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Speaker 1: Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher, where our mission is to foster allyship empathy and understanding. I am host Ramsy's job.
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Speaker 2: He is Ramses Joh, I am q Ward. You are tuned in once again Pacific Cipher, did you are? And the holiday spirits upon us? Indeed, Merry Christmas when you whenever you hear this, you've probably already.
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Speaker 1: Celebrated, because we're certainly celebraated too.
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Speaker 2: Merry Christmas to all of our listeners. Happy holidays, as to not, you know, offend or alienate anyone who is not of the Christian faith.
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Speaker 1: Bless all of.
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Speaker 2: Our listeners, all of our brothers and sisters. I hope that you know it's a prosperous time of year for everybody.
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Speaker 1: And we're looking forward to a prosperous new year around here. Please continue to ride with us because we have a lot of exciting things in store. But before we get there, we have a very I don't want to say exciting show, but you know, an interesting show in store for you. So stay tuned because we are going to be discussing the man behind the efforts to twelve, the movement that has been in place to bring about equity to black and brown and marginalized individuals in this country.
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Speaker 2: You are such a fair journalist, such a journalist. Man, Well you need to race with which I'll cutting you off. But man, just touched my heart. We'll break them down. We'll get there. My son is going to spend so much time with his uncle, ramsays, because he has so much in the way of character that I want my kid to have.
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Speaker 1: Man, Man, I appreciate that you won't go wrong. But like I said, stay tuned, because we're going to tell you all about this gentleman named Ed Bloom. We're also going to be We're going to also talk about SRO officers student resource officers and how they are problematic in schools, with some really interesting examples to share with you. But first and foremost, we are going to discuss, as always, some ebony excellence.
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Speaker 2: Today's ebny excellence brought to you by Actively Black. There is greatness in our DNA Actively black dot com. This story comes from Track and Field news dot com. Not Back but Better. It was a season of rebirth and resurgence for Shakri Richardson, who stormed her way to the top of the world championship podium and the one hundred meter dash in the campaign that won her honors as our US Woman Athlete of the Year. Her twenty two season, however, was one of frustration. Moments of extreme speed mingled with disappointment. She blistered dashes of ten seven three and ten eighty five leading up to Nationals, then failed to make the finals in one hundred or two hundred. She only broke eleven once that year, a ten to nine to three in Brussels that was just good for fifth. The twenty three campaign, however, would be astonishingly different. Only once in sixteen efforts at one hundred meters heats and finals did she runs slower than eleven flat. After a season open or four by one leg at Texas Relays, she put the world on notice in her first test in one hundred, running a ten to seven to five heat and a ten to five to seven final in Miramar, Florida, on April eighth. A month later, she got on the legal list with a ten to seven six win at Doha in the Diamond League. Suddenly, the twenty three year old Dallas native was back to being the women to beat into one hundred. Looking ahead to the Olympic year, Richardson remains committed to running two hundred in addition to the hundred. I want to be a competitor, not one of those athletes who just runs the one hundred. I'm a one and two runner. I want you guys to see this and I want to bring that out. So I'm excited about next year. That's a quote from Shkrie Richardson. She's my favorite athlete in the world of track and field, and she is and apologetically should carry.
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Speaker 1: I love it, have any excellence if I ever saw it. All right, So, as promised, we are going to discuss a gentleman by the name of Ed Bloom. And really this is this is a story that you sent to our group chat. Give us a little bit of background here cue.
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Speaker 2: This is a very very our job, and the position that this job puts us in daily perpetually requires of us to ingest some of our country's most difficult truths, especially with concerns to people of color, not just black people, and ironically not just people of color, poor white people as well. Having to live a life where the deck is constantly stacked against you, and then you are then placed in a position where you must feel guilty for just responding to that truth. Right you're playing the victim or you're you know you're They found a way to make it a pejorative for you to be the person who has to live at the mercy of those who oppress you full time. A friend of mine. The reason why this story was so personal to me and why I send it to you is because I actually wanted us to provide platform for a really good friend of mine that I went to high school with named Arian Simone. She is the founder or co founder of the Fearless Fund, an organization started to help fund female minority led businesses, and gentleman name I think Ed Blum or Ed Blum I think is his name, has made it his life's purpose to get rid of any initiatives that seek out to help those who are disproportionately affected by oppression, white supremacy, poverty, etc. He has flipped things on their head in a way where I think he's calling it or referencing it as reverse racism. Those who are getting special assistance just because they've always been the targets of racist white supremacists. Legislation bullying, fear mongering, intimidation. He'd like to make you think that these people are having some type of special benefit program because of their race, gender, and ethnicity, when it's quite not the opposite,
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but it's different than the way that it's framed. These programs exist similar to affirmative action, to kind of give relief to those live under the boot of white supremacist capitalism and who always have. So that's the reason why this story, before it was national news, ended up in our text thread because someone who I know and care about was impacted by it, and before it was newsworthy, it was just something wrong that I saw happening to someone that I knew.
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Speaker 1: So let's go ahead and explain who this man is. Share a bit with what you brought here today.
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Speaker 2: Okay, ac LU Meet Edward Blum. I hope I'm saying. This man's name.
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Speaker 1: Might be Bloom, but Blum doesn't sound But you know, we don't really care about pronouncing his name.
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Speaker 2: Right, think about it. The engineer behind this litigation is intent on sowing divisiveness amongst communities of color and an effort to dismantled diversity programs and civil rights protections that benefit all people of color students for fair admissions is the creation wow of Edward. He is not a lawyer, but he has a long history of crafting legal attacks on civil rights. Before I move on, imagine someone making it their life's work to craft legal action against civil rights. And that pause or moment of emptiness was intentional, because I don't want your imagination to work really hard. It's really just imagine what I say. I do not want people to have a fair, equitable life, and I'm going to make it my work to get rid of programs that assist to that end. I'll continue. After losing a congressional election in the early nineties, Blum, who was white, challenged the Texas redistricting process as discriminating in favor of African, African American, and Latino voters. While his success in that case Bush versus. Verge was limited to particular districts. Among his other challenges to the Voting Rights Blum was behind Shelby versus. Holder. That case gutted important protections in the Voting Rights Act with drastic effects for voters of color. His attacks on laws and policies designed to promote the equality of people of color are not limited to voting rights. Blum also crafted the unsuccessful challenge to race conscious college admissions programs and Fisher v. University of Texas. I wish that there were not like countless examples of this guy hurt because he lost an election determining that that was based on the fact that he was white, and has since made it his life's work and his business to challenge anything that he feels gives an unfair advantage to people of color, well as if there was a such thing.
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Speaker 1: Well, him getting the Supreme Court to overturn the college admission admissions requirements was a big deal for all of us because again, it reflects the values and the sensibilities of straight, Christian, healthy white men, and it's another step toward this individual creating further creating a world in his image. And it
also such a legal president right for him to do it again and again and again and again.
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Speaker 2: I want to read more. It says failing in Fisher, Blum badly strategized that he needed Asian plaintiffs. He formed Students for Fair Admissions as a vehicle to file litigation. The organization's leadership can sense solely of mister Blum. Abigail Fisher and Richard Fisher, her father, those students for faird missions. Blum recruited members in quotes and filed his challenges to college admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina with a twist. This time, Blum claims that the consideration of race discriminates against Asian Americans. Ramses, why is that part important?
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Speaker 1: Because these affirmative actions, uh moves done by colleges and really by anyone, is meant to bring about in theory, it's meant to ensure that the ethnic composition of a given body, student, body, workplace, you know, employees, composition, et cetera, more closely reflects the population and isn't skewed heavily in one direction or another. And so in theory, this would be something that would ensure that there was a proportionate number of Asian Americans admitted to Harvard University and what was it the University of North North Carolina as well. And so these race based admissions ensure that everyone has a shot and that one race isn't heavily favored over any other races. So that's that's my best guest as to why it's important.
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Speaker 2: And I think he needed non white allies, of course, to further push this idea that there was a new form of discrimination. So instead of framing it as this giving opportunity that didn't exist to students of color, he framed it as this is taking opportunities away from other students of another ethnicity. Which some of these things seem so obviously manipulative that we would hope our legal systems could see through them. But this gentleman is, however, evil clever. While blooming Out purports to represent the interest of Asian Americans man, it's hard to not be. None of his goals in litigation have changed. Blum isn't seeking to ensure that universities adequately addressed an implicit biased against Asian Americans in their admission practices, nor is he asking him to asking him to take other affirmative steps to recognize the value of Asian American applicants. The relief Blum seeks is narrowly focused on what has always been his objective, a prohibition of any awareness of race in college admissions. If Blum gets with his wish, statistical projections show that white applicants will be the primary beneficiaries. Not talking about race doesn't erase discrimination. It reinforces the privileges of white applicants by ignoring the ways in which deep seated structural racial inequality impacts individuals.
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Speaker 1: I think this is what I've been waiting for right here.
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Speaker 2: So heads up, affirmative action benefits Asian Americans too, absolutely, absolutely
so.
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Speaker 1: His his legal position in recruiting, you know, certain students is to say that maybe these Asian students had certain grades or certain test scores, or were qualified or something like that, and that Harvard ignored those applicants and sought out black applicants, and then those Asian applicants were not able to be admitted to Harvard, so that room could be made for additional black applicants who were as qualified or less qualified. This is his his legal argument in the courts. And like you said, Q, him basing it around Asians students and not around white students was very clever of him, because then it shows, well, this is not working. And we've seen other people in popular society suggests that affirmative action and DEI initiatives and so forth and so on is simply trading one form of racism for another, when the fact is that's not true, but it's a convenient thing for them to say because it hits the ear and makes you think, is that true, which, of course we know it is absolutely false, but it is the basis of their brief, their legal.
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Speaker 2: Brief, and starting the conversation with that point is highly effective, because now something that seemed right before you set it straight forward now seems confusing and makes even quote unquote decent people question their positioning, sure, even when it's obviously the right thing to do.
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Speaker 1: So let's play a game with our listeners. So everybody, everybody here, let's let's all do the same thing. Let's imagine that we're going to play a game of monopoly. Everybody's familiar with monopoly, okay, And in the game of Monopoly, let's say that Q and I we both get to start the game of Monopoly, and we get to go around the board five six times. We get to collect two hundred dollars every time. We get to get all the what are the apartments in the houses, properties, houses, hotels, hotels, what they're called the app So we get all the hotels, or we get let's say we get eighty percent of the hotels between the two of us, right, and then after we've gone around the board six or eight times, we say to you, hey, and now you can start playing. And for the first couple of laps, let's call this period, Jim Crow, let's call it the black codes. You know, you're only going to get one hundred dollars you passing to go, okay. And then for the next couple of laps, you can't buy any any properties. Okay, let's call that redlining, funny enough. And then you know you can't collect on community chest. We'll call that the war on drugs, you know, just the war on drugs, all on and on you. You understand that this country has done a lot of harm to black people intentionally, legally, it was the law of the land. Okay. And let's say after we've gone around the board maybe twelve times or so, where you've spent a lot of your money because we owned eighty percent of the what are they called not apartments hotels? Okay, and you're broke, and we have everything that we need to
clearly win this game. Now there's two options. One of them is equal. We say, okay, you know what, We're gonna play this game fair. Everybody gets two hundred dollars for passing go. Everybody can get community chessed, everybody can roll with both dice, everybody can can play the game fair. That's equal. Are you gonna win with us having eighty percent of the hotels? Absolutely not? And you know what's even worse when we compare you to us, Why aren't you just like us? Why are the rates of this in your community so low? Are the rates of that in your community so low compared to who you? I can give you one answer. Okay, Now, would you rather have equality? Or I should say it this way? Is equality going to fix your situation? Or is equity going to fix your situation? Now, let me tell you what equity looks like. Equity looks like. Okay, let's do some things that allow you to catch up to where we are. Let's get you a third dice to roll. Let's double the amount that you get when you pass go and community chest. Let's make sure that we at least get you a couple of houses to play on the board and get you some property so that you have a sporting chance of reaching a point of equality. That's affirmative action, that's diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Speaker 2: The really difficult thing with this conversation is it's people versus systems, and those that benefit most from this systems do not want to point out the obvious problems with the system. So when you talk about systemic racism, if you're talking about systemic racism at a particular company or country like the one that we live in, those who are a part of that company and or country take that personally and buck against it, push back against it because they feel like you're coming at them. The Monopoly experiment being such a great example because the University of California conducted an actual experience talked about that right where they would rig a game, but it wasn't a secret. They would tell both players when the game started, thank you for saying that it was rigged. This person gets double the money when they pass go, and they get to roll the dice twice. Each time the person with all the advantages won. And none of the cases that the person with all the advantages think they won because of the.
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Speaker 1: Advantages, none of the age.
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Speaker 2: That is where we stand here, and that's huge one because I was better, I was more skilled, my business acumen, I play the game better, right, not just for this lucky role because they did a coin flip to decide who the first would be the benefactor. None of them attributed that coin flip to their success.
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Speaker 1: So I want to say this real quick before we move on. That is a function of human psychology that is not based on a person's whiteness, blackness, whatever. Human beings work that way, right, So just because you're white doesn't mean that you are bad, you know, or any of these things. Being human will allow you to move in that in that manner, but knowing it allows you to offset it. And where we are right now is we need to push back against this Edward Blum, I like Blom better Edward Blum individual and efforts that are similar to his in your workplace with DEI and all that sort of stuff, and of course on your campuses with affirmative action e