1 hours 15 minutes 15 seconds
🇬🇧 English
Speaker 1
00:13
It's an honor to be here with you guys this morning. I wrote a new book called The Black Tax, The Cost of Being Black in America, and it's about what is the financial cost of discrimination against black people. Often when people are talking about discrimination, we're talking about the morality of it, we're talking about the injustice associated with it, and I wanted to take a different look at it. I wanted to look at what is the financial cost, right?
Speaker 1
00:50
I wanted to look at what researchers have said is that cost and then over time see if we can aggregate that to build a picture of actually what's happening. So the book is broken into 3 parts. It's a lot of words, you can focus on me, it's okay. The first part is a look at the cost of discrimination across multiple industries.
Speaker 1
01:19
The housing, automotive, job search, high-end careers, online commerce, business financing, to see what that picture looks like. The second part of the book, I try to answer a pressing question, which is, how is it that after 400 years, 40-plus million African Americans own just 2% of U.S. Wealth. Either we are consistently inept, Or there is something else happening in the environment that we need to take a closer look at.
Speaker 1
02:07
The third part of the book, we explore an economic framework that I call PhD. As a framework that individuals and families, corporations, businesses, so on and so forth can employ if they want to address 2 particularly pressing issues. The first is, we're missing 6 million jobs and 1.4 million businesses with staff. Not sole proprietors, businesses with staff across the broader black community in America.
Speaker 1
02:43
Those 2 things combined with $8 trillion of net worth that is also missing, are the single biggest drivers for almost all of the socioeconomic issues and challenges that we are facing. So what is the black tax? The black tax is the financial cost placed on black Americans by people and our institutions that have conscious or unconscious biased against black Americans. Conscious or unconscious bias.
Speaker 1
03:22
Either they're aware or unaware. This clearly begs the question, right, Are Americans really biased against black people? Or do we just feel that way? So what I wanted to do was take a look at what research has said.
Speaker 1
03:41
So in 2012, AP, the Associated Press, along with Stanford, Michigan, University of Chicago, did a study to try to ascertain how much bias was across the greater electorate. They found a couple things. They found that the portion of Americans expressing explicit, conscious, they are aware of it, bias, or anti-black attitudes was about 50% of the population, which is a significant portion of the population. They also took a look and said, how much of the population has an implicit or unconscious bias and that's closer to 56 percent, about 6 in 10 in 2012.
Speaker 1
04:28
Harvard has been researching this for a number of years. Their researchers developed something called the implicit association test that they use to tease out unconscious bias in various people who take the test. And over 3 million people have taken this test. And what they have found is that 75% of Americans, so it's almost 8 out of 10, have an implicit unconscious preference for white people over black people.
Speaker 1
05:03
They also found that this automatic preference, as they call it, predicts discriminatory behavior, even for people who earnestly believe that they don't discriminate at all. As a matter of fact, they say that this is empirical truth. So if this is the case, then we should be able to see some evidence of this kind of showing up in a marketplace, right, as opposed to just talk about it qualitatively. So back in 2002, the university researchers at University of Chicago did a study and they wanted to take a look at discrimination in the labor market.
Speaker 1
05:52
And what they did was they created resumes and they allowed the resumes to vary in quality, what they called quality. So this was like the prestige of the school you went to, right? The depth of your experience. The length of your experience, right?
Speaker 1
06:15
And what they did was they changed the names on the resumes. So they would put white sounding names on certain resumes. And they used Brandon and Emily. And they would put same resume, black sounding names.
Speaker 1
06:34
So Jamal, Lakeisha, right? And they would send them out to various employers. And they wanted to see what the response was. So 1 of the first things that they saw was, for the name, the white sounding names, they saw 50% more callbacks than the same resume, very same resume, that just had a black sounding name.
Speaker 1
06:57
So Emily, 50% more callbacks than Lakeisha, No difference on the resume whatsoever. The other thing that they observed was as you increase the quality of the resumes, so the schools and the depth of experience and the length of experience so on and so forth, they saw with the white sounding names the callbacks went up 30%. This makes sense, right? Stronger candidates, yeah I want to talk to that young lady, I want to talk to that young man, fantastic.
Speaker 1
07:34
Same resume when the quality was increased but had a black name, no change in callback. 0 incremental interest. Statistically insignificant. Same resume, same level of quality increase, different names.
Speaker 1
07:56
What they also found was that to overcome this effect of the name, 1 might need up to 8 years of additional experience if you have a black-sounding name. They found that the level of discrimination was significant and it was uniform across industries and across occupations even size of the company. So another study was done by a nonprofit research firm And they also wanted to test discrimination in the marketplace. So what they did was they went and spoke to businesses.
Speaker 1
08:40
They actually did a really smart thing. They went and spoke to businesses and they said, listen, what are the skills that you need? Let's just start with your desires. What are the skills that you need?
Speaker 1
08:47
Let's just start with your desires. What are the skills that you need? Tell us the skills that you need. Tell us the skills that you will hire people if they have these needs.
Speaker 1
08:55
Smart thing to do, businesses share that information. Here are the skills that we need. So they say, OK, we're going to put together a year-long training program to develop and enhance those skills within various candidates. If the people have these skills, are you interested?
Speaker 1
09:09
Yes, we're interested. Of course you're interested. So they go through this year-long program. And what they observed was, for women, for Hispanics, for foreign-born participants in the program whose skills developed over the course of that year, their employment rates all went up.
Speaker 1
09:31
For the African Americans in the program whose skills increased over the course of that year, no change. No takers. No interest. Now the level of discrimination in the marketplace is quite significant.
Speaker 1
09:51
And it's so significant that researchers from Arizona State University found that if you're white with a felony conviction, you'll get more callbacks than a black candidate with no record at all. Think about what that implies. So you could say, look, I hear you, I kind of get it, maybe that's for regular people, I'm a high achiever. Right, what I do is I go to the top, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1
10:27
Doctor, lawyer, engineer, that's what we do. We don't do all this kind of other business. So I hear you. I get it.
Speaker 1
10:37
So another research study was done by a firm called Nexton. So they wanted to get a sense for discrimination that might be in the legal profession. So here's what they did. So they develop a memo.
Speaker 1
10:54
And in the memo, they proceed to insert errors. So you can see errors in grammar and spelling, errors in fact, and the analysis of the fact. Okay? Do you ever presented a memo to a senior level executive?
Speaker 1
11:15
You can't have these things, right? But these are embedded in the memo. And then what they do is they send this memo off to 60 law firm partners. And they tell 1 half of the group, the memo is written by a lawyer who's black, and they tell an associate who's black, and they tell the other set of partners it's written by an associate who's white.
Speaker 1
11:46
They want to see what the response would be. So what was the response? For the partners who are reviewing the memo and thought it was a white lawyer that wrote it, their grade of the memo was a 4.1 out of 5. It's like an 82, like a B, kind of B-.
Speaker 1
12:07
Right? Nothing to write home about. But this is a memo that has errors in facts and the analysis of the facts and grammar and spelling. Right?
Speaker 1
12:23
That's a pretty high grade. Now, for the partners that thought the memo was written by a black lawyer, 3.2 out of 5. That's a failing grade, That's a 64. You do not pass GO.
Speaker 1
12:38
And not only did they receive that failing grade, but their projections of this person being a good lawyer were much, much lower. Same memo, no difference. Just told you 1, this is a white person who wrote it, this is a black person who wrote it, very different take on it. Now, another interesting thing was in terms of like the grammar and the spelling errors, when they thought that it was a white lawyer that wrote it, they found 3 out of the 7 errors, Right?
Speaker 1
13:18
When they thought that it was a black lawyer that wrote it, they found 6 out of 7 errors. Same number of errors. Same exact paper. Just who you think wrote it.
Speaker 1
13:29
That's 100% more errors found. Same information. Nothing different. Nothing changed.
Speaker 1
13:37
Right? Now if you're a partner, and that's your assessment, then it might be difficult for that person to get the mentorship or to get put on special assignments or the things that you would need to get on a track to be a partner. That could have a significant and dramatic effect, because you're saying, listen, I'm not sure that this guy is the 1, right, based on what I've seen. Now you might still do okay as an attorney, right, you can go work someplace else, but you have the skills and the ability and the capabilities to be a partner, but you're not gonna get on that track or it's very unlikely.
Speaker 1
14:20
And the difference in earnings over a career could be $11 million off of interpretation, not the actual work. Now if you think about what's the impact on the family of this individual, what's the impact on the community, what's the impact on the church, what's the impact on the non-profit board that they may sit on, so on and so forth. It reverberates, right? Now a large law firm, it's only about 3% of lawyers are black.
Speaker 1
14:52
Less than 2% of the partners are black. Does this have anything to do with it? Right? Well, you can say, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm going to be a doctor.
Speaker 1
15:05
So I'm just going to bypass all that kind of stuff. They just stick to the facts. So the British Medical Journal, I should have said that in a British accent. I'll do that next time.
Speaker 1
15:20
They did some research and what they found was some interesting things. Number 1, they found that black male doctors make about 65, 000 less on average than white male doctors, right? Or said differently, white male doctors make about 35% more. Now, this is adjusting for experience and specialty and hours worked, all that kind of stuff, right?
Speaker 1
15:45
Let's just adjust for it so we kind of get rid of all that noise. $65, 000 annually, that's real money, right? If you think about that over the course of a year or over the course of a career, that could be almost 3000000 dollars of lifetime earnings that's lost. Now there are about 20, 000 or so, maybe a little more, black male doctors in the US.
Speaker 1
16:13
This is the average number across those doctors. So across that broader group, you're talking about $1.3 billion a year, last year, this year, next year, right? And over a career, pushing $60 billion. Significant.
Speaker 1
16:31
Again, this is, is there a cost to it? Right? It's not just does it happen, it's not just do people mean for it to happen, it's when it lands, is there a cost? Appears to be a cost.
Speaker 1
16:46
The American College of Healthcare Executives found that black healthcare executives earn about $26, 000 less. That's maybe a million 2 over lifetime earnings. Newly minted software engineers start out about $10, 000 less. Right?
Speaker 1
17:05
That could be half a million, that would actually be a lot more because salaries skyrocket. They can broaden quite a bit but just conservatively. So the question of is there a bias seems to be yes, the question of is it significant it seems to go from high to kind of like really high and it appears to have an effect. Now we don't have time, I don't have time to go through all of the areas that we looked at.
Speaker 1
17:37
So, I haven't gone through housing, right? The search process, the financing process, the equity appreciation, right? We don't have time to go through the automotive piece in terms of the purchasing, the financing, the insurance associated with it. Or the online piece, right?
Speaker 1
17:57
What do the studies say about commerce on eBay and Airbnb? Or the small business financing, right? The denial rates, the cost of borrowing, it's research behind all of these things that speak to these incremental costs when you hold things the same, right, all of which are covered in the book. What I want to do, though, is kind of double back and go to a broader question.
Speaker 1
18:28
And it's this question of, how is it that after all this time, it's only 2% of US wealth? That's a dramatically small number, right? For 13% or 14% of the population. It's a dramatically small number.
Speaker 1
18:42
Like, how is that possible? How is that the case, right? And then there's also other questions that come up. Like people say, listen, I don't understand why you guys keep talking about slavery as though it was a super long time ago.
Speaker 1
18:53
Like at some point, you need to get over it. Other people have come here, they have faced hardships, They have faced difficulties, they have worked through it, and they've done pretty well. But you guys haven't. And you keep complaining about it and won't let it go.
Speaker 1
19:11
Now, in the absence of information, that seems like a perfectly legitimate series of questions. So as we would say when I was an undergrad as an engineer, let's go to the blackboard. Let's just look through it and see what the context is, and if we can start seeing some patterns, if we can start putting some numbers next to it. So to do this, we're going to need to go back, right?
Speaker 1
19:36
I want you guys to go back with me, like in your minds, to about, roughly about 1860, right? Now, we're not going to have enough time to talk about the whole period of slavery, 250 years, volumes and volumes written about that. We just want to focus on costs and financing. The first thing I need you to understand is that slavery by definition is a 100% tax on your labor.
Speaker 1
20:03
It is a 100% tax of your labor. Nothing that you generate belongs to you, not even you, right? It is by definition a tax. Now, there's so much of that period that is difficult to quantify.
Speaker 1
20:20
But what you can look at is the labor extracted, because economists have looked at this. They've come up with different numbers as they've been trying to tally it up. So some researchers peg the number, the value of labor extracted from millions of people over 250 years, quarter of a millennium, as high as $24 trillion. Others as high as 97 trillion dollars.
Speaker 1
20:50
Right? Let's say the answer is somewhere in the middle. Right? And we say it's as high as 50 trillion dollars.
Speaker 1
21:00
You split the difference. You're doing comms. What were the people who were enslaved and were property, what were they worth? Because if it wasn't a big deal, these should all be really small numbers.
Speaker 1
21:18
Then we could just kind of move on. So let's just for a minute, let's figure out what were they worth? What did researchers say was the economic value of those people? Because they were property.
Speaker 1
21:30
So you can measure the value of those roughly 4 million people. And you have to do it. The numbers are so big, you have to do it in terms of total US wealth or years of GDP or net income, national income. That's the size and scales that we're talking about, to be able to get a sense of it.
Speaker 1
21:51
So if you do in terms of wealth, well, US net wealth is about $85 trillion. Annual GDP is about 19 trillion, Pretty big numbers. So if you value those people in terms of wealth, you're talking between 14 and trillion dollars in today, in present dollars, right? Equivalent.
Speaker 1
22:16
So about 15 and a half, you split the difference. If you value it in terms of GDP, now you're talking about the difference between 19 and 38 trillion. Big numbers. If you average those, it's about $28 trillion.
Speaker 1
22:34
If you look at those 2 modes of valuing it, and you say, you know what? It's probably somewhere in the middle. Now we're talking about $22 trillion, the economic value of those 4 million people in kind of today's equivalent. Now here's the thing, the net worth of black people, African Americans today is about $1.5 trillion, all 40 plus million.
Speaker 1
23:06
Which means that the worth to the country in today's equivalent was about 15 times more then than now after 150 years later. Something to ponder and to think through. I think most of us has heard something about this issue of 40 acres and a mule, right? So I just want to add a little context to that.
Speaker 1
23:34
This was discussed as a potential remedy, right, for slaves. So the idea is you have land, you have a mule which can help you create cash crops from the land, so on and so forth, you get a start in life. That never came to fruition. But let's just think about the economic size of what you're talking about there.
Speaker 1
24:00
So 40 acres in a mule is 160 million acres if you apply that across 4 million people. That's a massive amount. I once looked at a group of people buying some land. It was like 400 acres.
Speaker 1
24:13
You've got to go up in a helicopter for 400 acres. This is 160 million acres. It's kind of inconceivable size. Now if you value that, which you can kind of approximate it, the average value of land per acre today is roughly between 3, 000 to 6, 400.
Speaker 1
24:31
So you can put numbers on it. So you're talking about maybe a trillion dollars of value on the high end. You say, wow, that's a huge number. Now, if you compare that to the $50 trillion that was extracted, that's barely 2% of the total value that was extracted.
Speaker 1
24:47
Not even getting a return of 2% was sufficient. You will not get that, right? Now at the same time, 3, 2, and 3 years before, Congress passes something called the Homestead Act, which you may be familiar with. And what the Homestead Act is, is over the course of the next 60 years, they go out the process of distributing 246 million acres to 1.5 million white families.
Speaker 1
25:16
246 million acres, right? Now if you kind of put that in kind of today's dollars, because it's hard to conceptualize what that is, right? Well, you're talking of upwards of $1.6 trillion. Another way you could think about that is upwards of a million dollars a family.
Speaker 1
25:37
Right, the way it worked was you could get 160 acres for yourself. You stayed on it for 5 years, and then it would be yours. By the way, 5 years is about how long in the early days it would take for you to become a citizen. So you could come here with nothing, be given 160 acres, right, and then leave owning the whole thing, having exchanged no value for it other than being on it.
Speaker 1
26:08
And up to 93 million Americans are direct beneficiaries according to research of this kind of massive wealth building program, right? It just puts context to it because people are talking about boot straps and I get it man and I believe in the whole boot straps thing and hard work and all this kind of different stuff, right? But a million dollars is a hell of a boot strap. Now if you're in this kind of period, you've got to get a sense of what's happening.
Speaker 1
26:37
Because there's a lot of stuff happening during this period. You've got the Civil War. I mean, the Southern economy is in shambles. It's devastated.
Speaker 1
26:46
You've got $22 trillion of values gone. Emancipation. It's gone. The other thing you have to understand is that's 50% of the full net worth of the South.
Speaker 1
26:58
50% was just those people. It's gone. Now, people say, well, you know, was it a big deal? You know, cotton was the biggest industry that the world had ever seen.
Speaker 1
27:11
It was global. It's when upwards of 20 million people around the world were employed in that industry in 1 way or another. A million people across Europe and other cotton producing countries lost their jobs with the Civil War. We produced 61% of our exports were cotton.
Speaker 1
27:30
We were supplying the world. We were dominant. You cannot beat free labor. What does that mean for the world?
Speaker 1
27:37
It's a massive cotton famine. This affects everywhere. This affects Europe, it affects Russia, it affects Egypt, it affects India, it affects Japan, it affects all of these places. And a central question is what is America going to do to put her newly freed people back to work, right?
Speaker 1
28:02
And the land that was confiscated, that all the Southerners lost as a result of fighting and breaking from the Union, because it was all confiscated, none of it was theirs, was all given back to them. And what did they need? They need labor. The Land is worthless without labor.
Speaker 1
28:26
So what is the solution? The solution is what we call this Jim Crow system. Now, Jim Crow is amazingly not descriptive. Right, it's like the Sean Rochester period.
Speaker 1
28:43
Dun, dun, dun, right? Like, what is that, right? Who is Jim Crow? I like, What is that?
Speaker 1
28:50
So what it is, is a system of laws and customs reinforced with extreme violence. And it's designed to reinstitute 100% tax on a sharecropper's labor. Now you can say, listen, I think you're getting a little hyperbolic. I know they didn't make that much, but they got something, and you're talking about this 100% tax business.
Speaker 1
29:15
You've got to be easy, slow your roll. And I'm saying, you know what? I'm going to let you decide if it's 100% tax. So just walk with me through the process.
Speaker 1
29:25
So the crux, the foundation of this society is sharecropping, which is based on a contract. The way this worked is the large mega plantations, a lot of them were broken into smaller pieces, and black families would settle on those pieces. The idea would be they would work a portion of the land to produce cash crops and then they will share a portion of the harvest or any portion of the harvest. Now here's the thing, the white land owner set all the terms and conditions on the contract.
Speaker 1
30:04
Here's what I want you to remember. You don't get crops tomorrow, right? It takes a long time to till land and clear it and do all these kind of things before you get it. These people have nothing.
Speaker 1
30:19
At the end of slavery, they have 0.17% of US wealth. Effectively nothing. So the farmer, the white farmer, has to give them shelter, and food, and clothes, and seed, and tools. They had to spot them, all of that for an entire year on credit.
Speaker 1
30:39
At rates up to 70%. Right? And Some of these contracts, if you felt ill or sick, they had the right to outsource your portion of the labor to someone else and charge you for it. Now, I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 1
31:00
I would not sign that contract. Right? And I hear you. Like, I feel you.
Speaker 1
31:07
Right? So let's say you didn't sign a contract. There is a law for that. These are called vagrancy laws, because you have no land, and you don't have a means of employment.
Speaker 1
31:17
And if you cannot prove that you're gainfully employed, if you're idle and you're not a landowner, you can be charged with a crime and put in the state or county jail. You can say, look, you guys are super smart. You say, all right, that's not going to work. Here's what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1
31:34
I'm going to sign it, but I'm just not going to do the work. I'm going to break the contract. And lo and behold, there's a law for that. They're called contract enforcement laws, which means that if you break those contracts, then you'll be charged with a crime and you'll be placed in a state or county jail.
Speaker 1
31:53
Right? But you guys are beyond smart. So you say, I get that, but here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to jail and I'm not doing nothing.
Speaker 1
32:01
And they're going to give me 3 squares, and I'll be straight. They're going to get tired of that, and I'm out. They have something for that, and it's called convict leasing, which means that as a prisoner, they lease you out again to the very same farmer that you didn't want to work for, or to a private corporation. Now here's the thing with convict leasing.
Speaker 1
32:22
That's even potentially much, much worse than slavery in this 1 respect. A slave owner actually has an interest in your residual value. They would kill you if need be. They would beat you into an inch of your life, but they really would rather you be around for the next 20, 25 years working.
Speaker 1
32:43
Under this lease agreement, They have no interest in your residual value. I care not about you 15 years from now. What I care about you is 6 months, 8 months, 18 months, 13 months, whatever that time is. The impact of that is Mortality rates up to 50%.
Speaker 1
33:03
Mortality rates. So you don't sign a contract, you get put in state and county jail. You break the contract, you get put in state and county jail. You decide to sit in the jail, you get convict leased to the same person that you want to do it for.
Speaker 1
33:18
And now your life expectancy is now 50% risk of you being dead. And you have a family, and you have wife and children, and so on and so forth. Now, that sounds like 100% tax On your labor. I set your income, your revenue.
Speaker 1
33:39
I set your expense. That means I control your profit. And because I don't want you to go anyplace else with somebody who's generous, I'm always going to make sure that your expenses are far more than your profit. And I'm going to roll that over.
Speaker 1
33:53
That's called debt servitude. Now, Convict leasing, 50% death rates. By the way, it's very lucrative. Very lucrative.
Speaker 1
34:07
Because as a small farmer, you can afford a whole slave. But now you get to rent 1 for like 2 years. Right? Much more affordable.
Speaker 1
34:18
The state made so much money that in 1914, the state of Alabama, 20% of their revenues were from convict leasing alone. Right? Now this system of laws and customs lasted for 75 years. During which time 4, 000 black people were lynched.
Speaker 1
34:43
That's a public execution in an extremely brutal way. You can run the math on it, 4, 000 is equivalent to 1 person executed publicly every week for 75 years. You won't get the hint. Your children are gonna get the hint.
Speaker 1
34:59
Your neighbor's gonna get the hint. Everybody's gonna get the hint, right? Nobody's been prosecuted for any of those. That is the condition under which they are surviving.
Speaker 1
35:13
That is why it's 100% tax. That is why people call it as slavery, but just by another name. It was legal. So if the value extracted over 250 years was approximately $50 trillion, And this lasted a third of that whole period and it was a hundred percent tax on their labor, that could be 15 trillion dollars extracted over that 75 year period.
Speaker 1
35:44
If that is the case, then I want you to ponder this. At emancipation, they lost $22 trillion when those people were freed. And over the next 75 years, they would go and claw back 15 trillion of it from the descendants of those people. That's an extraordinary tax with nothing you can do about it.
Speaker 1
36:16
Now, I want to talk also about education. Human capital development, critical and important. Now, what you will find is when the land was returned to the planters, as we talked about, they needed an abundant, ready supply of people to work the land. They made a deal with white farmers because they wanted expanded public education for their children.
Speaker 1
36:52
And I said, listen, we will expand it, but we will divert the resources from black students towards the white students. And separate but equal, 1898 became a perfect vehicle to do that. What were some of the ramifications of that? Number 1, by 1900, you had 1 black teacher for every thousand students.
Speaker 1
37:16
Thousand students. By 1917, we had just 64 public high schools across the entire South for black students. 44% of all the buildings that were schools were constructed and owned by black people and many of the buildings that were owned by the public had been gifted to them, were actually built by black people so that they could get recognized and get funding associated with it. William H.
Speaker 1
37:50
Baldwin, the president of the General Education Board, kind of like the Department of Education back in the day, stated that the South needs Negroes educated so that they can be directed to be the best possible laborers. With the right kind of education, the Negro will willingly work menial jobs and will open up an opportunity for Southern whites to perform more expert labor. So a couple of quick things. Just, when we talk about separate but equal, put this in the context.
Speaker 1
38:16
New York City, 1920, 50 times more is spent on children in New York City, 97% of whom are white, than are spent on children in South Carolina. Migrants who came to New York, immigrants, so are getting an education that is significantly more well-funded. In the South, for every dollar invested in a black child, you got 5 to 8 invested in a white child. For every white student, receive 50% more years of education, and black teachers often got 25 to 34 percent of what white teachers were paid.
Speaker 1
38:55
Researchers say that if you had just invested in the children equally, Kept all the other stuff the same. Just invest in the children equally. Do what the law says. That would have closed the earnings gap by 50%, just that 1 thing alone.
Speaker 1
39:10
Keep all the discrimination, keep all that kind of stuff in place by 50%. For a generation, that's over $600 billion. For multiple generation, from 1898 to almost 1955, that could be north of $3 trillion. Then a quick thing I want to talk about, real quick, is what happened to all the black teachers?
Speaker 1
39:38
This was always something that was curious to me. At 1 point, all black students got taught by black teachers. Now, it's very hard to find black teachers. So in 1954, right before segregation became illegal, you had 82, 000 black teachers for 2 million students.
Speaker 1
39:58
They were 50% of the black professional class. Within a decade of Brown v. Board of Education, 40, 000 of those teachers were fired. Wiping out 25% of the black professional class.
Speaker 1
40:14
Researchers say that 90% of black principals lost their jobs in 11 southern states. The number of black students applying to be teachers dropped within 20, 25 years after that. And currently, 18% of the public school system are African-American, 7% of the teachers are black, just 2% of those teachers, of all teachers, are black males. Now if you look at that from a different perspective, it means proportionally, we're missing 352, 000 black teachers, public school system today, proportionally.
Speaker 1
40:48
If you looked at what they would be earning on average, average teacher salary across that number of people, 350, 000, you're talking about 20 billion dollars. That is not going to those teachers, that is not going to the black community this year and last year and next year. And that's been going on for 60 years now. What is the impact of that and on those families?
Speaker 1
41:14
So, We're not gonna talk about discrimination in the labor market, we don't have time. We're not gonna talk about housing discrimination, we don't have time. We're not gonna talk about the GI Bill, we don't have time. We're not gonna talk about the black tax from 1965 to the present, we don't have time.
Speaker 1
41:28
It is all, of course, available in the book. Right? So but the answer is always just try harder. 65%, 63% of white Americans said, look, blacks are just not trying hard enough to get ahead.
Speaker 1
41:50
Keep blaming racial discrimination on everything. 60% of white Americans said, look, you got the same or better opportunities than everybody else. You're just not making it happen. 70% say, you're just using this as an excuse.
Speaker 1
42:04
Now, before you have information, before you have context, these things seem like they might be reasonable. But in light of information and context, they seem absurd. So I'm gonna pause here, And we'll do some Q&A because I don't want to kind of hog the whole thing. We can have some questions associated with it.
Speaker 1
42:31
And I'll let Shadon take it over.
Speaker 2
42:35
First of all can we have a just a round of applause please. Thank you. What prompted you to write this book?
Speaker 1
42:47
Wow. So there's a couple of different things that went into it. 1, over time, I just kept reading about these various studies that would come out that would talk about discrimination. And it would come out like drip, drip, drip to me over years.
Speaker 1
43:02
But it always seemed like it was a tax. And I always said, I'm just going to keep track of some of these things, and I'm going to come back to it 1 of these days. And I see if I'm going to tally it up. And what wound up being the ultimate trigger is, so I work with individuals helping to put their financial plans together, right?
Speaker 1
43:24
And we focus on the importance of cash flow, we focus on the importance of assets, we focus on the importance of leaving a legacy, right? And how you break those things down. Anything that reduces cash flow reduces your asset ownership of assets and it reduces legacy. This seemed to me, and it is in fact, a reduction to legacy.
Speaker 1
43:41
If there is a cost, a cash flow cost, it is reducing our ability to leave legacy. So I decided to take a look at it, go into what research was saying, and see if I could uncover some really interesting things.
Speaker 2
43:59
Awesome. 1 of the things from reading the book, and you touched on it during the presentation, that really struck me was the study with regard to the legal briefs. And in tech, as you're well aware, 1 of the things that we struggle with is essentially very low percentages of minorities in the technology industry overall. And when I think about the legal briefs and the result of that, I wonder if you have some thoughts on maybe just potential connections between those 2 things.
Speaker 1
44:32
Yeah, I think the data says that there is significant subconscious bias. The data says there is significant conscious bias across. It's a matter of how is it manifesting itself.
Speaker 1
44:47
The fact of the matter is wherever and whenever there is a trigger, the bias flows. They used to have these problems in the music industry and orchestras. And it was with women. It was dominated by men.
Speaker 1
45:04
So what they did over time was put up some screens where they could just hear the music and not see the person right and when I could just hear the music and focus on that The percentage of women went way up. So it's the triggers for bias. The first thing is just accepting that it exists. The second thing is accepting that it's significant and it's unconscious.
Speaker 1
45:31
You don't know what you're doing, or what I'm doing, or whatever. There's no level of introspection or reflection that's going to show you this right it's subconscious but the key thing you have to focus on is the effect does it have an effect right you can't say well I'm doing this I'm doing that It's beyond your ability to know what is being done, but it has an effect and it has a cost. There was a study that was done on eBay, right? Baseball carts.
Speaker 1
46:00
I don't collect baseball cards, right? But it's a noble pursuit. Please baseball fans, don't. Noble pursuit, right?
Speaker 1
46:07
And they were taking a look at it, and they were just saying, all right, well they have various baseball cards, and they have white Americans selling it, black Americans selling it, and they would see what would happen. So it turns out that you have a huge price differential between when black people are selling it and when white people are selling it. It's like 35%, something like that. But the question is like, how would you, like what, how do you know?
Speaker 1
46:26
It's a baseball card, like how do you know, right? And what they would do is really clever. They would take pictures and just have the person, the tip of the person's fingers in it. That's it.
Speaker 1
46:35
That's all it took, trigger the price differential. Like it's this real and it's this serious. And you can't deal with it unless you admit that it exists. And admit that it could possibly exist with you.
Speaker 1
46:46
And not that it's possible, that it's probable. And then you can start dealing with it. You guys have some of the super smartest people in the whole world working here. You could build software to track this stuff, do it, and view it as helping decision makers.
Speaker 1
47:02
It can be addressed. I think the critical thing is, I think it's in the book I quote Zen Tzu. Seems kind of cliche but he's really awesome, right? And he says, listen man, anything that has a form can be named.
Speaker 1
47:19
Anything that has a name can be conquered. Give it a name. Give it a form and address it.
Speaker 2
47:26
And then last question, and I'll open it up to the audience. But Can you speak about the opportunity or the ability for black community as well as allies to address this tax and these huge, huge, huge massive deficits that you're addressing and highlighting?
Speaker 1
47:47
Yeah. So there's a framework that I propose. I call it PhD. And PhD stands for Purchase Hire Deposit, because we're really thinking deeply about how do you affect things.
Speaker 1
47:58
And the things that I'm trying to affect really are the 6 million jobs that are missing and the 1.4 million businesses that are missing. Because so much is emanating from that. And if you want to affect those things, it's all about how you're purchasing, how you're hiring, and how you're depositing. Now, when you think about it from a purchasing standpoint, at the individual is how and where you spend your money.
Speaker 1
48:19
You have total control over that. And that's both for people who are black and people who are not black. How we spend our money is super important. African-Americans, unfortunately, spend about 98% of our spend on non-black enterprises.
Speaker 1
48:35
So small changes in that can have a massive impact because it stimulates demand, and demand stimulates the need for employees, so on and so forth. From a corporate or organizational standpoint, you're talking about supply chains. That's where the purchasing is happening. So in addition to cutting the check for various nonprofits which I encourage you to do and to keep doing right but if you're sitting on top of anyone right an 18 billion dollar supply chain right having more black firms in those supply chains is what's going to drive that jobs gap.
Speaker 1
49:08
You can create 10, 15, 20, 000 jobs by doing that, and it's incredibly powerful. Why? Because generally about 75% of folks employed at black firms tend to be black, African-American. That means 25% are not, which by definition means we're the most diverse companies in the world.
Speaker 1
49:32
And then hiring, obviously, you guys work on that. There's some things that I would say that goes along with them that I said like be careful of let the numbers kind of tell the story like be careful of right because we got to this this point where we say like diversity and minority and inclusion I think is the other word right typically euphemism for not white male okay typically euphemism for not white male Let me explain to you who that is. 90% of people on earth. That's who not white male is.
Speaker 1
50:03
Like, that's targeting the world to address issues. Now, when I'm talking about trying to address the gap of the 6000000 people, right, employees that are missing, and a gap of these businesses, right, that are Underpinning of communities, I'm talking about being specific. So we have to look at those things. If you say, listen, man, we're going to focus on ensuring that we have more women involved.
Speaker 1
50:27
Fantastic. God bless them. Do that all day long. Super critical.
Speaker 1
50:32
But when you get under the numbers, if you look at women businesses with employees, they're $1.2 trillion of revenue that they're generating. If you say, of those women, how many of those are black women? Less than 2%. So if you're driving programs spend to increase the presence of women, which you should do, right, it's not until you're $99 that you're gonna affect a black woman.
Speaker 1
50:55
So you're not gonna affect that gap that's there and you're not gonna affect all the issues associated with it. You have to be specific, right? If you say all right, well you know I want to make sure that I empower Latino businesses, absolutely wonderful. Do it.
Speaker 1
51:12
Keep doing it. Expanding it. If you look at the total spend for those businesses who have employees, those are the mega businesses, right, that have employees, it's almost about $400 billion. If you look at how many of those are black, it's like 2%.
Speaker 1
51:26
Like, that's not how you're going to affect it. So you could have a thriving minority program and have marginal to no effect for black Americans. This is what I want us to be cognizant of and be laser focused on. When we talk about minority and diversity and inclusion, you're not speaking about black people.
Speaker 1
51:45
You're talking about everybody who is not a white male, right? That's not very specific.
Speaker 2
51:52
Then deposit?
Speaker 1
51:54
Deposit! Thank you for the reminder there, right? So deposit is super critical, right? What is the primary function of banks, right?
Speaker 1
52:01
It's to provide, it's commercial lending. If you look at the US banking system, lending to commercial enterprises, lending to agribusiness, right, lending to consumer, lending to government, that's where the money is going. Now when you look at black businesses, again, there's only 104, 000 black businesses that have employees in America. So that's where I'm alluding to the 1.4 million that are missing, supposed to be 1.5.
Speaker 1
52:31
Those businesses are starved for lending and credit. 80% say that they would hire if they had access to the resources. Researchers say that those few businesses need up to $9 billion of capital today. They're the most likely to hire us, network effect.
Speaker 1
52:53
So and they're extremely undercapitalized. What do I mean by that? Of all the deposits that African-Americans have in general, Only about 2% are in black financial institutions. It's a historical issue and challenge that we've been dealing with.
Speaker 1
53:08
Right? If you look at the total US banking system, only 4 out of every $10, 000 is in a black bank. They simply don't have the deposits to do the lending that is necessary and that they want to do. And by the way, they have the same regulatory expense.
Speaker 1
53:26
Extremely small base. That is powerful. Corporations, where they deposit their money. Businesses, governments, where they deposit their money.
Speaker 1
53:35
Individuals, where you deposit your money. And the other thing that's very powerful is that you have something called a money multiplier effect. You guys remember this from economics, right? So every dollar you put in is $10 of economic activity that goes with it.
Speaker 1
53:49
Put in a dollar, Federal Reserve requirement, 90 cents get lent out, so on and so forth, you have a $10 impact. That's huge, that's powerful, that's not happening in this banking system. And the idea of PhD, really, I don't know if you guys hear, but people often talk about how long money circulates in communities, right? Some communities it's 6 days, some it's 100 days, some it's like 35 minutes, all that kind of different stuff.
Speaker 1
54:15
What they're talking about, and I'll tell you how to calculate that, by the way, is PhD. You have individuals who are depositing and spending and hiring in ways that create jobs and expand businesses within their communities. Just from the little bit of the walkthrough that we did just now, you can see that there was no real opportunity for us to do that in a significant way. You got 250 years of slavery followed by another 75 years of extracting every nickel from you.
Speaker 1
54:54
Very often what you see today are miracles walking around. It's amazing that you have this level of achievement despite that. And I haven't finished telling you all the other stuff. Right?
Speaker 1
55:06
So.
Speaker 2
55:07
The 1 thing just to dovetail with what you just said on that in terms of the miracles, that you literally have miracles walking around, which I want to highlight that because speaking to so many people of color, especially in tech, especially here at Google, so many of them are experiencing imposter syndrome, which we spoke about before. And when you when you go through the book and some of the things that you've outlined, and through the layers of the systemic barriers that were intentionally put into place to extract wealth, to extract opportunity, to extract all these things. And you see that despite all that, you have people who are here.
Speaker 2
55:53
Could you just talk a little bit about what you think of imposter syndrome?
Speaker 1
55:57
Yeah. So we spoke about this earlier. And I'll kind of be honest with you, it was hard for me to relate to, because I've never felt like an imposter. I think what is very difficult is Now it's you against the world.
Speaker 1
56:18
But when we were growing up, it was us against people in our circle. Now the circle is the world. It's like anybody who has access to communication. And you have people that are truly amazing and show that.
Speaker 1
56:33
I think you have a lot of people we kind of talked about this a little bit that pretend to be amazing, but it looks very authentic, right? Because you can be anybody's James Bond, if you want, kind of online. But part of the problem is is that we don't have everything needs to be within context right and that's what we don't have we don't have context right like if you're coming from a community that has 50 to 100 times more economic resources. And I'm not being hyperbolic.
Speaker 1
57:06
Then another community. What is happening in your sphere is that success becomes probable. When you are coming from a community that has won 1 hundredth of what you're dealing with, success is merely possible. Anything is possible.
Speaker 1
57:25
I could dis-form and reform in a room next door. I mean quantum mechanics says that that's possible. You can look at the numbers and see the probability of that happening is particularly low. If you're going to build your strategy on that happening, that's not going to work very well.
Speaker 1
57:41
The issue is of the context. People come and they say, I just don't get it. I look around and I just see all this opportunity and people are not taking advantage of it. And it's because the same barriers, and I'm being so kind with the word barriers.
Speaker 1
57:58
You could literally be killed for economic, for starting a business. You could literally be murdered. There's nobody to complain to. I mean, Congress didn't even pass anti-lynching laws.
Speaker 1
58:11
People were lobbying forever. They didn't even pass it. Can't do it, right? When you have, so it's the context.
Speaker 1
58:20
I think when young people, I read someplace there's something at Harvard called the bottom third, which is like super smart people at Harvard feel like not smart because they're competing with other super smart people so they wind up being in the bottom third and so you're like you're like on Krypton you're like oh I can only lift 3 mountains you know what I mean right and this guy can lift 10 I am so not worthy right and other people are like
Speaker 2
58:48
do
Speaker 1
58:48
you like I'm trying to lift bricks and you're up in the third mountain. They need context. They need to see lifts of that.
Speaker 1
58:56
On a broader scheme of things, you're amazing. This place just doesn't have enough seats for all the amazing people. And that's the context that we don't have and that we don't get. So we can't measure it appropriately.
Speaker 2
59:10
I'm going to pass the mic to questions.
Speaker 3
59:13
1 of the challenges of doing this kind of work, of trying to transform within organizations, is that 1, a lot of the people, let's say from the white community, who step up to work with you, are willing and mean extremely well. But 1 of the things that can sometimes work against those efforts is that I'm not sure most people are even aware that there is a very implicit demand from the right community to be validated and to have to feel good in whatever is being discussed. And where that comes into conflict, I think about the statement that you made about specificity.
Speaker 3
59:52
Because we've had that discussion internally about, don't just say inclusion. If you're going to battle sexism, then name it and battle that. And the strategy for that versus the strategy for neurodiverse people who are autistic and the strategy for white supremacy and the effects on the black community. Those are very different strategies.
Speaker 3
01:00:12
You can't put them all together. But when you become specific, when the leaders in the room who are going to be the majority white don't feel good about it, everything gets pushed back on it. And you can spend an entire year creating programs, giving speeches, giving impassioned pleas, standing ovations, rolling on the floor like Patti LaBelle. And at the end of it, it will come back to being smushed like Play-Doh, into a very general, innocuous turn that people feel good about.
Speaker 3
01:00:45
And that is exasperating to go through. I'm interested in hearing your perspective on how you move in organizations, where even in the most well-meaning organizations, with the most well-meaning people, because a lot of times, people who are more liberal are actually more offended when you become specific. Because they often feel that their presence and well-meaning should mean that we shouldn't be having conversations that are as heavy. Interested in hearing what you think about that.
Speaker 1
01:01:16
Yeah, so there are a couple different things there. The first is it's important that people all have the same amount of information. See, what we have is lack of information.
Speaker 1
01:01:29
What we have is strong feelings combined with lack of information, and then asymmetric distribution of power. So I'm shutting down this conversation. It's a wrap. If you want to keep it popping in your bank account, then it should be a wrap for you.
Speaker 1
01:01:45
But the issue, part of the reason I wrote the book is so that we can have more productive conversations. When you're ignorant, nonsense makes perfect sense. So the idea is to provide context. People react to it.
Speaker 1
01:02:01
The first thing is, I had no idea. I didn't know. So 1 of the things that I'm interested in doing and trying to do and encourage people to do is this idea of doing more business with black enterprises because it creates jobs. And communities, families are supported by jobs and communities are supported by families, so on and so forth.
Speaker 1
01:02:21
I don't start with that, with leading with that discussion, because everybody has opinion already formed on it. What I start with is like the discussion that we're having, Because it causes people to think differently. Because you're like, yo, I didn't know. You know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1
01:02:34
Like, I didn't know. Like, no 1 told me. We all have similar curriculums. We don't learn this stuff at any of our schools.
Speaker 1
01:02:41
Right? We don't learn it at church. So if there are people who say, listen, I'm interested in having these type of effects. They don't have to be, but if they are, then 1 of the things that they need to read is get access to this information.
Speaker 1
01:02:53
Took me a long time to pull it together, to be able to kind of tell a story, because it compounds. This all is happening at the same time. And what you will find is if these individuals read this, it starts to shift people from why are we having this conversation and why is this a big deal because that's where people are right now, right? To how do we resolve it.
Speaker 1
01:03:13
See the fundamental problem is we try to solve problems that aren't problems for people. If I just start leading, but we got to do this for black people, you'll be like, oh my god, it's another minority program. I'm banging my head in the wall. You know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1
01:03:29
But when you say, wait a minute, let's kind of walk through this, Let's kind of talk about this stuff. You get exposed to it for the first time. You see how it's building. You're like, good god almighty.
Speaker 1
01:03:37
No 1 told me that this stuff was the case. You start to shift and evolve to, wow, what do we do about it? Now X program becomes important. Now you see there's a difference.
Speaker 1
01:03:48
You know what we have is you know someone's like, man I didn't eat in 5 days. Okay so like that's I think you're getting into the starving realm, right? Certainly in the ketonic phase, right? And somebody else is like, I haven't eaten in 55 days.
Speaker 1
01:04:04
And they say, well, we're the same. We both haven't eaten. So my solution is I'm going to have a box of crackers,
Speaker 2
01:04:12
and I'm
Speaker 1
01:04:12
going to be good. And you should have a box of crackers, too. And you have a box of crackers, and you're still dying.
Speaker 1
01:04:16
And I've got to understand what's the matter with this person. The issue isn't degrees. It's not binary. It's not whether or not you have struggle.
Speaker 1
01:04:24
It's what's the struggle and the context of the struggle and the information behind it. So for these individuals who are open to this, then I say start with this book, walk through it, discuss it, see the extent to which that helped. Democrats, their implicit, their like explicit bias is like 35%, right? So it's low, right?
Speaker 1
01:04:48
I could be generous and say they know what the right things to say their implicit bias is like 55% subconscious so so there it's there right now you don't mean it is there So you wind up running into those things. But faced with information that kind of compounds, it tends to have an effect on people who say, listen, let's really talk about what programs could actually be effective. And now I kind of get it. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1
01:05:15
So that's what I would say. It's kind of a long answer, but necessary.
Speaker 4
01:05:19
What is the earliest age we should make black kids aware of the societal bias against? For example, at what age should we tell black boys that they may be followed in stores because of their color? Could making the kids aware of these things too early be less optimal?
Speaker 1
01:05:36
That's a great question. We have 2 kids ourselves. We live in a predominantly white community, like predominantly, right?
Speaker 1
01:05:46
So these things come up whether you want them or not. And our kids are really young. I say talk to them early. Let them know.
Speaker 1
01:05:55
Society is not waiting for them to mature to break the news to them about how they feel and how they're valued, so on and so forth. We've been dealing with those issues since our kids were in kindergarten. So we've had really frank discussions, you know what I mean? Even along the lines of talking about slavery in school.
Speaker 1
01:06:18
It could be a very shameful experience, right? People looking at you and all this kind of different stuff. And what we tell our kids is you have nothing to be ashamed. What did you do?
Speaker 1
01:06:27
You did nothing. Things were done to you. I mean, it's for other people to be ashamed, right? And it's important that they have that perspective, right?
Speaker 1
01:06:37
You're other. Why are you like this and all those kinds of things? And it's important that you instill a sense of, like, feel awesome about yourself, even if others don't. Right?
Speaker 1
01:06:48
Like, I teach, or We teach our kids about black history. We teach them about history long before America, so that it's normalized to them. They get it. And you can feel good about the contributions that you've made.
Speaker 1
01:07:04
It's so, so important for young people. So that's what I would say. Have the conversations early, because society is not waiting for them to mature.
Speaker 4
01:07:12
OK, thank you. Another question I kind of had floating on the back of my mind, as you were talking about buying black, essentially, buying into black businesses and being more intentional about including black business owners in our supply chains and all those things. So I was wondering if we can quantify the profit of doing that.
Speaker 4
01:07:33
So for example, let's say if we had a 10% increase of the population buying black right now, what would that translate into in how many years in terms of money?
Speaker 1
01:07:48
That's a great question. It's kind of like a business school professor might ask that kind of question. This is how I would speak to it.
Speaker 1
01:08:00
The first thing is you don't have to boil the ocean. Small moves can have massive effects. There's 104, 000 really large black businesses with staff and employees. They generate about $150 billion a year in spend.
Speaker 1
01:08:17
Before you get to the whole world, if you just focused on African-Americans, our total spend is $1.2 trillion. So shifting how that's spent in even small ways could have enormous impacts on demand. Now, take it a different way. That $1.2 trillion is generating about 24 million jobs across the US economy.
Speaker 1
01:08:37
Very, very few of those are within our own communities. I think it's important that we do what we expect other people to do. Because we get to control how we spend and when we spend. Nobody else gets to do that.
Speaker 1
01:08:52
And when people say, listen, man, I, too, am interested in economic development, because I kind of get it. You know what I'm saying? Nothing gets better when there's economic deprivation. So I want to march with you.
Speaker 1
01:09:04
I love it. March. But don't just march. If you deposit, don't just march and you have $150 million business.
Speaker 1
01:09:13
Think through Who are you buying products and services from? And where do these businesses fit in into that? Because those businesses are employing people who are generating income for families. And that's creating the resources to cover today, have some for tomorrow, to do the enrichment, and all the kind of other things that we're talking about.
Speaker 1
01:09:30
If you have a certain kind of economic profile, you get to move if you don't like what's going on. You're not stuck in that spot. But if you don't, you're stuck. You're just a long foot for the ride.
Speaker 1
01:09:41
So to be more specific, there are important things that we can do with our resources. People will open up 500000 dollar bank accounts and things like that. We got over a hundred billion dollars in the bank. We could, black banks only have 4.9 ish billion, kind of the last time I checked, where we could oversubscribe them in no time.
Speaker 1
01:10:05
If you move that that money into those banks, they'd have to hire 31, 000 people today to be able to manage it. It would generate another 70, 000 in the supply chain to be able to help them. That'd be $100, 000. Just that.
Speaker 1
01:10:15
That's before you even get to all the lending and stuff that they would be doing. We have a lot of stuff in our control. We just need to do a little more. Yes, sir?
Speaker 1
01:10:26
I have
Speaker 5
01:10:26
a really basic question. What do you mean when you say a black business? And how do you, as a consumer, just like Google searching, figure out what that is?
Speaker 1
01:10:35
Yeah, so great question. So typically, it depends on who's defining it, right? So when you think of a black business, you think of a business owned by black people.
Speaker 1
01:10:46
But ownership varies quite a bit. So for governmental purposes, it's generally like 51% or more. For purposes in general, it's people who have a substantial equity position in the company. That's very, very helpful.
Speaker 1
01:11:04
There are various directories that try to aggregate black businesses. There are online sites that do that. I don't think there's a universal 1 that ties everything together at this point. Here's something else I want to say about this concept of PhD real quick.
Speaker 1
01:11:25
So PhD is like purchase, hire, deposit. So it's not just about black businesses. It's not exclusively black businesses. So purchasing is about the supply chain if you're a business.
Speaker 1
01:11:36
Hiring is about your payroll. So to what extent are we showing up in your payroll and in your supply chain and representative ways? You know what I mean? Because those people are creating jobs, right?
Speaker 1
01:11:49
They're executing PhD, right? Which is powerful. Why is that important? Because, you know, 80% of all spend is going through those 2 areas, right?
Speaker 1
01:11:57
That's generating a lot of economic activity.
Speaker 3
01:12:01
Yeah, so my question is related to what you're talking about. I was wondering if you had created any sort of perspective on your numbers on what's the negative impact of the black taxes to like US economy period. Like all this underinvestment, right, is not only affecting black people, right?
Speaker 3
01:12:19
It's also, there's some bottom line being impacted on the US overall in the short term and the long term. So I was wondering if you had told that story, kind of with your numbers or extracted that story.
Speaker 1
01:12:30
So that's a great question. The short version is I have not quantified that. That's the opportunity cost.
Speaker 1
01:12:38
You know what I'm saying? Because we operate in a 0 sum game, my gain is your loss kind of thing, Part of what this is costing, you got a million black men in jail today. It's not even possible to get that in a natural environment, like from the beginning of time. It costs $30 billion a year to keep them in prison.
Speaker 1
01:13:08
If they were working $15 an hour, they'd be making $30 billion a year. That's a net $60 billion cost just to the country for those people. Why are folks in jail? When you go through it and you see like the economic hollowing out that's happened to the community over and over again, what happens is you wind up having depression, people self-medicate, do it with drugs, right?
Speaker 1
01:13:32
You're economically deprived, you're trying to make money, like economic activity, You're doing it with drugs. It's something that's available to you. You're not doing it because you love it. You're doing it because you need economic resources.
Speaker 1
01:13:45
And then that starts a negative feedback cycle. And then the response to that is incarceration, as opposed to, OK, I have a medical issue here to address, or I have an economic issue to address. So that's a $60 billion cost. Like all of these incremental, it all comes back.
Speaker 1
01:14:02
All these incremental supplements that they wind up having to do with food and all kind of different support, it's because we've had double the employment rate for white Americans for 60 years. If you don't have that problem, you don't need to make all those investments. People are above sustenance. So the short answer is I haven't compiled that in 1 kind of accurate number.
Speaker 1
01:14:28
I think that's an assignment for me to take on. I got the marching orders.
Speaker 2
01:14:34
Again, thank you so much for just putting the effort into this to allow a platform for people to be able to have informed discussions and data-backed discussions instead of opinion-backed discussions. So, 1 more round of applause please. Thank
Speaker 1
01:15:00
you you
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