Speaker 1: Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to
Speaker 1: welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher, where our
Speaker 1: mission is to foster allyship empathy and understanding. I am
Speaker 1: your host, ramses.
Speaker 2: Job, he is Rams's jaw. I am q Ward. You
Speaker 2: are tuned into Civic Cypher, Yes.
Speaker 1: You are, and we are back like we never left,
Speaker 1: and I don't think that we will this week. I
Speaker 1: want you to stick around because we are going to well.
Speaker 1: Q is going to share a story of something that
Speaker 1: happened as of the day of this recording, so this
Speaker 1: is this is kind of hot off the presses, but
Speaker 1: we're going to share a little bit about the real
Speaker 1: world implications of the anti immigrant sentiment and how it
Speaker 1: has diffused throughout this country and how it has even
Speaker 1: Q's household, and so stick around for that story. We're
Speaker 1: also going to be talking about the fires in la
Speaker 1: specifically the neighborhood of Altadena, California, and that's a historical
Speaker 1: black neighborhood there, and we're also going to be discussing
Speaker 1: ways that you can help, And of course it's important
Speaker 1: to frame that conversation properly in the in the political arena,
Speaker 1: you know, the ways people are talking about a ways
Speaker 1: people are, you know, trying to ensure that there's not
Speaker 1: an outpouring of empathy and and there's there's no real
Speaker 1: sense of community nationally, and we're going to do our
Speaker 1: best to kind of inject a little bit of that
Speaker 1: back into the narrative because there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: that are being infected by the fires there, and we
Speaker 1: are one of the shows that is able to reach
Speaker 1: the country, and so we're going to do our best
Speaker 1: to try to shed some light on some communities that
Speaker 1: you may have overlooked. But before we get there, we're
Speaker 1: going to start off, as ever, with some Ebony excellence,
Speaker 1: shall we I think we shall. Today's Ebny Excellence is
Speaker 1: sponsored by Actively Black. There's greatness in our DNA, visit
Speaker 1: actively black dot com and Q and I. We discussed
Speaker 1: this before and we think this is such a great idea.
Speaker 1: We are going to dedicate this week's Abney Excellence to
Speaker 1: the great Michelle Obama. So I'll share a bit the
Speaker 1: article that we have from you. This is from The Independent.
Speaker 1: Former First Lady Michelle Obama is skipping Donald Trump's inauguration
Speaker 1: because she doesn't want to plaster on a smile for
Speaker 1: someone she fundamentally believes as a threat to American democracy,
Speaker 1: according to a report, Now, of course, Donald Trump's already
Speaker 1: been elected, and he's been president for some time now.
Speaker 1: But we're just getting to this in the way our
Speaker 1: recording schedule works, you know, we decided that we're going
Speaker 1: to go back and retroactively share this in a couple
Speaker 1: other things. I'll continue. It was confirmed last week that
Speaker 1: she would not be attending the President of lex swearing in,
Speaker 1: but her office did not give any further explanation in
Speaker 1: its brief statement. The forty fourth president was introduced by
Speaker 1: himself and took his seat beside sorry inside the Capitol rotunda,
Speaker 1: next to his fellow former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush,
Speaker 1: as well as their wives, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.
Speaker 1: Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also snubbed the event. Michelle
Speaker 1: Obama also missed Jimmy Carter's state funeral last week due
Speaker 1: to a scheduling conflict, although it subsequently emerged that she
Speaker 1: had been on vacation in Hawaii. And it's that sentence
Speaker 1: that I think kind of helped us decide on whether
Speaker 1: or not to include this in our ebony excellence. You know,
Speaker 1: black women in general have done enough fighting. You're not
Speaker 1: just born to fight and die. You deserve to go
Speaker 1: on vacation in Hawaii rather than sit next to someone
Speaker 1: who would rather you didn't exist in his in his world.
Speaker 1: So shout out to missus shall Obama for leading the
Speaker 1: way even now, showing us what it means to prioritize yourself.
Speaker 1: All right, first up to I know a bit of
Speaker 1: this story, but I stopped you in the middle of
Speaker 1: the story because you know, every so often we end
Speaker 1: up with something that kind of knocks on our own doorstep. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it's I wanted to hear this along with the listeners.
Speaker 1: And I know that I heard some of it. But
Speaker 1: you know you had something happened to you earlier today,
Speaker 1: the day we're recording, and you know it started all
Speaker 1: the way up at the White House. So you know,
Speaker 1: share a bit about your day, and then I'll let
Speaker 1: everyone know when the point where where I listened up to. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's part of this story.
Speaker 2: Won't be new to listeners that have been with us
Speaker 2: for some time. I'm very very vocal and very very
Speaker 2: outward with my disdain for our newly elected president and
Speaker 2: what I've learned over the last ten years is that
Speaker 2: not all the people that I know, love, care about,
Speaker 2: and commune with agree with me when it comes to him.
Speaker 2: The interesting thing about the way that I learned that, though,
Speaker 2: is that they reach out to me to apologize for, defend,
Speaker 2: and make excuses for him. I don't go to them
Speaker 2: to preach my disdain for him. They come to me
Speaker 2: to tell me all the reasons why I shouldn't feel
Speaker 2: how I feel about them. And it's always been very
Speaker 2: confusing to me because it's always been very clear who
Speaker 2: he is and who he aims to hurt. He's never
Speaker 2: pretended to be an ally, and that's the thing that
Speaker 2: bothers me the most about, not just him, but the
Speaker 2: people I know who defend him. It's not like they're
Speaker 2: being tricked. He's never pretended to be anyone other than
Speaker 2: who he is. So you don't like it's not even
Speaker 2: there's no veneer, there's nothing that you have to see through.
Speaker 2: There's no cloak, there's no act, there's no costume. He
Speaker 2: shows up as a sexist, racist, bigoted person, and that
Speaker 2: should be enough, I think for most of the people
Speaker 2: that we know and care about to agree that he's
Speaker 2: not good, except he's somehow figured out a way to
Speaker 2: have people still like give him bail. And I've always
Speaker 2: argued I always start with my kids, you know, when
Speaker 2: he ran for president the first time around, and Ramsen
Speaker 2: and I live in Arizona for most of our lives.
Speaker 2: This has been a Republican state post pandemic. I think
Speaker 2: was one of the few times, if ever, that the
Speaker 2: state didn't show up at the polls and help elect
Speaker 2: a Republican leader. And I live downtown in the city
Speaker 2: that I live in. The largest polling location is across
Speaker 2: the street from my house, and I got to hear
Speaker 2: people chant build that wall while holding my half Mexican baby.
Speaker 2: And I always try to take the story there because
Speaker 2: it should be the most easy thing for someone to understand,
Speaker 2: even if you were gonna make it in your mind, okay,
Speaker 2: for one person to not like that guy, the black
Speaker 2: guy with half Mexican kids, you think would be the
Speaker 2: one where you would like. Okay, I like him, but
Speaker 2: I understand why he doesn't. And for people who are
Speaker 2: in my life personally, and again, people who are listen
Speaker 2: to our show, you got to hear me in almost
Speaker 2: tears and ramses in a heidened level of frustration, talk
Speaker 2: about my son being kicked and called the N word
Speaker 2: at school. Yeah, emboldened by the Trump effect, for people
Speaker 2: to stop being so polite, for people to wear their
Speaker 2: racism like a jacket, like a cloak, like a cape,
Speaker 2: and be super racist and be blatant racist and aggressive racist.
Speaker 2: And again back then, I pushed back against people that
Speaker 2: I know and care about, saying, yeah, I'm glad people
Speaker 2: are finally admitting how they really feel and saying what
Speaker 2: they really think in private.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, why.
Speaker 2: What they think and doing private has no impact on
Speaker 2: your life at all? What they do in because society,
Speaker 2: for a large amount of time required them to pretend,
Speaker 2: even if just pretend, to be decent people in public,
Speaker 2: to be polite, to be respectaful, and to be less
Speaker 2: dangerous to you and your people. And we saw something
Speaker 2: coming back then. And then he got voted out, and
Speaker 2: I honestly thought, briefly, Okay, that's done, that's over. But
Speaker 2: he never really went away. And then he started being
Speaker 2: in the news all the time for being in court,
Speaker 2: for having all these criminal and civil charges against him
Speaker 2: and losing all these criminal and civil cases and you know,
Speaker 2: teflon Don showed that nothing can stop him. He all
Speaker 2: the way up on his remy Ma and Fat Joe
Speaker 2: back in the election cycle, won the presidency again, and
Speaker 2: as I spoke up against him while he was running
Speaker 2: and after he won, kind of just venting my frustration
Speaker 2: and my disappointment with my fellow Americans and US as
Speaker 2: a nation just bending the knee to this criminal, this crook,
Speaker 2: this con man. Once again, people in my dms preaching
Speaker 2: the word of Donald J. Trump and telling me all
Speaker 2: the reasons why I shouldn't be upset and how it's
Speaker 2: going to help the economy and all this nonsense. And
Speaker 2: my plea months ago when we learned he was going
Speaker 2: to be the president again, was what happens when he
Speaker 2: keeps his word. When he decidedly puts a cross hair
Speaker 2: on all brown people. I won't say black and brown,
Speaker 2: I'll just say brown, because all of us are brown.
Speaker 2: When he puts the target on us, then what because
Speaker 2: my kid, just like Rams's kid, just like most of
Speaker 2: my friend's children. If in a group of black people
Speaker 2: look like black people, but in a group of every
Speaker 2: race racially andguous, if you put my son in a
Speaker 2: room full of Cuban children. He'll look like a Cuban kid, Mexican, Haitian, Colombian, Dominican, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Eritrean.
Speaker 1: Yeah, only serrenemies.
Speaker 2: I could go on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, only seven percent of the world is white, so
Speaker 1: you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: I could go on, And we are somehow, so we're
Speaker 2: so pure and we're so us that we've separated ourselves
Speaker 2: from Haitians when they said they were eating pets, from Africans,
Speaker 2: when they told them to go back to their s
Speaker 2: whole countries, from Mexicans when they called them criminals infiltrating
Speaker 2: our borders to commit crimes and rape our women and
Speaker 2: sell drugs. From all these marginalized groups us, we had
Speaker 2: the nerve to sit this one out as if it
Speaker 2: doesn't eventually land back on our doorsteps. And I wake
Speaker 2: up today, and because I work in news and around
Speaker 2: just works and news, we get more news alerts than
Speaker 2: you could possibly imagine. It's part of the gig. When
Speaker 2: we got this job, we signed up for a service,
Speaker 2: and we get thousands of updates and headlines. That's part
Speaker 2: of how we decide what we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: when we crack these microphones for you, and of course
Speaker 2: the one that stood out to me the most. At
Speaker 2: about seven o'clock this morning, Trump authorizes ICE to target courthouses, schools,
Speaker 2: and churches. Once upon a time, those locations, those places,
Speaker 2: those buildings had some sovereignty, they had some sacred nature
Speaker 2: to them. Law enforcement wouldn't violate people praying to their God,
Speaker 2: children learning, and people doing their jobs in our judicial system.
Speaker 2: But Donald Trump's a pig, and he doesn't care about
Speaker 2: decorum or anything that was in place before he got there,
Speaker 2: if he didn't create it. It's bad, especially things that
Speaker 2: protect anyone, because if a law was created to protect someone,
Speaker 2: that means that people weren't being kind to those people
Speaker 2: in the first place, so we had to create a
Speaker 2: law to protect him. Trump wants to make sure they're
Speaker 2: no longer protected. Whoever they are, whoever we are, as
Speaker 2: how we should feel. But we've done a great job
Speaker 2: of othering other cultures, other religions, people with different sexual orientation,
Speaker 2: people with different hairstyles and different skin colors, people who
Speaker 2: subscribe to a different way of dressing themselves. So when
Speaker 2: I saw schools on the list, my greatest fear started
Speaker 2: to bear fruit that followed up by a message that
Speaker 2: said the Arizona GOP signs a bill stating that they
Speaker 2: will cooperate with Donald Trump's federal immigration practices. And then
Speaker 2: I got a text message that said MESA Public Schools
Speaker 2: and I didn't even read the rest of the message.
Speaker 2: I grabbed my jacket, I grabbed my car keys, I
Speaker 2: got in my car. I went to my kids school,
Speaker 2: and when the principal saw me there, her face had
Speaker 2: the exact like we didn't even have to speak. She
Speaker 2: looked at me, I looked at her, and both of
Speaker 2: our faces said, Yeah, they've come home to roost. This
Speaker 2: is now something that we have to deal with with
Speaker 2: our children today, not months from now, not further down
Speaker 2: the mine, right now. And I had to sit and
Speaker 2: come up with a plan for my five and seven
Speaker 2: year old to not have to fall victims to a
Speaker 2: law enforcement raid at their school, because those people are
Speaker 2: so disgusting that not even our children are sacred. But
Speaker 2: we knew that already when mass school shootings didn't lead
Speaker 2: to any type of actual gun reform. We knew that
Speaker 2: already when even white kids getting shot up at school
Speaker 2: didn't lead to even a serious conversation about gun reform.
Speaker 2: We knew that already, so make the targets of our
Speaker 2: hate and our lack of care, and our lack of
Speaker 2: empathy and our lack of humanity are lack of humanity.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Brown people, and we absolutely don't care. So
Speaker 2: to my black people who may have frowned when they
Speaker 2: heard that my children are half Mexican, you think your
Speaker 2: brown baby sitting next to my brown baby is going
Speaker 2: to be the one they decide not to mess with,
Speaker 2: not to check for documentation, not to check to see
Speaker 2: if mammy and daddy are Haitian or Cuban or Puerto
Speaker 2: Rican or Mexican or Colombian or Brazilian or Nigerian or
Speaker 2: from Ghana. You think that's where they'll stop. Because of course,
Speaker 2: all racist people who would dare enforce this type of
Speaker 2: law and raid an elementary school, of course they know
Speaker 2: how to look at your kid and tell what country
Speaker 2: their great grandparents are from. Right, every fear I had.
Speaker 2: As soon as he took his oath, he put into
Speaker 2: action the president they elected. Because I won't even say you,
Speaker 2: if you listen into this show, you likely didn't put
Speaker 2: a target on my family's back. As soon as he
Speaker 2: was back in office, and now maybe you understand why
Speaker 2: you'll never see a flattering or even what you consider
Speaker 2: to be a fair post about him on my page.
Speaker 2: I consider it very fair because it's true. But you
Speaker 2: think I should give them the benefit of the doubt,
Speaker 2: and I never will.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it makes sense if, like you said,
Speaker 1: if now you live in a world as of today
Speaker 1: where ice agents can raid your children's schools and take
Speaker 1: them and I mean we've seen this movie before. You
Speaker 1: know they end up in cages somewhere near the border
Speaker 1: because of.
Speaker 2: Their displaced and unable to find their families, Like imagine
Speaker 2: your five year old, Imagine your five year old daughter
Speaker 2: in a cage.
Speaker 1: I want to say something here. There's because you know,
Speaker 1: the status of your children is different than the status
Speaker 1: of my children. You know my children are half Mexican
Speaker 1: as well. But there's there's a reality to Donald Trump's
Speaker 1: promises and now his actions that affect people and affect
Speaker 1: community in a way, especially in these border states where
Speaker 1: we live, that people nationally may not consider because the
Speaker 1: worry that you have doesn't just stop at your house,
Speaker 1: It extends to your community. And then that worry overlaps
Speaker 1: with the worry of other people in our collective community.
Speaker 1: And there are people that we know that have been
Speaker 1: on this show, that that have paid taxes, that have
Speaker 1: they love this country, They've done they've done everything right.
Speaker 1: And because you know, paperwork takes too long, or the
Speaker 1: process is too expensive, or whatever the reasons are, not
Speaker 1: everybody has the mobility and the access that you might think.
Speaker 1: But you know, I've moved here when I was two
Speaker 1: years old. I literally know no one in the country
Speaker 1: I came from. This is my home, this is everything
Speaker 1: that I've ever known. And you know, you know, I've
Speaker 1: had to work too. You know, I've been afraid of
Speaker 1: this my whole life. And now he's tripling down. Instead
Speaker 1: of making a path way that's easier for me to
Speaker 1: instead of streamlining the process so I can get everything
Speaker 1: I need to not have to live in the margins
Speaker 1: of society, He's going to send me to a place
Speaker 1: I never I don't have any memory of, and I
Speaker 1: lose my life here and all my friends and everything
Speaker 1: I've ever known. And for a lot of people, the
Speaker 1: humanity of that is lost on them because they're like, well,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump said, these are all criminals, and he's only
Speaker 1: going after the bad ones and so forth. Nope, there's
Speaker 1: ICE agents now empowered. Not Donald Trump. Donald Trump's not
Speaker 1: knocking on our doors. But there are people who get
Speaker 1: to flex their racist muscles now.
Speaker 2: There are people who are ICE agents just because they
Speaker 2: get to do this.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and if you don't live in a border state,
Speaker 1: you might not know about that.
Speaker 2: And the idea that only the undocumented or only the
Speaker 2: illegals are only the bad ones. Like, tell me the
Speaker 2: last time you saw a child with a shirt that
Speaker 2: set illegal on it. Tell me the last time you
Speaker 2: saw a child with their permanent resident card or their
Speaker 2: birth certificate or they're whatever on a medallion around there.
Speaker 2: They intentionally don't do that type of They don't go
Speaker 2: to that level of scrutiny when they show up. Who
Speaker 2: do I think doesn't belong here?
Speaker 1: That's how it works. Remember SB ten seventy here in Arizona,
Speaker 1: where they just could pull people over and stop people
Speaker 1: because they looked like they might be illegal. And we
Speaker 1: push back on that out those of us that are
Speaker 1: like kind of of an activist tradition. But Arizona has
Speaker 1: long been plagued by racist border patrol agents and policies
Speaker 1: and The truth is is that even if none of
Speaker 1: the bad stuff, the worst stuff that could happen, even
Speaker 1: if none of it ever happens, you do understand now,
Speaker 1: hopefully a little bit more, why having a person like
Speaker 1: that in the highest office of the land makes your
Speaker 1: day to day life, if wildly uncomfortable, because you now
Speaker 1: have to live under that threat because you were born
Speaker 1: here versus there. You know, I was born in California
Speaker 1: and Q was born in Michigan. But circumstances of our
Speaker 1: birth do not determine the caliber of men that we are,
Speaker 1: even if you were born here.
Speaker 2: Though, to put an end to birthright citizenship something else
Speaker 2: he said on day one, like this is how he
Speaker 2: came out of the gate. Let me harm and remove
Speaker 2: protections for as many people as possible that are not
Speaker 2: just like me. And it's pretty disgusting, man, And this
Speaker 2: is my reality. Now I have to stress about what
Speaker 2: could happen every day as long as he's president.
Speaker 1: Well, I thank you for sharing that. I know that
Speaker 1: that makes you a little bit more vulnerable, butppreciate you
Speaker 1: telling the whole story.