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You're listening to Sisters-in-Law, the podcast, episode six, the new Civil War. Is Civil War starting in America? Well, maybe it is. Here's some evidence. Three Wilmington, North Carolina police officers were just fired for racial slurs and hate speech that was recorded on their squad car video cameras.
Kevin Piner, a 22-year vet with Wilmington Police Department. Jesse Moore, 23-year vet with Wilmington Police. And James Gilmore, 23 years with Wilmington Police Department, were heard on their squad car videos talking about black people. Not just saying the N-word, but saying the N-word. But what's more important than that is what they were talking about.
Michael Piner, the 22-year vet with the police department, said he felt like civil war was coming and he was ready. Piner said he was going to buy an assault rifle and he felt martial law was coming. I quote, we are just going to go out and start slaughtering them effing ends. He didn't say effing ends. He said the real words. I can't wait. God, I can't wait. I'm ready.
The country needs a civil war to wipe them off the effing map. That'll put them back four or five generations. Hmm. Four or five generations. Back where? To what? And why? Sounds like war talk to me. But the new civil war may not be so new. It might be a continuation of the old civil war. Let's talk about it on Sisters-in-Law, the podcast. ♪
Jan, I know you've been thinking about this for a long time. Tell us what you're thinking about in terms of the new Civil War. Well, I think I am of the opinion that the Civil War never really ended. You know, it ended inconclusively because there were members of the Confederate Army who never actually gave up. And then the issue that the war was started to fight
economic privilege, as well as the preservation of slavery. Slavery was abolished, but there's been an incomplete absorption of the former enslaved into the U.S. citizenship. We never really reconciled what exactly are the rights. We're supposed to have the same rights as citizens, but in the Constitution, there is no explicit guarantee of a right to vote.
And so now for more than 100 years, we have been tussling back and forth. There was a bright day during the time that the Voting Rights Act was adopted, but then the Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act was flawed and outlawed as unconstitutional portions of it, namely Section 5 and Section 2. And so we have the issues that the war was fought over
and one of them was white superiority, has never been reconciled. So it's not surprising that we continue to have these skirmishes, these battles. And these battles are being fought out now even more than ever because there is an occupant of the White House who seems to have, if not Confederate philosophy, at least Confederate leanings. So we've been fighting a cold civil war, and it seems to be heating up.
Dylann Roof, when he shot up Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, in his manifesto said that he was preparing to fight a race war. It seems that some of our fellow Americans have never reconciled themselves to the fact that African-Americans are full human beings entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship. And so what does it mean in terms of Black business in this pandemic era?
The pandemic has been interesting because it has revealed to a larger audience things that we as African Americans who study our history and study politics have known for a long time. We've known for decades that there are health disparities, but COVID-19 and the disparate death rates has shown us just how the social determinants of health
impact us on every turn. And the same is true, I'm afraid, for Black business. A report came out last week that said that as many as 41% of the million Black-owned companies in the United States may never reopen or go out of business completely and permanently as a result of the fallout from the pandemic.
The ever-expanding COVID-19 has just unearthed yet another racial disparity. It's shocking that 40% of Black-owned businesses may permanently close due to a combination of lack of customers, lack of federal funding and support, and lack of private saving and access to capital. Many Black-owned companies have already closed when they were determined not to be essential from a government perspective.
Keep in mind, they're not closing because of lack of talent, lack of ability to serve customers well, or from any form of neglect. Many Black-owned businesses are closing because they do not have the financial strength to weather the worst economic and health calamity the United States has faced since the Great Depression. CBS News reported last week that there were more than one million Black-owned businesses in the U.S.,
At the beginning of February 2020, that research came from the University of California at Santa Cruz, which drew from census survey estimates. There's just one more reason to complete the census. By mid-April, 440,000 Black-owned business owners had closed their companies for good, a 41% plunge. By comparison,
17% of white-owned businesses closed during the same period. While we are still digesting the racial disparity and COVID-19 deaths and reeling from the televised execution of George Floyd, we now must face the fact that one of the true bright spots for African-Americans, our businesses, is being erased. From 2018 to 2019, the number of firms owned by African-American women grew faster than the overall growth rate.
for women and for black men, an annual increase of 50%. That's what I mean when I say it's been a bright spot. Black women start out with less income and less wealth that can be applied to creating a new business in the first place. And then there is the longstanding gender pay gap that widens for the majority of racial and ethnic groups as women move up the corporate ladder, though not to the same degree.
African-American women make only 62 cents for every dollar a white male executive earns. 62 cents, which means that African-American women have to work 19 months, a year and seven months to earn what a white man in a comparable position earns in just 12 months. When it comes to wealth, the racial inequality is even worse.
According to the Brookings Institution, a close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds staggering evidence of racial disparities. The net worth of the average typical white family is $171,000. But for Black families, it's barely 10% of that, or $17,000. And that was before the pandemic. Gaps in wealth between Black and white households reveal the effects of
years and decades and even centuries of inequality and discrimination. And there's also a difference in power and opportunity that can be traced all the way back to the founding fathers. The black-white wealth gap reflects a society that has not and does not afford equal opportunity, bottom line, to all its citizens. And so we have lots of work to do.
Well, what do we do to rescue Black business? Well, there's several things that we can do. One of them is that we can patronize those businesses ourselves. We can stop being kind of
wanting to go to the other side of town or go to the newest mall and this sort of thing and patronize black business because we put that money back into our own community. The other thing we can do is challenge corporate America to do a better job of diversifying its own supply chain and there are plenty of qualified black-owned businesses that can do business with the likes of the largest companies in the country
But we have to put the pressure on, just like we're putting pressure on to stop police misconduct, we must stop corporate misconduct and keep them from boycotting Black business. And then there are government responses. Economic injury loan through the Department of Commerce, the Small Business Administration, which is part of the Department of Commerce, those economic injury loans
The deadline is this coming Tuesday, the 30th of June. I'm getting my J's mixed up. Thank you. The 30th of June. And if you are a business owner and if your company has been injured by the coronavirus and the aftermath and the health disparities,
then you should definitely go to the Department of Commerce website, Small Business Administration, and fill out a relatively simple application for up to $10,000. Now, I believe that that limit should be raised to $100,000, but that won't happen before Tuesday. There is likely to be an epidemic-related financial stimulus
There is one called the Heroes Act that is pending in Congress right now. We can contact our members of Congress and urge them to give relief to small and economically disadvantaged businesses like most of those owned by African Americans. So there's no perfect solution, but the worst thing we can do is to do nothing. Well, how do you relate that to what we're calling the new civil war? How is that warfare?
You know, economic injustice is just as violent and does just as much harm to our communities as police misconduct and excessive use of force.
Both are ways of stopping growth and development. You cut off somebody's life with a bullet or you cut it off by depriving them of economic opportunity. We live in a capitalist society, which means you are to have life, liberty and pursue happiness. You must have access to capital. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Well, I see the new civil war in so many things, the old and the new civil war in so many things, but none more vividly than in the Trump administration's efforts to end the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare,
when daily COVID-19 cases outdo each other. Every day there's a new high. Here in South Carolina, we had one day of 1,600 new cases. In a tiny state like South Carolina, 1,600 new cases in one day.
It's very noteworthy. But the day before, there was another high. It was a record set the day before that and the day before that. It's going all across the South. And interestingly enough, these very high spikes in COVID-19 cases are in the states that I call the Confederacy. Well, it's the Confederacy plus those states that rose in insurrection against the United States of America in 1861.
And add Arizona, add a couple more states. But that's because they weren't states at the time of the Civil War. I still call them Confederacy. But right in the midst of that, when the numbers are spiking all across the South and in the West, the Trump administration files to end the Affordable Care Act. If that's not an act of warfare, I don't know what it is.
More people need insurance now than ever. There were 37,000 new cases in the United States a couple of days ago, 125,000 deaths due to COVID-19. 13 states, the Confederacy, report 50% rise in COVID-19 cases. And the CDC says that for every one case that we know about, there are 10 cases that we don't know about.
And let's be clear, the war on the Affordable Care Act has never stopped since the law was enacted. Going all the way back to 2016, the Supreme Court upheld it as a tax led by Chief Justice Roberts, which was a surprise to many. He found that the government has the right to tax and that the Affordable Care Act provision for mandatory participation in it
was essentially part of the taxing power of the United States. Well, this is actually the third time that the Supreme Court has been asked to review the Affordable Care Act to determine whether it was constitutional. But contrast this.
The Affordable Care Act is more popular now than it has ever been. 27 million lost their job-based coverage in March through May of 2020 due to COVID-19, and 500,000 Americans signed up for the Affordable Care Act in these same months. And right now, when we need insurance the most, the bomb that Trump
throws on the American people is the bomb of trying to get rid of their health insurance when they need it the most.
One of their arguments is that the 2017 Congress voted to eliminate the penalty for not having health insurance. That was the individual penalty that taxed people who did not have health insurance. That tax was to encourage people to get health insurance, either through their employer or the Affordable Care Act or through the expansion of Medicaid. Well, Congress voted to eliminate that penalty. Okay.
And so Trump is using that as one of the arguments before the Supreme Court right now. And they've even said that the pandemic doesn't change what Americans know, and that is that the Affordable Care Act is unlawful and it's a failure. Well, it's not unlawful yet.
And it hasn't been a failure. As a matter of fact, as I said, it's more popular now than ever. And it's actually a lifesaver at this point. But, you know, there's something interesting about that 2017 Congressional Act. It did not colloquially we say that the tax that the penalty was repealed. But actually what the Congress did was made the penalty zero.
So you could make an interesting argument, and I'm hoping that those states that are defending the Affordable Care Act will make the case that just because a penalty is reduced to zero does not mean that the penalty does not exist. Theoretically, the Congress, at its discretion, could come back and raise the penalty to some other number other than zero.
And if you look at it in a broader sense, like Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican senator from Tennessee, said the 2017 vote was meant to eliminate the penalty, not eliminate the Affordable Care Act. I think Tennessee is one of those states in the Confederacy that voted to expand Medicaid.
almost throughout the Confederacy, those southern states and a couple of western states, they would not extend Medicaid or expand it to include more people. But I think Tennessee was the state that was. They wouldn't expand Medicaid despite the fact that their people are suffering and despite the fact that the federal government for 10 years is picking up the cost of Medicaid expansion.
Right. They were just devilish. It was sinister and evil that it wouldn't cost the states anything to expand Medicaid. They just didn't want poor people to have insurance. And I think that's sick and evil. Many of them call themselves Christians, but I don't know where that is in the Bible. And part of the sickness is that the nickname that it picked up, Obamacare, is offensive to the president. And so I have.
It is offensive to the president. He wants to get rid of everything with Obama's name on it or a legacy on it. But I say about that 2017 Senate vote to eliminate the penalty or to make the penalty zero, that the Congress could have voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They could have voted to repeal it, but they didn't. And, you know, we've heard the mantra repeal and replace repeated.
But they didn't repeal it. And they certainly haven't found a replacement in all these years. And, you know, it's been almost a decade now that the Affordable Care Act has been law and the American people have gotten used to it. You know, there were there were several votes to attempt to repeal Obamacare one way or another. And every time it came up short, remember, Mr. McCain?
Yeah, I'll never forget it. One of his last acts as a member of the Senate was to vote to preserve Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act. Every industrialized nation in the world, every industrialized nation in the world treats health care as if it were a human right. And what we're finding out from COVID-19 is
is that when one person doesn't have health coverage, you cannot gloat. You cannot be satisfied or smug because in a pandemic, whatever affects one affects all. So if you've got a big chunk of your population that can't get medical treatment or can't get it paid for, then that damages everyone, especially if the disease is contagious.
Well, you know, you and I have talked about the pandemic from the aspect of how long it's going to last in the United States. Well, I think it's going to last several years. And my concern, one of many of my concerns, is that when there is a vaccine for it, that those people who need it the most, namely African-Americans and people who are working on the front lines of trying to battle COVID-19, won't be able to afford it because they won't have insurance.
Well, I am optimistic that Roberts, he did some jujitsu to preserve the Affordable Care Act the last time it was presented to him. And I am optimistic that he and Sotomayor and Kagan will find a way, and even Gorsuch will find a way. Republican politicians are saying out loud, this is not the time to be cutting off people's health insurance.
Well, there's one Republican who wants to cut it off, the one who is at the head of their party. And I wonder, at this point, will the other Republicans be willing to jump ship and not be behind Donald Trump in this terrible bomb that he's thrown on the American people? One thing politicians are pretty good at is reading the political tea leaves, also known as polls. And if you look at the states like
Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and even Florida and Texas of all places. And Arizona of all places. The president is barely even in the polls in Georgia, Texas, and Arizona. They're spending money this week on television ads in Georgia.
It may be the first time in 50 years, well, not that long, because it seemed like Georgia was competitive when Clinton was running. But it has been a long time since Republicans felt they needed to spend money on advertising in places like Texas and Georgia. And as these politicians see those tea leaves and read those polls, they may be less sympathetic to the president's point of view than they were the last time this issue came up.
Well, I hope you're right. It seems that Bill and Melinda Gates have been thinking about the same thing that I was thinking about. I wish I had their money, but I'm glad that they're thinking these thoughts. They have put their money behind their thoughts.
And they want to help get a vaccine. And more than that, they want to make sure that African Americans get the vaccine when it becomes available. I thought that was noble and I thought it was wise because we do so much of the work that holds this country together. If our community is sick and dying, the country won't work. The country does not work without us. They can't do without us. I've been at home now for months.
March, April, May, June, four months. And every day, the black mailman comes to deliver the mail. Every Thursday morning at about 8.30, the crew of garbage men come to take away the trash from the week before. If I order pizza, the pizza guy comes and he also is black. Most people, something like 80% of African-Americans work in jobs that they cannot do from home.
They never stop working. And that is one reason you see these awful deaths of COVID-19, two to three times the rate of white folk dying from COVID-19, because we are still driving buses. I think about our cousin who drives a train in New York. He hasn't been at home. His work is deemed to be essential. And so many, many others. Well, that's absolutely right. I think
that we have really proven that there is a civil war going on, whether it's the old civil war or the new civil war. I don't want to prove it, but it's not just the police officers who say ugly things and think ugly thoughts and are preparing for a civil war. It appears that there's a war against our businesses. There's a war against us through insurance companies.
And this COVID-19 bears all of it. But, you know, it reminds me of Frederick Douglass. And I'm always reminded of Frederick Douglass. And I'm amazed at what he knew as a man in his time. What he said about struggle was, if there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be moral or it may be physical or it may be moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. I don't know any words that are more appropriate now.
than those words. We're going to have a struggle and we've got to have this struggle. And it seems that now is the time because the world has changed because of George Floyd, because of the pandemic. And we really have to take these steps that you talked about to save our black businesses. And we have to be aware of what's going on in the Trump administration and not just in the top bill of our election, but in state and local elections as well.
We've got to register and vote. We've got to be prepared. We've got to ask candidates the difficult questions and then vote our interest. We're the best on earth at doing that. Now is our time. Hopefully this civil war won't end like the other one or go into a cold war. We need to move now while the iron is hot. Well, there is one encouraging aspect to all of this. I don't recall at any point in my lifetime
when I saw as many non-Black people protesting an issue that affects mostly Black people in the streets of the United States. Now, protest by itself won't change laws, but it does put the kind of pressure on politicians and elected officials to make the kind of changes. I was proud and pleased to see that the Justice in Policing Act, which would outlaw chokeholds
and make other improvements that would do away with qualified immunity. I was pleased that the House was able to pass that in the Congress. That would make a real difference. I was disappointed to hear once again that Mitch McConnell will take good law
and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk or file 13 and not even allow the senators to discuss or debate it because he is insisting that any amendment to the bill would require 60 votes in a hundred number Senate where the Republicans have a four vote majority. That is just a prescription for doom. But
As of this year, the cohort of Americans that are younger than 18 are mostly black and brown. So let's say that another way. Most people under age, is it 25? 18. Under age 18 are black or brown and not white. That's correct.
And that's part of what you're seeing play out. You've got a young... If you look at those marchers, many of them are very young. Many of them are not even out of high school. And all they... For eight years, Barack Obama was what a president looked like to them. If you're 18...
and Trump's been in four years, that means you were 14 when he got elected. For the eight years prior to that, from the time you were six years old until you were 14, the only president you knew was cool, dispassionate, intellectual, always polite, Barack Obama. Right. And so to have this president behaving the way he is, it's shocking to them.
And they seem unwilling to take it. And what I hope that we will do as older African-Americans and older Americans, period, is to support them, aid them, help them. Let's not turn on each other. They don't do it the way we did it. No, they don't. Their world is different than the one we grew up in. But together, we can make this nation a little bit more perfect than it is now.
Well, I feel encouraged too, Jan. I always want to say from now until November, whenever we have an opportunity to have this podcast, I want to encourage people to register and to vote.
You can register online now. You can go to vote.org, select your state, and register online. Do it now. There are going to be tricks in November. There were tricks in the primary, but we can't let that stop us. What we know more than anything, we know it more clearly now than ever, elections matter. People in office matter, and our votes matter.
Well, I think that's all we have for today. Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it. And I hope that everyone will go to Spotify or wherever they get their podcasts and follow us and visit us at sistersinlaw.blogspot and read our blogs and posts and visit us on Facebook at Sisters in Law.
And you can also visit me on Davina Mathis. I have a Facebook page and I'm also linked to the Sisters-in-Law Facebook page.
And I welcome your comments. We're going to start reading some of the comments on our next podcast. I've had some interesting ones, some from the racists and some from some people who are not racist, who are like minded and some who are not. And we hope that you will join us. Go to Sisters in Law on Facebook or sistersinlaw.blogspot.com. Send us your comments and we're going to read some of them on the air.
Thank you so much. You've been listening to Sisters-in-Law, the podcast, episode six, the new Civil War.
