 Natalie, Molina, Nino. Everybody hear me or see me? We can hear you and see you. Good afternoon, good morning. Good morning and good afternoon to our East Coast folks. I'm gonna share my screen. How are we doing there? Can you see my screen as well? No, we see you. Tech geniuses. We're probably gonna have to help me out on this one. Share application window. I think after three days, we've sort of become family, so it's okay. We'll figure it out. There you go. Now we can see your screen. Yes. Yes. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much. All we're really trying to do is present. So tell me if this is... We got you. A provocation. Okay. All righty. Thank you so much. So yes, good morning and good afternoon for our East Coast friends. That panel just now was fire. Thank you. Thank you Rashad and Crystal and Cynthia. You know, I was asked by Spectrum as I think a number of the flash speakers have been asked to provide and deliver to you a provocation, which I have to say feels like a bit of a tall ask, especially at a time when we're in the middle of a pandemic and lots of us and many of those who we love are putting their bodies on the line on our streets to defend literally the right to breathe and live of our black brothers and sisters. And what I've been thinking a lot about is just this term equity. It looms large and it really seems to sneak its way into a lot of our conversations. But I've been thinking about that. And I've concluded after quite a bit of thinking that equity in many ways lacks ambition. And let me explain what I mean by that. You see, as a Latina, if I had a job as a waitress, there's a statistically very high probability that the gender wage gap would have me making 55 cents less in fact than 55 cents on the dollar of my white male colleague, right? And a call for equity would have me making the same as my colleague. But in a country where most workers are not paid living wages and where the minimum wage falls short of anything close to what's needed to have even the most basic of needs met, where would that really leave me? Now, don't get me wrong, the data is super clear. The US short changes people of color in every way. We're talking healthcare, education, safety. But even if you put us aside for a moment and you look at the country overall, the US healthcare system, the justice system and our collective literacy levels are an embarrassment among developed nations. Equity lacks ambition because if all we are aiming for is to get to the mediocre subpar scraps that the dominant culture in this country has settled for and accepted as normal, then it's time to raise the bar. And it's time to reimagine the world according to us and what we need, what we ultimately decide. So I've been imagining what the world looks like if the answer was yes. And the answer to Langston Hughes' question about dreams deferred is yes, they explode. Imagine that the explosion that we're living right now is an opportunity to propel forward as an extended family of people of color. In the words of Afro-Latina poet Ariana Brown, if you are alive, you are descended from a people who refuse to die. And nothing is more sacred than you. Imagine for the first time in lifetimes, and I do mean lifetimes, that the answer to your aunties, to your grannies and to your abuelitas is yes, we're gonna be okay. The answer has to be yes. We owe it to our ancestors and we owe it to the seven generations that our native brothers and sisters remind us to protect. And the way forward in my view is simple, take care of our own. And if you ask me, this is what it looks like. It looks like waking up in the morning to the sound of an alarm on a phone from a black-owned telephone company. And then making your bed with sheets made in a Navajo-owned textile factory. And maybe making yourself breakfast filled with fresh fruits from the Latinx-owned grocery store franchise. And putting on some ethically made clothes made by your favorite D.C. fashion line. Then maybe getting in the car that you bought from the Korean-American-owned car dealership and on your way, blasting music that you downloaded from the Muslim-American-owned streaming service that gives equity to artists and donations to peace. And finally, at the end of all of this, when you get to work, you walk into the doors of the tech giant that put every other social media platform out of business. When the three black women engineers who built it said to all people of color, this is a family-owned business and you are our family. It's not enough to close the wage gap. It's not enough to think about diversity and inclusion nor is it enough to aspire to equality. It's really time to raise the bar and reimagine the world in our image. And I think it starts with a yes. Yes to an economy built by us and designed to serve us. Yes to ownership at all levels because asset ownership has always driven where power is centered. And make no mistake, I'm talking about centering the power with us. It's gonna require investment. It's gonna require momentum and it will require very uncomfortable conversations. It'll likely be hard before it gets easy and we will be accused of destruction. And our answer to that too will be yes because our prosperity, our joy and our wildest dreams, they were always meant to be built on the exploded ashes of the broken promises that were made to our ancestors. It starts with a yes from you, from me and from everyone around us, which is why the only question that's really left to ask here is, are you in? And that's it. I would love to take questions and comments and have a conversation. Wow, thank you for that, Natalie. If I was just, I mean, I'm taken by the provocation that equity lacks ambition. Oftentimes we stop there and you've sort of pushed us to kind of think beyond that. And so that's, but what would it mean? I wonder, so part of this piece is around separation from one another. We don't see each other, we don't live amongst one another. And so as you were going through, I was struck by the comment that if you are alive, you descended from a people who refuse to die. And as a pushback to our separation, I wonder if you could tell me about one who refused to die that brings you here to us today. This was not a scripted question. Thank you, Nadia, for asking it. Last week, a woman by the name of Mariyama who owns a company called Sumo Home Care was on CNN with Poppy Harlow. She immigrated here from Sierra Leone. She survived a civil war. She came to this country and became a registered nurse. And then she co-founded a company that now has 150 employees, works outside of Philly and serves a predominantly black community with critical, critical medical needs that have to be delivered at home. And I think about her and I think about the fact that after all of that, we live in an environment where the federal government decided to unleash over $500 billion of federal stimulus and that by design, because let me be really clear, you don't accidentally exclude 90% of people of color from a $500-plus billion program. That's not an accident. By design, people like Mariyama were excluded from that and TD Bank rejected her loan inexplicably. And after everything that Mariyama had been through, she was about to lose her business. And in an act of desperation, she went out looking for alternatives and she found me and my team and we were able to connect her to a bank in DC called Live Oak Bank that has been helping me with a lot of black and brown-owned businesses. But I think about people like Mariyama and those are stories that if it hadn't been for Morgan Simon profiling her on an article in Forbes and if it hadn't been for CNN then taking that story and putting it live on TV, we would never have heard of Mariyama. I would never have known she existed if it hadn't actually been partially Rashad. One of Rashad's board members is Ian Fuller who connected me to Mariyama. I mean, these are all the connections of the black and brown community working together in alliance. But Mariyama is the epitome of a descendant of a people who refuse to die. I appreciate you sharing that. So I wonder like, how do we get to a change, a shift in the narrative around what we're going after with equity? So you talked about the definition of equity, lack's ambition and I am so vibing with that. And because what you're suggesting is to push up against the dominant culture as the standard by which we live our lives. What if they haven't gone far enough? Is this sort of what I mean? What if, I mean... They haven't. When we look at what the white dominant community has achieved, do we really say, that's wonderful. A living wage, minimum wage that can't even afford a family, a two bedroom home. That's what equity would get us today. I mean, we can do so much better than that. And I think that that's the frame that I want us to kind of transcend. This idea that somehow, because the dominant culture has excluded us that all we're gonna aim for is what they've managed to get. If we were to reimagine from scratch, I don't think that a lot of the systems or even some of those targets that we've previously held as our goals would even be relevant. Are you kidding me? We all want so much more for our families and for our kids. And so I think that that's what it is. It's, I think it's loosening some of those connections between what equity means in our hearts, which I think in our hearts, it means prosperity. It means so many things that our communities have been excluded from. But I think that when we combine our heart and mind and we take a good look, we want so much more. And that's why I think it's a question of not asking so much for permission. And it's about breaking things and building new ones and being unapologetic about that. So for all of the folks who are listening to you right now, give me one, two practical steps that we can take to reimagine and live into this new ambition around equity. I don't, I want this to be really clear that I believe that things like the gender wage gap, the racial wage gap, these are important problems that must be solved. Yes. But you don't build multi-generational wealth by making the same thing as your colleagues. You build multi-generational wealth by investing, by having the ability to build true investments that are beyond just your day job, whether it's buying your home, whether it's investing in another business, whether it is investing in the markets, right? Those are the sorts of things that become really important. And so I just want us to measure that yes, the wage gap is important, but multi-generational wealth and ownership is what's more important. And we know because of the work of Andre Perry, it's simply by virtue of playing the black owner of a home, your home is worth less, right? Fighting those sorts of systems. I mean, one of the wonderful things about what Andre Perry built is that he didn't just do the research of why black home ownership immediately results in lower values of a home, but then he built an interactive map where you can go and you can look up the address of your home and the zip code of your neighborhood and then you can call your bank and say, what the hell? Yes. And so I think taking action on things that are less about wages and more about ownership is probably step number one. Step number two, and the thing that I would ask everyone to consider is whether it's you investing in what's in your piggy bank or you having large amounts of assets to invest in, if you are an investor of any kind, again, micro scale, macro scale, there is no investment more important in 2020 than getting rid of the current occupant of the White House. And there are ways of doing that that involve not necessarily putting money into campaigns. There are ways of doing that or you're investing in the grassroots organizations, especially organizations that are black and brown led that are actively 365 days a year working on making sure that the elections go our way. I've chosen to work with the Movement Voter Project and the Movement Voter Project has created a fund that allows you to put money and channel money into organizations that are only black and brown led. They also allow you to filter by state so that you can focus on Minnesota, you can focus on Michigan, you can focus on the key states, but however you do it, that is the single most important investment that you can make. And if you are a professional investor, let me be really clear, nothing that you invest in has a chance of success with the current occupant in the White House in other four years. So invest in the elections, even if it's only to preserve your existing portfolio and make sure that it's successful. Well, Natalie, thank you so much for joining us for this Lightning Boat Round. We appreciate you, we appreciate the work that you're doing in the world. And now we'll turn our attention and I'd like to introduce them.