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hy do Black Americans lack the elevation we say we deserve?

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What up, though, and welcome back to another episode of Run Your Mouth Podcast with your girl Key. We y'all know I talk about everything and anything, but everything has substance. And we're gonna dive right into today's topic. Today's conversation may make some of y'all uncomfortable, but discomfort is often where growth begins. So why haven't black Americans reached a collective elevation we constantly say we deserve? There you have it, people. That's the topic. That's a discussion for today. Why are we still stuck in this rut that we talk about? Why are we still asking somebody to pull us up by the bootstraps? Why aren't we looking on every corner and seeing our stores? Why don't we see convenience stores with our names on it? Why don't our family names carry the legacy that it should? What are we doing wrong? Okay, and before anyone misunderstands me, this is not about blaming black people for every condition affecting our communities. We cannot discuss our present position without acknowledging slavery, segregation, discrimination, redlining, unequal education, mass incarceration in the black community, especially with our males, and the continued racial wealth gap. Yes, it exists. Those systems were very real. And their effects did not disappear simply because laws changed, because we all know the laws were just bent a little bit. They didn't really change. They just bent, modified, and kind of worked and wiggled around to make it look like it was in our favor. But we still see the injustices of the day. We still see the unjustified arrests, the murders in the street by those who were called to protect and serve recorded. Lies in our face. And still nothing happens. But today, I also want to talk about what is within our control. And not saying we can't ever control that narrative, because we can. But we got to first start with what's within our control. We say we deserve economic power, stronger communities, and greater respect. But too many of us struggle to live together, work together, employ one another, support one another, and build together. So the question is, and will always remain, still remain, remain the same then and remain the same now. Are we only asking for elevation or are we preparing ourselves to maintain it? How many of us were born with quote-unquote silver spoons in our mouth? We didn't work as hard as our parents did, but we fumbled the bag. You know, the baby boomer. That generation went on, worked hard, retired, they carried the torch, and then you have the next generation who kind of uh I can live off of mom and dad's money. Oh, my mom and my dad had good jobs, and my mom, my dad, or you know, they ex-military, my mom, my dad, they were civil rights uh participants. They they they they paved the way so I can chill. How many of us have come up in households that sound and look a little bit like that? Why is it so hard to live together? One reason we struggle to live together is that many of us have learned to survive as individuals, not live. You heard I say survive, instead of functioning as a community. It's a big difference in living and surviving. When you when you raise to survive and you raise to think you gotta do everything by yourself, you often confuse pride with independence. Those two go one in the same of blocking many helpful blessings that can reach down and help you. When people have experienced scarcity and discrimination, grown up in poor households, and instability for generations, they may begin to see everybody and every opportunity as limited and every neighborhood as potential competition. We we suffer so bad with the mindset of everything gotta be a competition. I say this all the time. Um, if you don't follow my social media or you don't read it, or you don't comment, don't like it, don't matter, don't stop, nothing. I say it all the time. We are not in competition with one another. When we all trying to get to the same finish line, we should be holding hands and running together to tear that joker down, bust it, bust the rope wide open. But we can't do that when we always in survival mode. Survival teaches people to protect what belongs to them. But community requires us to consider what belongs to all of us. It's not a you thing, it's not an I thing, it's a we thing. Protect your block. I remember growing up, and I speak about my city all the time because I just so love the ups and downs, the pros and the cons of growing up in an urban inner city. Um when I saw it good and I saw it bad. I was there for it through the 70s, 80s, 90s, early 2000s, seeing the good and the bad. But we knew that we failed together, we rose together, we thrived together. That's what it takes a lot, and that's what we lack a lot in the black community in America. We live near one another without truly knowing one another. We may share a whole neighborhood, but not share responsibility for its safety. We see something, we say nothing. We don't share responsibility for cleanliness. You go two, three yards past and grass not cut, junkyard cars in the driveway, broken down stuff outside, children of elders or future safety and cleanliness for our communities going by the wayside. We may say we want peace, but we avoid the conversations and the sacrifices required to create it. It's just talk. It's just my sugar known when you're talking about it, but it sounds crazy because you ain't doing nothing about it. What are we doing to create environments that's safe, thriving, clean, and feels like a community as a whole. Living to together is hard. It's hard. First thing we want to do when we're children is we want to grow, we want to grow up so we can get out. What are we trying to get out so bad for? Because we have been taught that we need to survive alone, that you need to do everything alone. You ain't got nobody. You better learn how to do this. Ain't nobody coming to save you, true that. You gotta save yourself, but it doesn't mean that you can't help save somebody else. And when we learn that concept that while nobody has the obligation to come and save us, we're gonna save each other. And we're gonna make this thing work, and we're gonna make it greater and better together. Because living together is hard. It's hard to live in the household with the people you you born and raised with, let alone living in a community with a whole bunch of strangers and and trying to call them family. But we live so close-knit now and so tight that we don't even know our neighbors. And to live together in a community requires your trust in your patience, boundaries, and a willingness to resolve conflict. It means understanding that not every disagreement is a personal attack and not every correction is disrespect. And that I see it so much on the internet all the time. You can say one thing outside of what somebody agrees, and they probably don't like you anyway, and they're gonna come for you like nothing ever before. And you can go down 15 comments and somebody done said something even worse, but they they fuck with them, so they ain't gonna say nothing. I delete block and get done with them people so fast because they're looking for something, they're looking for something negative defined to you all the time so that they can have a competitive, envious, jealous spirit, and they was just waiting for the attack. No, cut them loose. We ain't talking about them. Those living together, growing together, working together, and thriving together as a black community. And this is over here. This is America. We dropped the ball. We dropped the ball on so many things that was handed to us. You know, we look back and we want to always talk about the slave trade. We want to always harp on somebody to call your school the Ivy League school. You still waiting on somebody to invite you to the Oscars. You still waiting on somebody to say you're good enough. Have you not realized who you are? Do you not know the skin that you're in? A lot of us don't. We don't realize the power we possess right in our own neighborhoods. We don't have to move to another one, we don't have to build another one. We gotta take care of the one that we have. We gotta secure the bag in our neighborhoods. We deserve. And it also means accepting that your community cannot be built around convenience alone. We can't expect neighbors to show up for us during emergencies while remaining absent from the everyday work of maintaining the neighborhood. You you don't see neighborhood watches anymore. We want the benefits of a community without always accepting the responsibilities of the community. You gotta be a community person to live in a community. You got cul-de-sects. Can't even go all the way through them. We had blocks. You could ride past nobody, never see you come back by again because you could cut a left, cut a right, go to a whole nother block. But now we're building cul-de-sects. You gotta come back the same way you came in. You gotta pass these houses, the same ones, you gotta pass the same neighbors, you gotta make a little loop-de-loop and come back around. So you're going to see each other pretty often. You'll see the same, it's a dead end. You gotta just circulate around in your neighborhood, but yet we still walk around and won't speak. We'll jog through the neighborhood, we're gonna let kids ride bikes if they even go outside and still won't speak. We want a community without community responsibility. We speak so proudly about black unity, but unity requires more than matching shirts, y'all. Hashtags and social media posts. Let me say that again. Come your community requires more than matching shirts, hashtags, and social media posts. It all looks good, don't it? It sounds good, it looks real uniform. But then you all turn around and next week and you arguing with your sisters and your brothers, your friends that you grew up with, and you played in the playground, but then you turn around next year and it's a family reunion, it's a class reunion, who everybody's supposed to be so tight. You done tore it down. You done tore down the trust, you done tore down the respect, you tore down the boundaries, and now you want to build you don't know anything because you're so self-centered, so caught up in your own little world, you don't know nothing about what's going on around you, but you are the people who say you want to come together as a community, you want to get on social media and you want to be a community leader, you want to start something, you want to start an initiative, you want to go, you want to save the people, you want to do this. You can't even do it in your neighborhood. You can't even bring five people together. How are you gonna bring 50, 500, 5,000, 50,000 millions of people? But you want followers, but you can't be a leader in your own neighborhood. You gotta care about it. You gotta care about what you talk about. You can't just live in your house. It means respecting the elderly person who lives next door. It means protecting their neighborhood instead of damaging it. It means correcting harmful behavior and allowing other people to correct your children. Being correctable as an adult. It means correct book and saying a lesson. Every day you need to be learning something. But immediately we need responsibilities, period. Can't say that enough. We want someone to support our business. Business? You'll y'all will scroll past stuff that you know you like, you'll secretly buy it, but you'll never share it. You will go and shout with somebody doing the same thing that somebody you know is doing, and you won't even bother to shout with them. What does it say about your ears? For the last five years, I've used vendors at top brand designers use same quality. Never had a complaint about the quality of my apparel. But I ain't putting somebody such and such and such and such name on it. So it ain't gonna go there, huh? Y'all know what y'all do. Y'all know how y'all act when it comes to one another. Oh, the black owned beauty supply store is too high. But you going in the one owned by the Asians or the foreigners and spending the same amount of money because you in there all week doing the same thing. We don't have that type of connection. We're shipping from a country that we have no connections in. So we're having to get vendors and we're having to import our goods, resell, rebrand. So of course it's gonna be an upcharge until we learn how to make these connections and until we learn how to pave our way by supporting one another. If I gotta go spend 20 more extra dollars at this black-owned salon than I would if I go across town to the Dominican shop, whoop-de-woop, then that's what it is. That's what it's gonna be. And if enough of us do that, we'll put a chokehold on those who taxing us and not allowing us to come in and import and export those gatekeepers of branding. Because they're out there. I promise you. That's exactly what's happening. You can't get your you can't get your business off the ground because you can't get it imported and exported properly. You can't, you you don't have the monetary or the the shipping accessibility to get your your stuff in bulk. So you you you got a middleman. You gotta cut out the middleman. That's the only way we're gonna rise, y'all. But y'all don't get that. Y'all cry about a couple extra dollars being spent in your neighborhood by somebody that looks like you versus driving all the way down to Timbuktu burning gas doing the same thing. But you want somebody to support you. We want people to recommend us, but we refuse to recommend someone who offers the same service because we see them only as competition. We say there is room for everybody until somebody else enters the room that's actually doing it and doing it well, then it's a problem. Healthy communities understand that one another has to have success in order to grow. Another person's success does not automatically reduce your opportunity. If one black-owned restaurant succeeds, it can't create traffic and opportunities for other businesses nearby. If somebody's blocking it. But if you have a mindset that says, hey, this black-owned restaurant then came into my community and it's going to create traffic and opportunities for my business, because now I can go over here and do this and I can tell them that they're doing this. If I'm selling cupcakes and they're over here selling brownies, hey, go over there if you want brownies. I ain't gonna chokehold you and I'm gonna start making brownies knowing brownies wasn't my thing. Cupcakes was my thing, and I'm gonna send I'ma send you over there to get your brownies because when you want cupcakes, you're gonna come over here to me, and I'm gonna expect them to tell them, go over there for your cupcakes, because I ain't making cupcakes, I ain't trying to do it all. I said this before in the community back south, small town. Everybody wants to sell plates. That's fine. All y'all go in one building. Have y'all ever been into one of those international um Korean spots where they have several different Asian cuisines? You got your Korean food, you got your Chinese, you got your Japanese, one of those bars. It's phenomenal. Because everybody, every Asian region don't actually eat the same, they don't all eat the same type of food. You have an array of different food, but they all under one roof. You got your Bangkok food, you got this, you got that. It's phenomenal. You can get this noodle, this rice, hibachi over here. Why can't we do that? That requires us to stop treating every successful black person like an opponent. That's why. Everybody you see to look like you should not be your competition. Do y'all not understand that we are so far behind in the game, so far behind in in the money and in the procruitment and the creativity, so far behind in leaving a legacy. We ain't got no time to hate on each other. Are y'all not? You ain't tired of putting a face on a t-shirt and raising money? You're not tired of doing all these elaborate things that look like you got money, but you actually have none, and you're not leaving anything to your family? That's not tiresome. So why do we struggle to work together? Our major challenge is trust. We have been conditioned to be distrustful of one another. We have been conditioned to compete against one another, we've been conditioned to try to be the brown nose that are outdo the next one. We've been conditioned. Some of us have been disappointed. We've been deceived or taken advantage of by people who look like us because we've all had this embedded in us for so long in some fashion or form. Even those that didn't grow up in the Jim Crow eras and the Jim Crow states, Confederate states, we still run into it where we see other black people who feel like they have an opponent in each other, and they have to always be cutthroat with each other. Because if you're doing good in your house, I got a problem with it. Y'all kids will fight each other. You don't know what their parents worked and did to get them what they have, but then we have kids killing each other by shoes. We have children fighting over brands and clothes because we've conditioned them to think that doing well has to be bad, and you gotta take from your own instead of trying to ask what the recipe they have and what they're following. What's the blueprint? How did you do this? Help me, show me, take advantage of each other's knowledge and stop looking at it as a op. We need to hold each other responsible for that, and we can't keep harping on the deception that we've experienced, we can't keep blaming everybody for how one black business treated us or how they felt. Teach and learn from each other. We sometimes decide that we cannot trust any black business or employer or partner based on our past, but we rarely apply that to the same standards as we do to other groups. We will go and we would be mistreated in a a beauty supply store, but you still go back and shop. You will go and have get looked over at a department store, but you still go buy that birkin bag. You would be looked up and down and followed all around in in a high-end store, but you still keep feeling like it's a privilege to go give these people your money and put their name on your chest, even when you know that their product ain't really for you and they really designed it for you. They just knew you would pay high-end for it, and they probably selling it somewhere else very, very cheap. If we receive poor service from one large corporation, we do not stop shopping at every major company. It's like the Target Band. Okay, so it was put out there that they did whoop-de-woop-de-boop. But do you know how many companies that that entity controls? Did we stop all of them? No. So stopping there then shut them down. We gotta stop the whole the whole conglomerate. We gotta stop going all of them that's that's associated with them. But we too scared to miss a meal, too scared to miss out on high-end unnecessary clothes, too scared to trust God. For one, y'all knew I was gonna talk about God, right? You already knew it. If you don't want to hear me talk about God, and this ain't this ain't the station for you, go on somewhere else. Because I'm gonna always keep it real and let you know where your help really come from. Believers, non-believers, you better start believing something, and you better start listening. One restaurant, we ain't gonna call no names because I don't want to get sued. But you know, you you pull up in the drive-through, they got a whole bunch of little black kids working, whole bunch of little white kids working, whole bunch of little Hispanic kids working, a whole bunch of little old people working. Get your order on. We do not swear off of every restaurant owned by that group, because they probably own a bunch. We go right back the next week. We post and cuss and fuss about it, but you go right on and you support them anyway, and pay for that high-end coffee, pay for that, pay for that killer burger, them killer fries, and all that other mess that you're putting in your stomach, you go right on back again. However, one bad experience with a black-owned business can become this is why I don't support black business. Dumb shot with them whole smear campaign, and I'm guilty of it myself. I have I have gave bad reviews. I mean, I give reviews, I'm a review giver. Good, bad, ugly. I'm gonna give it, I don't care whose it is, but it's not to a point where it's slander to the point where it's hateful, it's probably teachable. I remember giving one one really, really bad review, not to the restaurant, not to the owner, to the service of one of their workers. And I meant what I said and said what I meant. And now I'll write it again. It wasn't to the owners, very pleasant owners, very good food, very pleasant establishment for the area. But you need to know that you hire. Somebody that's possibly altering your traffic. Because if your people can't work by a standard and use best practice, then yeah, they need to go. I don't care what color they are. But it ain't stopped me from supporting that business. I didn't give that business a bad rep, I gave that employer a bad rep. And that's unfair and harmful for us to do that in our own community. Just shut a whole establishment down because we don't like a person or drag a whole initiative from a black-owned business because their prices might be a little bit higher than the competitors. But do we sit and we think about why? Black business should absolutely provide excellent service. They don't get a pass. You don't get a pass to be ghetto just because that's the stereotype. You don't get a pass to have poor service. You don't get a pass to treat people poorly that come in your shops or shop with you that you don't like. You can't be one-sided. You you are held accountable to do good business. Supporting black-owned businesses should not mean accepting disrespect or poor quality or unprofessional behavior. No, act like you're running a business. Accountability is a part of support. At the same time, customs must also be fair. Supporting a business means respecting its prices, policies, and those people's time. We cannot demand discounts from our friends and relatives while willingly paying full price elsewhere. I say it all. I would love, love, love, love, love to gift every child I know in my family, friends, relatives, a free children's book if it's gonna help them read and get them off of a tablet all day, every day. But how will I ever survive? I would love to send out t-shirts if it's gonna get put on the stage by somebody at thousands and thousands of boxes bulk. I would love to, but what is that gonna benefit me? No, you black rapper, you black singer, you black actor, you black actress, you black business owner, if you want to support me, pay for it. If I feel like gifting you and I feel like that you are deserving of my promo, and I want you to put my brand on your chest, that's what I'm gonna do. But should I be held at at a standard that this is this is something I have to do just to put it out there? No, you should be willing. But what do what do we do? What do we see in the black community with our black stars and our black celebrities? They'll watch y'all and they'll go mimic what you do. They already got a million followers and boom, they done took your idea. You ain't got enough money, you ain't did enough. You ain't bringing it back to your community, you ain't helping nobody else but you and your family. But we steady supporting you. These are the same people that we're supporting. We're going to concerts, we're buying their brand, we're supporting everything they put out. But they going over here to the other vendors and the other sponsors, and that's the product they're supporting, trying to get you to come buy that one, but they didn't buy yours. They didn't support yours. Your friend's business is not your personal coupon. Pay them people, buy their product, support them like you would anybody else, because it makes sense. And I'm gonna let I'm gonna make it make sense to you in a minute. Just keep listening, stay with me. Why do we struggle to build together? Oh Lord, why do we struggle to build together? Why would we go and pay a million dollars to go in a community that we have no uh return on our investment in when we can build in our community together, build 20, 30 houses together? Why do we do that? Building together requires long-term thinking, shared sacrifice and the ability to trust a process. We can't be quick. That may not produce immediately, we can't be quick. The results may not come tomorrow. We can't be quick. The results may not come in five or ten years, we can't be quick. We gotta trust the process. We gotta stick with it. You gotta get you people that stick together. We drag, drag, drag. Y'all do because I don't. I love LeBron James. They drag him. But he stuck with his friends, he stuck with the process. He waded it through. Say what you want about him as a basketball player. Say what you want about his charisma on the feet on the court. But he is a businessman. He stuck through, stuck through his marriage, stuck through his parental responsibilities, stuck through his friendships, stuck through his business, and stuck through his career. He stuck through. He weathered the storm. Whether you like him or not, that's what he did. And that's what we have to do. We have to trust the sacrifice. We have to think long term and we have to trust the process and that the sacrifices will yield us benefit. Many of us have been conditioned to look for quick returns because our communities have faced so much urgency. We need it right now. We suffer it. We need this to happen right now. When people are focused on surviving today, it can be difficult to invest in something that may or may not benefit them in the next generation. But guess what? That knot is very tiny. It's a very tiny aspect of that may will benefit the next generation. Whatever you plant, that seed you plant today, it's gonna yield some fruit. May not blossom a whole tree full of fruit. It may not, the grass may not be green all the time, but the grass is gonna grow. Hell, even dead grass grows in some patches, in some areas. Fruit is produced on rotten trees. You got apples that's still that that's rotten, but you still got a whole nother side that's producing pretty red and green apples. So sometimes you just have to weather the storm. And that's a problem that we have. We we feel we you know, I don't know if that's so much conditioning or that's a lot of TV. Because you know, people who watch a lot of TV, they they tend to have a a fantastical mind. They feel like everything is is supposed to be a fairy tale. It's TV, people. Maybe you should start watching so much of it because everything's gonna happen in every trust to process in order for us to build together. We struggle, we wait, we work, agree on leadership. Everybody wants to be the leader. We don't agree on priorities or methods. Instead of creating room for different approaches, we can turn everything into a disagreement. We do it all the time on social media. One person's view may not look like yours, but it'll be flipped into a whole argument and a disagreement. Then you standing on your ground on what you believe in so much discord, and people don't know how to just say, hey, we agree, disagree. This is what I said, this is what I mean. You arguing and fussing with me ain't gonna change it. Me arguing and fussing with you ain't gonna change it, but this is what I said, and a lot of times those people who don't have that solidarity to stand on, they end up going back and forth wishy-washy and don't even remember what they say about it. We gotta learn how to understand and discern that every disagreement is not does not have to be an argument, isn't it? It's not criticism. It truly can be constructive criticism, and that's what we play have problems in our leadership ability. We don't know how to be good leaders sometimes in the black community because we already got this distrust, we already got this I need to finish first attitude, we already got this demeanor and this wall built up that we gotta hoard everything like we in prison on a five-minute child break and we gotta cover our food on chicken day. You ain't gotta wrap your arms so tight around your plate, ain't nobody coming to steal it. Ain't nobody coming to steal it if you're working with a team of solid people. One person wants to lead, another wants recognition, the third refuse to participate unless they control the entire project. Everybody ain't a leader, everybody can't do the same thing. You know, you might start at 50 things, you might be good at 10. Know how to pass them other 40 on to somebody else. It doesn't mean that your idea wasn't good, it doesn't mean you didn't have the right initiative, it just meant it wasn't your purpose, your path. I already know I'm not good at editing, not because I can't be, because I don't want to be. I don't want I like organic shows, I like mistakes, I like you hearing exactly what I said the way I said it. I don't want to go back and make it perfect because perfect is not my purpose. My purpose is delivering, to deliver something that actually is effective, not perfect. I know when to fall back and when to not dig my hands into something. I have a hundred ideas, y'all, for real. I'm always trying something different, but I know I'm not uh majestically perfect at every one of them, so I know when to fall back, but it doesn't mean I won't share with somebody else. I might see that twinkle in another person's eye and be like, oh, you should start doing events or or decorating. You're good at that. I'm not good at that. My walls don't be white wherever I go, they're gonna always be bare and plain and clean and neat because I don't want to have a house full of flowers and a house full of portraits and a house full of I love you stations and all that. I don't want it. And I'm not good at finding that that that niche to to capture that vision because it's just not my calling. So would I hire a home decor person? Yeah, tell them I can tell you what I want, but I'm not good at doing it. I'm not good at sitting down twirling flowers together. Not my thing. It's beautiful, and would I love to have that that talent, but it's just not my thing. But doesn't mean that I can't see a person that has that artistic ability and say, oh, well, you should purchase these. I saw your your bouquets on your page, and then I ran across these on Etsy. Hey, won't you go this link and get you some product and you know make your beautify your stuff more? That's that's how we make it. But no, the mindset some of us is we'll sit and watch some people page all day and we'll copy everything they do knowing good and damn well you don't know what you're doing. And rather than ask them, what I'm what how do I do this? You'll go and try to mimic the whole process and won't be a bit of good at it and won't stick with it, and you'll stay in competition, having the same friends, same followers, same people for years, and mount to nothing when you could have been flowing that traffic over here and finding you something that you're good at in that person's company, you know. If if I'm not a baker, but doesn't mean I don't like to eat sweets, so I'm gonna share. Share the share the person's food. Tell people who like, oh, you got an event coming up. Let me let me let you put you on this person who makes a great uh tray table, a great treat table, or snacks or whatever it is, because I'm not gonna do it. That's how you get things going and you help build other relationships and businesses for other people. It's shared ownership, it requires people to contribute money, time, skills, relationships, and accountability. It requires written agreements to go into partnership with people. Can't do everything on word of mouth. Oh, yeah, my mom and them say, Oh, we're what up, Dobra. Um, we're gonna do this like this. No, sit down and put it in writing with these people. And it's not disrespect people when you draw up contracts and agreements. It's not. This is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to do it. If it's going to be a problem, then this ain't this ain't it. Me and my best friend, when we started this podcast, I started it alone when I brought in the other contract. We got an agreement. This is what we're going to do. No, we ain't making millions of dollars yet, and it might look weird to you, but that's the anticipation. I anticipate this being bigger than it is today in a day or two, or day or three, or day a hundred, or day of two hundred, four hundred, five hundred. So we're gonna we're gonna put this in writing right now. How we're gonna split this, how we're gonna do this, how everything is gonna be, so we won't have to hear it once we hit a million dollars. It ain't got nothing to do with our friendship. Do I trust you? Yes. Do I love you? Yes. Do I believe in you? Yes. Am I gonna do right? By gonna put this in writing and make sure that we're solid because it's business, yes. Don't get offended. We cannot build lasting institutions on handshakes and assumptions and good intentions alone. That's what we mess up at. We also have to stop abandoning projects at the first sign of difficulty. First sign you don't make no money, don't quit. If you know that's what you you know that you know that's what you're good at, that's what you're meant to do, keep going. Don't quit just because 50,000 people ain't following you. Don't quit just because you didn't say enough to quit your day job. Keep your day job and keep doing what you're doing. Keep going through the difficult times because every organization, business, and community effort will face conflict, financial pressure, and imperfect leadership. That's everything you everybody you work for got messed up people. Everybody up top got a fucked up organization, somebody sitting in a seat doing fucked up stuff, and y'all know it. Everywhere. That's a part of it. If we treat every problem as proof that collective work is impossible, we will never create anything strong. And it will never last. It can't fall apart. We got to employ each other. We this is the this is the strongest part of this segment that I'm sharing with y'all today. We got to employ one another. I cannot say it enough. You must pay them properly, even when you can't pay yourself in the beginning. You gotta pay the people that work for you. You gotta treat them with dignity, provide clear expectations, and create opportunities in advancement. A black-owned workplace should not reproduce the same mistreatment we complain about in other workplaces. How you gonna treat your people like the people who oppressed you? How you gonna get your nose so high up in the sky that you don't understand what this black woman and this black man is going through? Don't abuse it, people. But how can you in leadership as black people employ the same discrimination, the same hate, and the same disadvantages that your oppressors apply to you and call yourself a leader? We cannot build liberation through exploitation. On the other side, when someone from our community hires us, we must bring professionalism. We gotta be reliable. Y'all go to work. Respect one another. Don't walk in your job because you got a black leader and instantly think, oh goodness. Respect one another. Respect, don't ask for a handout, don't be in there thinking you deserve to get a promotion when you late every day, just because your manager black. Respect the leadership that you have. Familiarity should not become an excuse for arriving late or ignoring expectations or failing to complete complete the work that you're assigned to do. You know what you need to do. Do it. Just because your auntie is the boss or your uncle owns the company don't mean you get to do what you want to do as a black person in a black community with black leaders, because remember, we're already behind. So nepotism only works when you're solid as a rock and ain't nobody coming for you. If somebody coming for you, see you in that coming for stage, don't don't expect to be treated with this this hierarchy while them people still building their business. We cannot say, you know, if we want our businesses to grow, both black employees and black employees must understand that professionalism is a shared responsibility. You cannot treat people poorly, no matter what. You cannot have expectations that are unrealistic no matter what. The employer must lead properly, and the employee must perform properly in their establishment. Every manager is not a good leader, and we find that a lot in our in our communities. We spend enormous amounts of money, but spending power is not the same as economic power. Economic power comes from ownership, y'all. Investing, education, employment, and keeping money circulating in your community and productivity. We can't keep borrowing from Peter to PayPal and think that's productive. We won't see no ROI. We celebrate what someone is wearing, what they are driving, and where they are vacationing. But how often do we celebrate someone buying land, establishing a trust, opening a business, purchasing adequate insurance, or preparing a will? No, we want to go stop just giving you a policy and holding on to it and teaching your children to hang it on the wall like your grandparents had, or put it in a safe box, pay that because it might not look like much now, it might not be doing much for you, but what it's gonna do for the people you leave behind. They'll have a little bit of something, a little bit of wiggle, wiggle room, a little bit of chimp change in their pocket to start something. We gotta stop thinking about right now and what we're gonna do for right now and how it benefits us, and start thinking about legacy money and legacy moves. That's how you leave generational wealth. You work for it, you build it, you grow it, you pass it down, and so on and so forth. But y'all want everything right now for your own selfish selves in your house, in your pocket right now. You don't want to drive that car until the wheels fall off because you want to spend your money buying new shiny stuff all the time. You ain't thinking about your kids coming behind you and theirs coming behind them, and how 15 years of you being in debt affects their future when you didn't even have to be. Now there's nothing wrong with enjoying life by all means. I don't save nothing, I ain't gotta save, but I handle my business. Handle your business first. Put it if that if you got a thousand dollars to blow every week, but everything else is handled, blow your thousand dollars. That's your budget money for you to blow. Live your life. You deserve it, you deserve joy, you deserve travel, you deserve beautiful things, you deserve to see the fruits of your labor, but don't be a fool. And don't be around here eating fruit that ain't ripen yet. But your appearance without foundation is not elevation. You being able to afford a birken bag or you being able to buy every pair of Jordans that come out does not define your wealth, does not define that you have made it. Sliding money down your shoulder, down to your fingertips don't mean that you're rich, don't mean that you have invested your money properly. A luxury car parked outside a home facing foreclosure is not wealth. Designer clothing purchase with unpaid bills is not freedom. Looking successful and becoming financially secure are two entirely different things. You want to look like money, but you ain't got none. You ain't got gas money to the next week. Because we have not understood financial wealth is not on our bodies. It's not when we don't even own the brand. We must teach our children how money works, not only how to just spin it. I was very adamant about creating that book, Money Matters, and you know, making it happy for children to want to put money in the bank, save money, buy their own items when they go to the store, and learn how to swipe a card, learn how to open up a bank account, learn, you know, learn money because it does matter at an early age. Social media has made comparisons, divisions, and public humiliation profitable, and that's what a lot of people in the black community are harping on. They want to be content creators, and your content is only growing if you're creating stuff that's bringing your community to a demise, exploiting your people, and humiliating your people. That's the only stuff that's really growing. Stuff that's teaching you how to grow, how to elevate, how to invest. You don't see that circulating, and we are steady falling for that nonsense. Every black person you turn around, they're trying to turn into that entertainment business within minutes, share arrests, arguments, failures, graduations, being costing a hundred million dollars, all of that stuff. We share all of that proms, all this crazy mess. But we don't share job openings, we don't share actual college graduations, we don't share business opportunities, but we say we want black people to succeed. Sometimes success attracts more suspicion than support. When someone begins progressing, people always ask who they think they are or what they do to get that, who helped them, who they laying up with, what they doing, is it legal? You know, instead of studying what they did, researching, asking for help, we find reasons to discredit everything and be negative and talk bad about everybody behind their backs and not give constructive criticism because that's the necessary criticism that we need. But constant public destruction is not accountability. We have to stop using humiliation as entertainment and then wondering why trust is missing from our communities or why people look down on us and think that we're clowns, and that's all we got to bring is entertainment and degrading conversations and platforms where we sit and we talk about what the next one's doing, didn't do, putting them down. Only nah. Some of our inability to live, work, and build together comes from unhealed pain. Trauma can show up as mistrust, defensiveness, jealousy, fear, and survival mentality. We are always in defensive mode. People who have always lived in survival mode may believe that another person must lose for them to win. That's why we have so much black-on-black crime, so much gang-related crime. That gang down the street ain't doing nothing to you. They ain't bothering you. Why are you going down there bothering them? That's what we have to ask ourselves. Ain't about to tell you to get out your get out your membership. Do whatever it is you want to do. But is it elevating you or helping your community any for all y'all to just be at each other's throat all the time about nothing? No, it's not. This is why elevation cannot only be financial, it's not all about money in our community. Everybody wants to get rich, but nobody wants to learn how to elevate and how to grow and put some stability in your community. We need emotional healing, we need healthy communication, we need conflict resolution and the ability to disagree without destroying relationships. Every disagreement does not require a permanent separation. Sometimes you just need to walk away, take a deep breather month, week, day, hour, year. But it don't mean that person never brought you no good. It doesn't mean you and that person will not do business well together. It doesn't mean that you and that person are not meant to be friends. It just means you need time to heal separately. And then you revisit it and you mend it and you fix it. Set aside your pride and your emotions and you look at each other and you say, Hey, what do we got to bring to the table that's gonna help both of us? And you build and you grow. Because every correction is not disrespect, every boundary boundary broken is not betrayal. Some people just actually have to break that to mend that. And we just make nice posts and act like we really supporting black communities and black business, and we down for one another, knowing you backbiting each other at the same time, and you're in a group chat with 50,000 people, and one person gonna tell somebody and they're gonna tell somebody and boom. We know what you really are. You can't always be starting a project to heal the community and heal the world, but then you renege on everything you do. You're the problem. You are the problem, but you want to bring a bridge together. You must treat them fairly. Period. It's not hard. You look around, work together, employ one another, they grow, they thrive, and they got big bank because they know the recipe. Asian community. Live together, grow together, build together, employ one another, they thrive, got big bank, because they know the recipe. Hispanic community. Work together, live together, grow together, build together, shop together, thrive, got big bank, know the recipe. European community. Live together, grow together, lie together, steal together, came over here, stole the whole country together, thrive, got big bank, because they got their recipe and they know it and they live in by it. But we we Africa community. You go to Africa, they live together, work together, thrive together, build together, stick together. We came over here in America. Black Americans, and we forgot the recipe. We forgot how to thrive as a nation, as a community, live together, work together, build together, grow together. We forgot that we need one another. So that's my time, y'all, because y'all are I'm always gonna try to give you what I can give you in less than an hour. And I really kind of want to be like 20, 30, 40 minutes. But tonight I felt like um this was something that needed to be elaborated on because we are looking around, we realizing we don't own grocery stores, we don't own convenience stores, we don't own liquor stores, we don't own salons, we don't own beauty salons, we don't own malls, we don't own the clothes we wear, we don't own the cars we drive, our names are not set across the front grille. We don't own the shoes we walk in. Come on, people, it's too many of us to not own something. And I'm not talking half of us work and don't even never own the house that we live in. But we say we own it, but we the bank really own it um because the deed ain't hanging in our house. But how can we? Yes. Can we? Can five of y'all live together and put it set aside your pride and act like you got some sense, pay your bills, save your money, and and flourish together and pay that shit off 10-15 years. You gotta have a house note for 50 years. Nobody ain't never gonna get it eat. We gotta make sense out of nonsense. We've been dealt nonsense. We've lived in nonsense, we've grown in nonsense, we've thrived in nonsense, and we gotta learn how to combat the nonsense around us and definitely get it out of our neighborhoods. Y'all figure it out. We're gonna figure it out. Keep God first. Thank you for joining me for Run Your My Podcast, brought to you by Read It Group, none other than me. My name is gonna always be my name. I'm gonna always keep it with you. And I hope that y'all will keep it real with yourselves and figure it out. If not for this generation, for the one coming behind you and the one coming behind them. We can make a change and we can make it better. We can make it better together. That's just not a slogan. We are better together. We really are. We ain't gotta always get along, we ain't gotta always like each other. We ain't even gotta always love each other because that's hard for some people sometimes to learn how to love properly when they haven't been loved properly. But we gotta stop not having accountability for our environment and our past and the and the things we haven't healed from, and we gotta want to see that change in our community. And that's when people start seeing that we are real. Because it's just like faith. If you have faith and nothing never changes, people tend to doubt it. But when people see the change and they see that you've done pray, you done stuck with it, and and and God has delivered on everything he said he was gonna do, then they like, oh, that's that's really real. Oh, he's mean as hell, he's bad as hell. Oh, I remember when he was a little boy, he was doing woot-to-woop woot-do-woop. But then he thrived and he stayed in faith and he stayed working, he stayed changing his life, he stayed fixing his heart and elevating within his community and within his mind or her mind, and now boom, they the greatest. That's what it's all about. So stick with it, y'all. Join me next time for Run Your Mouth Podcast. And I hope y'all have a good rest of your day. Enjoy your morning, enjoy your evening, enjoy your night, enjoy your life.