A Black Executive Perspective now presents Need to Know with the award winning hyphenated Dr. Nsenga Burton. Dr. Burton. What do we need to know?

Hello and welcome to Need to Know with Dr. Nsenga Burton. I am she, Dr. Burton. I am happy to see you today. Today, I would like to talk to you about um, a couple of things. One, there's an article about, uh, Billionaire's kiss in the ring, um, of the 47th president. That's coming into office on January 20th. Dr. Martin Luther King's national holiday. Yeah. Uh, and then, uh, there was a wonderful, um, Video it's not a video. It's an Instagram post of, uh, by Keith Boykin talking about the same thing and how it is really compromising media and media companies. Because you have these billionaire owners who are literally doing whatever they can to curry favor with this president, because they know how punitive he is and how he demands loyalty and they are in fear. Of what may happen or what may come once he comes into office. And so now we are really in a place of we being the public are in a place where we have to really think about whether or not to trust our media. In a way that we haven't before, um, because we have, as Mr Boykin says, and it might be Dr Boykin, but Keith Boykin says, uh, slow marching into authoritarianism and we are complying. We're complying by responding to settling lawsuits that are frivolous. We are complying by, uh, pulling endorsements of national, uh, presidential candidates, um, which is what happened with the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Uh, we are complying by getting rid of our DEI, uh, uh, uh, policies, uh, that really were put into place, not because, not to give people, uh, fear. not to give people opportunities they hadn't earned. It was because people had earned those opportunities and still were not getting them. And so it's like you at least have to interview someone or what have you. And if you look at the stats in schools and what have you, um, the only people who are really being affected by the erosion of the DEI policies are other students of color. Our numbers aren't going up or down because you weren't admitting us anyway. I'm a college professor 23 years in. Um, and so I know that to be true. So, you know, with all the in place, it wasn't helping us. It was really helping, um, you know, white women. It was helping in some cases, white men, because white men, if you looked at those numbers, they have been going down significantly in terms of those who are choosing to enroll in college and universities. Right? So it was helping them. Get in even though they may not have had the best grades. Um, and then even with this happening, you know, the folks whose numbers are dropping, Asian American students, Asian students, um, are trying to sue black students for taking their spots instead of people who have, um, benefited from legacy emissions and all that kind of stuff. And so there's just this laser focus on black people having anything. Anti black racism is pervasive throughout the world. Right. It is pervasive in this country. So people literally think that we shouldn't have anything and. The reason that they think we shouldn't have anything is because they think that we're less than right. So we don't deserve to be in these places. We haven't earned our spot. We were in servitude slavery for so long. How dare you think that you should be here or there? So I'm bringing all this back together. All of this is part of the same poisonous fruit. And that is called racism and it's called anti black racism. And so basically, what you all are doing when you are settling these cases, when you are allowing him to escape, um, and have allowed him, but, you know, by and large to escape, uh, serving time that he would have been, uh, he would have been, um, made to serve. Had he been a regular old person, um, you know, it is, you know, The hypocrisy of holding people in jail who haven't even been charged when you have someone who is now going to be president of the United States with the number of felonies and convictions that he has is just, uh, it's preposterous. It's a boring every all the S. A. T. words. It's all of those things. Um, and so what I'm saying is. What is happening is that people are getting misinformation and disinformation. But in addition to that, what is happening is the erosion of our institutions that are supposed to be the foundation to our society to our democracy. And so, if you can't trust your media, if you can't trust your HR, your HR professionals, if you can't trust your admissions counselors to colleges and universities, then where are we going? And where we're headed? You know, we live in a democracy. The beauty of a democracy is that everyone allegedly has a voice that you can correct, uh, damage that has been done to people populations or what have you, you can change things as a populace. You can say, hey, this isn't work. Segregation isn't working for us anymore. So let's see if we can create some opportunities so that everybody has equal access to resources didn't happen. But, you know, we aspire to it. Um, you know, part of being a democracy is not only just having one vote, one person, which, of course, we know that hasn't happened with the Electoral College, which has to be done away with, um, if we ever want to have any type of power, the people, the populace over our lives ever again, um, that those things are in place for a reason. And so when you have people. Who own these media companies, and, you know, the irony is someone who works in media. The irony of these media companies is that the people can afford to buy and sell and trade and do all the things that they do are typically not media trained people. They may be business people, but they're absolutely not journalists. They're not media or communicate. media makers or communicators. So they don't have the same level of ethics. They don't have the same amount of training. They don't really understand that we are the fourth estate, right? There's the executive branch, the legislative branch, um, the three branches of government. I'm having a brain fart on the other one, but the fourth estate is the press. We're supposed to be the watchdog, right? Um, and we're supposed to be there for the people to make sure that, um, we are, uh, Not being abused, used, mistreated, um, by those different branches of government. So I just wanted to use today to say that sometimes, um, and to echo what Boykin said, sometimes you just have to make a decision. You have to decide if you're going to be on what I call the right side of history or the wrong side of history. And I will say that if you are bending the knee. Kiss in the ring or any of those things and basically selling out the people who have made you, i. e. your customers. Uh, IE, your fellow humans, your fellow citizens, uh, your fellow, um, uh, colleagues, then it's, it's not going to end well, it's not going to end well for you. Like, you know, we, we are, uh, one of our foundations is violence. For this country, I hate to say it, but it's true. It's violence country found on violence. It was founded on the elimination or the attempt to eliminate whole groups of people. We don't have a great history when it comes to our foundational principles and to be heading back that way as fast as we can is very, it's not scary for me because I'm a historian, you know, you can see these things happening in cycles, but it is problematic and I don't think that people know what they're signing up for. So. We have to hold our people accountable. Uh, that includes the businesses. Um, you know, you have to figure out how to vote with your dollars because that's the only thing that people in this country understand. That's how capitalism works. So be mindful of what you support. What you do. Um, you know, I'm in the process of figuring out how to get myself off of Amazon and off of prime. I've already, and I worked for the, uh, an organization that was owned by the Washington post for 10 years. Um, but I canceled my Washington post subscription. I canceled my LA time subscription. Um, I'm getting off of Amazon and I'm going to finish watching cross. I got three more episodes cause I just cannot say no to Elvis Hodges. Um, but after I finished cross, Uh, prime's gotta go too. And uh, it's just unfortunate, but it's just like, you're not going to run my people into the ground. And have me help pay for it. I'm just not going to do it. So, you know, Walmart is like literally walking distance from my house. I go all the way over the target and pay more targets are messing up. I'm just gonna have to do away with them too. We just got to figure it out. Um, and I think, you know, 1 of my friends said this weekend that it's going to be really hard to actually Purchase things ethically anymore because of how the country is, um, being structured and just being structured to be run by major corporations and billionaires. Uh, and basically the people are supposed to, we're supposed to bend our knee and just pretend like this is normative. And we have no say in it. Well, I don't believe that. And, um, I am here to say that I'm not going to be a part of it. So if I can in any way, shape or form do anything, it can be the slightest thing. And it might not be a big deal to you. Uh, but when I look at my tax, when I started doing my taxes, I see how much money I spend on Amazon. I think it's going to be a big deal if enough of us do it. Um, and then that's what I'm going to do. So I think you need to know that you do have some power. You can exercise it in a myriad of ways. You know, it can be doing what we're doing. Tony and I are doing. Talking about what we're talking about, um, you can do it with your exercise and your dollars. You can get off of X, which I've done that as well. I'm now debating on blue sky because I just don't trust the platforms anymore. I don't know what they're gonna do with our information. I don't know who they're gonna sell it to. I don't know how they're gonna sell us out. So I'm just, you know, in that frame of mind, because all of them. You know, it's Instagram. It's threads. It's all of it. Mark Zuckerberg. It's Jeff Bezos. It's all of the billionaires. They have been at the knee. And so I'm like, well, I can't trust you with my information anymore, or I can't trust you with my people and not that we ever really did, but it's just like, okay, well, you know, commerce is commerce. So this works, but when you are basically saying to a white supremacist that whatever you say and do, I'm going to go along with it. You can't do that with my money. And with my identity and my information, you just can't do it. So I got to figure this out. I don't know how I'm gonna stay in business, but some of us are having some meetings and trying to figure out how to stay in business aside from being on these social media platforms. We have websites, obviously, we own those, but, um, you know. It's just a matter of time before even those, those places are purchased as well, the people who provide those services. So, um, I say do what you can now. Do what you can that feels good. If you're not ready to give up, Aidis Hodge on cross. I understand honey. You ain't got to do it right now, but work towards it. Work it out. Like let the brother get his, you know, his shine. He's going to be on some other stuff, but you know, he always lands nicely. Um, but if you're not ready for that, that's okay. We're not judging. I'm just saying try to do what you can most of the time. So you can stay out of Walmart easily. You can stay out of Publix easily. You can't stay out of certain places easily. There are other things that you can do other places that you can buy. And actually Amazon, you just get up and go out. There's the benefit of Amazon just comes to the house. It's not even more affordable anymore. It just comes to the house. So just get up, take a walk, get up, get in your car, get on the bus and go get what you need. All right. So that's it. I wish you a wonderful day. Please tune in next week to a black executive perspective podcast, and we will see you then. Happy holidays.

A black executive perspective.