ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray shares part one of his time with a panel talking about the 2024 General Election.
The six-person panel featured three previous guests on the show — financial counseling CEO Marvin Wilson, entrepreneur Richard Cuff and Dr. Herbert Harris, an author and public speaker — as well as investor Len Gilmer, broadcaster Shakhea Moore and Florida State Sen. Rosalind Osgood, D-Broward.
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Corie began the conversation by addressing people who may want to sit the election out altogether. Sen. Oswood replied that to not vote is still a vote in and of itself.
“I’ve heard the rhetoric about not voting, but we must be real honest. If we’re going to make any change happen, it’s going to happen by us addressing the political determinants of social justice. It’s the laws, the policies, the practice and the budgets that makes nothing change in our community consistently and I say that because I’ve had some tell me that their bank accounts were better doing certain times, but at the end of the day, we have to uplift our whole community, because when we have high concentrations of poverty, mass incarceration, massive amounts of homeless people, we all pay additional taxes and we all pay more for those things to happen in our communities,” Osgood said.
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Moore agreed with Sen. Osgood, saying that sitting out in this election is just not an option, especially for Black communities.
“What’s mostly disappointing is a lot of the rhetoric that I’m also hearing is the fact that, you know, to Sen. Osgood’s point, ‘Oh, well, Donald Trump gave us a stimulus check,’ or, you know, ‘Gas prices were lower back then,’ or, ‘Groceries were lower.’ That may very well be true, but we also know that he didn’t give the stimulus check, he just signed it to take the credit for it, but when it comes to Black communities and there being such a tight race between, you know, voting for VP Harris or Donald Trump, I think that the message is clear. Like, where do we want to go as a country?” Moore said. “(...) I definitely want to hear the opinions of my colleagues on this call, but I really don’t think that sitting out this in this election will do us any justice.”
Corie went to Wilson to ask what his thoughts were about Black communities not voting in 2024. Wilson suggested looking at all of the possibilities ahead, in light of it being a new time.
“Look at our future, man. You know, where do we want to put our country, where we look at it, where we think where we should be? Not to go either to Trump or the Kamala way, I just say, just listen to your spirit and know, you know what’s right,” Wilson said. “(...) Someone that’s going to take accountability of where we are and understand where we are as a whole. When it comes to Black women, Black men, just who we are and what we’re standing for, I think you’ll make the right decisions based on the actions of the leaders as opposed to president candidates.”
Dr. Herbert Harris spoke at length to address the frustration of when people, intentionally or unintentionally, act against their best interests.
“This idea of not voting. As leaders, we’ve really failed our Black men and women. (...) There was a lot of headwind going, you know? We look at the school system taking civics out, taking trades out, so they basically undermine young Black people, and going to a school system in the South and the North — and in particular, a school system where people really don’t care about you, where you got one guidance counselor for 1,000 students — and so nobody’s been directing our young people, and so they don’t even know where to get valid news from. They are so accustomed to getting their news from the internet now they don’t even relate to all of the Black papers struggling, because this was our primary source of valid information relative to us, and so we’re at a very, very bad point, and I think we need to really, really realize a very, very bad point, that we have our young people taking their information from the internet, and this happens so fluidly that they believe it. Even stuff that doesn’t make sense, and when they don’t know the history, they don’t know how to put it in context and take a critical analysis to it and say, ‘Hey, go back scripturally, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’” Harris said. “(...) It’s a tough situation. I don’t know how we can turn it around right now. I think we’re going to really have to appeal to the internet and those means for mass communication, one. Two, we’re going to have to go on a real one-on-one, personal education with as many Black men as we can contact, and three, we need to really remind folks of the history, they’ve forgotten it. That’s why they don’t want to teach it in the schools, that if this thing goes down the way that some people want to go down, that it will set us back 150 years, and they have no idea what that means, but people like me who lived it need to be telling them.”
Hear the full interview and more in Season 5, Episode 11 of “Black Men Sundays.”
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