- Appreciate it.

Thank you.

- Yeah.

Okay, last month, Detroit Future City held its annual forum, which brings together civic, nonprofit, and business leaders for a day of strategizing about the city's next chapter.

The keynote speaker was Michael McAfee, who is president and CEO of PolicyLink, which is a national research and action institute based in California.

His address focused on community, equity, and leadership during a time of deep division in our country.

I spoke with him after his talk.

And here's a portion of our conversation.

I wanna start with you talking about whether you feel we are ending one thing to go to another.

And if so, how do we do that on our own?

How do we separate, I guess, from what we have known, all of us, our entire lives, to go to something different?

You use the word "all."

A lot of people don't want to go with us, I feel, to something different.

So how do we make sense of that?

- Thank you for the question.

What we're asking for, the nation wasn't designed for.

We just gotta own that and accept it.

Our institutions weren't designed for it.

Our laws weren't designed for it.

That is what the tension is.

The fundamental problem in the nation right now is the founders and all who participated in the democracy and the economy in the early part of it never ask themselves one question: What happens when the thing that you've never loved becomes the majority in the nation?

See?

They forgot to send us back.

(audience laughs) And so now, you're having to sit with that.

I mean, think about it.

That's not a simple question.

What happens when the thing you've never loved, you gotta live with?

And it's become the majority in many of the places and getting ready to become the majority of the entire nation.

It's already, where I live in California, people of color are already the majority.

Think about how disruptive that is when you founded a nation that said I wasn't even human.

And now we're the majority.

You talk about disruptive.

Now you may have just wanted the economic benefit, but you still now gotta live with the consequence.

See, and that's part of the problem when you're asleep at the wheel of a democracy in an economy.

Didn't think about that.

This tension is about that.

But we can't even talk about race in America.

That's the problem.

We don't even know our history.

So the problem is what happens when you have an ignorant citizenry, at the same time, you socialize people to be maximally selfish no matter what color they skin, 'cause Black and brown folks that bought into this capitalist thing too.

So when I say this as a founding moment, because in many ways, we've gotta socialize an entire new generation of folks to hold the interest of the all.

It's not how we were socialized.

We all were socializing.

I mean, kids today, starting the time they born.

To compete, to step over you, to get into the good school.

For what?

You ain't gonna have no jobs now.

You're gonna have student loan debt.

But you're doing all this stepping over people for what?

You know, I'm fascinated by how we don't care about the all until I'm in trouble.

You know, I'm in the bay and all these folks who thought they didn't have a dog in this equity fight and wanna run away from it.

Oh, I bet you they talking about equity now that they losing they jobs because of AI.

See, now they like, "What we gonna do about the economy.

What are we going to do about the economy?"

We ain't gonna do nothing.

You just said we don't care about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

You just said we're taking that off the table.

You just said we can't talk about equity, our gaps.

So what can we do right now?

So yeah, you got that $2 million home.

Figure out how you're gonna pay for it.

That's rugged individualism.

You see my point?

Because that's real, folks.

The very folks who don't like equity, don't like diversity, equity, inclusion, they gotta eat their own dog food right now because you're not replacing that salary that helps you with that $2 million house in the bay now because AI has come for your job.

But when it was coming for low-wage workers, you didn't care about them.

It was a personal defect about them.

I wonder what the personal defect is about you now.

You see how we get into this?

Because we've never wanted to focus on the system.

Absolutely, personal responsibility is important and so is understanding the design of an economy that is designed to extract labor at the lowest cost for all of us.

But when you don't tend to these things, you miss that point.

So that's why I think it's an exciting point 'cause I think you get into a place just from a street smart perspective where you're gonna have enough pain from everybody that folks are ready to do something different.

And what I'm asking us to think about, this is actually not that foreign.

There is a whole area of organizational development literature, it's called popular ecology, where I'm asking us to think about how do we ride these waves of these environmental jolts to usher us into something new?

Because people are going to feel the pain and the folks that I'm least worried about are poor people 'cause we know how to survive.

I ain't worried about poor people.

I'm worried about all these middle-class folks who have forgotten how to survive or never had to.

So folks think as they cut programs and things like that, that they're actually hurting poor folks.

No, you're not.

If you ain't never seen how a poor people's economy works, you really should go check it out.

I get to see it every day with my sisters and I come from it.

That's not what you gotta worry about.

There's a generation of people who have not been conditioned to perform in a society where they're getting ready to lose all supports on top of we've unraveled the basic safety net that we had.

So I think this is an exciting time because our institutions are framed, et cetera.

I mean, think about how relevant an institution is if they have to have a board meeting to say they're gonna help Black people.

Think about that.

If PolicyLink had to have a board meeting to say, "Is it safe enough for me to help poor whites?"

do you think that would be a relevant institution?

Because if you're that scared, you ain't gonna do no real work anyway.

And so what I'm trying to signal to you, our institutions were already irrelevant and feckless.

We've just not wanted to say it publicly.

So this is a moment where, if we're smart, we don't get lost in all the calamity of it all and we start building that future.

- You know, I also go back just five years, right?

To a really different moment in this country when all of a sudden, it seemed as though there was real momentum on the side of reckoning with history, of reckoning, with inequality.

This whole phrase, DEI, was kind of coined five years ago as people started to say, "Okay, look, we have to do something different."

And now DEI is a pejorative, right?

It's an insult that you watch the cable news shows or on social media, someone gets called a DEI hire or a DEI this or that.

I mean, in five years, it feels like we've lost everything that built up to that moment.

But is there anything that we can take with us from that five years into the future the to rebuild it?

- The first is to understand what would happen when you introduce a significantly new intervention into a space that was never ready for it.

You know, it wasn't like the nation did work to get ready for the racial awakening.

It hurled into it.

That was like one of those environmental jolts that I'm talking about.

And so yeah, people started having their own journeys.

I saw white folks do the most beautiful processes of educating themselves and thinking more deeply about race and changing organizations.

It was actually beautiful.

I saw Black and brown folks doing the same.

But the problem was, the nation wasn't ready for it.

But there was also a lot of bad practice going on.

You know, we never said to ourselves what would happen as a trainer if you stand up in front of a room and just tell people they suck over and over and over?

At what point do you think that they're not gonna rebel against you?

And we never checked that bad practice.

That's not evidence-based adult learning practice, folks.

It wouldn't work for any population.

So in many ways, they're on the wide spectrum of all the things that happened.

There were a lot of good things that happened, but there were a lot of bad things, but most importantly, there was not a strategic approach to advancing the agenda.

And that's why I'm asking us to be deliberate and founding.

We should have expected that there was gonna be a major blow up.

Our institutions weren't ready for this.

Our society wasn't ready for this.

Our citizenry still is ignorant about this.

And we never said, "Well, what will happen if you just then dropped this bomb in the middle of it?"

Right?

So we should be smarter as we go forward.

Now that's why I'm saying we gotta be the founders.

We live through that we should be smart enough now to know how to lead the next time we get a chance through it.

But what also happened was, and this is where we have to be honest, in many instances, because we've been hurt, we weren't holding the interest of the all.

We was just like, "Look, I'm fine just serving Black people," 'cause you know what?

Nobody cares about our issues.

So I'm signaling this because we even had to deal with this at PolicyLink.

When I centered the a hundred million at the time, living at 200% of poverty, the staff asked me a question.

They said, "Can we just focus on the 50% of that population that is Black and brown 'cause folks don't want to?"

And I said no.

I had just became president of PolicyLink.

And I'm like, "Man, y'all gonna hit me with this right now?"

But it was going to be a deal-breaker about whether I stayed or left.

Because remember, the operative word in the equity definition was "all."

And even though they were asking, not from a malicious place or a discriminatory place, it was coming from a hurt place.

I understood it, but it wasn't going to be right.

It wasn't going to be right.

And these are the tough decisions that we gotta make every day.

It is time for us to do the right things when we get a chance to, holding the consciousness of those, the all and those founding capacities that I shared.

- Yeah, I'm big on the idea of, especially in moments like these, helping people understand what their specific role is.

What they can do, what they can think about, what they can learn that helps build, that helps this new founding that you're talking about.

You go back in history and think of different times in which new things are created.

There's individual action behind all of that.

And I think there are a lot of people struggling with what to do, especially right now as so many people are just kind of suffering through what's happening to them.

So what would you say to this audience or another about action?

What do they do?

- The first thing I want you to do is remember what I said.

You gotta remember that we earned this moment because if you skip over that, you will be unaccountable.

Because it's easy to blame someone else for how we got here.

I'm not saying blame the victim, that's not what I'm saying.

I'm telling you to remember all those things that we've said.

Don't talk about race, class, gender.

All the times that we've tried to change the words, we were not only in our work and our power.

All the times it was okay to call Michelle Obama a monkey, all the times it was okay not to allow Obama Supreme Court nominee to go forward.

See, these are all the frame that we forget about.

We thought these were just conversation topics.

They're not.

- And you can see the entire Detroit Future City forum at AmericanBlackJournal.org.