E48: Let's Just Stop Fighting: Recommit to Empower the Next Generation

Hello everyone, how are you?

Welcome to Inclusion Unscripted. My name is Margaret Spence, and today we are going to reflect on the affirmative action case that came to the Supreme Court. I had originally planned to take a bit of the summer off and not return to do the Inclusion Unscripted live until probably August, just taking a mental break from this. But today I am back for an episode of Inclusion Unscripted where we're really going to just— I don't even want to talk about the affirmative action case, I don't want to talk about the Supreme Court itself, I just want to talk about the fight, the fight that we are in as people of color, as women, as the LGBTQ+ community, as American citizens, as people who want small d democracy, as people who want diversity, equity, inclusion, and equality. The question is why are we still fighting? That is the question. I think that is the question I want to talk about today, and I don't plan to do a 45-minute, um, live podcast today. I just want to evaluate the fight because I think there are many of us people of color, Black people, women, the LGBTQ+ community, um, young people, people who want to see a different future, where we feel that we are fighting in vain. We feel like this fight that we thought we had won, or that we were making progress— I don't think we've ever won anything I think where we felt we were making progress, we realize that we are not making any progress at all. And unfortunately, today in the middle of my live, there is a rainstorm going on outside and the power and internet keeps getting more buggy, but I'm gonna do this, um, and I will pause whenever the internet goes out, but I want to get some stuff off my thoughts. And really, I want us to stop talking about the affirmative action case in the negative. I want us as people of color, as Black people— I'm not going to talk to everybody, I'm going to talk to Black people, right? I want us as Black people to stop talking about the affirmative action case and double down on what it is that we are going to do every damn day from now forward to advance our people, to advance us. I almost don't want to talk about anybody else. I want to talk about us as Black people, right? What are we going to do to advance ourselves? And what do we need to do looking through the rearview lens of affirmative action as we drive away from it But in all honesty, we've driven away from it a long time ago. I mean, for many of you, this is gut-wrenching, it's heart-wrenching, it's, you know, I'm gonna get emotional about it. I hear you, but this train left the track in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan. That's when affirmative action left the train track, right?

So maybe I'm dating myself, I'm a little bit older than some of you, And I remember when this fight started in the '80s with Ronald Reagan.

That's when the affirmative action fight really started.

And so we come to 2023, and the train pulled into the station and kicked the whole crapload of us off, and we are somewhere. So let's talk for a second.

About what we do as Black people. And if you've never joined me before on Inclusion Unscripted, my name is Margaret Spence. I am the founder of the Inclusion Learning Lab, and I am the host of Inclusion Unscripted. And we are not just building diversity and inclusion, we are living this thing every day. We are living diversity, equity, inclusion, equality, belonging, thriving, justice, all of that acronym shit that you guys want to use. We as people of color don't get to put the acronym on in the morning when we walk into the organization. We have to live this shit every day. So we live this diversity, equity, inclusion, equality, um, belonging, thriving—

we live this stuff every single solid day. We don't get to unzip our Blackness and go home to something different.

When we wake up in the morning, this is who we are. When we wake up in the morning, we lead and we live within the inequities that has been built around systemic racism in the United States and around the world. We live with it, you know, um, we don't get a choice to put it down. So race is always the discussion for us because that is how you see us.

You know, every so often I have to leave the United States and go home to Jamaica because I just need a dose of solid Blackness where I don't have to fight because I'm Black. That's the truth, that is the truth. And I'm feeling right now today that I need to buy an airline ticket and leave this effing country for at least a week to go figure out that my Blackness is perfect just the way it is.

But that's neither here nor there. That's not what we're talking about today. I am tired of fighting. I'm sick and tired of fighting for our existence.

I'm sick and tired of white people moving the bar every time they think we are getting closer to accomplishing something. I am sick and tired of living in these white spaces that I have to contort myself to be something that I am not. I am sick and tired of not being able to tell you the truth honestly. The truth is no one had a voice around affirmative action. Everybody posting on social media right now about affirmative action didn't have a voice to protest, to get in the streets, to do something before the Supreme Court did this. Nobody had the gumption to reach out to the one guy that's been driving this affirmative action discussion since the '80s. Nobody had the gumption to talk to this guy who has been pitting the Asian community, the AAPI community, against the Black community in bringing this affirmative action case. So let's have an honest discussion about what this fight is. This fight was a white man pitting the Asian community against the Black community in the fight for affirmative action. That's what this was. And we don't want to say that. We don't want to say it. We don't want to, like, come right out and say what this is. That's what happened. And Then the next case that came out today about the, um, imaginary website lady who has never built a website for anybody, never built a website in her life. She gets to the Supreme Court with a case that says, I don't have to build a website for an LGBTQ+ couple who wants to build a wedding website, but she's never actually built a website for anybody. But she gets to decide with 6 human beings what the rest of us should think and do. So if we are going to constantly be in this fight for affirmative action, fight for admission of Black people, fight for XYZ, if we're going to live in the fight space, that is where they want us to be. That's where the white people who are driving this wedge between the communities of color and the LGBTQ+ community, they want us to fight, but we've got to get strategic and stop being so damn tactical about what we do, right? We need to stop being tactical. We need to become strategic. We need to be strategic about what we do from here going forward. So today I'm not going to spend a ton of time talking about what we lost, because in all honesty I don't think we lost anything because affirmative action has been benefiting white women since it was, it was created, and Black people have come along for the ride. The law was sort of written for us, but the people who benefited from affirmative action have been white women, right? And what, what nobody wants to talk about with the dismantling of affirmative action is that white women are going to be the biggest losers. Users in this affirmative action discussion.

But that's not why we're here.

Let me tell you why we're here. I have an 18-month-old grandson.

His name is Douglas.

That's why we're here today.

We're not here for all of you that are currently in the workforce and all of that stuff.

I'm not here for y'all. I'm here for my 18-month-old grandson who arrived in this world 18 months ago with a whole bunch of laws that was in place that protected him, and today those laws are not in place.

That's why I'm here.

So here's what we need to do, Black people. Let me talk to you because I honestly don't— don't—

I'm not going to care about everybody else.

I'm going to talk about us. We have to recognize that in order for us to achieve what we need, we need to double down inside of our own communities. We need to double down inside of our own communities, inside of the Black community. We as Black professionals who think we have arrived at the mecca place, who think we have arrived at the top, who have great job titles and beautiful cars and Gucci purses. We need to disconnect from the stuff of success and recognize that our entire being as Black people is in threat, just as it was in the '40s and '50s and '20s and the 1800s when they dragged us onto the slave ships.

And brought us to the Americas.

Our existence is under threat, and just as white people are coalescing around themselves, Black people need to coalesce around our communities. We need to build our communities from the ground up. We need to build our communities from the daycare center to the doctor's office. We need to build our communities from the daycare center, from the time the baby lands in a woman's womb. We need to build and support our communities from the inception of the egg all the way till the person reaches wherever it is that they want to go. And we as Black people need to support our community. I don't give a rat's shit about anybody else's community right now. The community I care about is mine. My grandson who's 18 months old, that's who I care about. Because I be damned if he's gonna walk into this world that we want to take a shit on and tell him that is perfect and he must come in and chump around in this shit that we're trying to create. And if you don't like me cussing, log off, right? Because I am sick and tired of us forgetting where we came from as Black people and forgetting our communities because we have been allowed to move into the suburbs and move into the, the white communities, and we've forgotten about our Black communities. So when you take affirmative action away from us, the way we solve it is that we as Black people who have gotten those college degrees and those PhDs We start going back into those elementary schools and middle schools and high schools and educating our Black students. We start going back to the daycare centers, to the, to the single mom communities, to the, to the married couple communities, and we start to put our arms around our community. Because unless we create a plan that is our community-focused, everything that is being done to stop us will succeed. Yes, we need to vote, but voting ain't gonna get us too damn far. It's not. What we have to do is go back into our communities, take off our red bottoms, put on those you know, Clarks, put on those, um, Keds, put on those sneakers and go back into our community. We need to be volunteering in our daycare centers. We need to be volunteering in our schools where at-risk youths are. We need to be going into our high schools and talking and helping our students, our Black students. Become prepared for these colleges. But here's what we need to do: we need to help our Black students understand that Harvard is not the answer to our Blackness, right? Florida A&M, Bethune-Cookman, every one of the historically Black colleges is just as good as any of those white colleges. I remember in 1979 being recruited to go to college, to go to an all-white college here in Florida. The recruiter came and sat in my house in New York and told me all the reasons why I should come to that Black college— that white college. They gave me all the reasons why I should come, why I should get a presidential scholarship, why they were going to give me all kinds of money to come to that white college. And when I arrived on that white college campus, the level of racism that I encountered affected my mental health for years after I left that campus. The level of actual hostility that I encountered from those professors, the administrators, and I was stuck there because I had no money to leave. So I had to endure that. Is that what we want for the next generation of our kids? We want affirmative action to go into these hostile environments where these white people don't want us there, and we want to feel that our mental health is okay going into that shit? If you don't want us on our college campuses, so be it. It's time for us to double down on our own institutions. Our own institutions, our own medical schools, our own dental schools, our own colleges, and say to the system that doesn't want us in it, "F you, we don't have to be here. You are not our only option." See, we're fighting and we're not building our own bench. Our bench needs to be built. We need to stop Black-on-Black violence. We need to go into communities where kids are at risk, and we need to say to those kids, there is an opportunity out of here. And we need to start taking those, those vehicles of opportunities to our own Black community, our own schools. And here's the thing to the HBCUs, because I sent a kid to an HBCU. One of my sons went to an HBCU, right? And I could tell you that was not perfection. That was days of hell. If we are going to fully invest in our Black institutions, then our Black institutions need to fully invest in our Black students. Fully. We need to gain capacity so that we can absorb our gifted, strong empowered students, and we need to put our arms around them, graduate them. And then when they come into the corporate world, all of you Black professionals who've arrived in these corporate circles, you need to start engulfing and putting your arms around every Black person that arrives on your— at your job site. Because if we don't care about ourselves enough, then we will continue to fight for a space where white people don't want us, and I'm tired of fighting for a space that you don't want me. I, I'm not gonna fight that fight anymore. What I'm gonna say is Margaret is gonna double down on going into the Black community, going into schools as I do now, and working with kids to say this is how you can manage your career, this is what your college experience can look like, this is how you fill out an application, this is how I'm gonna write you a reference so you can get into the school. And if you've graduated from one of these majority white schools that is now going to try to contort themselves post-affirmative action and you want to champion a Black student onto that campus, recognize that you are championing them for 4 years or 5. You're gonna champion them through the entire experience because for too long we have neglected our own communities in an attempt to fit in to the majority community. But we are the global majority, and if we as the global majority cannot put our arms around ourselves and create opportunities for ourselves then we miss the opportunity. We miss the opportunity, and we are always in the anger mode because white people decided to take something away from us that we thought was securely ours. There is nothing based on what has happened from the overturning of Roe to the affirmative action cases to the student loan issue, to the LGBTQ, I don't want to make you a website issue, to the total assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is nothing that's been given to us that is secure. So if we think that we have arrived, that our job titles and our positions are safe because we are the Black person in the room, think again. The world that they want to create does not include us, so we better start creating a world that is resilient for ourselves. See, here's the thing, Black people, we have to be resilient for ourselves. We cannot depend on white people to create a path that is going to allow us to succeed. We cannot do that because what ends up happening is the Supreme Court, 6 white people, get to decide, as they did in the Dred Scott decision way back when, right? See, every time we get a right and we feel that those rights are secured and we fought the battle and we don't have a battle left to fight The Supreme Court is used to remind us of who we really are to them, and somehow we are surprised that this happened. We are surprised that the Supreme Court pulled affirmative action fully away from us. This is what they've always done— give you the red ball, you go chasing it. And then they pull it away. Think about this. PPP loans were given to hundreds of thousands of businesses across the U.S. Those loans were given and they were forgiven, as in you don't have to pay them back. So you got federal money, and if you filled out the right set of paperwork, you didn't have to pay the loan back. While Black businesses failed because we didn't have a safety net, right? Many of us didn't have employees, so we couldn't get PPP loans, right? So, but we— but now we're asking for student loan forgiveness because somebody told us that going to Harvard and getting $100 million worth of student loans was going to advance our careers, only to find out when we showed up in the white companies that we're being paid less, we're advancing slower, we're not achieving what we should achieve, and the DE&I program is trying to right the wrong.

And they plan to dismantle the DE&I programs too.

So we aren't going anywhere unless we recognize really quickly, recognize that in order for us to advance In order for us to move forward, we've got to take our communities to ourselves. We as Black people, we as brown people, we as the, the, the global majority, we have to take control of our communities and not depend on white folks to validate our existence. That is the truth. So that is the truth. We have to work with our communities. We have to work with our communities to build what we want to see. If you want more Black doctors, then we need to go in to the communities and find the kids who are excelling in science, and we need to tutor and mentor and work and walk them to the finish line. We have to do that. We will not depend on white teachers and white professors to point out that our students are the best. We have to empower and hold up our own community every single day. If we want better, um, maternal child care, maternal outcomes for Black women, then we've got to get into our community and put our arms around Black women so that when they get pregnant, they will live to have their babies. I am sick and tired of waiting for the white world to fix our issues. They don't give a shit about us. Let's say it real clear, they don't care. They can talk caring, but if they cared, they wouldn't allow the Supreme Court to do what it's done to women, to Black people, to the LGBTQ+ community, to everyone. They wouldn't allow it. You wouldn't be silent and voting for that if you cared about us. So why don't we just stop deluding ourselves and stop fighting and start making clear action plans to build a Black community built on empowering us from the time the woman is pregnant to the day we die. We are responsible for our community. They are not responsible for our community. We are responsible for our community. We are responsible for our affirmative actions. We are responsible to affirm our importance. We are responsible for the affirmative actions that it takes to build a progressive, empowered Black community. We are responsible for it. I don't give a shit about what the Supreme Court did. What I am saying to you is we are responsible for the Black community that we are a part of. We are responsible for the Black team members inside of our organizations. We need to stop upholding white supremacy and let it fall on the sword that it needs to fall on. And if you're doing the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion, We need to stop making excuses for the reasons why equity does not exist. We need to stop because all we are doing is making ourselves less important. None of us have arrived anywhere unless we recognize that if one of us is left behind All of us are behind. We have to understand that our affirmative action is to go into the Black community and build a solid Black community. We don't care what the media says. We don't care about how they title us. We don't care about how they want to think about us. We don't care about that. What we care about is making sure that no one gets left behind. You Black people have not risen up to the top of the hill enough to forget about the person at the very bottom who is living in poverty and impoverished. We have not gone up the mountain high enough to forget about our brothers and our sisters who are left behind. In poverty who feel that gun violence is the answer. We have not gone up the hill enough to forget where we have come from, because every second that we are breathing, the white world reminds us of who they want us to be. So unless we recognize that we have to build our community. We have to be responsible for our community. There's no amount of posting on social media that's going to make affirmative action come back. So it's imperative that we take our own affirmative action. Our affirmative action is to go into our community and build it from the ground up. Let me give you a sense of what I'm talking about. A couple days ago, I posted on LinkedIn— someone posted about a venture fund for Black hair care products and that they were going to empower Black hair care products so that Black women would have hair care products. They were going to give first-level funding to that. That's great, but guess what happens every time a Black hair care product company excels, make sales, we buy their product. That Black founder is forced to sell to the big companies, the big white companies, and they take our Black investment and put it into the white coffers, and they give us nothing back in return. Let me give you the example. Miel just sold to P&G. Carol's Daughter sold to L'Oréal, right? Um, all of these companies have sold out, and the people who are leading the companies that are selling the products back to us as Black people are white men. That's the irony. But because we are not conscious of our being, conscious of who we are, conscious of our commitment to ourselves as Black people, we get to be served up as an item on the menu. So the Supreme Court chose this week to serve Black people, LGBTQ people, right, student loans who are primarily Black people. They, they chose to serve us all up on a platter. So what do we do? What do we do? We double down in our own community. We take our affirmative actions to our community. So the call to action for all of you is simply this: What are you going to do starting today to make the Black community better? What are you going to do to make the Black community better? And don't tell me that we're waiting for something to happen. If every single one of us went into an elementary, a daycare, a middle school, a high school, and gave back even an hour a month to Black students and gave them a bellwether curve to look at, gave them a shining star on the hill. If we did that, we would not need affirmative action. See, we don't need these carrots that they keep hanging in front of us. We do not need the carrots. We don't need them. You want to give it to us and take it back? Take it and shove it where the sun don't shine. We don't need it. What we need is specific actions, specific actions that are going to affect how we show up in this world. That is what we need. We cannot and will not depend on anyone else to affirm us. We have to affirm ourselves. That's the message from the Supreme Court. That's the message. So if we want to wallow in self-pity of something we lost that we really never had, we really never had it. It was an illusion that we had it. Because giving one Black person an opportunity is an illusion for the rest of us to think that the opportunity door is open. It is an illusion when you say to us, oh, affirmative action allows you to go to Harvard. It's an illusion, right? Because it's only a handful of spots at Harvard. It's the rest of the schools that we have to think about. If you're gonna try to dismantle legally diversity, equity, and inclusion, go for it. Dismantle it. Go do it. Make yourselves happy. But we don't have to depend on an organization's DE&I program to tell us how to manage our careers. We need to have career coaches inside of the Black professional world that tell us how to manage our careers. See, let me give you an example of how this works. 7 years ago, I was in my local public supermarket and I saw a young Black woman as a cashier. And I was a full vegetarian at the time, and I used to go into the store almost every day to buy things that I needed to eat because vegetables spoil quickly. And I saw this young woman at the cashier.

Her name was Savannah, and I saw her there every day.

And I finally said to her one day, Savannah, why are you here? You seem too bright to be a cashier. And she said to me, I have a bachelor's degree in microbiology and I have a bachelor's degree in biology. Two degrees. And I don't know, and I want to become a dentist, but I don't know how to do it.

This is real.

And I said, wow. I said, here's the thing, I don't know how to help you be a dentist, but I'm gonna surely try. I said, starting today, I'm gonna come in, every time I come in here, I'm gonna mentor you.

And I came home and I made Savannah my project. And she was my project for 5 years. She worked in the local Publix right up the street here from my house, and I went into Publix and I would talk to Savannah and I would coach her, and I would say, okay, what are your grades?

And she said it was like a 3.2.

I said, I don't think that's good enough for you to get into dental school. Let's figure out how we're going to make that happen. I helped her by doing research, and I got her, um, connected to Barry University in Miami. And I called some people that I knew from the HR world that I live in, and I called and I said, I think I remember Barry having a feeder program to Nova Southeastern University for the School of Dentists. And my friend said yes.

And I spoke to Savannah, helped her with her MCATs, helped her with her dental school application, and she couldn't get it done because her grades weren't good enough. And I said to her, I think you need to enroll in the program at Barry University to get a master's degree, which is the first 2 years of dental school in that program, and see if you can get into Nova Southeastern. This is in the supermarket. This young lady never came to my house. This is what Black excellence and spotting potential in people looks like. Because many of you walk into the supermarket and the Black person bagging your groceries, you pretend that they don't exist because they're there bagging your groceries. See, this is what it looks like in real life. So I spoke to Savannah over and over. I gave her my phone number and I said, if you ever have any doubt, call me. And she went and studied, and she got into Barry's program. And then when she got into Barry's program, I said to her, okay, I'm going to help you put your resume together so that you could go to the Nova Dental School, and I'm going to work with you.

And I started working with her.

When she did her application, she was so scared the day she went to take her test, she called me from the test and said, I think I should walk out the door. And I talked her into sitting through that test.

I canceled two calls to talk to her into taking her test for her dental school admission, and she did it.

And then she couldn't get into, to Nova because they had already filled their class. And I said to her, you know what we need to do?

We need a plan.

We are— you're gonna get up every day and you're gonna go down to Nova and you're gonna sit in front of that dean's office. And this is the God's honest truth. I said, you're going to sit in front of that dean's office You're going to make an appointment with him. You're going to show him that you want to be in his school. And Savannah made a plan, and every Wednesday she put on a suit. And I said to her, get a suit, even if it's the only one you got. Get a suit, go down to the school, sit there, talk to the dean, and say, I really want to be in your school of dentistry. And eventually she got in. She got in, and she invited me to her pinning ceremony. That was the first time I met Savannah's family. But I saw her potential inside of a supermarket, and I spent 5 years talking to her, cajoling her, empowering her, crying with her to help her get into dental school. That's what Black people need to do for our own Black people. That is it. Because we walk blindly through life forgetting that there's one person that you need to reach, one person that you need to reach, one individual person, and affirm their actions and kiss affirmative action goodbye. It's our actions that's going to build this Black community. We do not need validation from white people to be excellent. We are already damn excellent. The reason they brought us here on slavery is because we knew how to farm and they didn't know how. That's the reason we came here as slaves. They didn't know how to build this shit. We did. And they got us here to do it for free. So let's stop giving our power to the system and taking our power back. We don't need your damn affirmative action. We're gonna affirm our actions inside of our community and build our own community. And one day you will look back and say, wow, that's what they did, because we got tired of the games you play. So I'm done. The message is simple. Stop the damn fighting and let's recommit to empowering the next generation, starting with the mother who is pregnant today. We cannot afford for Black women to continue to die during childbirth waiting for a system that's going to empower us. No, we can't wait for them to give us access to higher education. We gotta double down on our HBCUs. We can't think we arrived when they continue to pull the rug out from under us. We only gain if we gain it ourselves. That's how we gain that part. So thank you all for listening. Thank you, Akeem.

Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Cecilia.

Robert! Oh my God, Robert, how are you? Robert, thank you. You and I were both in that hellhole on that college campus trying to fight to be Black. Yes, Maxine, thank you as always. Thank you all for joining me today, and I may be here next week, I may not.

It all depends on how I feel at this point. Take care, everybody, and let's stop fighting and recommit to empower the next generation of leaders, Black leaders. Take care.

You're like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and Sound. And when I fall, you tied a rope to me. You're blessing me every day. I was down with an illusion, like a sparrow with broken wings, but now I shine with your reflection on me.

Take care, everyone.