustrated with us because we go back and we blame the last 400 years and we blame white privilege and we blame everyone else rather than just saying hey i'm going to take advantage of where i am i'm going to bust my butt and i'm going to sit here and think about okay what is my granddaughter ladonna going to be doing five generations from now with this company that creates millions not for my son but my son's son my son's son and my son's daughter and my daughter but we we complain like how do we create and get over the past and focus about today and change tomorrow that's so good i'm screaming on the inside right now y'all were uh like making a joke when ladonna was coming in and she walks in in slow motion yeah she does that's how you suppose when madonna comes in a room everybody says who is that and she comes with she comes with a presence yeah she has this invisible entourage around her right she does and when you said that about she's always been free she may not you know see it that way but because i truly do believe that entrepreneurship is freedom it's the only way to ultimately you know live free and to not be into debt to other people but i thought about my grandbabies that's gonna be lincoln and zoe one day i just saw them they go walking slow like you know you just personified that for me you changed the narrative yeah like that's what i've been working for and i never knew what that was gonna look like but i did say i wanted to be great because i wanted for my granddaughters to walk into a room and for them to say my grandmother was mignon francois and i want that to matter for something and for her that matters mm-hmm she's walking in it she's walking it's reliving it all she has to do is walk in and say you know her last name and then you start telling her story yeah she doesn't have to say anything and i love that but the way that the way that we answer the question my sisters and i laid our grandmother to rest last year when we when we left her funeral we went to tario louisiana okay and that's my maiden name and so tario was one of the largest plantations in louisiana and so we asked siri to take us to tario and it landed us in the middle of an operating sugar cane field and standing there with my sisters i was in awe of the landscape thinking about the past i thought about the women who walked that ground before me i sauntered onto this plantation you better not tell me nothing about being here this isn't my land but it's got my name on it and so i'm gonna be here and if i was we were off onto these people's property yeah and we walked in there with our level of privilege and as we stood there this four-way stop sign it dawned on me that i had to be great and i had to do my due diligence to make my name great because the women who came before me whose names you will never know who were excellent in all that they did they had to be excellent in all that they did you will never know their name but you will experience them because you will experience me and i will be great and you will say my name and you will say my name and it will be attached to good business yeah and it will be attached to generational wealth and legacy because i'm gonna make certain that it happens and so what i've been doing with my business and my time i took my business back to new orleans where i'm from i had this idea that i wanted to redeem the time that was stolen from them and so i wanted to plant my business in places where we had been historically enslaved and create enterprise and go back and get the money that they couldn't get and so we had to go back to new orleans where we're from and where the hub of slave trade was and i had to teach it to my sisters and then they're going to teach it and then those children are going to teach it and we're grooming the next generation right now and i just think that that's how you do it you don't make excuses you don't say i think about barack obama and how he said he had to do his homework in those kind of wee hours because that's when his mother was available and i think if we stop making excuses for our children or why we can't do things we will have a great a greater generation with a greater opportunity and i just think the way that you do it is you do it hard if it's hard you do it hard and i just think that you you don't get to complain [Music] just like you were saying you don't get to complain no excuses yeah you don't get to complain no excuses it's we got to take ownership and and when you say how do we do it it doesn't have to be you know we got to come together that's the problem we're constantly talking man we got to come together we got to come how about you just do your part i do my part but i can't do my part i'm black well that's that's that's the problem right there you you think you know in terms of people think in terms of you know black as a stigmatization stigmatism and it's not they have a 400-year head start what are you talking about i'm trying to catch up i'm just trying to do my part see see see we all have a leg to run we all have a leg to run it's a relay race right before you somebody else was before you your mom and dad they came along they're running their race and they passed the baton to you for you to run yours she talked about her legacy they ran their race and they're passing out now she's just running a better leg to prepare for the next that five-year-old or whoever to run the next we we cannot be caught up on what anybody else if we just do our part yeah just out you're changing the legacy of your of of of your of the o'neill family right right right am i right right by what you did right but all you did was your part yeah when your leg is done god's gonna call you home ain't no more running to do yeah yeah run to the best of your ability and stop worrying about who else on the track um yeah run to the best of your ability ladonna you you the baton is in your hand of a multi-million dollar budget a year company i want you to talk into that how do you feel because aren't you the first woman in the chair of your family yes at young you're in your young 30s um let's talk about that because i got to ask you this question straight up did what they say did the white culture the white man um prevent you and your family from succeeding there were some road bumps for sure you know certainly but um you know it's interesting just to think about what you're saying passing the baton and that when you were saying that i was thinking it's when you're part of the race is done but it's up to you to leave nuggets of wisdom along the way yeah so you know there's no way i could be where i am right now without the wisdom of my father and their grandfather so my great-great-grandfather founded our company in 1896 so 125 years later we're still in existence and the sole purpose is because he wanted to provide an opportunity for newly freed black people to have their voice heard in the context of religion so you know they wanted to get away from the religion of the the white man if you will and the oppression that comes with that but still be able to freely express themselves in the context of christianity so in the way that he wanted to do that was in the written word obviously in the 1800s and previously it was literally illegal for black people to be literate so to to go from being born in mississippi in 1843 being enslaved and then in 1896 buying a press to literally distribute the written word amongst freely your newly freed black people is something that is is quite impressive you know there were threats on his life and you know obviously like nobody wanted him to succeed that was on the outside but he was able to succeed with the support of his peers in the church wow so interestingly enough you know he couldn't just go somewhere and buy a press he had to rely on a white counterpart to help that transaction and he also relied on his wife to provide some resources as well so she actually sewed into his dream to be able to establish the company now just and i know anthony is on you but i just want to say what you just said was so powerful because while he has this macro scopic your great-grandfather microscopic view of racism in his day which would be totally different than we what we would even begin to say we can experience he also has a view of white people totally different than most mm-hmm yeah and that and that's the god narrative that's the part that as a believer you should not be experiencing racism like everybody else because you're not up under that same umbrella wow you should not be yeah yeah the favor of god should be on your life i don't get scared when a cop pulls me over he has the answer to the same god that i have to answer to and even if he has bad intentions i know the person who controls his heart so why am i going to fear him does that make sense not that not that that there isn't cops who do bad things right but i've made it this long you asked me about a gun i made it this long without a gun because i know who controls the heart of man and i'm not being super spiritual i'm simply saying that i haven't experienced fear like the person who every time a cop pulls them over it's shaking in their boots rewind time 15 years ago were were were cops killing blacks yes but were you afraid to get pulled off no what's the difference tv what's the difference media now you've been given a fear you've been handed a fear right now i have to worry because i've never personally experienced a cop doing this but i saw it on tv i heard it on the internet so therefore now when the cop comes i got to put my hands up i got to make sure that i don't go fast for my wallet that's been handed to me as a believer i don't operate in that i can talk to him with respect and and anything that is going to happen let me tell you something child of god it was going to happen with or without you that's who we serve the guy who controls both evil and good no nothing gets by him it's all in his hands and so his narrative of of of racism is is is not like everybody else would have been because here it is you're in business today multi-million dollar business generations later off of the seed of somebody in a different color skin mm-hmm the idea of allies if you will and going back to what you said about the fear being instilled it's also power instilled in others so come on we get the fear they get the power wow mm-hmm so we gotta say that again yeah so we need to switch that it's like i said it's a broken system anyway i think we need a new sort of switch it play their game it needs to be eliminated and started over it's an understanding of what's happening to you versus what's happening for you come on mm-hmm and and when you when you see it that way like it's a choice it's a choice to believe that everything that's happening to me is happening for me because the bible tells me that he always causes me to triumph that's fine and that it's not over until i win and that all things not some things not sometimes not some of the things not some of the time are working for my good according to his riches you know we can we can talk about this for hours and we've been talking about this going on for you know a while but i want i want to end on a love note about us what is in one sentence sentence you guys not a paragraph are you looking at are you looking at me when you're just saying you know oh yeah look at that you know sentence i want you to take some time i want you to think about what do you love about the black community what do you love when you think about us what makes you smile what makes you happy what encourages you what what gives you that joy that that excitement about us as a community no no no no no before you go can i can i go last but i can't do it in one sentence no yes it's flavor i'm a new orleans girl and katrina put us all over the world like pj morton said and we sprinkled that flavor from sea to shining sea and in every place in our culture american history red or yellow black or white you see the influence of the enslaved african people and no greater time did i see that than how we were spread after katrina and how we saw our culture end up in different cities around the world so for me what i love about the black community is its flavor and how it has fed this entire world wesley i love uh how we stand together and pick up each other when you know we're down yeah and standing together as a unit whether it's fighting for black lives matter regardless of you know the black people that may be a part of the movement they're still black they still want to be heard and they feel as if we're fighting for something which we are intentions are in the right place and you ask yourself is that good enough me personally that's something that you know that that person you know has to deal with but us standing together as a unit and also picking each other up you know uh when when you're down i think about it as in the people i have in my circle i'm big about you know surrounding myself with um you know black people who uplift me who pushed me who motivates me who who gives me that that burst of energy when i'm having a bad day and i got some great friends who do that so you know saying that to say just just continue to uplift you know one another love it who's next oh you smiling i'm gonna keep it to the one sentence thank you [Laughter] i was gonna use that none of them none of them one sentence i love how we can make something out of nothing hey one sentence can you do one sentence madonna can you do one uh maybe okay well i was gonna say like i it's hard to pick i love everything about black culture i love you know just the the variance in our experiences i love like our culture i love that we can you know see a black person walk down the street and do a little head nod you know what that means you know i just i love our shared experiences i know i'm going on i love hbcus i graduated from two i went to spelman for undergrad and tennessee state university for my master's so it's just like those shared experiences are something that you can't even explain you just have to be there to witness it and feel it ladies i love i just love black people i think i think black people are amazing um everything that you guys said creating something out of nothing being able to connect i think that's that's probably my favorite thing about black people and like i said be on the hbcu campus it's so diverse we come from all different places and we have our problems within the community but everybody has their problems and it's like my little brother i'm gonna talk about him i'm gonna mess with my little brother but if anybody else messed with my little brother it's on site it's on site and i think it's the same for a black community we have our problems but and we have our differences but at the end of the day we have each other's back and we're gonna love each other and we're gonna connect and when you see a black person in public you're on an all-white space or wherever you're at it's like and you know what that means so you can get you can give each other the look and you all know what that means you know exactly what you're thinking you're the last one preacher you got 30 seconds that's right cause you can't do a sentence but i give you 30 seconds so the word love means value literally um anything you value you cherish anything you value you hide right if it's a value you don't just leave it out in the open and you hide it because things of value get stolen so when we say love we're really saying value and what i value about us is that we're so valuable but we just don't know it the world knows it they hide they hide our history value they steal our identity value everything that makes us valuable are the things that we look down oppression you don't oppress a people who are not a people mm-hmm why would you oppression is because there's a value there and you don't want them to know they have value and so what i love about us what i value about us is just how valuable we are but the day will come where our eyes will be open and we'll understand who we are but until that time the world knows it the world sees it and the world will continue to profit off of it and continue to you know make money off of it and be successful off of it we built the world built it do your homework do your history valuable we're just ignorant as to who we are that's why you're the pastor i was gonna say i need to know where your church is because i already know your name now like you said well i want to thank you all for thank you man doing uh this is my second black history panel uh definitely not my last you all have just share with us your thoughts and i thank each and every single one of you for taking out of your time to come and just share your thoughts share your opinions share your wisdom and share your experiences you know and so thank you so much and to those of you all watching um thank you thank you for spending this this week with us listening to our thoughts uh listening to our hearts uh share this um it's on both youtube and podcasts where you listen to podcasts so make sure to subscribe on youtube and subscribe and download and share um on the podcast and i'm gonna tag all their information their instagrams clubhouses youtube's twitter we're gonna put that in the show description and just here's the key thing i wanna leave you all with love everyone at the end of the day love everyone no matter their skin color and i didn't talk at all because i'm just the host but i would definitely agree with weston that i have some of the greatest blessings have come from white people some of my biggest burdens have come from black people but then i've had some bad things with white people as well and so one thing i've learned is to love all just as much as i love you it's your boy ayo let me see you you already know on the next show peace [Music] out you

Channel: The Table With AO

Views: 95,225

Keywords: anthony oneal, anthony oneal debt free degree, anthony oneal student loans, money, budget, how to save money, personal finance, debt free, how to budget, debt, how to make money, how to get out of debt, student loan debt, student loans, african American, black, hiphop, culture, millennial, student, The MOST IMPORTANT Conversation That Needs To Be Continued (Black History Panel 2021)

Id: 2aMF3-a3ubM

Length: 123min 18sec (7398 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021