Vernon Discusses the Role of Cooperatives in Black History

VERNON OAKES: Good morning, everybody. This is Vernon Oakes talking to you about Everything Cooperative this February, 2015. We have Black History Month on a snowy day outside, but a beautiful, beautiful day. It looks like a picture when you look outside the window. I like to go out and play in the snow. I don’t like to live in it. This is cold. This is cold. It was great driving in this morning. I thought there would be trouble, so I got an early start. I was able to get here because I really wanted to talk to you about education in this last week of Black History Week.

Carter G. Woodson is known as the father of this Black History Month. Carter G. Woodson said if you can control a man’s thinking you don’t have to worry about his actions. If you can control his mind you don’t have to worry about his actions. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he’s inferior you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status. So, The Mis-Education of the Negro is the book that he wrote that’s famous about, you know, it’s amazing, about this miseducation, because when Jessica Gordon Nembhard was on the program the first week of the month, she talked about this education, this cooperative knowledge, this history. She said there’s a long and strong history of cooperative practices, particularly in the legacy of African Americans promoting and practicing cooperative ownership. But, it’s not known.

It’s [SOUNDS LIKE: silent]. People don’t know about it. It’s interesting to me, and I say sometimes, or I believe, that there’s folks that create the curriculum of what’s going to be taught in schools, they just don’t want us to know about our history. I was told I have also had the belief that one percenters, those that are wealthy — matter of fact, they don’t even have to be in the billionaire category, multi-millionaires — it’s not just the miseducation of negros, miseducation of poor people.

They don’t want people to understand about this co-op model, is my belief, because if they understood about this co-op model they could go out and start their own businesses, joining collectively, cooperatively, learning how to do that, go out and start their own businesses, and then they make the profit. Fascinating. I never believed in this 40 acres and a mule. Even as a young kid, I just did not believe — and at the time it was white folks — but, that anybody that had money is gonna give it to the masses.

That just didn’t make sense to me early, early on. Maybe even the first time I ever heard of it. But you know, there are some ways that people can go out and earn, and make their own 40 acres and car, or tractor. Mules don’t work it anymore, that much anymore. So, it’s like, how do we get and build wealth? Cooperative businesses, this cooperative economy is one way of showing folks how they can build their own wealth. And then Pauline Green, from the International Cooperative Alliance said — she’s a British chap — she said, that cooperatives helps people to come out of poverty with dignity. It just helps people to come out of poverty with dignity. So, how do you get that knowledge? Because there are people that really wanna keep, I think it’s more than just the negro, any poor people, they don’t want ‘em to be educated.

They don’t want you to know, me to know, that there’s some options out there where you can control your own destiny, where you can create wealth. A gentleman by the way of Jim Joseph who was the ambassador to South Africa, an African American when Mandela was president for three years, and he was on the program. He said, you know, the programs that America has for the poor, Blacks, whites, Latino, it doesn’t make — and for the poor, it helps people to survive.

I mean, you give people welfare or food stamps, that helps you to survive, but it doesn’t help you to strive. It doesn’t help you to create wealth. It doesn’t help you to get — my mom used to talk about getting on your feet. My father, my grandfather, how do you get on your feet where you have more money? You can have savings at the end of the month, as opposed to having more month than you had money. And too often growing up that’s exactly what I, we as a family of ten — at one point in a three bedroom home there was my grandfather, my grandmother, my father, my mother, and six kids, one bathroom. Before the bathroom is was the outhouse.

I remember that well. I did not like those big flies, and worried about snakes. So, you know, we come a long way because now in my life, through education, through knowledge, I have more money than I have month. So, it can happen in a generation or two, but it really takes knowledge, and too often people that are in power, people that have money, don’t want you to know about ways of creating wealth. If they give you money, food stamps, seven, eight dollars an hour, don’t even want to give you ten dollars and fifty cent an hour, then you have to spend it to survive. And you spend it in establishments that they have, they own, and it goes away from your community very quickly, and the community doesn’t grow, you don’t grow, you don’t get on your feet, you stay behind. And that’s what happens to too many Americans.

You know, Martin Luther King said that if you have 40 million people that are, you know, begging, on welfare, and so forth, there’s something wrong with the system, and the system has to change. And my belief, the system from capitalism needs to go to cooperativism, one way. It can’t go totally out of capitalism, but more and more cooperatives come into existence. More and more cooperatives, then you have every day people creating wealth. Every day people with not necessarily any more than a high school education, or not even having a high school education, you get the knowledge you need.

When you start a co-op you get the knowledge you need to run a business. And as Ruthie Wilder said on the program, that knowledge you learn about how to run your business — and she’s in Baltimore with a housing co-op. I think she said 160 units. I don’t know if it was a 2 million dollar business, I can’t remember the numbers, but she learned how to run a business. And her career was, like with Metro, with the driving of the trains. I don’t know how much education she had, but I would suggest to you that her education, her formal education was not learning how to run a business. But she learned how to run her cooperative business, and she’s the president of it. And she said that when she learned the tools that she learned in running her business she took to her life. So, in running a housing corp. you have to learn how to deal with reserves, or savings, that you save money today for when you have to replace the roof in five, ten, twenty years from now. So, she has learned those things, and she put them to use in her everyday life. Carter G. Woodson, no man knows what he can do until he tries is one of his quotes.

I would suggest to you, one of the first persons that I had on the program, October 2014, 2013, said that one of the reasons there are not more co-op is ‘cause it’s hard work, straight out, it’s hard work. And you know, if you don’t — and I’ve seen this in managing housing co-ops, that they really function once a person’s mentality changes from a tenant to an owner. That change doesn’t happen quickly for everybody, and some people it may never happen. But, once you move from, I can pick up the telephone and call somebody and they’ll come and fix something, even if I messed it up.

If you’re a tenant then you’re used to the landlord, that you can call him. It doesn’t mean he’ll come and fix it, but you can call him to fix it. Once you get that you’re an owner, and that if you mess something up you’ve gotta fix it, some people don’t want that. They don’t want that responsibility. But, long range, the research has shown that the rent stays a lot lower. The housing co-op in Atlanta, the two bedroom was 500 dollars a month when they did this research a couple years ago. Where in apartment buildings it was 5 to 800 dollars a month.

So, when people know that they own it they take better care of it. You have a better sense of community. There is community. An apartment building too often you may not even know your neighbor. But, in a co-op you get to know your neighbors, and everybody looks out for each other. I like nosey neighbors now, because that’s one good sense that you can keep the crime down when people are watching out for stuff. And they said in this research that in co-ops crime was down compared to apartment buildings. So, once you know that you’re an owner, once you know that your decisions matter, not only in your household, but in all of the households in the community, then you take different actions.

You look out for each other, crime is down, you take better care of your unit. You perhaps would turn off the water when you’re brushing the teeth or shaving, so that you eventually pay for it if you keep it on because you’re the owner. So, co-ops, at the personal level, and at the community level makes a lot more sense. The question is, why aren’t there more? And I contend, and one of our persons told me I had a sinister view, that there are people that don’t want you to know. And I guess that sinister view comes from being Black in America. Because too often growing up in the South during the 60s, during the riots, in high school, that folks would call you the N-word, and sometimes they would try to spit on you, or do — or, you know that they didn’t want your best.

And too often in my world — I’ll be 68 this year — in my world there’s been too often that you try to do something, you do it your best, and you find out that there’s somebody holding you back, simply because of the color of your skin. It may be some other reason, like economics. They want that job, they don’t want you to get it, so they’ll lie on you or do something so that you don’t get it, but they’ll use the color of the skin as a way of keeping you down. And I believe those actions are sinister. And I also believe after this lady said this on the air, that she knows rich people, and they want people to grow. And I think that’s true, too. But there are some wealthy people that will — and that happened all the way through our history there were wealthy people that wanted to see everybody have a fair shot, have a fair chance if they were willing to work, and do it. You know, even early on Underground Railroad was a cooperative. Underground Railroad was people working together, whites and Blacks.

If it wasn’t for the whites the Underground Railroad would not have worked, where Blacks were taken out of the slavery, and out of the South, and going to different people’s homes, and more often than not those homes were white folks’. So, you do have people that are wealthy that really want to see everybody grow, and survive, and have an equal chance. But, I would also say that there a lot of people out there that have money that don’t wanna see. They wanna keep people down. And it’s not just African Americans, this Mis-Education of the Negro, that miseducation goes to a lot of folks, white people, and Blacks, and Latin. So, you know, it’s just a big thing this month, this Black History Month, understanding our history. We’re gonna take a break, but we’re gonna come back and talk more about Carter G. Woodson and this cooperative. Talk to you right now. [music]

VERNON OAKES: Jessica Gordon Nembhard in her book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, you know, one of her summaries is that African American cooperative movement has been, and is a silent partner to the long Civil Rights Movement. And that is so true. And we’ve had David Thompson on the air a couple times, who’s writing another book on the same subject. And it goes all the way back. Frederick Douglass got help from cooperators in England. He went to England as a slave. They donated money and helped him get speaking assignments. And so, he could buy his freedom even before he came back. So, he came back as a freedman, with the help of cooperators in England. And also just to the dichotomy of, you know, this constant struggle. You have England going around trying to colonize the world. Europeans in particular, whether Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, colonized meaning taking control over, however they could do it. Just a sidebar, one of the reasons I like Ghanaians is that there was a tribe in Ghana that the British could not capture.

And so they kept their own governance. And I met the king once, Ashanti Tribe. But, for the most part they colonized. So, you have the British going around, colonizing, and miseducating folks, no matter who they were, wherever they were. So, that they could get people to think of them as the superior, think of their culture as the way to live. And however you live, whatever your religions were, whatever your customs were, they were not the way. So, you get all of this going, and at the same time there were some English people that helped Frederick Douglass. So, you had some English people — and I would suggest maybe the majority because they were a class system, and they believed that you were in the upper class that you had certain rights.

And if you were in the lower class you didn’t have very much rights, and they treated white people the same way. And in England, there was a class system. India, anywhere that you went, anywhere the English went they brought this class system. I was taught in junior high and high school in social studies that we don’t have a class system here in the US. I have learned that that’s not true. It’s not known as stringent as in the British, and you can move. And Obama talks about the middle class, and in the US you can move from poorer class to middle class with education and hard work. But, there’s still a class system here. Bill Gates has the most money in the Forbes 400 with 80 billion dollars, 80 billion dollars. You know, that’s just staggering. If he got four percent interest off that 80 billion dollars that would be 320 million dollars a year, if my math is right, four times eight, 32, 320 million dollars a year whether he works or not. Okay, four percent, and they say the average somewhere runs between four and five percent. Five percent he would be at 400 million dollars a year. And they can use that money.

I mean, you might be paying 21 percent on your credit cards, you may pay 9 percent on your car, and they invest their money so they get a piece of it back. Jessica Gordon Nembhard also said that there has been a strong role for Black women in this cooperative movement, a strong role for Black women. And I find that in housing, most of the presidents of housing co-ops that I have known, or been around, or managed, have been women. Most of the board, if they have a five member board you may have three or four members are female. So, strong role even now in the housing world. You do have some presidents that are men that are very strong, very good, but the majority are women.

So, also coming from Africa, this mutual aid society. You have Africans wanted to be buried. And individually they could not save money, so they would pool in their dollars in communities, and they’d create a mutual aid society. And that aid, not only in burial, but it eventually became mutual aid in hospitals. And that sort of what I have been told came over from Western Africa, Senegal, and Ghana, and The Gambia, and those places, Ivory Coast. So, you had this sort of working together. And we had Jim Joseph on, I talked about it earlier, and he talked about Ubuntu, a Southern African tradition, a way of being is what he called it. Ubuntu was that I am because you are, you are because I am. It is a community group. It is that we are working cooperatively together. So, that was sort of in the nature. And you find that with Native Americans, which was called Indians, but Native Americans and tribes that everybody worked together, everybody had their roles. In Alaska the same thing. So, that this cooperative way of working together is a way of life in a lot of different cultures. But, it seems like from the European way is that it’s just individual, this John Wayne, the Lone Ranger kinda thing.

And you know, they really worked in groups. John Wayne, if you look at any movie, there was a bunch of folks around him, whether cavalry or on his ship. It was not him doing it by himself. He may have been the leader in his hierarchy governance, but it was not a individual kind of thing. And it’s like it’s not really true, this thing of the lone individualist. But, that’s the way that — and Jim Joseph talked about in South Africa and Southern Africa, they had the same, more of the white had this view of individualism. I am because I am, as opposed to I am because you are. And we are because we are. We are a group. We’re working together.

And he said, Jim Joseph said that Mandela, the reason that he could work with the people that imprisoned him, because he knew that if he hurt them he was hurting himself. So, because of this Ubuntu, this thing of this cooperative nature, treat your neighbor as yourself, love your neighbor as you love yourself. I mean, it’s this whole sense of we are, this whole cooperative way of being. So, I really like this co-op model, this co-op business model. Last week we had this young man, 34 year old Esteban Kelly on talking about solidarity economics. And I’ve heard that a lot. I didn’t get into talking to him, solidarity. I mean, he said we are together, we’re solid, we’re working together. It’s as we are cooperative, different organizations that work cooperatively together, solid together. We work each other, and the sixth principle of cooperative is cooperation among cooperatives. So, you get the credit unions working with housing co-ops, maybe helping the affordable housing co-op such that when they have to get their down payment, or their membership buy-in, it could be 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 dollars that they perhaps could borrow from the co-op. Because a lot of times banks don’t understand co-ops.

They don’t want to understand co-ops, I think. And their focus is on the individual, and how much money you have, or what your credit is. And in these affordable housing co-ops too often people don’t have good credit, or don’t have a lot of income, and definitely don’t have wealth saved up. And a lot of times the banks, when you want to borrow money, they want to make sure that you have collateral that they can go after if you lose their money. So, we’re looking to try to see how we can get more cooperation with the credit unions and housing co-ops so that when somebody needs 2,000 dollars, or they want to buy a computer, they can go down to their local credit union, which is a cooperative — in both cases housing co-ops and credit unions are called consumer co-ops — but working together is solidarity economics.

And the benefits — I had a program after President Obama’s State of the Union message. And that program was all about everything that he wants to get — not quite everything — but most of everything that he wants to accomplish in his State of the Union, he could do it cooperatively. That’s solidarity economics. He hasn’t talked about that yet, but perhaps one day he will. So, Jessica Gordon Nembhard talked a lot about when this cooperative model has worked, like the Great Depression in the 30s. You had perhaps your biggest growth of Black co-op development, because of the economic need of people working together, and the organizational support. That’s what makes it so good is that one person may have this skillset, another has another skillset. When they learn how to work together they bring in different skillsets. So, it’s a better chance — matter of fact, statistics show that a lot less co-op go under, because people are working together. They bring their different skillsets, they learn how to put ‘em together, they can do much better. And there’s a lot of room for co-ops in today’s world, in the 21st century. You know, we’ll take another break. I get excited about this. I hope I don’t sound too preachy, but if I do I hope you get the message and perhaps you want to start your own co-op. We’ll be right back. Don’t touch that dial. [music]

VERNON OAKES: Glory. You know, the freedom is like religion to us. Justice for all is not enough. You know, it’s not specific enough. Getting this education, there was a sign at Greenbelt Homes — Greenbelt’s a 1,600 unit cooperative — that said A Cooperative gives people the tools they need to control their own destiny. If you really want to control your own destiny, and get the knowledge you need, getting into a co-op is one way of doing it. Getting into a co-op can help you get the glory. You know, it’s like, where do you get the education if we’ve been miseducated in our schools? And I was.

If you’re miseducated in our schools then where do you get the knowledge? How do you get the knowledge? Carter G. Woodson said there’s two ways of getting knowledge. One is what you get in formal education or somebody teaching you, and others are what you’ll get on your own. Jessica Gordon Nembhard said that a lot of times there was a study group. Before the co-op was formed there was a study group, and people came together, and they learned, they studied, they got knowledge. And in getting the knowledge they were able to make choices that were best for them, where they can control their own destiny. They’re no longer miseducated. They can create businesses, create organizations that help them. And when they create them most often the products or the services were as good as, if not better than the competitors. And when they made profit they got a chance to keep it.

We had people in here from NCBA CLUSA from around the world, and they were talking, a couple of them talking. And they said that one of the huge differences between a farmer that was in the co-op on one side of the street, and a farmer that was in a co-op on the other side, one is the farmer in the co-op, their product looked better. They were greener, they were fresher, they were stronger, they weren’t wilting. And when the farmer was asked what was the major difference between being in a co-op and not, at first he pointed at the farmer across the street, and his product, but he said that he could now feed his family for the whole year, and have some left over. Where before he couldn’t even make enough off the farm to feed his family, to survive, subsistence, could not do it.

More year than food, more year than money. And now by being in the co-op they learned how to produce better products, better crops. And a lot of times these crops didn’t use fertilizer. They were organic farms. They got more money for their crop. They got different locations they could sell their crop, different markets they could send their crops to. So, that they could get more dollars to feed their family, and have leftover to build wealth, to perhaps grow their business. Freedom is like religion to us, justice, it doesn’t say it all. We learned resist. Talking about Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus. Well, it’s not very well known, but Rosa Parks, and a lot of the Civil Rights leaders went to a school called the Highlander School. And I really wanna go there and study it more, because I wanna know, what did they teach them at the Highlander School that they were not taught in the regular schools? And a little bit that I’ve gotten is they taught them about their civil rights. What are your rights as a citizen in the US? What happens when you go vote?

Why people don’t want you to be able to vote? Really the reason people don’t want us to be able to vote is because if we don’t vote then they get to put into power who they want to put into power. And the people that then go to power will create programs and laws that help them. This is why the wealthy put so much money into politics. This is why the Koch brothers, K-O-C-H, will put so much money in for Republican folks in the House and the Senate, and in local jurisdictions, states, and county. They want as many people in there that will create laws, and create programs that help them get more money. I mean, they don’t do it because they are philanthropic, and they want to help these folks.

No, the ultimate goal is to not have us to vote, not have us to people in power that will benefit us, but to put people in power that will benefit them. And it’s unfortunate it’s them and us, but that’s what happens. I never understand why the people that have all of this money want to get more. They don’t want you to get it, because if you get it, then they don’t get it. It seems to be real simple when you can understand it. And it’s taken me a long time to get it. You know, and I talked that the one percenters get 60 percent of the income that is produced by the US. So, if the one percenters get 60 percent then 99 percent get 40 percent. We have to share the 40 percent. It also became clear why they don’t want to raise the minimum wage. Because if they do raise the minimum wage then that would mean that either one of two things would happen, that the people below will get more of the piece of the pie, and they’ll get less. So, maybe the 99 percenters will get 60 percent of the pie and they’ll get 40, and they don’t want that and they don’t need it.

Or inflation, that then if you go from six dollars an hour to ten, a 40 percent increase, or 45 percent increase, and then all of a sudden gas starts going up, food starts going up, so they can make more money. So, there’s a net gain after five years of so, so that that growth doesn’t make any difference. You cannot buy any more goods and services at ten dollars an hour than you did at six or seven bucks an hour, with inflation. And that’s what ends up happening a lot of times when you see that the minimum wage is increased. So, they want theirs.

So, the question is, how do we get more people to get the knowledge they need to make informed decisions. I tell young people now, I say, why you go to school? And they say, to get an education. I say, why are you getting an education? A lot of times they don’t — oh, I had one young lady just tell me the other day, about twelve years old, she said, I get an education so I can get a better job. I said, that’s fantastic. Okay, you know why you wanna get a better education. Or, she said, get an education so I can get a degree so I can get a better job. And I said to her, what I have found is you really want to get knowledge. Whether you get a degree or not, you really want knowledge. And too often, too many times, you’ll have people with a lot of degrees but no knowledge.

Or, at least they don’t know how to put that knowledge into work. So, you want to get knowledge either by getting it formally and getting degrees, or by joining a study group, learning how to creative cooperatives, so that you can get knowledge and you can make better decisions, better choices for your life, so you can live a better life and have control over your life, and end up with more money than month, savings, wealth that you can pass on for generations. And one of the things I found out is that of the top ten people on the Forbes 400 list, three of them made their money on their own or with their corporations. Now, they didn’t make it on their own, but they made their money.

Where the other seven have inherited money. And it seems like the ones that inherited money really want to make sure that they can make more money off the inherited money. So, they don’t really want these programs that help the everyday, common person. They want programs in place to help them to both conserve their money, pay less taxes, and/or get more money, get more interest, and pay less taxes. So, I really encourage you in listening to get into a study group. I may want to start one of these study groups for cooperatives. And learn how to create a co-op. One of the things that my employees and I are doing is turning Oakes Management, which is a property management company, into a worker owned co-op. A worker owned co-op is when the employees own the co-op.

They make the decisions. They can both own it and control it. If you have any comments or questions you can call in at 1-800-450-7876. 1-800-450-7876. If you want to talk about this miseducation of poor people, Mis-Education of the Negro, miseducation of everybody that — Carter G. Woodson said it, the oppressor, the person that’s oppressing, the person that has the power, has always indoctrinated, taught the weak, the enslaved, the people that are in the lower classes, add in these other things, but he’s always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong, of the oppressor. So, the history is his story. The history is anybody that’s writing the history. They have written out of the history books about cooperatives, and the role that cooperatives have played in the Civil Rights Movement, the role that cooperatives have played in creating wealth for African Americans and people that are the weaker, and the lower classes. So, the strong, white folks, white men, have always taught Blacks and people in the lower class, whatever they wanted them to know. This ends up being the miseducation of the weak, the miseducation of the oppressed, and that has no color.

The only difference really is, when I boil it down — the common denominator when I taught math — is that, who has the money? And who’s going to get the money? And it’s unfortunate that too often the people that have money want more and more and more and more money, which means they don’t want you or I to get it. That is, the oppressor. Carter G. Woodson says it very well in his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro. Jeremiah Wright was at Shiloh Baptist Church this Sunday, that’s my church. He was there last Sunday. We had our Historically Black College and University day.

So, he was there and he was talking about the Philistines and miseducation. If you recall, Daniel, when he went in the lion’s den. And he was comparing the miseducation of Philistines with the miseducation of Blacks. And now, look, it doesn’t make any difference. It goes all the way back. It makes no difference. It’s those that have power want to keep people that don’t have the power, the weak, they don’t want to teach them. They want to miseducate, or they want to teach them exactly what they want the persons to know so they can maintain the power and keep control and keep getting the resources, the money. If you really want to call in you call in at 1-800-450-7876. And we’re gonna take our last break for this session. This is 2015, Black History Month. We’re talking about the father of Black history, Carter G. Woodson, comparing what he has taught with what Dr. Gordon Nembhard had talked about, and others on the program. We’ll be right back. Hope you’re enjoying the show.

VERNON OAKES: Information is power. This is why National Cooperative Bank is sponsoring this program. They give you the information that you need to join a co-op. If you’re not a member of a credit union you can join a credit union now. It used to be that there used to be certain people that each credit union was formed for. Now, more and more they’re letting other people come in. And so, the National Co-op Bank wants to give you the power, the information that you need, because information is power. Although, if you get information and you don’t use it, then it’s useless.

It’s the same as not having the information. So, you have to put action to power. It’s the same thing with faith. Jeremiah Wright had talked about the Philistines, Daniel in the lion’s den, they had faith. Those brothers had faith. But, if you don’t put that faith to work, it also says faith without work is dead, it’s useless. So, that’s the same thing with this information. You have to put it to use in order to get something out of it. And learning about cooperatives, and then joining perhaps a study group, or a group of people coming together to form one may be a way of using this information. John, how you doing this morning?

JOHN: Good morning. How you doing?

VERNON OAKES: I’m great.

JOHN: Well, I’ve been listening to your show here and I have a question to ask. It’s pertaining to I guess you would call it the misinformation of the Black race, here in Washington we have, some people celebrate the legalization of marijuana. We have others who are fearful of it. Okay, and I have a question, what is more important to the Black race, money and wealth, or drugs? You can’t have both. You can only have one. Which one would you take? And I’m gonna hang up and let you answer that question. And think about Ward 8, think about Ward 7, think about half of Ward 5, and some of Ward 4. Because we’re getting plagued with some financial, and–

VERNON OAKES: Hey John, I think that is an excellent question. It’s a little bit off the subject of cooperatives, but I’m one of the people that don’t like the legalization of marijuana. And I really don’t like it among the family because different from alcohol when somebody smokes marijuana it comes from one apartment to the next. And so, you can have the influence of marijuana on you, or your family, or your kids, and you’re not smoking it. It’s like this second-hand cigarette smoke. And I’ve experienced, I’ve been a property manager, that this marijuana smoke, it goes throughout the unit. You can find it in the hallways, and one apartment to the next.

But, you know, I don’t think your question, at least for me, is not just what’s most important for Blacks. It’s what’s most important to whites, Blacks, Latino, brown, yellow, green. I mean, what’s most important to people. Is money and wealth more important than drugs? That answer, it seems to be a very easy answer. You’re much more concerned about wealth and taking care of your family than you are drugs, unless they’re drugs that are prescribed for medical reasons. So, that answer seems — I think your question must be much broader than that. But, it’s like, I don’t like that people of the District of Columbia have decided — this is a personal thing now — that have decided to legalize drugs. And I’ve found that one of the reasons is, in multi-family homes, if you’re smoking in one apartment, the smoke goes over to another, if not the three or four apartments. And so, you have secondhand smoke, just like cigarettes. And some studies I’ve heard on cigarettes the secondhand smoke is worse for the lungs than firsthand cigarettes, as bad as if not worse than. So, secondhand smoke I don’t like, and that’s what you get with marijuana.

So, I don’t like it. I would like to see that go down. But, you know, what’s more important, money and wealth, or money and health, or drugs, and that’s an easy money and wealth. But, the wealth goes, it’s spiritual wealth, it’s economical health. Spiritual, emotional, financial, what you’re talking about, and money. It’s physical health, emotional. So, it’s all the different system. Health is much more important than drugs, unless drugs are used — and I have a friend that was blind, had glaucoma, and he was prescribed marijuana early to try to stop it from going. It didn’t stop it. He got high with his cookies, and smoking. But, I don’t like it. I don’t like that at all. But, thank you for your question. You know, in this Black History Month wealth is much more, and health is much more important.

And this miseducation of — and I’ve expanded that also — it’s not just Blacks, negroes, Philistines, it’s everybody. It’s how do you get a group of people to do what you want them to do. When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. No man knows what he can do until he tries. So, how do you get people to know? And this is why National Cooperative Bank is sponsoring this program, is to get people to know about co-ops, so that they can get the education that they need to control their destiny. They can get the education that they need to create wealth. They can get the education that they can that they can make informed decisions. They can get the knowledge that they need to make informed decisions, no matter how much formal education you have or don’t have. Carter G. Woodson had trained himself through I think the age 20, maybe it was 17. He taught himself and then he went and got a high school degree and got it at 20. In 1912 he got a PhD from Harvard. He was the second African American to get a degree from Harvard, W.E.B. Dubois being the first.

And W.E.B. Dubois talked about co-ops. He advocated for co-ops, working together. My father used to say that too often Blacks were like crabs in a barrel. I don’t know if you’ve heard this quote before. That means that when one crab sees another crab climbing out of the barrel they’ll reach up and grab ‘em and pull ‘em back down. You know, I think that happens with anybody that don’t like themselves, that don’t care for themselves. And that’s one of the things, if you read this letter from Lynch. Lynch was a — I think he came from Barbados, or somewhere. And he was teaching the whites here that what you have to do is get the Blacks to think only of the whites as people in power and that have any kind of knowledge, that they are superior. And you get the Black women to be against the Black men. You get the light skinned to be against the Black, darker skinned.

And you keep this division, and he said that would last for 400 years. It will last forever and ever kinda thing. And that’s what I think you see happen too often with Blacks. And we think that it would be hard for us to come together because of that. But see, in these study groups you learn how to work together, how to solve problems together. How when there is disagreement — and there is going to be disagreement, I’ve learned that all of my life — when there is disagreement you learn how to resolve the disagreement without punching each other and without hurting each other. You stay on the behavior and the disagreement and not on the person. So, you learn these things that you learn how to work together, which whites, the oppressor have taught us year in and year out, this division. So, we’ve been taught that even though if we came from West Africa, Southern Africa, in our history, in our cultures it was I am because you are, and you are because I am.

Remember, they did everything that they could, the miseducation of the negro, the miseducation of the Philistine was to make you to learn their language, their culture, make them right and our cultures wrong. So, looking out for the individual, for self, as opposed to looking out for your neighbor, and self. Looking out for people down the street in your communities. How do you work together so that when the tide rises everybody rise? As opposed to trying to be on the boat by yourself, or the tide may rise, but you get it all and other people get very little.

One percenters get 60 percent of the income, and 99 percenters, the majority of the population gets to split up 40 percent of the nation’s income. How do we get the tax laws that Bush put in place that support the rich, how do we get those turned? It really means that we have to get the knowledge, and we have to get out and vote. And we have to put people in place that will produce the programs and the laws that protect the people. It seems simple, and I’ve got that the reason that so many whites will vote for people that, like the rich would want to put in place, it’s because they’ve been miseducated also. It’s just the miseducation of the negro.

It’s not just the miseducation of the Philistines. It’s the miseducation of the poor folks, the folks in the lower class — middle class and lower, miseducation of. So, we get this education change, get people to vote so we can get the people in place that will create the policies and procedures. And this will not happen overnight, but we can make strides in the next election to get people in place that will create policies and procedures that will help the majority of the people. HUD programs, they create apartment buildings now, not co-ops. Who owns the apartment buildings? Not the poor, it’s the rich. They make more and more money off of government funds.

They get tax breaks. They talk about that the rich more often pay less as a percentage of taxes than their secretaries, or people that work for them, pay a lot less. So, I would like to see them pay the same. I would like for it to be fair. And, the tax laws are not fair not. You know, we’ll be back next week. The hour has gone. This month will be gone, this Black History Month. But as somebody said, this Black History Month is every day. If you need to contact me you can contact me at V-O, V as in Victor, O as in Oscar, at oakesmanagement.com. O-A-K-E-S, management dot com. We’ll see you next Thursday. Thanks a lot for listening.