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Showing posts from November, 2024

Why Black people love Cadillacs

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This is Nicholas Dreystadt, and in 1934, the Cadillac car company was on the brink of collapse, especially due to the Great Depression. Nick, a production manager for GM, crashed a corporate meeting called by the president, and made a radical proposal that changing the company's racist / restrictive sales policies to start selling Cadillac to Black people would save the brand.  He wasn't sure why, but Dreystadt noticed that southern Blacks were easily and willing to spend cash for cars. Desperate, the board gave him months to prove his theory. In three years, the company went from being broke to becoming profitable. What Nicholas had not taken specific note of was that the reason Black people had money was because they didn't lose it during the depression like white people did - who lost most of their money when banks went under.  Racist policies restricted Black people from having accounts, so they generally saved their money and oftentimes hid it (often times literally in...

Presidential deja vu: Woodrow Wilson

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**"I originally wrote this in 2004... If you paid attention in civics class you remember that Trump is not really new and in regards to presidential elections, he has set us up for deja vu. 1912 we elected a president very similar to him. Woodrow Wilson is historically known for his support of white supremacy and for his efforts to remove many of the advances and freedoms of black people, especially in government and in the military. his post- World War bungling of bringing soldiers back home actually caused the race riots of 1919 where disgruntled and disenfranchised white former soldiers rediscovered their inherent racism and began attacking and killing black workers out of jealousy and economic desperation. His foreign policy missteps post World War 1 created the climates that allowed for the control of  international territories by allied victors such as Japan, who colonized parts of China,  Asia, and even the Middle East, which later led to Brazilian jujitsu a...