[00:00:05] Speaker A: You're listening to casual talk radio, where common sense is still the norm. Whether you're a new or longtime listener, we appreciate you joining us today. Visit
[email protected] and now here's your host, Leister.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you're at. Casualtalk radio founded Casualtalkradio. Net. My name is Leister. I'm your host. I'm talking about a topic that bothers me. It didn't bother me because of impact. It bothers me because of its accuracy. It bothers me because it's true. And I don't know that people understand the severity of the misinformation that's being shared. So the information I share is coming from various studies that are done around the job market as it pertains to minorities specifically referring to black Americans. Just to clarify why I say it, why I say the way I said it, I call black American, not african American, because if you were born in America, you're a black American. If you are of african american descent, but you're born in America, it's not like you were born in Africa or your parents were born in Africa and then you migrated here. Sure, your ancestors, we can have that conversation. That's not relevant. Point is, if you were born in America and your parents arguably were born in America. So let's go one level up. I refer to those as black Americans because I think it's important to draw a distinguished line between black Americans and African Americans. Though semantic in nature, the reason it matters is that black Americans and the opportunities, whether they're there or they're missing the conversation is dramatically different for black Americans versus our ancestors. That's why it's clear to distinguish. You got to clarify to yourself the opportunities for you. There's a lot more of them, but they're harder to take advantage of. Our ancestors didn't have significant advantages like you do today. Part of that is because of the evolution of the economy. Part of that is out of necessity. Part of that's out of population, part of that's out of location. There's all sorts of factors and reasons. The bottom line, you have different opportunities than your ancestors. Just to clarify why, I draw a distinguished line, given that it is these opportunities I want to talk about. Because when we think about opportunities, we think about work, we think about money, we think about family, we think about property, generational wealth, education.
There's multiple different opportunities. Certain people will sell you on the narrative that you don't have the opportunity to go to college, everybody has the opportunity to go to college. Let me repeat what I just said. Everybody has the opportunity to go to college. The operative word in there is opportunity.
Everybody has the opportunity to go to college. It has never been easier to go to college than it is now. Here's what the media will tell you. The media will tell you that everybody can just get a loan and go to college. The fallacy is loan. Why is the loan being pushed? The loan is being pushed because it benefits who, it benefits the banks, it benefits the schools, it doesn't benefit you. That puts you in debt. But they'll sell you on the idea that by going to college in this fashion, you're going to make so much money, you'll be able to pay off the loans and you're fine ignoring the fact that you still have to take care of your household, you still have to take care of yourself, you still have to get to and from work, you still have to put food on the table, you still have to keep a roof over your head, you still have these incidentals that come up. You might have medical situations to deal with. You have possibly children that you have to see to their education as well. You might not be a dual income home.
So this loan, that sounds good because it's a gateway into getting into school. And of course, taking Stafford loans that doesn't require any credit check, pretty much anybody can do it. And all they look for is your high school education. Well, your high school education in some cases can be used to discriminate against you because they make the assumption that if you're a stellar performer in high school, it's going to make you a stellar performer in college.
In a perfect world. That's true. However, I would argue you don't have to be a stellar performer in high school to be a stellar performer in college. You can be in high school that person that simply just doesn't understand why you have to go through this crap, right? You don't understand why you have to go through all these different classes that have nothing to do with the real world. You don't get why there's so many math classes. You kind of get why there's PE classes, but you don't get why they're mandatory. You don't understand why art is mandatory. You can be that kid who doesn't understand the selection of classes and why somebody else is choosing them for you, and as a result, you rebel, you resist, you fight back against what's being pushed upon you. You might be that kid that doesn't make you a slacker. That makes you somebody who's quote, woke. And I don't mean woke in the common misuse of the term. I'm referring to the kind of kid who wakes up and realizes somebody else is guiding your future and you don't like it. You sense this happening, and when you sense it happening, you're fighting it. You don't want that. There's something different you want for yourself. You may not know what it is. You know that. You probably don't want what's being pushed upon you because there's classes that don't align with where your brain is. Every kid is asked the question, well, what do you want to be when you grow up? And people will say the same things. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a nurse, I want to be a teacher, I want to be an astronaut. It's a laundry list of what you know. These are things that you know are available and accessible to you that may not align with what you're actually good at or that's aligned with your interests because you don't know you're too young. So it's premature to ask the question when they first ask. I can't remember the first time I was asked. I'm pretty sure it was prior to the 6th grade. At that point, I have no idea what I'm answering. I have no idea what it means. I have no idea the pros and cons. I have no idea if I'm going to change my mind. There's too many things I didn't know that I didn't learn, and things are evolving underneath you. The best time to really ask that question is unfortunately, when it's too late, when you're already in junior year or senior year and you're about to be released into the world, that's the best time to really ask the question, given that you've gone through stuff. But to do that, they can't subject you to a bunch of classes that are assumptive. If they do that, you're already steering them down a certain mantra. The government knew this and so what they did is created this blend of generic classes because they don't know what it is that you want to do, and they're trying to expose you to a bunch of different things. The fallacy of it is that they assume the parents are going to fill the gap, that your parents are going to educate you around the things you need to know, but your parents may not know. Your parents probably came from a time when it wasn't clear about all the different options. And again, the economy is shifting underneath all of you. So things are now available that weren't available when they were coming up that you aren't exposed to because your school system is like a decade behind in the curriculum. So I'm talking about really a bigger problem when I talk about opportunities. It's a bigger problem in just the nature of how fast the economy moves, how fast society moves, how slow government moves, the fact your parents wouldn't have been exposed to it, and that our education system is not prepared to handle it. So all you can really trust is your own self exploration, trying things out and exposing yourself to different things that you never thought possible.
I was fortunate to have some of that opportunity, but the vast majority of it didn't come to way later, after I was already in my 20s, after I was already having a hard time. And I just so happened to be mentored by a very nice elderly white woman who to her credit, she was the toughest boss I've ever had. But at the same time, I needed that. I needed that reinforcement of what I didn't know and what I didn't understand and what was going to trap me. I needed that. That's what I needed. She was never direct personal attack. She was never cussing and swearing directly at me. She was never an attacker. But she was very tough, she was firm, she had high expectations. And ultimately that's the hardest I've ever worked in my life. With one slight exception. There was a point where Red Bulls was my best friend. I'm way past that era. But my point is, that's what I was going through at the time. Mentally, I needed that. I wasn't in the right spot to prepare me for what needed, but it was already too late. I'm already in my twenty s. I missed a good period of time where I could have been mentored in the right position and instead I was introduced to mentors that didn't have my best interest at heart. They were concerned about themselves and possibly using me to advance their own agendas. So the summary of why I gave you that preface is opportunity is always available. The opportunity to go to college is always available. It's not about the loan, it's about the opportunity. But you wouldn't know that. You can go to college fresh out of your own pocket and pay $60 a month and get a degree that is an accredited degree that will help you get into work and you can go at your own pace. There's all sorts of resources available for you and it's not crazy expensive. It's like $1,000 at the most. You may not know that. So hearing me say this now, it's like, okay, well, then why are they pushing those? They're pushing those because think about it. If everybody were going to a college that's within your price range. It's not crazy expensive, easily accessible. Start anytime, finish anytime, go at your own pace. What's the use for the loans? You don't need the loans. So then the narrative is, yeah, but that accreditation isn't the one you want. That accreditation is perfectly fine depending on, again, what you want to do, not as dictated by somebody else. If you want to go into being, let's say a nursing assistant or let's say a veterinary assistant or one of these other transcriptions, one of these other trades, that's just to kind of get you in, get your foot in the door, it's perfectly fine to go to one of these other sides because ultimately the accreditation is valid for those careers. The accreditation matters based on transfer credits. So let's say you decided you want to go to Yale, right? Or you wanted to go to Harvard or one of the other elitist schools. If that's what you want to do, great. Now the burden's on you. You're not going to have as much accessibility to go there. But then you're forcing yourself to do those loans. And by that decision you're saying to yourself, I am okay extending myself on loans because I trust that I'm going to get somewhere later. Perfectly fine. I've known plenty of people that have done it and it worked for them. That wasn't going to work for me. Having as somebody who has student loans, I recognized this was just a scam because I didn't really get much out of those, hardly at all, other than the transfer credits. Well, and even then, it took me going to the school that I did graduate from in order to really recognize it. And that's the school where I didn't pay a crap ton of money and it's perfectly accredited. I didn't need it because I was already in the workplace. I did it just to check off a box, to say, yes, I went through this kind of a program and I got something out of what I burned years trying to get. So all I'm saying here is opportunity is one that's always available and there's always multiple options, and you have to decide what makes sense for you. If you don't, other people are making the decisions for you and they run the game at that point. They're the ones who have the gates. They're the ones who close the doors. They're the ones who blockade you. Not because they're racist, not because they're trying to be racist, sexist or otherwise, but because that's the game. The game is all about. We're going to push these things in front of you that may not necessarily be to your best benefit, and then we'll make it hard to qualify for those things. Which gives you what? The impression that there's some sort of racial agenda, some sort of social agenda or something else preventing you from getting it, when the truth is you may not even need it and it being pushed upon you is a scam in of itself.
All of that then connects into this recent study that I was seeing that was talking about a shift in earnings. There's always been the chatter around women make less than men, right? African Americans, black Americans both make less than whites and their counterparts. And recently they see that there's a bit of a shift and it's starting to be a little bit equal. This bothers me. It doesn't bother me to see the numbers. It bothers me the background behind what they're talking about. Is it fair to say that jobs are more accessible to black Americans? I target black Americans now than it was, let's say, when I was 1819? No, I say no. But they're targeting very specific types of jobs. They're targeting jobs that historically weren't readily accessible, that are now more accessible due to the evolution in economy that we have. So truck drivers, there's always been truck drivers, but we didn't have the excessive need, increasing need for truck drivers like we do now. Certainly there's the Amazon, right? Amazon deliveries. We've got the rideshare deals, we've know home delivery of groceries, the instacarts and the ships and all these other things that now have come up and FedEx has grown ups, has grown. USPS is trying to expand. DHL is trying to expand its footprint. So there's a necessary change in it. And statistically speaking, it is not white Americans that want to work those kinds of jobs. I'm not saying that there's a preference, yay or nay, simply that they have statistically lent towards Mexican Americans. Black Americans, like Asian Americans, don't really want to be driving trucks statistically for why ever they don't. Most of them want to work the office jobs, no problem. The white collar, as it's referred, the blue collar. And this has gone back now I referred to African Americans. The blue collar has always been the inroad for the minority classes. The railroads and the trucks and the coal and utility and all these. That's always been the inroad for African Americans and then later black Americans. Simply that there wasn't as many jobs in those. Because of the rush towards the white collar that we experienced during the bubbles. There was a rush towards white collar, there was a rush towards real estate, there was a rush towards finance, certainly a rush towards stem. Less so on the science side, more on the technology side, right? More on the electricity, electronics, everything. Stem started to dominate the messaging that the media was putting out in terms of what you should be doing. The colleges and the government, specifically, the government started pushing that message. If you remember, Joe Biden himself went up there and talked about during the pandemic, all the people who lost their jobs, and they basically said, learn how to code. Because that's the narrative they were pushing on people, is that these blue collar jobs were of no value. Fast forward. And you get to all these uprisings with unions and steel and the pipelines and the real blue collar jobs, where there's a pushback, all of a sudden it comes into the forefront of people's minds, hey, these jobs are actually out here. Farming is still a thing. All of these opportunities are and have been available. But the media sold you the narrative. They weren't worth it. They're not the future. The media sold you on the idea that AI is going to take over those jobs and robots will do all the stuff. So there's not going to be. And unfortunately, a lot of those companies, because they lost a lot of that labor, started leaning more on the automation simply out of cost. It's not because they wanted to do it, because they want to make sure that the work is done with quality, as well as making sure that they can hire people. There's a lot of people that want to hire people, but they have to be able to justify what they pay those people, which does what causes people who are applying for those jobs to be critical of low pay, saying that you're underpaying people, which does what causes then this uprising about fight for 15 and all this nonsense that really isn't solving the problem, which does what causes the government to talk about stimmies and all this garbage. That's really not solving the problem. What I'm saying, all of the media messaging around, the root of the problem missed it. They all missed it. Everything missed it. The real root of what we were experiencing is a fight against blue collar. A push away from blue collar and telling people that white collar is the answer, which has the unnecessary impact on people from a cost perspective that you have to spend in order to get this money back. So you're basically taking out loans, putting yourself in debt, crossing your fingers that you'll find a job, and if you do that, it'll pay enough. And if it does that, you won't get cut or that the government won't declare some pandemic that closes it down and causes them to lay you off where you get nothing in advance because it's an at will employment. Hopefully, everything I just described gives you a little bit to think about in the full picture, the full picture of the real problem with the word opportunity. And when I say it's always been available, it's always been available. But the media and the narratives have pushed people in a certain direction that's slanted against you, and that has nothing, I argue, nothing to do with your race, creed, color, him nor her. It's more about what they want. They want to get rid of blue collar. They don't want blue collar workers. Blue collar workers are against everything that they're trying to do. If you keep pushing blue collar, you can't push to a narrative of EV. Remember, there used to be jobs of a guy or a gal running out to pump your gas. There used to be jobs of somebody running, and still are in Oregon, running out there to wipe your windows down. That used to be a job, a defined job, and they purposely took that away of, well, people can pump their own gas. Sure they can. So now they took away that work, and now they have the fuel pumps. You still have the gas stations themselves. Somebody has to manage the gas station. Somebody has to balance the book. Somebody has to run the convenience store, et cetera. Now you run into an EV world. The evs are crazy. More expensive. All that's doing is pushing the cost on those station owners higher than it would be just to have the people that were there before. But because they're rushing to the EV agenda when we're not ready, all that does is cause a rush on the manufacturing side, which does what? Causes all these recalls that you're reading about, because they're not ready. As I said, we're not ready. Or like what happened in Chicago, where it's just too darn cold and your car simply doesn't start. So it doesn't really matter whether you can get to a charging station at all. And if you do get there, the charger doesn't work because it's not designed to work in those extreme points of cold, which was based on the idea that it rarely gets that cold. The point is, it could get that cold, whereas your gas vehicle and your hybrids always worked. I am making full circle in. A narrative is pushed. The media is pushing a narrative. It's being pushed upon you and imposed upon you as the right thing to do, the right way to do it. This, folks, is the definition of socialism. It is. You're saying, this is how we have to do it. We got to do this. We got to push away from these things. We have to push this narrative. We have to push this agenda. That's where ESG came from. That's where Dei came from. That's where the woke education came from. It came from. We've got to do this. We have to do this is the right answer, period. Let's just move forward. That's where common core in math came from. All of that is pushed narrative that really had no basis in fact at all or foundation in common sense. Now, what do you see? You see the blackrocks of the world pulling back on things like ESG. You see certain organizations pulling back on things like Dei with this fanny business, the judge, because you see a sense where you simply had somebody that is a black american and she's entitled. She got the job because she's entitled. And as part of that entitlement, she did some very shady stuff. But people celebrated when that person got the job simply because, well, it's equality. Equality never meant that. You just simply give opportunities when they're not deserved. It doesn't matter. You could have all the best intentions of the world. It doesn't matter. You've got to put the right qualified person. And unfortunately, because of what has happened historically, which is not directly correlated to racism, it's more correlated to the media norms of what they accept as the way to do it, which is definition socialism. They've said this kind of education is the future. Statistically is not in favor with minority classes. STEM jobs are not in favor with minority classes. Education in general, just the concept of it does not align with minority classes. It's not that they don't want it. I'm saying that it doesn't align with them.
There's a structure in non minority classes, an expectation of education quality that you expect from them.
When you have generational wealth that you want to hand down, these families set it in their kids minds from an early age, you're going to be inheriting XY. I need to make sure you're ready for it. That's what I mean. That education is not aligned in most of these families. We describe black american families or other minority families, but mostly black american families. They didn't come into wealth. They had to work and bust their tail and bust their tail. And the only message they can give to the kids is you're going to have to bust your tail, too. Because I had to bust my tail. There might be a little bit on the education and its importance because they can kind of foresee the future, but it's not an expectation of performance. Rather the opposite. It is. You got to do it. It's like a reluctance. You got to do it because if you don't, you're not going to be on a level playing field with everybody else. Right. It's a different message. Are you doing it because you know it's the best way to maintain generational wealth, or are you doing it to compete?
That's the mind I almost cussed there. That's what's messing you. That's what's messing everybody.
It's a different messaging based on minority versus non minority families and what's pushed forward, and that's coming from the way the media is shoving things in multiple directions. Let me give you a simple example, and then I'll talk a little bit about this as I wrap up. Very simplified example.
Most non minorities, I say non minorities. Most non minorities are descended from, in this case, non minority families who were given, and I stress the word given because there was really no cost to it. They were given advantages from housing, land, even money, but mostly land and housing by way of the military. And what was going on decades ago.
During this time, the expectation is that this was going to create generational wealth for those families. It was actually written in the laws, like the GI bill. It was written in a lot of these rules and laws that black Americans, I stress black Americans were not to be included in this consideration in certain areas. And this actually was true in one of the areas close to where I'm at now. In certain areas, they actually built or reconstructed certain areas with property lines, and they used certain marks to identify this area is going to be predominantly minority, mostly black american. It's going to be mostly minority. And so what we're going to do is we're going to rebuild it in a way that isolates them so that on the other side, it's predominantly non minorities and minorities on the opposite. You talk about malls, strip malls, or people's homes or anything where there would have been a destruction. So they reclaim the land and they just tear everything down. And they build up these major strip malls. They build up something, a bridge or a freeway or something. And they don't consider the impact on diversity in that at the time. This is not as common as it is now as it was then. But the point is that was not in their mind was to keep a diversity, to keep a blend. You heard about the busing, right, of busing kids over to these other non minority districts to kind of force this integration and get rid of segregation, kind of push the issue. This was the opposite. This was to use land as a demarcation point to say, we are going to try to force keep these separately without really saying so. And then the non minority housing, so like rentals, regular houses, they would actually put in the rules they put into bylaws or something else that says, and it's not as blatant as this, but they essentially said this is not eligible if you're not of this descent or something else subtle, but it's pretty clear what it's trying to imply. It's trying to imply we don't want you here. A lot of the minority groups then and here I'm including Mexican Americans in this as well as Asian Americans in Washington state as an example. When they're migrating into these states because they're leaving where they're at for opportunity or something else, there's that word again. And they get introduced to all this, they're shocked. They're stunned. There was a study done very recently with Utah as a great example, and I got my own beef with them. But Utah, Idaho, I say Oregon, I say Washington, parts of Colorado where it's know, you look and you see that there's clearly an intent not to have certain people in that neighborhood. They just simply don't want them anywhere in the neighborhood. The exception is if you're extremely wealthy, you have a lot of money, money to burn, then you got to be careful you're not getting ripped off. But if you have a lot of money to play with, they're a little bit more flexible because money is colorblind. Right?
That's where this recent study I saw kind of clicked of this is a great story to tell around this and how it connects to opportunities, the lack of opportunities that I think is a myth. Opportunities are there, but it's a different mindset. It's different than what it used to be. The connection between salary levels, between minorities, specifically black Americans I refer to and then non minorities and that dwindling gap between the two and the idea that salaries are starting to be a little bit more equal. And there was an increase in the joblessness of the non minority side. In other words, historically, the message had always been a non minority will get the job over a minority. That's always been the message, and the media pushed it. And then certain in the social circles helped hype that up. This is saying the opposite. This is saying, actually it's a little bit more. They told stories about how in certain of the high schools that are predominantly black or the historically black colleges, certain where it just happens to be the demographic. They're basically saying, if you want to make the good money, you're going to need to learn XYZ like STEM careers. If you want to make any kind of money, you're going to need to do this, period. Otherwise you're going to work fast food. I can tell you from personal experience that's not true. Certainly it's a different era than when I came up, but it's not true because there's all these other careers I talked about, again, truck drivers, et cetera, that you can make decent money. It just may be that you have to work harder than you should, but it's not true that it's stem or nothing. That's a joke. And I say that as somebody who works stem, it's not true. And if I had my druthers, I would not work stem. I only work stem because it's financially advantageous. But it's not that I couldn't make a living. I could absolutely make a living on easily a third of what I make, actually, a quarter of what I make at this point. I could easily make a living. It just wouldn't be fun. Right? There's not a lot of discretionary, but my cars are paid off and I don't have a lot of expenses at this point. And yet I make a lot of money in that's excess, to kind of get ahead of it, to build up for retirement and generational and then possibly pass down to family members. But sure, getting to that, but that took decades. It didn't matter that I went to college first or not. I wasn't going to get this kind of a role by just going to college and getting fresh out that, that paradigm of going straight to college for a stem degree and then going straight into some high paid job that statistically leans towards non minorities. That's not a racial thing. It simply happens to be that for the colleges. Here's where the bias comes in, you get into some interview process, and they're looking for a college degree because all of them do, which is a fallacy, but all of them do. And there's certain people that recruiter, oh, well, I went to Harvard, and so then there's a bias. Okay? It's got to be one of these top tiers. Got to be Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Morehead or at least a top. If you're going to be one of those, that's the bias. That then is the filter where you don't even get to the person who needs your skills, and they don't even give you an opportunity to talk to them because it's all a computer. They force you to go online.
So statistically speaking, you'll hear me say that a lot. Statistically speaking, the minority classes are not going to jump through those hoops just to have the chance, cross fingers chance of getting into a job that they want versus just settling for a job that pays the bills, as sad as that is. So that doesn't mean that sometimes it's like, well, I had to because I couldn't find work in the short term. On average, it's like a three month turnaround to get into work. Unless, again, you're a non minority class, because they are more likely to go to do that work, to bust their tail, to do the internships, to do all the papers and spend six years. And while they're doing that, they are more likely to have family financially supporting them to where they don't have to work. It's a different shift. Right. So I want to be careful when we say, others say, well, the stats are getting equal. Well, not really. What's happening is that these jobs, these opportunities that were not talked about before are coming back in the limelight. There's more demand as we're shifting back to more focus on blue collar. That's always been there, and I would emphasize, anybody listening that's at least interested in what I'm talking about. I challenge you to do some research on these, these blue collar jobs. The truck drivers of the world, the ride shares of the world, they're going to be the future. It's not stem. Stem will always be there, but always as a supporting role. It will never be the dominant. It will never be the primary. It cannot. It has to support the blue collar. The blue collar makes everything work. You will never have a world where houses and homes and office spaces are built without humans in the mix period. It's not going to happen. You're never going to have a world where we don't have to have somebody driving behind the car. I'll say that, at least not in our lifespan. You're always going to have to have humans on the car itself, because even if you get to true automated driving, and I think that's a pipe dream, even if you do, you still have to have humans to maintain them. You still have to have police, you still have to have all these other human elements around them. The vast majority of what you need are blue collar. Blue collar is going to always be the heart and soul of the country, and the loss of it or the current administration trying to get away from it is dangerous and risky, and it skews the numbers that you see. So I would implore you, as a simple call to action, don't be fooled when you hear that everything's getting better in the job market. It's not. It simply means that there's a little bit more realization about certain jobs that were ignored. And those jobs now are coming into the limelight as these are opportunities and there's more demand and they're paying a little bit more because they're starting to understand these are necessary. You cannot automate every single thing. And those jobs, by and large, are not favored by the non minority classes. Doesn't mean that they don't. They do. They're just not favored by the non minority classes. The minority classes favor those jobs because they're a quick in, they're a quick way to get some experience. They're a quick way to make some money. Or maybe that's all you want to do. Maybe you just don't want to overextend yourself. You got family, kids at home, and they're great for that. Owning your own schedule, working your own hours. There's people I know that do it and they work and they love what they do. I just talked to one that's an Uber driver, and she loves what she does, and she's happy with it, and there's nothing wrong with that. And I don't want you to feel like you're ashamed that you don't work stem. And I don't want any of these colleges elitists telling you that stem is the only answer. And I don't want any media telling you that it's getting better. It's not. It's simply that there's more highlight coming to those jobs that have always been there and opportunities that have always been there that didn't get the attention before. And that's creating some balance because those opportunities were hidden from you by outlets outside of your control, which is not fair. So I think it's good that these are coming to light now. But we got a lot ways to go. We got more work to do. So keep tight. It'll get better.
Oh. Oh, close.
