Transcript:
Hello, Welcome everyone, I’d like to welcome you to the yo is this racist podcast. Now for some background My name is Gabriel Craig and I’m a sophomore currently studying business operations management at The Ohio State University. Throughout today’s podcast, we’re going to be going through many different topics in society and discovering is this in fact a racist, a systematic injustice? Or is it just society and humans being humans? Now one common practice in our society that I would like to talk about today would be tipping. Every time we go out to eat, there was always an unwritten rule that the server at least 20% and some people always tip less, more or not at all. Now, tipping is the compensation for many industries and many careers throughout our world. When a kid mows your lawn out front, you tip them. When a valet takes your car you tip them when someone delivers food to help you tip them. Now, tipping has been around for many centuries, but it has a very dark past and a dark origin that many people do not know about. Now, after slavery ended, many freed slaves were free able to go and work whatever jobs they wanted to try and build their own income. But white supremacists did not want freed slaves to be able to build up their own personal income and generational wealth. So what they did is they implemented tipping in many African American professions to stop them from earning a fair wage. When you create tipping the laws and minimum wage laws don’t apply to the wage, the person being served controls how much the person makes, and in many times, African Americans and many freed slaves did not get the right compensation compared to their white counterparts. In fact, many of them were not even tipped at all. This made it so that newly freed slaves could not build up the generational wealth they needed for their offspring to have a better life, leaving a constant cycle of them staying in the service jobs and being caught by the tipping loophole. Now, this phenomenon was not happening just in olden times, this was happening in our grandparents period, our parents period. And right now, Washington Post reported that black Restaurant Servers are making less than their white counterparts during the pandemic. These problems do not disappear with the same system we have in place, and we need to make a change in the restaurant industry. And make it so that fair wages given to all workers of color. So I would come to the conclusion that tipping is in fact racist. Although normal people tending every day are not racist. The dark ties behind this are significantly hurting the minority population in the workers industry.
And we need to make it so that all minorities and every worker, in fact, make an hourly wage to abolish tipping and prejudice. The next topic I would like to talk about are drug laws and prison reform. Now, why is it more common for a minority to be in prison? We all have the same laws to follow and they should all apply equally? Well, in our society. This is not true. And certain laws were created to lock up certain people of color, and not white people. Believe it or not, before 1971 most guns were illegal on the street, and did not have prison time or mandatory minimum sentencing. And you may think, Well, why did these laws change because people were being hurt, like the health department must have wanted to step in to make sure people weren’t getting hurt? Well, no, this isn’t true. The reason why drug laws were created were purely political reasons. In 1971, Richard Nixon declared drugs public enemy number one, and the ones I was convinced, many people think, was to make the public a better place. But that wasn’t true. The creation of drugs was helped the Nixon agenda, the Nixon campaign in 1968. And the Nixon white house after that had two enemies, the anti war left and black people. This is from former Nixon domestic policy chief john anchorman. This is what he told Harper’s writer Dan bomb, you understand what I’m saying? We know we can make it illegal to be either against the world or black but by getting the public to associate the hippies, with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily. We could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their communities, and ruin their lives. So a richard nixon White House cabinet member just admitted to creating drug walls to lock up minorities for political reasons. And you may think, Oh, this happened in the past and must be over now. But no, that’s not true today. minorities are four to five times more likely to be arrested for the same crime and serve a longer prison sentence than their white counterparts. All for nonviolent drug crimes. So yes, drug crimes are racist. They were created with malicious intent to lock up a part of our population for political gain, and no one can convince me otherwise. As you can see, so far in the podcast, we’ve talked about two societal norms that both have dark racial past. that many people don’t truly know about. And that just says a lot about our society. And we also have to think what other things in our society have dark racial past just like these innocent ones. Now let’s move on to a lighter note, I would like to be talking about certain terms that many people may go, Oh, is that racist? Now referring to a black person as black is not racist, only referring to black people as African American is, in fact, racist. This is because not all black people are from Africa, or have genetic ties to Africa, for example, South America, Jamaica, many other islands that are no connections to the continent of Africa. So what everyone is referring to the black population as the African American population, they’re doing an injustice, they’ll like be afraid to all white people as Eurpeon. all white people are not from Europe, there’s Australians, there’s a million other countries. It’s the same thing with Africa and black people. They’re not all from Africa. Many people think it’s taboo to say black and even cover their mouth. And they think they’re doing the right thing by saying African American, but many people would even prefer the term black because African American, it just sounds too extra to them. So I would say you are not racist if you do do this. But I think it is important to educate yourself and realize what your words may mean to someone who is not even genetically tied to that continent. Now the next topic I want to talk about on the podcast is this racist would be colorism in the media and Hollywood. And it has become almost too obvious to me at this point. And I think February Black History Month really showed me how the Hollywood feels about the minority population. So I first really noticed colorism really noticed it as a trend when I saw this one Disney Black History Month appreciation video, and it was showing all of his name black actors, and appreciating that it was really nice to deal with a good wholesome feeling. When you really looked at all the actors. They were all light skinned mixed actors. There was very little dark skinned actors on Disney screen at Disney’s like, hey, look, we have blacked actors. We have black actors, but only the ones we approved because they’re mixed with being white.
And I can see why dark skinned people can be very frustrated with this because they’ve been asking for representation and media. And then they get this whitewashed version of it. And although mix people are still black as well, you’re missing the main part of the minority population who has been arguing for this. And then when you look at colorism as a systematic injustice, you realize how much deeper it gets than just the media. colorism was created by white society to pit black people against each other and to make them discriminate by Oh, the lighter the skin tone you better you are when that is really not the case at all. Now Caitlin greenbridge from the Guardian, she writes that colorism shows up and even Starker ways the difference in periods between darker skinned and lighter skinned men, mirrors differences in periods between whites and blacks. darker skinned women are given longer prison sentences than their light skinned counterparts. This discrimination starts very young to if you’re a dark skinned girl, you are three times more likely to be suspended from school than your light skinned peers. And these are all people who are considered the same race. And just because their shade is a slightly different skin color is created this hierarchy. And this hierarchy was created by white supremacy in our society that has been systematically infecting it’s almost a virus is unconstitutionally changed how a certain part of our population has thought. I remember my girlfriend shared a story with me that stuck with her for the rest of her life. She is a darker skinned girl, but her sisters are a lighter skin complexion. And one day she was saying in middle school, and some lighter-skinned boys said, Hey, back in slavery, you would be a field slave and your sisters would be house slaves And so would we because you’re so much darker skinned at us. And she said it literally broke her heart and changed how she felt about the whole world. Because someone who she thought was her own race could be so hurtful to her. Now why did these boys say this to her to put her down? I don’t know. But I truly believe that it is deeply rooted in our society. And it was created by white people with a lighter complexion you are the more higher you on the hierarchy. And that is not correct and as even infected the own minority populations. I think a way we can combat colorism is support affirmative action programs to put more people in color and power and to put darker-skinned models on the face of media to show people that they are being represented. Alright guys, thank you for listening to the podcast. That is all I have for the yo is this racist podcast. I hope you guys learned something today. The biggest takeaway I want you to have is that even things we take for normal in our society can have an extremely dark past and someone can still be being hurt because of it. It is important to always be aware of your own prejudices. So I want everyone to have a good day.