Reimagining Black Relations - #39 Follow Results, Numbers Speaks!

#39 Follow Results, Numbers Speaks!

05/28/21 • 47 min

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

Previous Episode

#38 "The Qualifiers"

Scott Law, a trusted colleague and friend of mine, shared his thoughts and fears about the current generation, and his hope and aspirations for the next, while discussing the inherent need for all people to value each other and coexist equitably as one human family.
"We never thought about things in that way, and I wasn't raised to think about things in that way. We learn about people, we didn't learn about or be taught that there was this difference between a Hispanic person and a Black person, the Chinese person and so on. It was really about whether the person was good or they weren't. You get to the core of who you are and get rid of all this superfluous details that at the end of the day, shouldn't matter" - Scott Law

Next Episode

#40 Business of Poison

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