Reimagining Black Relations

Dr. Eve Hudson, Founder and Chief Strategist of Evingerlean Worldwide and Professor of Higher Education at Bellarmine University focused on the main social mobilizer for Black people. She touched on the opportunity available to everyone regardless of the color of their skin or socioeconomic background.
"People were people. Even through my high school, I didn't recognize I was going to a predominantly Black institution, predominantly Black school even, because I was going to school with friends. But even with friends, depending on where I was, they were folks from South Eastern Asian descent, people from Mexico, just from all over the world. And so I had a different concept about people, loving and accepting people, and seeing people for people. And it wasn't really until I had gone to an HBCU that I had thought much about being Black. But then, when I moved to the deep south, I really thought about being Black..." - Dr. Eve Hudson
http://www.evehudsonphd.com/

Paul Wilson, a founding member of Black Police Association and former superintendent with London’s Metropolitan Police with 31 years of public service expounded on why changing policing is almost insurmountable. He described the Police Occupational Cultures, vulnerabilities within the police services, and the birth of policing in the U.S and U.K. Paul expressed that the greatest pandemic in London is the loss of young Black men because regardless of your location in England and Wales, Black people are being disproportionately stopped and searched by the police.
"But at that time, they had something called the "sus" law. Suspected persons? And it was a law that was prevalently used if you'd like to control young Black people. Suspected persons member - police officer, could stop any Black person or indeed anyone, and without a victim, and without or little corroboration to arrest that person for being suspected of about to commit an offense" - Paul Wilson

Dr. Ward Ulmer, President of Walden University is confident our generation can make a positive change that will be felt by future generations. He believes that each and every person is a product of their upbringing, and considering we all came from the same place, it is not okay to be racist.
He asserted that, while he cannot control his white privilege, he can control whether he is racist or not. With the Walden community, he is committed to ensuring a safe, respectful, and open forum for people of all backgrounds.
"I think what makes this so raw, and so real, is, we saw a human being, being killed. We saw George Floyd killed" - Dr. Ward Ulmer

Anna Ekeledo, Executive Director of AfriLabs Foundation and Working Party Chair of eCommerce Forum Africa, spoke from Lagos in Nigeria. The Nigerian-Senegalese expounded on the excitement and the reality of being a Black youth on the continent. She highlighted the uniqueness of the environment, the people, culture, and solution adaptation, while identifying the most appropriate stakeholders to define and solve the Black problems. (Since the recording of the podcast, Anna has joined a Nigerian political party, the Youth Party).
"I know that there is still that savior mentality that says Black people haven't figured it out, we don't know what to do, we don't know how to do it. So we need to come and be supported. While I recognize that there are a lot of challenges that we still face around healthcare for example, or the education sector, and all of this, our infrastructures are not there yet, people are still financially excluded and don't have access to clean and affordable energy, yes, all those challenges are there but then that mentality of Black people can't figure it out and we need to come and help them because they can't think by themselves is not ...." - Anna Ekeledo

Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, Ph.D., Senior Associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Fellow with the Caribbean Policy Consortium, both in Washington, DC, provides vignettes on the end-to-end process of the drug business, which includes production, trans-shipment, consumption, and money laundering. He elaborated on the impact in the Black community, why "just say no" did not work, and why "the war on drugs" was unhelpful. The recommendations of this two-time university president and author of several books based on 3 F's--Faith, Family, and Friends--are profound.

"In an effort to control drug sale, possession, and use in New York city, they began to confiscate vehicles of people found with drugs. The first four months of confiscation, most of the vehicles confiscated for people using drugs were not from New York city. They were the rich white kids from New Jersey who were driving into the Black communities to purchase the drugs. So you've got to ask the question "is what you are seeing in the Black community of the Black community"? - Prof. Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith