Woke Leaves Black Women to The Wolves: It’s ... BAD

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the sharp rise in Black women’s unemployment in 2025, the backlash against DEI initiatives, and why efforts to elevate specific groups as “minions” of dominant cultural powers often backfire—leaving the broader group to face the consequences.

They discuss OkCupid dating data showing Black women receive fewer responses than even many incel-labeled groups, cultural tropes and archetypes available to Black women, historical patterns of favored minorities (Tutsi in Rwanda, Protestants under Cromwell, etc.), and the personal essay by Sesali Bowen (”Black Women Aren’t Just Unemployed, They’re Being Erased”).

The conversation covers financial habits, work ethic signals, shifts from “Black Girl Magic” to post-DEI realities, AI automation, government job cuts, and why merit-based systems might ultimately benefit everyone—including those previously disadvantaged by tokenization.

Provocative, data-driven, and unfiltered—watch for a deep dive into how “well-intentioned” favoritism can intensify backlash and what this means for cultural resilience and family formation.

Would you like to know more? 👀

Show Notes

* If I were a black woman in America, I’d be going off the grid

* Right off the bat, black women have the cards stacked against them the worst in dating markets

* And now, whether or not they ever bought into it, black women may have the cards stacked against them

* Here are some choice stats from an article I came across covering this:

* “In December 2025, “Black women were spending an average of 29.7 weeks, or more than seven months, unemployed—the highest rate among every group of women and among all men except for Black men, who had a slightly higher average,” The 19th* reports.”

* “At the height of the summer volatility, Black women accounted for 54.7% of all female job losses, despite making up only 14.1% of the female workforce,” according to an analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

* What’s sick is that the racket that caused the backlash which may be hurting a lot of black women was due to special treatment that was largely exploited by a small subset of already-privileged women

* We’ll go through the experienced of one of those privileged women

* And look at examples of other instances in which well-intentioned efforts to help specific groups have backfired

One Women’s Experience of Lost Privilege

The Purse published a guest essay from Sesali Bowen titled Black women aren’t just unemployed—they’re being erased.

Choice quotes:

THE LANDSCAPE

* “Since last fall, general unemployment rates in the U.S. have ticked up to 4.4%, from 4% at the start of 2025. At the same time, the jobless rate for Black women has surged, from 5.4% in January 2025 to a high of 7.5% last September. Economist Katicia Roy estimates that “since 2020, the real unemployment rate for Black women is 10.23%.”

* “There have been several factors linked to this disproportionate destabilization. The huge AI push, which is automating jobs that humans were once paid to do, is one. Last year’s mass cut of government jobs—where Black women are represented at twice the rate as in the private sector—and the abrupt elimination of DEI programs under the current Trump administration are notable others. As one of those Black women sidelined from the job market, this crisis feels personal.”

* Why are black women represented in government jobs at twice the rate as in the private sector?

* Data from federal EEO reports and labor researchers show that Black women are roughly twice their share of the overall labor force in federal and broader public-sector employment—about 11–12% of the federal workforce versus roughly 6–7% of the civilian labor force—while their share in the private sector roughly tracks their population share.

* Public agencies can adopt affirmative action or “affirmative employment” plans, but these must be formal, justified programs aimed at correcting documented underrepresentation, not ad hoc preferences.

* Under federal guidance, race can sometimes be one factor among many in recruitment and outreach, or in limited remedial contexts, but blanket quotas or automatic preference for minority applicants are not permitted under Title VII.

* Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes it illegal for any employer, including government, to make hiring decisions based on race, whether that is discrimination against or for a particular racial group.

HER PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

* “I’ve been self-employed since October 2019, when I was laid off as senior entertainment editor at NYLON following an acquisition and rebrand. I got lucky and sold my first book just months later—a collection of essays about Black feminism at the intersection of hip-hop, culture, and class. I spent the next year living on my advance and a few freelance commissions, and once my manuscript was done, I pivoted to copywriting.”

* Her book: Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist

* 351 reviews

* “Bad Fat Black Girl offers a new, inclusive feminism for the modern world. Weaving together searing personal essay and cultural commentary, Bowen interrogates sexism, fatphobia, and capitalism all within the context of race and hip-hop. In the process, she continues a Black feminist legacy of unmatched sheer determination and creative resilience.”

* “The opportunity to transfer my writing skills to branding and creative strategy was afforded to me on the heels of 2020’s racial justice reckoning. Widespread reminders that Black Lives Matter forced white people to confront their own biases about people of color and actively move past them to be better allies. When it came to Black women, specifically, this was easy to do because we were in the final years of the #BlackGirlMagic era. Spanning the 2010s to early 2020s, this period amplified how important Black women are to American culture. The general sentiment during this era was to trust Black women, as we were venerated for our expertise on politics, education, beauty, entertainment, and so much more.”

* What was #blackgirlmagic?

* #BlackGirlMagic was a phrase and hashtag used to celebrate the beauty, strength, creativity, and achievements of Black women and girls, especially in the face of racism and sexism.

* The phrase began as “Black girls are magic,” coined by CaShawn Thompson around 2013 and quickly shortened to the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic on social media.

* “During this time, about 30% of my revenue came from speaking and book engagements at universities and conferences. The rest consisted of freelance copywriting and brand strategy for different agencies and clients. I was the quintessential “multi-hyphenate,” and I started bringing in six figures annually. I self-funded my podcast (about female rap, of course) for an entire season. I started working on my debut novel, and I paid off a good chunk of credit card debt.”

WHEN THE TABLES TURN

* “Following Trump’s 2025 inauguration and the string of executive orders that followed, I felt a shift almost immediately. Many of the institutions that are most likely to support my work fall under Trump’s DEI umbrella. With his executive order dismantling federal funding for these initiatives, the organizations and academic departments that would have hosted me are now trying to remain compliant. My bookings have slowed to a near stop.”

* “These limiting policies coincided with the great AI boom. While I was used to lulls as a freelance creative strategist and copywriter, I only worked on two projects last year, when I’m normally on six to 10. And while my career began as an entertainment journalist and culture critic, the continued deterioration of traditional media has also made this path unsustainable. So without any other viable options, I decided in late 2025 to start actively applying for full-time jobs.”

* “I was surprised at how little traction I gained. Over six months I submitted dozens of applications that didn’t even land me interviews, even when I had an employee referral. The rejections led to a full-on existential crisis and forced me to ask myself some tough questions. Was I not using the right language to translate my skills? Does a multi-hyphenate muddy the waters when there are hundreds of applicants for a role? Did the author part of my career with the very Google-able online presence make me a red flag for behind-the-scenes roles that I could easily do in my sleep? Or was it the contents of said work?”

* She is implying she submitted “dozens” of resumes, which means fewer than 200 (otherwise she would have written “hundreds”

* If you’re doing a serious job search, it’s a full-time job

* You should be submitting a minimum of 10 resumes/day, and that’s assuming it’s for one of those tedious corporate applications where you have to enter tons of custom information and it takes ages or you’re preemptively developing solutions for companies and then pitching to them

* So she would have submitted at least 200 resumes in her first month (assuming she took weekends off), and yet she couldn’t do that in even six months

* Not a good sign of employability / work ethic

* There are also AI services that automate this for you

THE CULTURAL TOLL OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION OR SPECIAL STATUS

* “Many people, regardless of race and gender, have been impacted by the aforementioned shifts in technology, industries, and presidents. But what has also shifted is the narrative about Black women. On Instagram, sociologist and New York Times columnist Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom called this trend “the Great Retaliation against Black women in public life.”

* This made me wonder about whether there were other instances in history in which once-privileged groups (be they privileged via affirmative action, some form of protected status, etc.) were eventually hit with backlash and/or retaliation such that they might have been better without the artificially privileged status in the first place.

* See below

* Most painfully, she does not seem to recognize what she was participating in: “We are no longer heralded as the virtuosos of American culture. In fact, the values that earned us such visibility in previous years—equality, progress, justice, democracy—are now threats to a regime set on dominance and a revitalization of white supremacy and patriarchy. It’s not far-fetched to assume that a Black feminist thinker isn’t an ideal job candidate. I may even be a liability for any institution looking to stay in line with this new status quo.”

When Helping Specific Groups Actually Herts Them

The typical pattern:

* A state or empire confers selective advantage (education, jobs, tax status, legal carve‑outs) on one group.

* The advantaged group becomes symbolically associated with the resented regime or policy.

* When power shifts, the previously favored group is framed as illegitimate beneficiaries and sometimes as traitors or foreign interlopers.

Backlash ranges from loss of status and exclusion to organized violence, and in some instances the net effect is plausibly worse than what that group would have faced had no special privileges marked them out in the first place.

Religious / Ideological favoritism

Puritans and other Protestants in England after the Protectorate

Under Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, Puritan and other “godly” Protestants enjoyed political and cultural ascendancy, while Anglicans and Catholics were constrained. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, many of these previously privileged Protestants lost power and faced legal and social reprisals, a dynamic often cited in discussions of how a phase of religious favoritism can trigger later reaction once the balance of power flips.

White Christian segregationist institutions in the US

For decades, white Christian schools and universities in the US South benefited from informal state favoritism and de facto protection for racially discriminatory policies. When federal civil‑rights enforcement eventually removed tax exemptions (as in the Bob Jones University case) and other privileges, the resulting backlash helped catalyze the modern religious right, whose leaders framed themselves as persecuted victims of an anti‑religious state, even though they had previously benefited from state‑tolerated discrimination.

European‑allied minorities in other colonies (general pattern)

Colonial powers frequently empowered particular ethnic or religious groups (as soldiers, clerks, or intermediaries), which then became lightning rods for hostility after independence. Research on “ethnic empowering policies” finds that groups colonially favored in bureaucratic roles are often politically excluded once a different group captures the post‑colonial state, suggesting that the temporary advantage can turn into long‑run vulnerability.

* One could argue that black women were a minority that was urban monoculture allied, acting as its agent, and now that the urban monoculture is experiencing backlash, they’re the lightening rod

Tutsi in Rwanda under Belgian rule

Belgian colonial authorities racialized and elevated the Tutsi minority as “superior,” reserving most education and administrative posts for them, and using Tutsi chiefs to enforce forced labor on the Hutu majority. After the late‑1950s independence struggle and the 1959–62 “social revolution,” Hutu elites seized power, carried out massacres, imposed systematic discrimination, and drove hundreds of thousands of Tutsi into exile, laying the groundwork for the 1994 genocide. This is a stark case where an externally created privileged status intensified later backlash far beyond what would likely have occurred absent that colonial favoritism.

Syria – Alawites under and after the French Mandate

During the French Mandate, minority communities (including Alawites) were heavily recruited into colonial military units, giving them status and a pathway into coercive institutions relative to many Sunni Arabs. In the post‑independence era, segments of these same minorities—now embedded in the army and security services—became associated with regime power, and have faced intense, identity‑coded backlash during episodes of revolt and civil war, illustrating how initial preferential recruitment can later mark a group as a legitimate target for revenge when regimes are contested.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] what’s fascinating is as soon as people realized, well, this is unfair ‘cause only black women have access to it, why don’t we just make trans people our community of power? They abandoned black women.

Simone Collins: But I have this great essay that I came across by one of the black women who was one of the few very elite beneficiaries of DEI, who’s now very angry about the beginning of the end.

Malcolm Collins: Simon, she, she actually said something that. Validated what I said going into this no. She said no, I paid off a large amount of my credit card debt. . What she is saying is that she, one didn’t pay off all of her credit card debt, which is pretty astonishing to have so much credit card debt that during a period of your life where you are having a financial windfall, you cannot even pay it all off.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because, oh my gosh. And just, I’ve decided that basically if I [00:01:00] were a black woman in America, or if like one of our daughters just was a black woman in America, I’d basically be saying like, go off the grade girl. Like it’s, it’s over. Just, I, I don’t know what to do.

‘cause we’ve already talked so much about like how the dating cards are stacked against them. Like if we’re just playing like a video game of, but based on reality style, stats.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: What do you wanna do if it’s a dating game is to be a black woman like anyone, but be a black woman.

And now,

Malcolm Collins: oh, black women are blurred on the dating market and the OkCupid stats.

They like, they’re one of the only ethnic matchups black women where their own race doesn’t even have a preference for them.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Pre has a preference against Yeah. It’s like just no one. So I mean, like, so, so yeah, like go live by yourself off the grid. Because now

Malcolm Collins: also, oh, you know how bad it is to be a black woman Yeah.

On online dating. Yeah. You, you literally from the OkCupid statistics guys who are like mad in sell whatevers.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Black women actually have a lower chance of [00:02:00] having somebody reply to them than white men do.

Simone Collins: I know, I know.

Malcolm Collins: Keep that in mind. That’s how bad it’s

Simone Collins: wait minute, wait a minute. Yeah. No, because like, white men, you think it couldn’t be worse?

Oh, it can be. Oh, it can be. You think you have it bad. You’re a white dude watching this show. You don’t even know. And, and now whether they, which is really frustrating whether or not they bought in to like all the sort of DEI stuff that had recently helped many black women in America. It looks like maybe the cards are stacked against them in the job market too.

And that sucks. Here’s some choice stats from an article I came across covering this. In December, 2025, black women were spending an average of 29.7 weeks or more than seven months unemployed. The highest rate among every group of women, and among all men, except black men who had a slightly higher average than 19th reports.

And then at the height of the summer volatility, black women accounted for 54 point. 7% of all female job losses despite making up only [00:03:00] 14.1% of the female workforce according to analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. And and what’s sick is that the racket that caused the backlash may be hurting a lot of black women due to special treatment that was largely exploited by only a very, very small portion of already privileged black women.

I. So what I’d like to do in this episode is go through the experience of one of these privileged women who has gone through sort of the DEI Renaissance and who very clearly financially benefited from it. And then now is experiencing the fallout as there has been backlash against it. And then I wanna look at examples of other instances in which presumably well intentioned though we’ll see.

It’s not really efforts to help specific groups have backfired, ultimately hurting them. Mm-hmm. And I think really the punchline of this [00:04:00] is what you actually see when you look at other or previous, like favoritism or affirmative action programs. They were never actually meant to help underprivileged groups.

And this is super interesting. I didn’t really put this all together until I just started doing research for this episode, but really what it is, is a dominant power. Be it like a regime or colonial power chooses a specific minority group to basically be its minions and execute its prerogative and then win that colonial part.

Power like either loses some footing or there’s a regime change. That group of minions that they had empowered disproportionately to do their bidding gets major backlash.

Malcolm Collins: And we see this with Jews a lot.

Simone Collins: You see this with Jews. You see this, I’m gonna give examples from Rwanda. I’m gonna give examples from Protestants in England.

I, so I, I, what I’m pointing out though is what we don’t realize [00:05:00] is that black women in this, in this instance, were the minions of the latest colonial power. We literally call the, the progress pride flag, the colonizer’s flag of the urban monoculture, how

Malcolm Collins: Fascinat point,

Simone Collins: the urban monoculture had appointed black women as their minority group minions to execute their bidding and had installed them system systematic position to power.

Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and, and what’s fascinating is as soon as people realized, well, this is unfair ‘cause only black women have access to it, why don’t we just make trans people our community of power? They abandoned black women.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and, and well, and then since there’s been at least a partial regime change, both of those groups have seen a major falling out.

And what’s. What sucks, if you, like, let’s say you’re, you’re a Tootsie in Rwanda or you’re, you know, some other group that has been given disproportionate power by the regime in charge or by a, [00:06:00] a foreign colonist, right? That foreign group or the regime that’s in power, like they’re sitting high, right?

They’re above the fray, right. They’re, they’re fine. Like, okay, we, we’ll go, we’ll, we’ll go with toot season in Rwanda. And, and, and for context, I’ll, I’ll just jump forward to like this example of what, of what happened because I think not that many people are familiar with Rwanda genocide ‘cause it’s kind of depressing. Belgian colonial authorities radicalized and elevated the Tootsie minority as superior reserving most education and administrative posts for them. And then using Tootsie Chiefs to enforce. Basically it forced labor on the WHO to majority. And then after the late 1950s there was an independent struggle.

And in the 1959 to 62 social revolution, who to elites seized power, carried out, massacres, imposed systematic discrimination, and drove hundreds of thousands of Tootsie into exile. And that laid the groundwork for subsequent 1994 genocide. So the tootsies went from being like given all this privilege [00:07:00] and extra education and kind of given the power to like anchor a lot of people.

And then in the end they got genocided. And it’s just a really good, it’s one of the more extreme and stark cases where a very externally created privileged status than intensified into backlash. That was really violent. But this whole time. The Belgians are fine. Right. And it’s not like all tootsies were like they actively choosing to participate to participate in this.

Right. You know, this is over multi-generation, like in 1994 is when the genocide took place and a lot of this stuff was happening in the early fifties. So like kids of people who had like no participation in this are getting caught up in it. And that’s what really sucks about this, you know, favoritism.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Is like a very small minority of, of the, of the, of the, the minions, we’ll say the colonial minions gets to benefit from the favoritism, the DEI, the affirmative action, the whatever it’s right. And then everyone else in their group pays. [00:08:00] A very big price, typically dis I would say, a disproportionate price.

And I just didn’t realize until today that that is probably happening to black women. But I have this great short little essay that I came across just a little, a little treasure by one of the, one of the black women who I would say was one of the few very elite beneficiaries of DEI, who’s now very angry about the beginning of the end.

And so what, what happened basically was the purse, which is a, a sort of financial management economics focused substack, published a guest essay, a guest essay from Ali Bowen which is titled Black Women. Aren’t just unemployed, they’re being erased. And I’m gonna share some choice quotes from the article.

If you’re,

Malcolm Collins: I wanna go into a few other challenges that black women have in regards to this stuff.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: One is, one is cultural. Yeah. And the other [00:09:00] is what’s the word I’m, I’m looking for? So one is called Oh yes. The other is in terms of

Simone Collins: like, the fact that immigrants are so much better off than like in descendants of slaves.

Malcolm Collins: Well, black women who grew up in the United States. You typically, when you’re sort of building your personality, as we talk about, you have a sort of theory of mind that’s constantly running in the background and determines what you think about things. So what I mean by that is you experience some environmental stimuli, you experience some thought, and you’re trying to decide what emotion you have in response to that.

What you do is you say you, you, there’s a part of your brain, your, your consciousness that references this theory of mind that’s running and is asking, what does somebody like me feel about this? Because you can feel different things that we tell this, like Adam’s family theory. If you want to interpret, you know, wilted rose’s positively you can, it’s, it’s completely determined on how you see yourself and what sort of person you see yourself as.

Mm-hmm. Most people really only have as a choice for this internal [00:10:00] model of themselves, a trope that they are aware of in society because they do not have, it’s, it’s, it’s very rare for somebody to have these self. Knowledge and ownership to be able to construct their own trope of themselves completely a priori.

And the problem is, is that when you are choosing that trope, you know, or that trope is sort of choosing for you, it’s chosen from a number of tropes you see in your society. And this is where like representation does actually matter. The problem is, is that black women do not have many tropes to choose between.

And the ones that they do have to choose between are generally pretty unlikeable and toxic.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so when they’re choosing, like, what is it like to be me? Like what’s my personality to black women? Yeah. They may see black women astronauts now, and they may see black women lead characters now, but they all have like one of two personality profiles constructed by woke people that in real [00:11:00] life are actually quite toxic to be around.

Mm-hmm. Right. You know, the, the self-assured, sassy puts down men, you know, now they don’t, they didn’t decide to do this on their own, but they saw, oh, this is the way a black woman acts because this is the way black women act in, in the media. I have seen in the, in the world that I’ve seen right, of they don’t see some alternate archetype within their family or within their church, which you used to have other black women archetypes, but society,

Simone Collins: I mean there are many out there.

I mean, I think one. That is more common because I, I’ve watched a bunch of shows ‘cause they frankly have the best fashion that have like mostly all black. Oh. Either mostly or all black casts is just like the long suffering, doing it all for everyone, woman. Which I don’t know, I don’t see as like par particularly negative.

That’s, that’s

Malcolm Collins: not forever. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Maybe inadequate delegation, but like

Malcolm Collins: that’s a, that’s a common one in, in Latin [00:12:00] American culture too. Yeah. Yeah. But the, the, the second thing I was going to say is it’s a black cultural problem. So we’ll do a separate episode on this someday where I’d point out that.

Black Americans took a lot of their culture. From the culture that I come from, the Scots Irish culture, they are culturally very, very, very similar. As I point out, you know, I’ll, I’ll,

Simone Collins: I find that surprising that you’d say that. I mean, because I feel like if you look at the culture anthropology of, of black Americans, there’s so much like French influence.

That’s why you see a lot of French influence in black names in America. You’ve got the whole like New Orleans. No, the French

Malcolm Collins: influence is highly affectatious. It’s not actually in their culture. So if I am going to describe a stereotype that is offensive of two groups gathering, okay. Okay. They are out barbecuing.

They just got back from church. Oh. They are [00:13:00] loudly listening to music that is descendant from country and blues music of the

Simone Collins: right. This is like exactly what like we would do.

Malcolm Collins: They are eating. Fried chicken

Simone Collins: as would

Malcolm Collins: we, and eating watermelons,

Simone Collins: which we would too. Yeah. Okay. Actually, nevermind.

Yeah. Okay. Fair.

Malcolm Collins: What two groups have parties exactly like that?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Rednecks, the, the group that I come from and Black Americans they are highly resistant to people who think like, they, they feel an in an infectious anger to people who think they’re better than them. Mm. They are both highly conspiratorial groups, very obsessed with conspiracy theories.

Yeah. Authority. They, they both are anti-authority groups. They are both unusually violent groups. Mm-hmm. But. The one thing that the black culture did not copy over, which has unfortunately hugely damaged them, is a reflective disgust for people showing off wealth or status. Mm-hmm. And as such black culture unfortunately has [00:14:00] a problem with investing too much of the money they pull in, in signs of wealth and status, particularly expensive ones.

Where you will see even like famous rappers rent jewelry, so they can look even fame wealthier than they most, like most rapper jewelry is rented. Did you not know that? And so that they can look even that much more wealthier than they actually are. Like they should have all of the money they ever need, and yet they need to show off and even exaggerated and fake.

Iteration of their wealth which is obviously like hyperoxic, which puts them in a uniquely financially insecure situation, but continue.

Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. I, sorry, I just now need to look at Julie Rental because I. That’s fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: Well, actually another place you see this in black culture is in the ways that blacks form gangs.

Blacks never formed [00:15:00] a, a gang that was as hierarchically organized. Successfully as the Catholic gangs, like the Mob or the Mafia or MS 16 or whatever, they, they have had large gangs like the Crips and the Bloods and stuff like that. But they function more like, backwards gangs, which would be like groups with lots of internal warring factions mm-hmm.

That are highly decentralized and often at war with themselves as much as the outside. Which is why when you would think that blacks should have more domination over criminal enterprises, it’s often other groups of immigrant gangs that have more domination over the large organized criminal enterprises and the black gangs that are usually exploited by those gangs as foot soldiers.

Simone Collins: Okay. Interesting. Right. Anyway, yes. I’m going to, I’m going to read this, this woman, this woman’s Substack article. Black women aren’t just un unemployed, they’re being arrested first. She, she lays out the landscape. I’m not gonna [00:16:00] read, I’m gonna read most of the article ‘cause it’s pretty short, but I’ll, I’ll go fast.

So she sets out the landscape since last fall. General unemployment rates in the US have ticked up 4.4% from 4% at the start of 2025. At the same time, the jobless rate for black women has surged from 5.4% in January, 2025 to a high of 7.5%. Last September, economists Eco, sorry, economists, economist Katisha Roy estimates that since 2020 the real unemployment rate for black women is 10.23%.

Which is really high. There have been several factors linked to the disproportionate destabilization, the huge AI push, which is automating jobs that humans were once paid to do is one last year’s mass. A cut of government jobs where black women are represented at twice the rate as the, in the private sector.

And then the abrupt elimination of DEI programs under the current Trump administration are notable others as one of those black women sideline from the job market. This crisis feels personal. I didn’t [00:17:00] know. I just finished reading that, that, that, there were black women are employed in, in the government at twice the rate as a private sector.

That is crazy.

Malcolm Collins: Well, because they, they benefit from DEI more in the pri in the government than in the private sector. And I, I wanna note here, first of all, the mere fact that we are seeing a statistical fallout from the number of jobs that were cut in the government. Yeah. Indicates that Doge was actually effective, because a lot of people have been like, no, it wasn’t effective.

They just rehired them all as contractors. Mm-hmm. And it’s like, well, clearly not, are these black women wouldn’t be having an employment issue. Right? Yeah. So they must be rehiring the ones who weren’t there for DEI reasons, which sounds like a good thing for me. Yeah. The second issue that we’re dealing with here is when you create something like DEI, you create a perception on the market especially if they’ve gone on to like higher positions than they would otherwise be able to get within the government, which mm-hmm.

They, they did get mm-hmm. That you just cannot trust their competence. If somebody meets x racial heuristics, right? Mm-hmm. And black women have unfortunately [00:18:00] been left in that position sort of on, on the job market where somebody is just going to, even a black woman who’s just being sane about things like, oh, I bet you she had it easy, you know?

Because

Simone Collins: yeah, yeah. She probably wasn’t subject to the same. Pressures. And I honestly, I, I didn’t believe, I didn’t believe her. I was like, that can’t be true. But it, it is true that data from federal EEO reports and labor researchers show that black women are roughly twice the share of overall labor in the federal and broader public sector employment.

So they’re about 11 to 12% of the federal workforce versus roughly six to 7% of the civilian labor force. So,

Malcolm Collins: and I, I’d also point out

Simone Collins: just, just to point out, their share in the private sector roughly represents their share of the population. So it’s not weird, it’s not like they’re discriminated against in the private sector.

It’s that there’s clearly positive discrimination of some sort in the public sector, even though title let’s see, title seven [00:19:00] of the Civil Rights Act makes it illegal for any employer, including the government to make hiring decisions based on race, whether that’s against a particular racial group or just something else.

And so something’s kind of weird happening because. You don’t get like. Disproportionate in per the population in, in government without some form of discrimination, I think.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But the, the interesting thing, another interesting thing we’re seeing, I think yeah, that’s gonna really hurt black women is that you have a new sort of favored class within the urban monoculture.

And you can see this in groups that are extremely woke, you know? Yeah. More woke than government, which is something like the video games industry. Mm-hmm. In the latest video games industry report of the employees who were under 40 40% of them, that’s like 20 times the rate of the general population were gay or L-G-B-T-Q in some way.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that population, the, the larger alphabet two population that really anyone can identify into, if they feel like it, as I’ve pointed out that technically by LGBT rules, Simone and I are [00:20:00] trans. Because I don’t identify strongly with my gender, which makes me gender queer. She doesn’t either, like, I just don’t care.

It’s, I don’t, I do not see why people think really don’t care. Yeah. I cannot emulate why a trans person would care enough to undergo major surgery if I was a girl, I’d just be like, whatever, I’ll, I’ll live my life as a girl now. I’ll figure it out, right? Mm-hmm. And that makes me trans. So it is funny, the, the mere fact that I can’t understand why a trans person would care, puts me in their weird gender queer umbrella.

So, trans individuals. So, so anyone can identify, I could identify as I wanted to. Which gets me an advantage in the video games industry. Well now, you know, I don’t need to fill these spots with black women. And so a lot of black women were falling into the boomer woke, I guess I’d call it like the older version of woke, which you see within the government and stuff like that.

Ah, which people haven’t gotten the message that the rules have changed about who you favor. And what’s worse about Boomer woke is boomer woke jobs are the jobs that are the easiest to automate with [00:21:00] ai. You know, it is the, the, you know, the pencil pusher at the DMV or something like that, which it’s the very first jobs we should be automating.

Yeah. And those jobs were disproportionately held by black women.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of even like the private sector favoritism, we’re, we’re gonna see that in her reflection o of her personal experience. So she wrote, I’ve been self-employed since October, 2019 when I was laid off as senior entertainment editor at Nylon.

Following an acquisition and rebrand, I got lucky and sold my first book just months later, a collection of essays about black feminism at the intersection of hip hop culture and class. I spent the next year living on my advance, hold on freelance commissions. Hold on. I’m gonna tell you the title of the book and I’m gonna read a description and then you can comment because that might give you more.

And once my manuscript was done, I pivoted to copywriting. So, just before you comment on how, like, the now dying publishing industry disproportionately favored certain types, and this was one of those, you know, [00:22:00] I mean right. The, like, the publishing world was a big arm of what we, we would call the colonizers of the urban monoculture.

They were hiring their chosen minion class, which included black women and trans people. She was one of them and she benefited from it. Her book, just so you know is. One. It, it looked pretty successful. It got, it has 351, almost five star reviews on Amazon. It is titled Bad Fat Black Girl Notes from a Trap Feminist.

Bit from the description, bad fat black girl offers a new God I sound so white. Offers a new inclusive feminism for the modern world. Weaving together, searing personal essay and cultural commentary. Bowen interrogates, sexism, fatphobia and capitalism, all within the context of race and hip hop.

In the process, she continues a black feminist legacy of unmatched sheer determination and creative resilience comment.

Malcolm Collins: [00:23:00] So, one where was she laid off nylon, right? Like woke, industry woke job. And you can tell from what she wrote, but

Simone Collins: point out, she created just, I wanna point out right. The, the, the British Empire, you know, the whatever, like Belgians.

Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: There were above it all. While there’s genocide taking place. The, the people who sold nylon, sold nylon, made money.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: You know, like, all these people are above it. The colonizers are not in the freight. The black women are catching strays at the end of all this. Just wanna point that out. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: What, and this is why it you know, it, they, I, I, I get that, but we’re seeing a collapse of that empire, right? Yeah. We’re seeing media companies and a lot of this has come downstream of, as, as people keep mentioning the shutdown of United Aid after United Aid Aid

Simone Collins: shutdown. Usaid,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. USAID

Simone Collins: United,

Malcolm Collins: Tons of media outlets, but like, like woke media outlets have started going [00:24:00] bankrupt all of a sudden out of nowhere.

And like, it appears that it may have been funding more than we realized in terms of the woke media landscape. And so now you know, entertainers like us are able to replace him.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I still think that largely they’re fine. The, the, the, the colonists many of them have quietly pivoted in a different direction.

So anyway, no,

Malcolm Collins: they’ll eventually get screwed, like when

Simone Collins: people No, they’re just gonna die. They’re also very old Malcolm, so Oh, true. They’re fine. They’re retired. They’re, when

Malcolm Collins: people stop buying, I, I, no, actually, I’m gonna push my card here. Okay. When people stop buying woke video games, eventually the entire video game industry in America collapses.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They’ve cashed out already. Malcolm, they spike nylon top, they cashed out.

Malcolm Collins: There’s a lot of woke foot soldiers that are not black women. Simone, they, there are a lot of trans woke foot soldiers. A lot of

Simone Collins: girls. No, the, the trans, I would say that the black women and trans people were, were among, like, they were, they were both the [00:25:00] tootsies, you know?

And, and at the end, I can give more examples of groups like this. I’m just using them because, you know.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, continuum.

Simone Collins: She continues The opportunity to transform my writing skills to branding and creative strategy was afforded to me on the heels of 2020s, racial justice reckoning, widespread reminders that Black Lives Matter forced white people to confront their own biases about people of color and actively move past them to be better allies.

When it came to black women specifically, this was easy to do because we were in the final years of hashtag black girl magic era, spanning the 2010s to early 2020s. This period amplified how important black women are to American culture. The general sentiment during this era was to trust black women as we are, as we were venerated for our expertise on politics, education, beauty, entertainment, and so much more.

I didn’t know about Black girl Magic ‘cause I am not that terminally online, I guess. But it was this it just celebrated basically like. Honestly, I think it was kind of a mechanism of the immunization [00:26:00] of, of black women for the colonizers flag, the urban monoculture. But it was just like, oh, black women are leaders in beauty and strength and creativity and, and oh, black women and girls have done so much.

And the phrase began as Black girls are magic. It was coined by Khan Thompson around 2013, and then it was shortened into a hashtag just just for those who didn’t

Malcolm Collins: know I wanted to know. But you can see, I mean, I, I, that’s a, a racially supremacist term, you know? Yeah. Like it’s, it’s, it’s racist, it’s white power.

It’s bad, especially if you’re a group that is getting favor was in the industries that you’re working in when you are a group with. Demonstrable systemic power over other groups. That’s why.

Well,

Simone Collins: also it seems like tokenization, like you need your magical black girl. Like what?

Malcolm Collins: I mean, they, they wanted that.

And I think one of the things about all of this, and this comes to what I was talking about earlier in terms of the archetypes available to them. Hmm. This woman, like, clearly she was captured by this and made herself into this. Well,

Simone Collins: listen’s. The thing is, is of course she leaned [00:27:00] into it. It made her a lot of money, like it was her livelihood,

Malcolm Collins: but.

She still, I think any sane person reading this takes joy in the fact that somebody that is this much of a racial supremacist, this much of a, a genuinely vile human being from the stuff I’m, I’m hearing about her, if a white person was doing this stuff, talking about white lives mattered and stuff like that, I’d be like, you’re, you’re like a really vile person and I’m glad to see you fail.

And I feel the same way when I hear about her as, as do a lot of people. So that’s another problem in this is, is they like, haven’t learned from or looked back. And said, wow, you know, I really took for granted when I had systemic power over other people, and I was abusing that for years of my life.

And I even wrote a book about that like to dance on the graves of the, you know, people who were not able to, to rise at those companies, who were not able to, for the book Deal. Penguin, for example, recently put out [00:28:00] on a number of their websites that they only want to take book deals from women and people from like rarer racial groups.

And then if somebody has, it’s

Simone Collins: like a Pokemon card.

Malcolm Collins: It sounds overly European. I think they even gave an example like Brad or something. They wouldn’t Oh. Look at their books, they wouldn’t look at their transcript.

Simone Collins: I weep for all the, the, the indigenous I don’t know Maori people

Malcolm Collins: named Brad. But the point you’re being is the, the racial discrimination in fields like the one she was in, is very, very blatant and often transparent within these organizations.

You know, when I talk about the hugely overrepresentation of L-G-B-T-Q people in hiring in the video games industry that is because of discrimination, right? Like that clearly other groups are being discriminated against for that group to have so much positive discrimination within them because they don’t make up a disproportionate amount of video game fans.

Everybody knows video game fans are predominantly straight white men, right? Like, that’s, that is the group that, that’s why they always get mad at them and say, I hate gamers and everything like that. And so, [00:29:00] that, that’s another challenge that black girls have is they just didn’t have a lot of ways of