In episode 17 of the GHOGH podcast, Dr. Boyce Watkins continues his discussion with Jamarlin Martin by talking about building The Black Business School, and how he deals with his negro critics and their victimology teachings.

They also discuss the #MeToo movement, racial bias in Facebook’s content policing, and Boyce‘s successful marketing strategy.

You can listen to the entire conversation right now in the audio player below. If you prefer to listen on your phone, GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin is available wherever you listen to podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 17: Boyce Watkins
Jamarlin talks with Dr. Boyce Watkins about building The Black Business School, and how he deals with his negro critics and their victimology teachings. They also discuss the #MeToo movement, racial bias in Facebook’s content policing, and Boyce‘s successful marketing strategy.

This is a full transcript of the conversation which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jamarlin Martin: We have a special guest today on GHOGH. We have Dr Boyce Watkins. Let’s GHOGH! So let’s talk about your movement. Can you kind of summarize your background and what you’re doing today?

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah. What we do with the Black Business School is we believe in what we call the black core of three, which we believe black people should educate our own children, create our own jobs, support black businesses. We should have the ability to do those three things. Basically as a school, we have about 60,000 students now. Our students are better when it comes to wealth-building and investing than most Americans. I think over 80 percent of all millionaires invest in the stock market for our students. We’re approaching 90 percent. So our students literally have millionaire mentalities and their children will be millionaires in a generation. And so basically what we believe is that the educational model is wrong. We believe that universities are harming people by leaving them deep in debt. The average college graduate has defaulted on the student loans, many of them are going to die in debt and we believe that we can offer a superior educational alternative that is affordable for anybody. So that’s kinda what we’re doing right now.

Jamarlin Martin: One of the many reasons I love what you’re doing is that you’re optimizing the idea of financial literacy, investing, ownership, building businesses, and you’re packaging it. I don’t know if this is intentional, but kinda like in a religious way. I do not see a lot of folks going hard in the community with the teaching and the values that you’re promoting in the community. Do you know of anybody who’s going real hard, particularly on social media and with the younger generation?

Dr Boyce Watkins: There are people that are doing a great job, like Jay Morrison. I love him. Andre Hatchett, who runs The Black Real Estate School. There are people out there that are…

Jamarlin Martin: With your approach though, in terms of, you’re touching on stock, you’re touching on real estate, you’re touching on business capital, building businesses, building your marketing program. What would be the closest entity to the Black Business School? Is there one out there?

Dr Boyce Watkins: I can’t think of anything like that, exactly. What I can say is that I think the reason that it’s different from what you see out here is because it was my honest vision for the community. It was literally me saying what does the black community need, and I didn’t care what else was out there. I wasn’t trying to fit it with a specific framework. It was just something that solves a specific problem.

Jamarlin Martin: And that’s something we talked about yesterday. Uh, we’re a lot of folks, uh, you know, you want to own your own business, you want to raise capital, you want to be an entrepreneur, but before you step out there and make so many sacrifices, you need to make sure that your business idea is sufficiently different. If people have similar ideas, how are you applying it different? Are you applying it to a different demographic group, a different geographic area? But is the idea sufficiently different?

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah, I think that’s very important. I probably would have still done this even if there were a ton of people doing the same thing.

Jamarlin Martin: Like if there was 100 Black Business Schools out there?

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah, I probably would because you see a lot of people that have the same ideas, but different people have different abilities when it comes to the execution of the idea, right? Like Facebook. There are thousands and thousands of social media networks and companies out here, but Facebook executes at a level that other people have a hard time competing with. And so I do believe there’s something to be said about the dedication to the idea, what resources are putting are put behind the idea. So I tend to just personally have a mindset that’s built on a type of abundance that basically says, you know what, I don’t have to invent the hamburger to open up a hamburger joint. There’s going to be another amount of other hamburger joints out here, but our hamburgers are going to be unique to us and what we believe is going to taste good. And also we’re going to hustle up and we’re going to put some energy behind selling and marketing these hamburgers. So a lot of times, you know, and this is a big deal because I think I see a lot of people that have that scarcity mindset where they won’t even share their idea because they’re afraid somebody’s gonna steal it. I share ideas openly because I’m like, well, if you’re gonna, steal it, go ahead and steal it. And we’ll see who does the best job in the execution. I know that when we set up our ideas, we have an entire team of experts that get behind the idea. We put money into the idea, we add great resources to the idea. So our execution is going to allow us to stand out, even if other people are doing the same thing.

Jamarlin Martin: You know, there’s been some people who I believe we call Negroes. You’ve had kind of folks criticized, but that comes with the territory, right? You’re building a multimillion dollar company, diversified company. You’re doing it from scratch. You’re profitable, you’re making moves, your business is growing and you have some Negroes kind of stepping in and saying, ‘hey, we want you preaching victimology. Black people don’t have any money, stop looking at the belief that we can solve our own problems or we can do a lot better. We want you to preaching some of the old stuff. We don’t want you taking financial literacy, economic empowerment to the community because that hasn’t been done before. Hey, Boyce is trying to get money from the community and he’s selling stuff that’s higher price than other stuff and you can get that stuff elsewhere. But there’s no, you can’t see any kind of similar enterprises in the community preaching it. Like you’re preaching in the people’s language with the political context, but they say that, hey, I can get the Black Business School stuff everywhere, but there is no other business kind of playing specifically targeting our people that does all the things that you do. How have you been able to kind of handle some of the Negroes out there who you’re trying to, you’re building your movement, you’re profitable, you’re growing. And I have these Negroes criticizing what I’m doing, criticizing me. They want me to do it a certain way, but you’re just doing your thing.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Well, they have a saying in China that the fattest pig always get slaughtered. You know? And so anybody who tries to do something special, different, unique, and successful, you’re gonna have you’re gonna have people that are going to try to challenge you for whatever reason, whatever that reason may be. They may feel they can do a better. They may not like you. They may have their own insecurities, their own issues or whatever. And it is what it is. And, and I’m going to tell you what. One thing I’ve learned at everything, every journey, it helps you grow if you confront the challenge in the right way. And some of the best advice I got on that kind of thing was actually from a Louis Farrakhan who told me that you first of all have to gain the capacity to forgive those that really, really hate you, which was hard for me. It takes time to get to that point because I’m not like that. I’m built to be a fighter and I had to learn that fighting, you got to have more than one move your, your one move can’t always be to growl back, to just always bust back. And that’s the first thing. So I learned the strength and the power of forgiveness and love and support. And the other thing is that you can learn a lot from your critics. Sometimes your critics are right, sometimes your critics are pointing out a flaw that you need to address, and if all you can do is see yourself as some sort of victim of some sort of undeserved attack, then you’re going to totally miss the lesson that the universe has for you that maybe you need to get your shit right. Right? And that’s again, that I know this from my own experience of having to grow in the midst of criticism. So my, my position on a lot of this is very basic. You know, I’m not interested in further victimizing the victimologist by counter-attacking every time they have something to say. My belief is, look, the door’s open, we will educate anybody who wants to be educated. Anybody who has had a legitimate concern, we say, hey, come join. Come check out the Black Business School. Find out why our customer satisfaction rate is 97.5 percent. Find out why so many people love what we’re doing. And then if you see something we’re not doing quite right or a way we can serve the community better, we would love to partner with you, because really truth be told, I kind of feel bad for you if you are a black person who really believes that there is no way that we can elevate ourselves out of this condition.  In a way I worry about you because I’m thinking, who did this to you that made you think that we can’t do anything. We’re the greatest people in the history of the world. We have the history, we have thousands of years of evidence to that effect. So my basic argument is maybe we don’t see eye to eye, but maybe if we take the time to try to learn from each other, we can grow. So I’m not going to fight against that stuff. I’m just gonna keep on going.

Jamarlin Martin: You’ve been called by some Negroes, the black version of Rush Limbaugh. That you’re a black conservative. So, they believe that that is a very bad thing. But it sounds divorced from actual black nationalist movements, right? In terms of building our own institutions, doing for self, you see what these other folks are doing, you can do it too, that you’re going to need to build something if you’re not going to separate, if you’re not going to go to the extreme and separate from America, you better optimize the opportunities and the realities today to invest and build for you and your children. You can’t be stuck in the middle. Which one are you going to do?

Dr Boyce Watkins: I’m going to tell you what. I can’t think of any time, you know, where America is really opened a lot of doors for me. America is a place where, in a white supremacist system, I’ve been allowed basic opportunities, like to go to public school or to go to a white university or get a job working for a white man. Those are basic things I’ve been allowed. But when it came time for me to try to get the big piece of chicken, for me to get as much or more power than the white man has in my life, I had to fight for that. I had to fight for that. He didn’t, he didn’t hand me nothing. He didn’t open those doors, none of that. And that’s really what I want people to kind of understand is that you’re going to meet that natural resistance. In terms of like what you said about being called a Rush Limbaugh type figure. I see that. Okay, well, I guess that’s a perspective, right? That’s I guess what somebody may think. Now remember there’s different reasons somebody might say that.

Jamarlin Martin: Teaching folks that you have the power, you can do it. That’s Rush Limbaugh nowadays, with a lot of liberals. Man, he’s telling me I gotta go out there and try harder. He’s telling me instead of talking to 10 investors, I got to go after a 100. He’s Rush Limbaugh. I gotta do something.

Dr Boyce Watkins: I think it hurts us when we allow the concept of personal responsibility to be hijacked by the Republicans. You know, just because you’re telling people that they can do things for themselves that does not make you a right wing conservative that just makes you a human being that believes in your infinite potential to accomplish anything you want. That’s universal. That’s not a democrat or republican concept.

Jamarlin Martin: It’s an animal instinct in terms of you look at how animals take care of each other, are think about survival. They’re not getting wrapped up in all these ideologies. I know at the end of the day, I need to eat. The generations coming behind me are going to need to eat. I want them to have a good living and I know what I gotta do to provide for that.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah, absolutely. What I kind of speculate honestly is, I learned this a lot. I have a leadership coach named Nicole who works with me about how to use your power more effectively and conscientiously, and stuff like that. And one of the things that she introduced me to that I really appreciated was this idea that people are really inherently different. The way you see the world may not be the way somebody else sees it. She had me take this 16 personalities test and I found out about all the different personality types of, even just within my team and how different people will hear the same thing and come away with a totally different perspective. So what that showed me is that you can’t go into a conversation assuming that the other person thinks the way you do. You can’t. You have to go into the conversation thinking, okay, what kind of person am I dealing with and what’s going to make this the most productive relationship we can have. Right? You can adjust yourself. Now you could just sit around and be pissed off because they don’t get what you’re saying that they’re mad at you or whatever, but that’s not going to change anything. You can’t change what other people do, but you can change how you adjust to the situation. So what happened was first I applied that to my team just to understand the people I work with and get them in the right positions and all that. Then I started applying that to the world and I realized, Oh, wait a minute, you know, if I’m out here and I’m this guy who is built in a specific way, you know, my dad was kind of an Alpha type of guy, you know, my dad’s killed people before. That’s the type of man my father is, he’s a military man, police officer. He believes in discipline. He’s one of those, just like when he quit smoking, I said, how did you stop smoking? What did you do? Did you use a nicotine patch, did it take time? He said, no, I just stopped smoking. Right? Like that’s the kind of guy my dad is, so I’m built off of that, but everybody isn’t going to see that point of view. So when I talked to the black woman that I love by my side, she’s a social worker. So we’ll have these conversations where we’re jogging and she’ll say, no Boyce, no people have trauma and they need you to hear their issues and dah, dah, dah. And I’ll be like, no, he just needs to get his shit together. And so ultimately people are going to see things differently. And I think the most productive way to proceed is to try to learn from the different points of view. Not them all. You don’t have to internalize everybody’s perspective, but at least try to understand it. And then if you’re trying to work with that person or partner with them, you gotta just accept the idea that there is no one universal truth. Your truth is your truth. That ain’t everybody’s truth. And when I learned that, I began to see things in a way that probably made people think I was weird.

Jamarlin Martin: You know, when some of your Negro critics, they’ll say, hey, you know, you’re charging thousands of dollars for your Phd. You taught at Syracuse. You did the work in terms of getting your credentials. You’ve been in this for a long time. They’ll say, hey, don’t spend your money with Dr Boyce at The Black Business School, but they’re not attacking Phoenix University. They’re not attacking Georgia State University. They’re not attacking all these other institutions who are charging a lot, but you’re going to go through there without knowing how a FICO score works. They’re not going to teach you some of the principles you really need to be successful, right? They’re teaching a lot of abstract things, a lot of stuff that you’re probably not gonna need, right? But the Negro critics, they’re not attacking the HBCUs. They’re not attacking Harvard. They’re not attacking any of the other institutions that are helping loading people up with debt, not teaching them really good things to stay out of debt, not teaching them anything to stay out of debt. Not Teaching them anything about practical investing, not teaching them anything about understanding blockchain and crypto, but why do you think the Negro critics will say you’re not worthy black man, Dr Boyce Watkins, Dr Boyce Watkins. You’re not worthy the to go ahead and start your own business school and take it to end and wrap it up in a language that the black masses understand and go get this in the community like a religion. Why will they attack you with your school? But they’re not attacking the other schools. Why? Why do you think that is?

Dr Boyce Watkins: It’s white supremacy, right? White supremacy. An example might be when I taught at Syracuse University. If I’m a black professor, same credentials, top of my class, worked with the best people in the world. I walk in a classroom…

Jamarlin Martin: Can you share with the audience your academic background, from undergraduate to teaching?

Dr Boyce Watkins: Okay. I went to the University of Kentucky. I graduated with a triple major in finance, economics and business management and I got two bachelor’s degrees in four years in Undergrad. I was the Wall Street Journal outstanding graduating senior. So I was the number one finance student, beat all the white kids. I was number one finance student in the whole school. I got master’s degrees. I completed the requirements in math, economics and statistics. I got my Phd in finance from Ohio State University. In 2002, I was the only African American in the world to get a Phd in finance. And I lay that out so people can at least begin to accept the idea that maybe I’m not inferior because I’m black because, you know, one of the things I have to say to black people on a regular basis is stop discriminating against us, stop discriminating because we already know white folks have a hard time accepting the idea that you’ve got a group of black people in The Black Business School whose credentials are second to none. Many of them even went to the top white schools. Stanford, Julian Gordon, our Dean of entrepreneurship was a Stanford graduate. My brother went to Cornell. Attorney Tanya Nebo, she does multi-million dollar deals, she went to University of Virginia Law School. Dr Claud Anderson wrote PowerNomics. Dr Vaneesha Dutra is one of the few black women on the earth to have a Phd in finance. You’re really getting Wakanda. You’re getting straight, high quality black excellence in every shape or form. So ultimately we have to kind of have this conversation where we have to say, okay, we understand your concerns about anything you want to be concerned about, but don’t you have bigger fish to fry because I’m sitting there talking to somebody who is $100,000 in debt from a mediocre university with mediocre professors who couldn’t teach them the beginnings of how to succeed economically and especially how to succeed while being black. They know nothing about trying to make it through this life while being black. We know all about that. Our whole experiences laced in blackness. So we’re the ones who can actually give you the support that you need. And believe me, we would have been happy, we’d be able to do so many things if you’d given us that $100,000, you gave two mediocre white university, but instead of giving us $100,000, we might say, okay, over the course of the next year, you know, pay us $100 a month or something like that. And so what’ll happen is that familiarity will breed contempt. It is sort of like this disbelief that black people can create something that’s so excellent that it’s better than what white people have created. That’s why I say that white supremacy is laced in the DNA of many of us, and not just white folks.

Jamarlin Martin: So other negro critics, they saw an opening where you were getting advice from a Asian marketing professional and he suggested that you guys worked together and he’s helping you optimize your marketing for your business. So the way I interpret that is folks are going to be reaching out to potential partners who can help them to be successful, right? In some, in some cases, you may go with a non-black business, right? So they specialize in something that you’re looking for. You go to home depot to buy tools, that’s not black owned. You may, within the advertising sphere or marketing, you may work with another company and that person is not of your race. Why should you be locked up and inflexible in terms of how you can build your business? Why would you be locked up? Right? So the criticism is, Dr Boyce Watkins is working with this Asian guy and he’s working with your platform, so he’s a fraud.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah. I think that analysis is obviously incorrect, but also it reflects a point of view, right? It reflects that disbelief that’s implanted in us, that makes us say there is no way, you must be a fraud because there’s no way a black person on their own can achieve that level of success. There’s no way. It’s not possible. Right? So what’ll happen is you’ll have people that’ll formulate these conspiracy theories. Everything from, and there are videos out there literally that will say things like, I think there was a video that said I’m financially backed by the Jews. And then there’s another one that says I’m a government agent, right? So these really interesting things that people come up with because I think fundamentally from the core, if I were white business and we were doing these things, it wouldn’t be a big deal, right? But because you’re black and what you’re doing is unique and it’s successful…

Jamarlin Martin: We haven’t seen this before. You’re targeting the community, we’re suspicious. So many other people have come in to rape us.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Right. And my position is that, I eventually had to learn to let some of that go because I know who owns my house, right? We know who runs everything. We don’t discriminate. We don’t believe in discrimination because if I did discriminate than that would be no different from the white corporations that didn’t hire black people. So I don’t discriminate. But people that come and work with us, they know that they’re in our house. And what a lot of black folks don’t know yet, and this is something I try to teach my students is that there’s a difference between working with a white guy, when you’re the subordinate versus working with him and he’s the subordinate or working with him and you’re a partner. There’s a different level of treatment and respect that you receive. Because when you talk about building an economy, which is what we want to do in the black community, you can’t build an economy that’s in isolation like a North Korea type situation. You want your economy to trade with the rest of the world. You want to integrate with the rest of the world. So I tell my students, look, when you build your business, don’t just sell the black people, sell to everybody, just make sure you have a trade surplus so that you’re receiving more than you’re giving away, but at the end of the day, you have to go where the expertise is. You got to learn from other cultures. I’ve read entire books about Jewish culture to understand how do they teach wealth to their children from an early age because I want to know how this all works and I would partner with a Jewish guy in a minute, as long as he understood that this is our house. If you come in our house, you don’t disrespect house. So I think that for many of us, because this is new territory, we’re not really used to true black sovereignty. It confuses people. And what I’ve learned is that, there are people that are going to kind of get it. There are people that are going to believe you. And then there are people who will refuse to believe no matter what. And it is what it is.

Jamarlin Martin: Your marketing, at least as an observer, I’m a fan. I’ve been watching you for years. Your marketing is very on point. It appears to be self-taught, which I could relate to in terms of when I got into the digital media business, there wasn’t a school, there wasn’t a textbook there, it’s kind of self-taught, right? The market’s evolving. Can you share with the audience the key ingredients of your marketing strategy that has helped you be successful?

Dr Boyce Watkins: Well, let me say this, first of all, coming from the founder of Bossip and Moguldom, that means a lot, brother. I have to say that, because I’ve always had an admiration for you in the Black Wealth Bootcamp. One of the first lectures I mentioned you and when they named you the king of digital media and everything else. So you were somebody that we saw in an aspirational context, because that’s the future of the black community, guys like yourself, Lamar Tyler, what he does with Black and Married With Kids, he’s become a millionaire by getting black families to be healthier. You look around, you look at what Tariq Nasheed does with Hidden Colors, where he’s able to create some the original blackbuster films, not blockbuster, blackbuster, because they’re everywhere. He’s made a lot of money without necessarily going through those traditional channels. Right? So long story short, going back to the question about marketing and what are the things I’ve observed with a lot of businesses in the black community is that, I think we under-emphasize the importance of good marketing. I see a lot of businesses that come across where people will have this great idea and they’ll put money into the idea even in some cases, but then there’ll be no marketing budget. I met a guy like that. They’re very smart guy. He had one, he wasn’t one of these incubator competitions where they gave him a quarter million dollars and he put all his money into these engineers and developing the app. But there was no marketing budget. And I said, well, you know, that when Hollywood puts out a movie, they spend probably twice as much on marketing the film as they spent actually creating it. So we’ve never believed that if we make it, they will come. We believe that if you make something, you have to figure out what problem are you solving, who are you helping. So what do these people look like who are going to be interested in this product? How can you help them solve an important problem? And then how do you get this in front of them and create the relationship and build the trust that will lead them to want to transact with you? So I think of marketing the same way you think of love, or the same way you might think of relationships. No matter how attractive you are, you can’t walk up to somebody on the street and say, ‘hey, you look cute. Can we go have sex now?’ Right? It’s not gonna work, right? Doesn’t matter how attractive you are. Most decent people are going to say, hell no. All right. So what you do though is there are steps in that process and the steps involve showing or creating the reciprocity, showing the consistency, showing that they can trust you with their body. And then at that point, deeper transactions can take place after that. Like going to coffee turns into going to dinner, going to dinner turns into a visit to the house, visit to the house turns into a kiss, a kiss turns into, and the next thing you know, you’re getting married or whatever it is you’re doing, right? So I think of marketing the same way. So one of the main things I try to do a in terms of connecting with people and looking at the different brands, whether it’s my brand specifically or The Black Business School brand, is I want there to be consistency. I like for people to know who I really am. I think the biggest mistakes Tiger Woods made, Bill Cosby made, OJ Simpson made, is that they built brands that were not consistent with who they were as human beings. I said this to my friend Marc Lamont Hill about 12 years ago. I said, if people know my name, I don’t care if they like me or they hate me, they need to know what I stand for and who I am as a person. It doesn’t matter if you like me or not, I’m going to be me. Right? And I did that because I saw celebrities that would trap themselves by their brands. Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears did that too. Whitney Houston, they create this illusion and then when people start finding out who they really are, they’re shocked and appalled that Whitney has this other life, right? So brand building and marketing and everything else becomes a natural scenario where I show that, first of all, it starts with love. I show people that I love them. I want what’s best for them, I want to help them. I show consistency. I’m there everyday. Some people watch me online for a decade now, and because this is me living, me being who I am, right? I think I can add value because I’m not stupid, I got some education and I’m like, ‘Hey, let me tell you a couple of things’, you know what I mean? And then what that does is over time it leads into a low pressure scenario in which I kind of say, look, if you feel like I’ve really helped you, if you feel like I’ve really been good to you and good there for you, you know, do you mind helping us out too? We got this thing over here and we think that it can really help you go a little further in your process. Would you consider at least hear me out as I pitch this to you real quick? And that leads to natural trade. So it’s not high pressure stuff. So I’m not really a salesperson. My goal is just to be me and I believe enough. I liked me enough to believe that if I’m just who I am, that people will see there’s value here because I inherently know that there’s value a beneath that surface.

Jamarlin Martin: In terms of recruitment for the school, what’s been your most successful marketing channel in terms of bringing in students and the students converting?

Dr Boyce Watkins: We like Facebook a lot. We have a love-hate relationship with Facebook because they banned a couple of our pages for alleged hate speech. I don’t hate anybody, but that’s what they do.

Jamarlin Martin: Yeah, I mean there’s no black people on those policy teams, so it’s kind of like redlining. Our experience is they start seeing stuff, for example, one of our brands posted stuff about Barack Obama or Beyonce, they got some folks on there that say we don’t like this, we don’t want it on our platform. We’ve got complaints from users who I assumed to be white, the black people love this stuff, but their policy team at Facebook is really sick. So these white folks, they will bring in all their biases, all their interpretations of black culture. And they can go in subjectively and say, this black stuff is too edgy, but this white stuff is okay.

Dr Boyce Watkins: White supremacy! White supremacy doesn’t mean you’re a racist. If you’re a white supremacist, you don’t actually have to be overtly racist. All you have to do is exert your power over black people and then at that point you become a white supremacist. So literally if you are a white person and you say everybody should eat pickles for dinner, and I say, well I don’t like pickles. And you say, well if you don’t eat pickles for dinner then you should be put in prison, and I say, well that’s wrong, but you have the power to put me in prison. Then you’re going to do that. And then you can say, well, I didn’t do it because you’re black. I did it because you don’t eat pickles.

Jamarlin Martin: So on your Facebook marketing, I assume that they’re converting at a high level. Do you work with a partner to manage that or do you manage that in-house?

Dr Boyce Watkins: We do both.

Jamarlin Martin: If you’re interested in advertising on the GHOGH podcast, you can go to www.moguldom.com/ghogh. Once you’re there, click on the advertising link. Let’s get back to the podcast. Men being called out on abuse has been obviously a good thing, right? The culture that society needs to move forward where more action is taken in terms of the abuse of women, which is promiscuous, I believe has been promiscuous. It is promiscuous in terms of men abusing women, in my view. So Tony Robbins, the #metoo movement came for him essentially, where he said, hey, some of these #metoo women, they’re looking for attention and he was kind of dismissive of that movement. And one of our guests, Karen Fleshman, the Great Karen Freshmen, an activist lawyer out of San Francisco, she said on this show that the way Tony Robbins responded may indicate that he has something in his past in terms of men who are soft on abusing women. They could have something in their past. It caused the question. Do you believe that that assumption is correct?

Dr Boyce Watkins: I don’t know if it’s correct or not because I don’t…

Jamarlin Martin: But just in general, not necessarily Tony Robbins. If you see, let’s say black men specifically being soft on the abusive women, the rape of women, the harassment of women. If you see a black man being soft on abuse, could that indicate that this man either has something abusive towards women in his past, or possibly, he shares the values of the abusers? Do you believe that a lot of that stuff is there when you see black men who are soft on the abuse of women?

Dr Boyce Watkins: We could say this, we know that an abusive man would probably not support the #metoo movement the way it looks right now. But that does not mean that a man who does not support the #metoo movement must be an abuser. You know, it’s almost like how they were trying to prove the OJ killed Nicole because he abused her. That might increase the probability, but that’s not the same as proving that he did it or proving that he’s a murderer.

Jamarlin Martin: There are some very radical elements out of San Francisco, out of Hollywood, where just like in Islam, you have terrorists, you have fanatical Muslims, right? Muslims who will kill children, they’ll kill anybody, but there’s a pocket of folks in Islam who are fanatical, who are terrorists, and in this radical feminist movement, do you see a pocket of white women and black women who are with them banging that they are going too far in indiscriminately attacking black men?

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yes, there certainly is a pocket, right? In any movement, you have your extremists. An argument to be made is that, one, obviously the extremists are at risk of undermining the movement or watering down the movement or having people not respect the movement, right? If you’re too much of a hardliner, you lose your ability to gain the respect of those who are trying to simply be fair and trying to seek out the truth. On the other hand though, some would say that your hardliners do add value. They add strength to movement in the same way, Malcolm X’s presence added a legitimacy to what Dr King was doing. It was like the Black Panthers. So Dr King is like, I’m here, I come here offering peace and love and the Black Panthers are like, Yeah. And we got shotguns, so you better give him what he wants or it’s going to get real up in here. Right? So I think that the #metoo movement does need its extremists as long as they’re doing it for the right reasons and trying to be honest and fair. I think that the problem though obviously is that you don’t just have the extremists. You have some flat out liars. You have those who are exploiting the movement, right? I have a man that dumped me any hurt my feelings. So I’m going to go call him a rapist and I’m going to use the hashtag #metoo when I do it. And everybody’s going to believe he raped me because I said it on Twitter, and that’s happened. That’s happened thousands of times. And so what we need to understand is that not everybody who supports the #metoo movement is a victim. You have some perpetrators in the #metoo movement who are victimizing other people. And so we have to deal with that and be honest with that because it doesn’t matter if you support #metoo or not, even if you support what’s going on in the #metoo movement, you must deal with those liars and manipulators or whatever, because they’re going to undermine the ability of legitimate victims to receive the justice they deserve.

Jamarlin Martin: If you guys can indiscriminately, some of you guys, a lot of you guys, if you can indiscriminately start to go after black men where you start creating a cloud where we’re all abusers, we’re all rapists, the majority of us are abusing women, are violating women, are harassing women. If you’re gonna indiscriminately go after black men and it looks like we’re at the time where there’s going to be some banging between the radical feminists and the broader black community who’s thinking like a whole, we’re not going to be separated by these political movements out of San Francisco, right? So if you can indiscriminately go after black men, we’re all harassers, we’re all rapists, we’re all abusers. There’s an extreme segment who’s creating that cloud over black men, that if you can indiscriminately go after the black man, why don’t you bang like that against the white man and white woman from a racial standpoint? If you can indiscriminately put a dark cloud over most black men and you’re judging us in the extreme with this feminist jihadi movement, the radical element of this movement, please apply that to race, please apply that to white folks. If you’re going to come over here and start putting clouds and questions on the majority of black man, we’re all suspects now, we’re abusers, we’re harassers, we’re rapists. You need to apply that to race. Just let’s keep it consistent here because when black people start to put clouds on white folks, that is such a big controversy that the majority of the democrats are like this, put clouds on the Democratic Party. You’re not going to see negroes do that. But now negroes have been co-opted into this extremist jihadi movement out of California, where most black men are under suspicion. We’re suspects, just like on the street with the police, we’re suspects automatically. This is part of the extreme segment in the feminist jihadi movement out of California.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Well, what you’re describing right there in my opinion is America ‘business as usual’. That’s business as usual in America. A lot of the most extreme elements of the #metoo movement, they’ve kind of become bullies, it’s another way of describing a terrorist, right? They’re bullies and bullies pick on the weakest victims, right? So politically-speaking, sociologically-speaking, the weakest victim in America is the black male. The black male has the least protection politically and economically. It’s easy to vilify a black male as well because everyone’s afraid of the black male. So basically their attacks on black men are going to be different from what they do with white men because it’s easier for them to go get a Bill Cosby than it is to go get a Bill Clinton, right? Because if Bill Clinton were black though, Clinton would be in prison right now. But the thing is they’re not going to go get him because Bill Clinton would have support, people will back him up. In fact, when we tried to bang a white person or white institution that is beloved by…

Jamarlin Martin: ‘They’re not all like that, you’re being too harsh. You’re being too controversial there. I’m not going to work with you from a business standpoint because you’re too controversial.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Exactly.

Jamarlin Martin: But if I’m banging on a gender perspective. Yes. Let’s make this deal. Let’s be friends. And that’s not a big deal.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah. If you look at the Starbucks thing, right? If you did a poll, I’m sure there are polls out there, black people and white people view Starbucks differently. A lot of black people I know are still angry over the controversy. A lot of white people are like, oh, that’s no big deal. It’s just one manager, one situation. Who Cares? I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m not telling people what to think about that. I’m just saying that in almost any controversy like that that’s racial, when they poll black people, their view is different from white people. In almost everything. The OJ trial, black people thought he was innocent. White people thought he was guilty. The Bill Cosby trial. A lot of black people feel yeah, Bill was a bad guy, but he shouldn’t have been convicted. A lot of white people say no, he should have been convicted. And so I think that in America people kind of just protect their own and some groups have a great ability to do that. Some groups have very, very little ability to do that. So when a black man is unfairly attacked by the #metoo movement, it’s not always that they have no support. I know that when I’ve been attacked by white people, for whatever reason, I have black people that stood by my side. I had black women, they love black men maybe more than they love feminism and everything else. And those are the types of women that would support someone like me.

Jamarlin Martin: So you believe it’s fair to say that with black women specifically, that black men have not been there to protect us against abuse? He’s been violating us, he’s been abusing us and that the good black men, if they’re out there, at least from their standpoint, the good black men, if they’re out there, you guys need to be banging for us and you need to be banging against these other abusers in the community. But you guys are not speaking up. Do you believe that’s a fair statement?

Dr Boyce Watkins: I think that the interaction between the black male and black female has been so complicated by these systematic elements. Like mass incarceration alone just really disrupted the whole ecosystem. It really did.

Jamarlin Martin: But what does that have to do with us speaking up against brothers who are abusing women?

Dr Boyce Watkins: They can be disconnected, right? We could still do more. And the reason we should do more is because we need the support of loyal black women in the community who need to feel like there are men who have their back.

Jamarlin Martin: I think it goes back to why so many black men gang bang. Why so many black men want to be thugs. Why so many black men don’t have strong fathers in their lives on a daily basis. Right? And so the sense of masculinity, the natural sense of masculinity has been a perverted. It has been skewed in a way where at least some brothers out there, they believe being hard on women, abusing women, being violent towards women, that that is a man thing, and so if you have a healthy balance in the home, I believe you’re not reaching for these things to validate you. You’re not reaching towards something sexual or something violent towards women to validate you. And again, I think that void is there a obviously it from slavery where you do not have a knowledge of self, you don’t have a cultural heritage, a strong line of cultural heritage. You don’t know who you are. And then when you take out that strong father from most of our homes, this is where you start getting, like, it’s a macho thing like, hey, I’m less of a man if I defend women, it’s not a guy thing to do, to defend that sister.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah. And I think that’s accurate. I get a lot of flack from brothers when I was standing up for women. I think I saw somebody call me Dr Moist Twatkins. That was a nickname. they literally called me Moist Twatkins, right? And I’ll hear stuff like that. I think Umar Johnson called me, Dr Joyce Watkins, so you have this right? But being a man means I’m not going to get bitchy and upset about something somebody said. I kind of laughed when I heard it, because that’s what happens, right? You have those guys that are so insecure that they think that being kind to women makes you less of a man, but then you have men that are secure enough to know you should be. Of course you should be nice to women. You’re nice to your Mama. If you’re not nice to a woman, she’s going to cheat on you, leave you, hurt your feelings. So why wouldn’t you be nice to a woman who’s nice to you? Right? So I think that what happens in media, and this again relates to white supremacy, is that the black male images that are presented, especially to these little black boys who grew up in a single parent household because her daddy she got shipped off to prison for drugs or whatever, the images and media of black men are not productive images that are typically promoted. They’re not images that allow for the complete expression of the diversity of black maleness, whatever that means. So you have extremes, right? You have people that say that black men are too hypermasculine because they think every black man is trying to be like that rapper that wants to carry a gun and kill people, and that’s the problem, right? But then you have people that say, oh, stop telling yourself as the man up like that. Men can be sensitive. Men can be this, men can be that. No, you’re feeding into the complete emasculation of black men, which is another big problem. You’ve got a lot of mamas raising their little boys to become girls and they don’t understand that, it’s one thing if your son’s just gay and he can’t help it, but I’ve seen single moms say, ain’t nothing wrong with my baby being a baby forever. Well, your baby is supposed to be somebody’s husband, father and protect, and he can’t do that if he doesn’t at least know how to man up if the situation calls for it.

Jamarlin Martin: And I gotta say this is the popular crowd, this is the consensus crowd now in terms of folks on the left, extremists on the left. Their ideology, their belief system, their values is now kind of like a mob, right? So they’ve been victimized too. They’ve been marginalized in different ways, but now I feel like the consensus is coming for that black Christian. The left consensus in America, they’re coming for that black Christian. They’re coming for that black Muslim. They’re coming for the black men and women who believe in more traditional African values and principles. And so we reached a period in the United States where I believe there’s going to be a lot of disruption in terms of traditional alliances and connections where this stuff that’s coming from the left is going to start to bump into folks of faith, folks who believe in traditional African values. And so do you believe that the black community is strong enough to start banging back because I feel like the acceleration of some of these viewpoints, now I see black men, they’re scared to speak up. I see Christians, they’re scared to speak up. Muslims, they’re scared to speak up. Now the fear is starting to set in, right? And so I talked to a brother who works at Google engineer, Christian brother, he wants to be a preacher one day. He said it’s already happening, that he believes that people of faith like himself, who don’t go along with the secular trends in society, the flavor of the day, if you don’t go along with this stuff, this brother at the engineer at Google, he believes that the persecution has started. Do you believe that black people of faith in terms of Christianity, Islam, in terms of their living a certain way, they believe a certain way, folks who believe in traditional African culture, in terms of the thoughts, in terms of how to think about family, the roles in the family. Do you believe that that side is going to be strong enough to bang back in terms of the coming jihad against these institutions and people? Political jihad.

Dr Boyce Watkins: I believe they can bang back. I think that…

Jamarlin Martin: Do you see them? Because I see more fear setting in. I see people, they’re scared. At least I see a lot of fear out there, in terms of, I can’t say this, I can’t really rep my beliefs because it’s unpopular. People are going to view me a certain way…

Dr Boyce Watkins: I think that the persecution that I’ve seen, it has come mostly from the left. I don’t know a lot of liberals who really believe in freedom of speech. I just don’t know. Most liberals I know get offended. They get offended if you write with your left hand instead of your right. They get offended if I pick this water bottle up and drink it fast when I should’ve drank it slow. They get offended by everything. Right? What’s been unfortunately planted in the mind of a lot of liberals is that if someone doesn’t have views that are the same as your own, you don’t hear them out. You don’t tell them that they’re wrong. You just shut them down.

Jamarlin Martin: It’s like they want a Saddam Hussein, they want a Gaddafi. They want MBS out of Saudi Arabia, who’s now the king. They want a dictatorship, a lot of times it comes across as, ‘if you don’t believe like us, if you don’t step into this box, we’re coming after you’. And of course that goes back to the acceleration of the fear.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah. My theory is that if you look at the history of liberalism in America, it seems to me that they’re hell-bent on social engineering. They’re really big on kind of deciding what society they want to live in and what they think is right. And it wouldn’t surprise me in say 50 years if they start trying to find a way to make paedophilia, just a sexual preference, like everything else. I think that they have a way of kind of saying like, we want to program you to think in a specific way. Now, the funny thing about the people in the right wing is that they’re really big on these weird conspiracy theories too. I have friends that do nothing but watch Fox News all day, and they don’t even understand how, what they’re saying is just like what this other person said, who watches the same shows. They’re kind of programmed to repeat the same rhetoric, which is interesting too. But the problem on that liberal side is that they sort of have this almost arrogant monopoly on the moral high ground that leads them to feel that they have the right to judge anything and everyone and to shut you down if you’re a conservative. And I don’t see that many situations where a liberal goes to speak at a school and the protests keep them from speaking. But I could name a dozen cases where a conservative was coming to a university and they just did so many protests that they cancelled the speech.

Jamarlin Martin: Yeah. I think you bring up a very good point and an unpopular point, that there’s a certain wing within the liberal establishment that are jihadis essentially. You have to think and agreed like them or they’re looking to off you.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah. You got that communist influence in there too…

Jamarlin Martin: I think the hypocrisy within the liberal establishment is like this. You’re so intoxicated on democratic or liberal ideology, you can’t see the stuff that your own side is doing, so you can only see people doing stuff to you, but you can’t see what your side is doing to others. And let me give you an example. Barack Obama, 2008. Wall Street, the banks who skew Republican, they’re driving up inequality, they caused the financial crisis. There’s a lot of greed. Their time is over. I’m coming in. The Democrats are coming in to protect the people, to check these greedy people. And so the Silicon Valley establishment, they fund Barack Obama, they’re inside of his campaign and the liberals, they run on a Occupy Wall Street message that, hey, they caused the financial crisis, this greed in society is so bad and it’s causing all these problems. So this is what the liberals are saying, lot of Democrats are saying. So once Barack Obama gets elected, supported in large part by Silicon Valley, the billionaires, the institution’s, Facebook, all the people in Silicon Valley, you have Google and Facebook taking nine out of every 10 digital ad dollars, it was reported last year, out of the advertising industry. You have these companies getting massive and they’re doing things. There’s not one regulatory review. There’s not one democratic push that’s at least that I’m aware of that was public, where let’s look at what these greedy people are doing over here. The Republicans are just greedy, but we don’t have greedy people on our side. So during Barack Obama’s eight years, he bangs on Wall Street, but you wouldn’t see him bang on Silicon Valley. Why is that?

Dr Boyce Watkins: Well I’ll say this, I don’t know if Obama really banged on any corporate entity because I…

Jamarlin Martin: In terms of Wall Street, the financial crisis where we started to see Lehman Brothers go down and that type of stuff. It played right into his message. It was perfect in terms of, you can blame Wall Street for doing this. I’m going to take care of you. The greedy folks, with these corporations, when I get into office, they’re not going to take advantage of us like this. Their day is over.

Dr Boyce Watkins: I remember when he was going in on Wall Street, there was the rhetoric, but the rhetoric was very different from the actions. Obama didn’t prosecute a single Wall Street banker after the crisis occurred. And also the bailout money went to the banks, they didn’t go to Main Street.

Jamarlin Martin: That’s true, a lot more could have been done. I agree with you, but you did see some regulatory changes. He tapped that regulatory button, hey, we need to look at this stuff. After the financial crisis, he did not tap the regulatory button for the billionaires out of Silicon Valley. The Facebooks, that white billionaire set that are doing some of the same sick things. It’s a greed problem. It’s not a democratic party, it’s not a liberal thing. It’s a greed sickness in the society. But Barack Obama and the democrats, they don’t do anything. Why? Most of these people were liberal. They’re friends. But stop taking the moral high ground.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Yeah. In the campaigns you’ve got the bad guys and the good guys, right? So if I’m a democrat, it’s easier for me to point to the bad guys being the Wall Street bankers because the crisis just occurred and the people that got hit the hardest were a lot of poor people, right? Democrats kinda build all their power off of poor people. So that’s an easy narrative, I think for them to sell. I do think that when you’re talking now what you’re talking about what’s happened with Silicon Valley, you’ve seen an exorbitant amount of power going to the Googles and the Facebooks, and the people who are most pissed off about that are the conservatives because the Googles and the Facebooks are inherently liberal organizations. And so, just the way these organizations are run, which pages they choose to ban, how they’re doing business, has sort of been very anti-conservative, so I think that’s why now in the Trump administration, you see this push to regulate the people in Silicon Valley. I think the people in Silicon Valley, in the eyes of the conservatives, are seeing as sort of these latte-sipping liberals who have become the new billionaires. I think it’s a natural sort of thing. I think if you look at it from a bad guy, good guy perspective, who’s the victim, who’s the perpetrator in the case of the bankers, the perpetrators are the banks and the victims are poor people. That’s the democratic story. The case of Silicon Valley, the bad guys are these liberal corporations, the good guys or the guys who are being victimized allegedly are the conservatives. Right? So that’s a good republican story. So that’s how I’m seeing it played out.

Jamarlin Martin: Thanks everybody for listening to GHOGH. You can check me out @Jamarlinmartin on Twitter and also come check us out at Moguldom.com. That’s M O G U L D O M dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our daily newsletter. You can get the latest information on crypto, tech, economic empowerment and politics. Let’s GHOGH!

This podcast has been edited for clarity.