Black Americans After Affirmative Action

[00:00:26]Hello, this is Lady Boulay and I hope you're having a beautiful day. Thank you for your support. Thank you for your comments and thank you for your thumbs up. Thank you for all you do to support the channel and yes, we are commanded to love one another whether we want to or not or whether we agree with each other or not.

[00:00:46]Well, I want to talk about black Americans after affirmative action because I think that many people thought that there was just going to be black Americans out in the streets crying and grieving and gnashing their teeth and just having a hissy fit because affirmative action ended.

[00:01:08]People forget that black Americans have been in this country for over 400 years and we've been navigating everything that the system has thrown at us.

[00:01:20]Whether it's education, whether it's health care, whatever it is.

[00:01:27]We have been able to navigate the system because we really are a strong people.

[00:01:33]We're not the ones that's on social media crying as much as some other people are cuz they said 300,000 black women had lost their jobs since affirmative action ended. Well, I have been doing some research about that and where it is true that 271,000 black women to be exact lost their jobs.

[00:01:59]They weren't all black American women, and I'm not trying to be selfish or I'm not trying to say that I don't care, but they are saying it as if 300,000 of black American women lost their jobs.

[00:02:12]And so, black American people are going to have to go back into slavery because they are not going to be able to make it. So, they were really expecting a real meltdown from us, but they didn't get it. So, you have to factor in that they don't disaggregate the data. So, we don't know where those 300,000 black women are. There haven't been that many black American women out talking about this. Now, politicians have been talking about it. Democrats have been talking about it. "Oh, black women lost 300,000 jobs, and black men lost 800,000 jobs."

[00:02:53]But, when you break those numbers down, those are not all black American people.

[00:02:58]A lot of those areas where they lost jobs are areas where there are a lot of immigrants.

[00:03:05]And some of those immigrants are not legal. They're illegal immigrants. Now, I hate to put it that way, but that's the way it is. Black Americans have pretty much retained what they have. And now, I'm sure some black American women lost their jobs in those areas. But, I know a lot of black American people, and everybody I know that's been working all the time is still working. Not only that, but I know people who have gotten promotions since all of this has happened, and I'm sure you do, too.

[00:03:39]Now, I really don't know anybody that has lost their job because of of affirmative action because the fact of the matter is black Americans have to be qualified for the job from the start.

[00:03:51]We don't get jobs because the government has something set aside for us. If it's set aside, it's for white women or immigrants or gays or somebody like that. It's not set aside for us. We have to be qualified. And the biggest surprise, and it has been a pleasant surprise, has been the white institutions ending affirmative action in these white institutions. It has really hurt them. That's what I wanted to come here and say. They have been hurt more than black people have been hurt by it. Matter of fact, black people have returned back to their roots, which is the HBCUs.

[00:04:29]Those schools were founded for black people in the first place. See, all these other people come here running their mouth, but they don't have a built-in infrastructure the way we have.

[00:04:39]We already had a built-in infrastructure. Yeah, it would have been nice if America had used affirmative action the way it was supposed to be to try to give us some shot at equality, but, you know, it was never really going to last anyway. It's just like everything else they do. They They They say they are doing it for us, and then it turns out that everybody's benefited from it but us.

[00:05:03]But, what has happened with the affirmative action in these elite colleges and and universities, it really didn't turn out that bad for black people because at the end of the day, none of these PWIs can can compete with HBCUs when it comes to turning out black professionals. And then when you add into these regular state schools, these PWIs like the University of Alabama and Auburn and University of West Alabama and all of these, these colleges didn't ever get into that caught up in that in the first place.

[00:05:38]So, it was really the the elite PWIs like Harvard and Yale and and Duke and those kind of schools. And black people weren't flocking to those schools in the first place because, number one, they're too expensive, and number two, they black it takes them the rest of their life to pay off those loans. So, black people are making more realistic choices about where they're getting their education because they're not getting because they're not getting a job that you know, these white kids whose families are millionaires and billionaires getting anyway. The black people got to scrap for theirs anyway.

[00:06:14]So, really black people haven't been hurt nearly as much as they thought we were going to be hurt. As a matter of fact, black people have had a second wind since they ended affirmative action. Now, in my opinion, this is the way we're supposed to look at it because when integration happened, there were black people in the south saying, "This is not good for black people because it's always a trick involved." And we've seen that it really wasn't about trying to help black people. It was about how America was looking on the world stage going all over the world trying to tell everybody about human rights when the country wasn't treating their own citizens who had helped build the country right. So, America came up with this, "Oh, we need to integrate. We need to integrate. We need to integrate." And then even Dr. Martin Luther King said, "I believe that I have integrated my people into a burning house or something of that nature." So, what we gained was really not a whole lot better than what we had, but that society needed to be opened up. I stand by that. This society needed to be opened up, but I believe that there was a more humane way to do it for black Americans because we were already traumatized, and we are traumatized, but some of us are just handling it. So, they thought that ending affirmative action was going to really be the end of us. Well, it isn't.

[00:07:44]And one of these days America is going to learn who it's dealing with when it's dealing with us.

[00:07:51]They can't stop us. They can't stop our progress. They've tried that. They have tried that. The most inventions, the innovators, and the discoveries that black people have made in this country, overwhelmingly, those people have come from HBCUs.

[00:08:09]See, Donald Trump doesn't know that. And the people in his administration don't know that. But even with DEI rollbacks and the end of affirmative action, black educational attainment kept rising.

[00:08:22]Between 2000 and 2024, the share of black adults with bachelor's degrees nearly doubled from 14.5% to 27.7%.

[00:08:36]That growth continues even after affirmative action ended. This shows that we have resilience. Black advancement is not dependent on elite institutions or race-conscious admissions. Black people keep pushing forward even when the policy environment becomes hostile because we are resilient. And because we are resilient, we are winners. And that's not even bragging. That's just a fact. Okay, y'all, thank you for listening. And let me know what you think about the video.