Moneda Moves (98): The Journey To Rebuilding Black Wall Street
Feliz fin de semana — happy weekend — mi gente.
Summer’s back, and that’s not just in reference to the weather. As cities across the country lean in full swing into their re-openings, we are noticing changes in jobs and the economy. The US economy added 850,000 jobs in June, with hospitality and leisure growing the strongest. The number of people quitting their jobs to look for new ones is the highest it has been since November 2016. Meanwhile, consumer spending is expected to pick up in the coming months.
What is also certain, however is that recovery as we emerge from the pandemic is uneven across the board and it’s clear that the negative economic side effects of the pandemic will live far beyond the time of quarantine and one of the biggest groups in need of recovery will be the Latino community.
We discuss this and a new podcast episode in today’s notita. See you at the bottom.
Con poder,
Lyanne
Headlines to put on your radar.
The Journey To Rebuilding Black Wall Street: There’s a new podcast drop this week, and this is one you want to miss. It’s one of my favorite interviews so far. Meet Roosevelt Giles. Today, he is President and CEO of Atlanta Life Insurance and alum of AT&T, where he built network protocols for the likes of the Pentagon.
But growing up, he and his nine siblings led a very distinct reality picking cotton alongside his sharecropper parents. Eventually, they paid off the family’s debt and managed to get an education. As fate would have it, the company he runs, Atlanta Life, was founded by a former slave Alonzo Herndon who built one of America’s first successful Black businesses. But an issue he saw then that Giles still sees today? It continues to be expensive to poor and Black.
On this week’s episode of Moneda Moves, we talk about Giles’ journey to becoming a leader in technology and his ideas to rebuild Black Wall Street. Also in this episode, we talk about the kinds of responsibilities corporate companies must answer to as it relates to people of color in a post-pandemic world.
The pandemic overwhelmingly hit U.S. Latinos locked in low-paying, essential jobs: Demographic rates across groups will prove it alone. According to CNN:
“The unemployment rate for Asian workers rose to 5.8% in June, from 5.5% in May, registering the biggest percentage point increase, even though it remained below the rate for the general population.
The jobless rates for Hispanic and Black workers each rose 0.1 percentage points, to 7.4% and 9.2%, respectively. This puts the rate for both populations far above that of the overall population.”
Thank you for joining us! Until next week, catch us here on Moneda Moves.