Friday, March 29, 2024

Dr. Boyce Watkins: ‘We Need to Stop Following Behind White Folks!’ | VIDEOs

Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins / photo supplied

*The academic credentials of Dr. Boyce Watkins are lengthy, to be certain. Most commonly associated with business and financial scholarly endeavors, Dr. Watkins has also made considerable inroads into cultural controversies that ebb and flow upon the information highway, the myriad accounts transmitting bits and megabytes of opinion like platelets to far-flung extremities.

It has always perplexed this writer how the lines between celebrity and cultural legitimacy have been dissolved most corrosively by the ability of anyone to gain the attention of the masses if she or he is brave, bold or stupid enough to say the thing that sparks the conversation that’s necessary to move a culture.

Listening to the digital din permeating throughout many segments of Black American society, Dr. Boyce Watkins is many things; some good, some bad. Misunderstood Black intellectual? Self-aggrandizing blowhard? Cruel demagogue? Logical thinker?

Will the real Boyce Watkins please stand up?

The truth is only GOD and his Momma know for sure who Dr. Boyce Watkins is when you get past all the fiery think pieces, cultural criticisms, race-propelled shots, and other leading blacks.
But I recently got the chance to try and find out.

As a disclaimer, though I have been working as a journalist for decades, I’ve always been wary of “leading blacks” parading as Black leaders.

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Boyce Watkins (YouTube)EURweb.com: Explain the economic realities that COVID brought to the surface for the American working class?

Dr. Watkins:  COVID was just a flare-up of something that was already there. It didn’t just occur during the pandemic. It occurred during an election year. There are political leaders who deliberately poured grease on a grease fire to deliberately get people triggered and angry and going at each other. During the pandemic, what you saw was America’s inequality further exacerbating itself. Because you saw rich people really, blatantly, taking care of themselves at the expense of everybody else.

Most of the PPP loans didn’t go to small businesses or regular people, it went to people who really didn’t need the money. That’s why you saw Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, each of their net worths went up by over $100 billion during the pandemic.  It wasn’t a coincidence. This is exactly how the game was designed, and exactly how the game was played.

EURweb.com: And what is the impact on the everyday people?

Dr. Boyce Watkins: You always have to be prepared for a disaster. You get a paycheck, that money feels good, but you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you’re always in danger. That man can take that job away any second, for any reason he wants.

The pandemic took a lot of people’s jobs away very quickly and a lot of us, unfortunately, were not prepared for that. Also, you saw the politics of the pandemic. That’s also because a lot of people refused to get the vaccine. I’m not saying whether they should or shouldn’t have got it. What I’m saying is, if you wanted a paycheck, you really didn’t have any other choice.

EURweb.com: What message should the Black community be getting from this?

Dr. Watkins: The same way that the United States is imposing economic sanctions on Russia because Russia is doing something they don’t agree with, America has always imposed economic sanctions on the Black community in order to control our behavior. So, economic freedom allows us to break away from those sanctions and live the life we deserve without other people constantly telling us what to do.

Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins

EURweb.com: Individuals are quitting their jobs in historic numbers. There seems to be a dramatic shift in how we all see our relationship with employment and entrepreneurship moving forward.

Dr. Watkins: I think people are quitting their jobs because they’re doing what people like myself have been telling them for years. I keep telling people, the corporate plantation is stealing a lot more from you than you think.

Do you think that it’s just about money? No, they’re stealing your life. If you spend 40 hours a week at your job, by the time you retire you will have stolen spent from 80 to 100,000 hours away from your family at a place where people don’t really like you very much. You spend more time with your boss than you do with any other human being on earth, even your children. That’s not natural. It’s not supposed to be that way.

That all is a product of the industrial revolution, a product of capitalist propaganda. I’m not here to say that people shouldn’t work and shouldn’t want to go make money, but you gotta understand the importance of having critical thinking skills when it comes to this system.

If you can’t think for yourself, they’re going to think for you and they’ve got a place for you, especially if you’re Black. You become a commodity.

Ultimately, it’s like a chicken on a farm, there is a purpose for that chicken and that is to get slaughtered and feed somebody else. The only way the chicken can escape that farm is if she becomes aware enough to realize that he has to get the hell off of that farm before she gets slaughtered with all the other chickens.

EURweb.com: So, what is the notion of Black economics within a greater American infrastructure that generally lets Black business endeavors wither and die?

Dr. Watkins: I (recently) spoke in Detroit, and the title of the speech was the seven principles for building your own Black Wall Street. One of the epiphanies that I shared while I was there was this; we don’t need a Black Wall Street, we need a Black-OWNED Wall Street. They’ve had Black Wall Streets for thousands of years.

Mainly, in places where there are lots of Black faces and lots of commerce, the problem is that Black people have typically been the commodity, not the beneficiary of those systems.

You go to a place where there’s a slave auction. That’s kind of a Black Wall Street because there are a lot of Black faces. The prison industrial complex, a lot of our prisons look like HBCUs.

Meanwhile, these men and women are being moved around like cattle and people are making money from them. What we have to understand is that there are just levels to this stuff. Capitalism doesn’t necessarily need you to be Black for it to use you as a commodity but it does help if you are Black.

Also, you have the workers. America was built with slave labor.

Without slave labor, America wouldn’t be what it is right now. Then you’ve got the beneficiaries. The people that actually own the capital, own the assets and that benefit from the hard work of others. I think it’s really important for us as a community to be sure we participate in all the layers of that process. Not just the ones that we’re told to participate in.

(Note: Like sports or entertainment)

And, also, it doesn’t mean we have to be capitalists in order to benefit from free enterprise in America.

In fact, I discourage students from the Black Business School from becoming capitalists because capitalism is going to be the reason why America fails. Capitalism is the reason why we’re getting involved in wars that have nothing to do with us, capitalism is what creates an excessive amount of greed, exploitation and economic inequality.

At the same time, just because you walk away from capitalism doesn’t mean you have to become a socialist or a Marxist. Socialist, Marxist, Communist economies typically fail. (Note: Vietnam and China are outliers to this mostly true statement.)

What Black people have to understand is, we gotta stop imitating white folks when it comes to our political ideology. Stop letting them tell you to be a socialist or a Marxist, and all that Just be Black. Being Black, whatever that means to you, means that we understand that we need our business owners so that we can actually create jobs for ourselves. Being Black means that, also, we’re going to take care of the community.

As a Black business owner, yeah we’re going to have a triple-double bottom line. At the BBS, we’ve given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Powernomics corporation because we believe Dr. Claude Anderson is hero and it’s a shame that he’s not a fixture in the school system.

We’ve given them a quarter of a million dollars over time because we believe Black people should be choosing our own heroes. Long story short, I really think we need to start with the basics, which is to develop enough intellectual and spiritual sovereignty to understand that we are the ones who have to decide the directions of this ship and stop taking cues from white folks who hate your guts. That’s how you lose every time.

EURweb.com: Talk about the Black Business School and the notion that it’s a “for-profit” institution, as well as other controversies that surround it.

Dr. Watkins: I’m in a lot of controversies because a lot of the world doesn’t think like me. But I consider it a compliment because it means I’m challenging the thinking of other people. I don’t take back anything that I have ever said. I stand by it, I Can defend it, I can explain it.

I’m not asking anybody to believe it or embrace it, just recognize it just like I should be able to recognize the opinions of people that are different than my own.

We serve 150,000 students from around the world. About 70 percent of them are attending the school for free. What tends to occur is, you have people that discriminate against Black-owned businesses. They think any Black business that is charging more than zero dollars and zero cents for the product is stealing from Black people. ‘Oh, those negroes over there. They’re taking Black people’s money!’

What’s fascinating is, they will go after a Black business with all the vitriol in the world, but nothing to say when Popeye’s Chicken came in and made $6 billion off of Black people last year. They have nothing to say when Nike and all these other corporations are making major, major money. But they’ll destroy a small black business in a minute.

We don’t run away from that. We’re not afraid of that. We do surveys with our students and 96 percent of our students tell us that they learned more from us for free than they did spending $100,000 going to a white man’s university.

That’s not an accident or a coincidence, we didn’t get lucky. I’m a college professor! I know how those systems work and I know the strengths and weaknesses of those systems.

One of the weaknesses is that the student loan department is the No.1 decliner of Black wealth in the last 30 years. We are going so deep in debt to get these college degrees that don’t pay us very much money, and half of all Black people default on their student loans. So, not only are they getting into more debt than they can repay, but they’re picking up skillsets that are only training them to go work for white people.

A lot of our Black college graduates have not been used to build wealth in the Black community, they’ve become tools for building wealth in the white community.

There are so many smart Black people out here who will never get on TV because they don’t rap, they don’t know how to play basketball and they’re not some comedian telling jokes. They are doctors, lawyers, accountants, professors.

Dr. Boyce Watkins (YouTube)
Dr. Boyce Watkins (YouTube)

Be on the lookout for more of this eye-opening and sincere interview with Dr. Boyce Watkins in a future feature story where we continue discussing the negative effects of Black stereotypes perpetuated in the media, his real thoughts on Lil’ Nas X and Lizzo, and much more.

Stay tuned, excelsior!

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