The Race and Wealth Podcast Network

About 1 in 3 Americans is currently a freelancer or a small business owner. By 2020, the number of freelancers are estimated to grow to 40%! It's becoming easier than ever to start your own business and work for yourself. But the idea of giving up a steady paycheck, retirement benefits, and health insurance can be daunting. The good news is that most successful freelancers and entrepreneurs don't just up and quit one day. They take their time to build a foundation for their business and personal finances before they leave their day jobs, and you can too. In Part 1, we talk about how to: • Start diversifying your income and exploring your skills with side hustle ideas • Categorize your skills and talents and identify potential income streams and customers/clients Episode Highlights: Dyalekt: Poor people in America are the most charitable people in America...Poor people give about 4.3% to charity or some sort of charitable function, and for everybody it’s 2.2% average. Pam: Not everyone wants to, or should want to, go freelance, or should want to do this on their own. Maybe you just need to quit your job and get another job. Pam: Are you someone who needs structure? Are you someone who needs to be told what to do in a sense? Yes, jobs will give you autonomy, but are you someone who needs feedback from someone else to know whether you’re making progress? Because, as a freelancer, you’re not ever gonna get that...Do you need external motivation go get your work done? And that doesn’t mean that you can’t get that work done. It just means needing those deadlines, and needing someone like a boss to tell you what to do next and how to prioritize stuff, there’s a lot of people who need that. Pam: It [freelancing] doesn’t have to be that serious. You could give this whole freelancing thing a try. Try your own thing, and know that the worse case scenario is that you just get a job if it doesn’t work out. Pam: Ask yourself, one, what have you already done to make money? ...Write down everything you’ve done to make money, from babysitting to newspapers...The next question is what do you like to do that has not been paid? And this gives you a lens into what your interests are that you enjoy, outside of your day job. ...And then the last question we want you to ask yourself is: What are some things you wanna learn how to do, regardless of how much money you’ll make? Pam: Who are you selling to? And who is gonna be drawn to your product or service?

In this episode of Radical Imagination we visit Stockton, California. It was known as the nation’s foreclosure capital during the 2008 recession. Today, it’s the first city in the country to try universal basic income as a strategy to reduce inequality and boost economic security. This bold experiment gives residents a minimum monthly salary regardless of income or employment status. Angela Glover Blackwell sits down with Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, who became the first black mayor in the city’s history at age 26, to talk about his income initiative and what lessons it holds for the nation.

In episode 3 of Spotlight Dedrick speaks with Angela Glover Blackwell, nationally renowned organizer, activist, author, and thought leader, about the history of the equity movement, where we are today, and how we need that equity understanding to help address issues like the racial wealth divide. Dedrick: Today we have as our guest Angela Glover Blackwell. Angela founded Policy Link in 1999, which has become the country's leading equity organization. Prior to founding Policy Link, Angela served as Senior Vice President at the Rockefeller Foundation where she oversaw the foundations domestic and cultural programs. She is also known for pioneering new approaches to neighborhood revitalization as founder of the Oakland, California Urban Strategies Council and from 1977 to 1987, she was a partner of public advocates, a nationally known public interest law firm. So, Angela, thank you so much for joining us today. Angela: But just the fact that people are drawn to the language warms my heart because I think that it suggests that we are moving in a direction that is going to make it more urgent to really achieve the outcomes for everyone especially focusing on the people who have been left behind. And, as we thought about it, we thought what we really need to do is put down a marker, what are we trying to do? We felt that what we were trying to do was create a society in which people could reach their full potential. And that while equal opportunity and equality were important concepts and we didn't need to give up on those, just creating equal inputs would not produce reaching your full potential. Take education as the classic example of that. If you talk about equality and education what people kind of go to is, let's make sure that children go to school the same amount of time, have teachers who are equally well prepared, have challenging curriculum. But when you think about what children bring into the classroom, some having been in a preschool program for two years already, some with parents that can provide everything that they might need in terms of outside the school room: violin lessons or theater, whatever that might be, schools that are very well equipped with everything. Just making sure that you have the same curriculum does not really guarantee that children will reach their full potential. Some need more. Some need intensive early childhood development programs; some need wrap around services from communities. Angela: That is not just a conversation that is taking place within communities of color. It is becoming, and I predict, it is going to become even more the national conversation. The majority of babies born in this country since 2012 had been of color. By 2030 the majority of the young workforce will be of color. By 2044 the majority of all people in this country will be of color. The fate of the nation is now dependent on the very people who have been left behind and I predict that that conversation, once it is fully unleashed is going to really drive everything that happens going forward. The people who are now in power in the White House and many of the people who support them are nostalgic for a time that never was. America was not great when people were living under Jim Crow. America was not great when people were working in the fields, and children not even able to go to school. America was not great when people were being lynched in America. We know that people are nostalgic for a time that never was, but the sad thing is that they are ignoring a future that is inevitable and right. Because what’s needed in the future we will have because of the shifting demographics.

What happens after we die? Estate planning, Trusts, Wills—these are things we associate with the wealthy, but do they matter even after we're gone? For this episode, we were able to talk to Bomopregha Julius, an amazing estate attorney, on the importance of planning even if you don't think you have much to your name. Estate planning is still important and is often, but not a necessarily known, a link to generational poverty. Music Featured in this Episode: Until I Die by Jupiter 7 Destined by Definite Run Until I Die by Tonye Aganaba

As cases of police abuse and misconduct gain attention, activists have moved beyond calls for reform to advocate for the abolition of police. It’s a controversial and widely misunderstood idea. How would police abolition work, exactly? How would we protect public safety? Radical Imagination host Angela Glover Blackwell explores these questions with humanitarian hip-hop artist Jessica Disu, a.k.a. FM Supreme, who has publicly called for police abolition. And we hear from Rachel Herzing, co-director of the Center for Political Education in Oakland, California, about the racialized history of policing and innovative community-driven alternatives for public safety.

Dedrick and Dyalekt discuss how the racial wealth divide affects Indigenous people and how, by recognizing our similarities and differences, we can band together to work toward bridging the divide. Episode Highlights: Dyalekt: Thanksgiving is a contradiction for a lot of folks, and everybody feels weird about it but it's one of those things about power structures, right? I railed against it very much, many a time, until I realized that for a lot of my family members that's the only time, we have to be able to break bread. Dedrick: What I try to do is recognizing that the conquerors, when they conquer people, they usually take the holidays of the conquered and put their own holidays on top of it. Dedrick: I hope everyone figures out some way to celebrate in a way that is meaningful to the family and disrespectful to history and our current reality of racial inequality. Dyalekt: I feel like Indigenous, Native, First Nation people often get left out of a lot of these racial wealth divide discussions. There is the idea that, there aren’t many of them left and they’re scattered on reservations, so their data is really small. Then there’s other folks who are like, well they got their casinos and everything so they’re doing all right. So, in one way or another, they’re kinda left alone. Dedrick: And some people think they are actually doing much better than they are. I do think this lack of data is a very big problem. It is challenging because there isn’t good wealth data on Native Americans. National wealth data, even basic income data, unemployment data is hard to find. Dyalekt: When people talk about folks being scalped, everyone likes to say, ‘Oh Native Americans were running around scalping the Europeans who came’, when that is the opposite of what was happening. Native people were scalped! There were too many Native folks on this land that the Europeans claimed on their own. So, what they said was that, if you clear out Native Americans, we will pay you. They would pay you for every scalp you brought because that was proof that you had actually killed a person. Whenever you are talking about scalping, remember you know it completely backwards. Dedrick: Native American median income is about $36,000 which is exactly the median income for African Americans. They also have twice the unemployment rate of White Americans. I think there is a lot more reparations that need to occur for Native Americans. We need reparations for African Americans. We don’t want reservations, we want reparations, right? So that they have capital that allows them to succeed in this economy on their own. Dyalekt: The least that we can do is to be informed about the ways that we have points of tangency no matter our backgrounds. To have a better understanding of the similarities that the other groups have all together in this country so that we can have a better understanding of the umbrella of oppression that is happening to all of us so that we can see what actual areas, what policies we want to endorse and what points we want to attack. Dedrick: The most we can do is, as we are creating for ourselves our own ways of advocacy for our particular communities, recognizing that supporting different community’s advocacy that is also for justice, really in many deep ways is inherent to your struggles as well. I am not on this thing where everybody is the same. No, no, no. There are distinct differences, recognize the difference and understand that. But also, in the difference understand that there are similarities in basic economic redistribution and that you are going to need to actually step out of your community to work with other communities.

In Episode 3, we discusses consumer protection as it relates to housing for our military service members and emotional support animals in housing with Amber Lee, Lending Compliance Program Manager at NCRC. The conversation covers what rights service members have and the discrimination facing this population everyday. Episode Highlights: Amber: Veterans face a lot of additional issues. They may be looking for housing as a disabled person but also it is the first time in our country that veterans are facing an issue of being under housed. They are struggling to find affordable housing. Amber: The CFPB did a survey of service members and they found that generally service members have higher levels of financial well-being. They also found that ⅓ of the service members that they surveyed didn’t have more than one month of emergency savings. 23% had no emergency savings at all and nearly 35% of service members are what we call cost burdened. Which means that they are spending more than 30% of their income on housing and fewer than half of them own their own homes. Amber: Veterans today are a lot younger, younger people are tending to rent more than they are buying in general. Veterans and service members today are currently the more diverse in history as far as racial and ethnic makeup. A lot of that might mean that they are being shut out of the housing market because of inter-generational poverty, segregated neighborhoods, the things that everyone faces. Amber: Source of income is different. Some states put it on as you can’t discriminate against someone because they are on public assistance. If they can cover the rent, they can cover the rent. It doesn’t matter where their income is coming from. Amber: The Military Lending Act doesn’t directly relate to housing in that it covers other types of credit. It caps the interest rate at 36%. Whereas civilians can go to payday lenders and often times those loans will be upward to 400%. If you are a service member and you are covered by the Military Lending Act, no one can give you a loan for higher than 36% interest rate. Amber: Service members who fall into cycles of debt, often it causes them to lose their security clearance. Thousands of veterans get booted out of the military service every year because of financial distress. Amber: The Military Lending Act was passed in 2006 after the DOD did a study finding that these predatory lenders were running to the bases to find young, financially distressed kids and suck them into these loans. The CFPB is responsible for enforcing the Military Lending Act. Ideally, they are the ones that should be going out searching for people who are violating these. Amber: The Federal Trade Commission is doing some stuff. They finalized a regulation that requires nationwide consumer reporting agencies to provide free electronic monitoring for service members. It is the Free Electronic Credit Monitoring for Active Duty Military rule. The official rule will go out later this month. It is attached to the Fair Credit Reporting Act. They’ve also gone after some companies who were trying to allege credit repair schemes. Amber: The Service Member Civil Relief Act protects existing debt while you are on active duty, period. It doesn’t matter when it originated. It helps protect service members against foreclosures, termination of their lease, evictions due to failure to pay their monthly rent. It protects against wage garnishment if they can’t pay their loans. It also prevents you from having to pay more than 6% interest on your credit obligations that incurred prior to you commencing your military duty service. Amber: File a complaint with the CFPB. They do make it very easy to file a complaint on their website. Rose: You can always contact NCRC we’re more than happy to put you in contact with one of our member organizations that does Military Lending Act work and provides resources specific to service members.

In this week’s episode Brunch and Budget takes it back to the basics of investing. Dyalekt and Pamela speak with Caleb Silver, Editor in Chief and Senior Vice President of content at Investopedia, about the basics of investing and how to get started. Episode Highlights Caleb: More than half of the country is not invested in the stock market or in the equity markets. The best day to start investing was yesterday, the second-best day is today. Caleb: Investing is a path to wealth that most people don’t participate in. It is one of the most stable paths to wealth. It is getting started and having a plan. Caleb: There is the noise around investing which you need to ignore. There is having a plan and a path to investing and having the discipline so that you are constantly adding to your investments and building your wealth over time in a way that avoids as much risk as possible. Caleb: People who have a disciplined approach to investing and know their risk tolerance and are not betting everything on one or two stocks, those are the people that are compounding their wealth 5-10% every year. If you do that over time and you start young you are going to love yourself as you get a little bit older. Caleb: Typically, the rules have been, the younger you are the more stocks you should have in your portfolio; those have the fastest potential for growth over time. They are also the riskiest. If you are 20, the typical rule is you should have 100% in stocks. If you are 40 you go to 80% stock - 20% bond portfolio. As you get close to 50 you maybe want to balance that out a little more. The older you get the less risky you want to be, in general. The younger you are the more risk you are willing to take because you have the most important thing on your side, and that’s time. Pamela: I will say if there is anything that you don’t understand, we have used Investopedia for many of our investment appetizers. I still use it today as a financial planner when I run across jargon I don’t understand. There are videos, easy definitions. There’s great real-world examples and things like that. If you don’t know where to go for investing, this is a great place to start. Caleb: Come any time, it’s free. We are here to share the knowledge. If you see anything that you think is missing from the site or want to add something to it, you can always hit me up. I am easy to find on About Us section of Investopedia. Caleb: Check our reviews. Check out our courses online. Check out the regular content that we do. We have some newsletters too. I write one every day in the afternoon, Market Sum. It comes to your inbox at 5:30. Or in the morning we have News to You to set you up for the day. There’s plenty of content and you are welcome to it, have at it. Dyalekt: My favorite thing that you said this whole time was talking about making sure your money can make some money while you sleep. What are 3-5 steps or things that I should know so that I can sleep easy when I start investing. Caleb: Knowing what your risk tolerance is. Building a diversified portfolio. Adding to it over time by dollar cost averaging, a little bit every month. Rebalancing every year so that you’re not too heavily weighted one way or the other. And don’t look at it and pay attention to the news all the time because that is only going to make you nuts. Enjoy the magic carpet ride of compound annual growth, there’s nothing quite like it.

Racism, toxic inequality, persistent poverty, police misconduct: these are big serious problems, and if you believe they require big audacious solutions, then this is the podcast for you. Hosted by Angela Glover Blackwell, Founder-in-Residence at PolicyLink, Radical Imagination focuses on radical solutions to our society’s most pressing problems. It features conversations with thinkers and changemakers from multiple fields working to deliver equity wins at scale. The United States once had open borders. Migrants from all over the world would arrive fleeing war, escaping poverty and seeking opportunity. Open borders made our country strong. But many Americans today are horrified — or frightened — by the idea of “open borders.” Harsh new immigration policies are making it more difficult than ever to come to the U.S. or even ask for asylum. Nevertheless, violence, oppression, poverty, desperation, and hope continue to drive migrants to our borders. Last year, more than 1,000 migrants from Central America gathered near the border of Guatemala and Mexico to travel north in search of asylum. Radical Imagination host Angela Glover Blackwell sits down with Roberto Corona, founder of People Without Borders, an organization that assisted this refugee caravan. We also hear from New York Times Columnist Farhad Manjoo, who has called for open borders. Tune in to Radical Imagination, for stories and solutions that are fueling change. https://radicalimagination.us/

In the second Spotlight on Race and Wealth episode Dedrick speaks with Mehrsa Baradaran, Professor of law at UCI Law about race and wealth inequality. Mehrsa discusses Postal Banking and The Homestead Act, policies that can lead to bridging the racial wealth divide. Episode Highlights: Mehrsa: When you have a natural system where a few people are going to hold a lot of capital or one raise doesn't have capital was not allowed to own homes and their property was not protected. Can you disrupt that? What you see in history is that the only way you build wealth in new communities is a capital shift. Mehrsa: This is where wealth vs income comes in to play. Wealth inequality is much stickier and much less dependent on individual decisions. Yes, a person could increase their income within a certain range, even that is pretty sticky. It is very difficult to go from a very low wealth family or environment into a high wealth one and vice versa. The passed down nature of wealth really creates these intergenerational disparities. Mehrsa: This is why this idea of individual decision is this false promise of equality. I don't think any class has a monopoly on good decision making. Dedrick: The problem is if you look at Black or Latino wealth, it is mostly in-home ownership while white wealth is more in stocks and these types of things. The issue is that blacks need to be more in stock but it’s not looking at the reality of if you have a median wealth of 3 or 4 thousand dollars you are not running around trying to figure out what stocks to invest in. You’re lucky to be a homeowner and you’re trying to pay off that mortgage. Mehrsa: 60% of Americans have their main asset in a home. It’s cross racial, but with black and brown homes they don’t increase in value as much as do white homes because of embedded natures of segregation and racism. The market is racist because it embeds people’s preferences. People would rather move in to an all-white community than a black one and those market rates reflect that. Mehrsa: Poor people pay 10% of their income just to use their money because banks are no longer serving these clients. And then you have payday lending and high interest rate other forms of lending: pawn, title. So how do you fix this? A lot of people respond with community banks, small banks, credit unions. My research and history show that these banks either are not or are not doing it. Credit unions are not offering accounts to the unbanked. They’re just as big, their clients are more wealthy than bank clients even. Mehrsa: One of the most effective, in American history, of financial inclusion was through the postal bank. It is not a radical idea, but it has been approached as one. The idea is the Post Office already exists everywhere. It already has that transmission mechanism of it already gives money orders, already has its own network. You could transfer money; you could deposit money in a little saving account there. You could link up and get a digital account. You could even get loans at the Post Office. Dedrick: There is much more mainstream conversations about big policy ideas that could help address some of these issues. Even though postal banking wouldn’t bridge the racial wealth divide. It would disproportionately help the under banked which are African Americans, Latinos and large numbers of Whites as well. Mehrsa: This is where the Homestead Act comes in. Over the last 30 years, and I have spoken a lot against this, we have these tax incentive programs like opportunity zones or enterprise zones. The idea is we are going to give businesses goodies like tax cuts and the business investment in this community is going to benefit everybody. And that just doesn’t work, one, because of the capital idea. The person getting the capital is that business. The person getting the tax cut is the outside business.

How do our economic circumstances affect the role that traditional family units play in our culture? In this week’s episode of PREACH Dyalekt, Dedrick, and Pamela discuss the effect that the racial wealth divide has on the nuclear family concept. ------------------------------ Episode Highlights: Dedrick: Marriage has always been an economic structure. I think it is only more recently that we have made marriage much more this idea of strictly about culture and even more so about love vs economic need or socio-economic need. Dyalekt: The reason why specifically Black families are thought of as not having fathers is because since the days that Africans were enslaved in America, we had our families separated. That is something where they knew what they were doing and decided to make it the norm. Even after folks were free and started to build their own, that idea persisted. The justification for why it was ok to enslave us became the justification of why it's ok to ignore us today. Dedrick: I think people use the two parent household for villainous purposes. I don’t think the two-parent household in any way is a villain just like the one parent household is not a villain. You can try to frame it in a negative way and use it for negative things but no, two parent households, one parent households are realities that we are dealing with. Dedrick: However, it’s not often talked about the deep costs of having kids. What does that mean in the context of racial economic inequality? Where Blacks and Latinos are making 60-65 cents on every dollar that Whites make and only have maybe 4-6 cents in terms of wealth. The costs for having children for Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are much higher than for Whites. What does that mean about how we handle family? Pam: One of the stats that you had that I found interesting is, “due to the rising costs of sports, the number of students who aren’t physically active has increased to 17.6%, being physically inactive is even more likely for low income children who are 3 times less likely to participate than children who reside in higher income households” because of the costs of these private leagues and the deterioration of public access to physical activity. Dedrick: When you have a kid you often want a bigger space, you want it to be in a place where there are parks or access to things, and better schools so that puts greater value. Again, schools are funded by local taxes, the more income you have, the more that is invested in the schools. All of this creates a radical increase in your cost of housing, just by having that child. Dedrick: Imagine, $12,000 per child, if the median income is around $50,000, that’s $50,000 before taxes. Take away those taxes, now you’re down to $37-38,000. You’re spending almost a third of your income on that care and you haven’t paid yet for your housing. Children used to be this idea that they help you generate wealth from an agricultural standpoint. You have more kids; you have more free workers for the farm. But now children are in many ways, wealth destroyers. Not many households can afford $12,000 or more going out of your pocket. Dedrick: The least we can do is recognize the unspoken reality of the economics of marriage and family and how the challenges that you are having in your life around marriage and family relate to those things. Understanding that there is this larger context, you can’t change the larger context, but hopefully by understanding the larger context you can make a better path for yourself to deal with these issues. Pam: The least you can do if you are in a place of privilege to be able to decide whether to create a family, without any economic considerations, is recognizing and acknowledging that a lot people do not have this privilege. There are a lot of economic factors and systemic things that are stopping people from being able to do that.

In this episode of the newest podcast in the Race and Wealth network, Spotlight, Dedrick discusses integration and dismantling structural racism as we look at urban planning and housing with Dr. Edward Goetz, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and the Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Professor Goetz specializes in housing and local community development planning and policy with a research focus on race and poverty and is the author of The One-Way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities. --------------------------- Episode Highlights: Goetz: The book is not a critique of integration per se, it is a critique rather, of how we tend to pursue integration. The critique is based on my argument that we generally place the burden of integration on people of color and we generally accept the limitations to integration that are imposed by white communities. What I try to do is push back a little bit on the argument or assumptions in a lot of fair housing advocacy that people of color need to live near white people in order to live a good life. Goetz: As we have been pursuing integration, we do so by trying to integrate people of color into predominantly white neighborhoods. Why do we do that? Why is it that this is our approach to integration? We do it because we have this sense of what a lot of people call the ‘tipping point’. Which is the level of racial diversity in the neighborhood that essentially triggers white flight. By incorporating that into our policy we incorporate the racism behind it. Goetz: It essentially presents racial justice as a kind of situation where whites agree to share the benefits of white neighborhoods, of white society. It forever puts people of color in this position of supplicant; of benefiting from the generosity of whites who are willing to share their advantages. And that too incorporates an inherent hierarchy that I think we need to get away from. Goetz: To the extent that we start focusing on this spatial distribution of people and mix of people we can lose focus on what the real objective is. The real objective is equal status and equal economic power in society. My fundamental argument in this is that it can result in taking one's eye off the true objective. I think that simply the spatial arrangement of people doesn’t quite get to the dynamics that have caused the kind of disparate outcomes that we see from one neighborhood to the next. Goetz: The definition that I use (of gentrification) is both a physical upgrading of a community and an economic upgrading in terms of the entry of new households, of higher socio-economic status so that likely means higher levels of education, higher incomes. It is usually associated with a certain amount of displacement of the incumbent residents who are now much less able to compete in the housing market because of rising rents and rising home prices and are forced to move to other parts of the cities. Goetz: I see this happening in a few cities where people who live in lower resourced communities and communities of color essentially standing up and arguing that the solution to their problem isn’t to move away from their communities. That they very well understand the disadvantages that they face in their communities. But the solution is not to move away and to disperse to white neighborhoods. What they want is the ability to have greater self-determination over the outcomes that occur in their community. They want control over economic assets, and I think you see more emphasis now on ownership of land, community land trust, recycling of wealth within communities and reserving for community members the notions of how to improve those communities from within.

In the last episode Dyalekt, Dedrick, and Pamela discussed the policies of the current democratic candidates and how they do or don’t address the racial wealth divide. In this week’s episode they begin the discussion on who the ideal presidential candidate to close the racial wealth divide would be. Pamela, Dyalekt, and Dedrick listen to and discuss Jesse Jackson’s Democratic concession speech of 1988 and discuss his policies.

The Racial Wealth Divide has been a topic of conversation this election year with Presidential candidates detailing plans on how to approach and deal with it. Pam, Dedrick, and Dyalekt review the proposals of several candidates and see who's really real. B/W 'Policy' by VerseBorn

The Thanos Snap, for those people unfamiliar with the recent Avengers movies, was villain Thanos’ use of a powerful artifact called the infinity gauntlet to reduce half the population of the universe to dust in a single moment. But would randomly removing half the human population help with the Racial Wealth Divide? Certainly, many societal power structures would be upset by the removal of key figures, but the overall balance of power and resources between groups would need to be independently upset in the aftermath. Would half the population vanishing make it easier for poor individuals to gain access to wealth, or would a drastic upset like this once again be twisted to benefit those already in power? For inspiration for possible answers, we turn to China’s one child law, and a critique of the superhero formula.