Issue 287: Business and equity

Hello everyone!

We’ve got a CRC meeting today. It’s always a lot to push out a newsletter and do regular news coverage for NJ.com on the same day, so we’re publishing this newsletter ahead of the meeting.

I’ll send out the CRC meeting recap through NJCI after it debuts on NJ.com to make sure you all get it.

Take care and until next time…

— Jelani Gibson

Q&A with …

Bill Davis

When I went recently went to an African-American Chamber of Commerce meeting that discussed disparities for Black business, I learned that many of the solutions put forward there were similar to what’s already being done in the cannabis space.

There was also a certain amount of consternation among people who knew the issues the cannabis space is dealing with and wondered whether or not the proposed solutions were going to be good enough to get things moving in a productive direction.

So, for today, we’re going to check in outside of the cannabis space so we can also reflect on what other industries are doing, what they’re learning from the cannabis industry and vice versa.

Here we continue our Q&A series this week with Bill Davis, who’s served as an Africana Studies instructor and academic advisor at Rutgers University.

The Cannabis Regulatory Commission has put in place a similar licensing scheme to some of the things that have been discussed here. That same commission however, has faced resistance from some municipalities in taking that same social equity approach. It’s also running into headwinds with a Senate president who called for getting rid of those commissioners and doesn’t agree with them fining some of the largest companies in the space.

That interaction takes place within the context of a majority white legislature in a diverse state that’s wedded to a home rule policy that has been criticized for exacerbating wealth segregation. What do these factors say about the overall political nature of this majority liberal state and its relationship with Black people?

It says we’re expendable.

Slavery was a business. The prison-industrial complex is a business. Cannabis has also been posited as a form of reparative action to heal those harms. Explain those links and its connections to the state of Black business in New Jersey.

The correlation is that New Jersey was the last northern wtate to end slavery. New Jersey was the only northern state to vote against Abraham Lincoln. New Jersey has some of the largest wealth gaps between Blacks and whites in the country, the highest disproportionate rate of Black men being incarcerated in the country. You see the homeownership gap.

New Jersey is one of the richest states in the country. How do those things filter through? New Jersey leads the country in Black maternal deaths. There are some specific issues that require reparations from the state and various businesses that benefited from slavery. Most Black-owned businesses as I mentioned earlier, do not have enough sufficient capital be able to sustain themselves.

It’s not only how many millions of people died during COVID, how many businesses died? The major businesses that have sufficient enough capital to be able to sustain that circumstance? Very few Black businesses. Part of reparations for me, would be how we invest in Black-owned businesses.

I heard you mention legislators of color and their obligation. Do you feel like legislators of color are meeting that obligation?

No. Not at all.

Why not?

Just to be straight, I think many legislators of color are aligned with the party rather than in line with their constituents. Let’s take Murphy as an example. Murphy got 94% of the Black vote. but the issue of the reparations [committee] has not gotten the green light yet in New Jersey.

Mainly because [Assembly Speaker Craig] Coughlin (D-Middlesex) doesn’t want to bring it up for a vote. So the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice among other organizations are trying to find a way around that. But the Black Legislative Caucus is not pushing hard enough in order to get that done. If we were pushing hard enough, some of these statistics that we see here now wouldn’t exist.

The promise of the Democratic Party is to get more diverse people in positions of leadership. Whether it’s incidents like East Orange with Leroy Jones lobbying for cannabis, or the Paterson police takeover, people of color can run into frustration with political leadership of color. In a business context and outside of it, what does that say about the limits of diverse representation in high places?

It says two things. One, sadly, is that people can be bought and paid for. Secondly, as a community we are not paying close enough attention so that when people are bought and paid for, we can get their ass out.

What type of political mobilization do you think is necessary?

I think it’s a question of finding candidates who are not completely aligned with the Democratic line. The Democratic bosses are trying to appease Murphy, many of them are trying to support his wife who doesn’t have any political experience and was a former Republican.

Many of the Black Democratic participants are trying to align themselves with Murphy, because they think that Murphy might realize something for them. So it’s going to take some courage for people to be able to withdraw from this dependency on the Democratic machine and make a decision that we’re going to fight back even if we don’t win.

So you’re talking about a divestment of sorts from the Democratic Party?

Absolutely. You hear about accountability all the time, but the question is are we holding people accountable who are supposedly representing us? I just don’t think that we are.

What do you say to the counter-argument that the candidate that is the most electable is the candidate that will work the most pragmatically for your interests? You saw this with Black voters and Biden.

When Howard Washington became the mayor of Chicago, he went against the Democratic machine. When Ras Baraka ran against the Democratic machine of Newark, he ran against the Democratic machine. So there are examples within our lifetime of politicians who have run against the machine and won. They did the groundwork that was needed in order for it to change and those are the candidates and efforts that we need to be engaging more.

The county bosses decide who’s going to be on the line. Prepare to rebuff the county and support candidates who we think are not interested in the county line.

How do you provide support networks for the inevitable retaliation that comes from going against that sort of system?

They had Frederick Douglass up on the [conference] screen. The Underground Railroad ran through New Jersey and Harriet Tubman made stops alongside places in New Jersey. There has never been a time when we’ve advanced and there have not been consequences, which is why we celebrate the people who were prepared to deal with those consequences.

I’m not ever going to tell people that it’s going to be easy. But I would say the question at the end of the day is what are we comfortable with?

If there are efforts being made, we have to get more participation at the grassroots level in order for these efforts to accomplish what we’d like to see.

There was only one Republican in the state of New Jersey that got more than 50% of the Black vote, do you know who that was?

No, not at all.

(Former Gov.) Tom Kean. On his first time, Kean went against his political base and supported New Jersey divesting from businesses in South Africa. There was an increasing number of Black New Jersey high school graduates, but a decrease in Black New Jersey college enrollment. Kean started what’s on many campuses now, the pre-college programs to get high school students on college campuses so that we can increase Black enrollment.

We are clear about our interests, we just need people who are actually prepared to push back.

• Time machine to 1985: Blacks Help Elect Republicans In New Jersey, Cleveland; Young Professionals Seen as ‘De-Aligning’ From Democrats, by Washington Post’s Milton Coleman: New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean (R) was reelected with 60 percent of the Black vote, improving his performance with blacks sixfold over 1981. Meanwhile, Cleveland Mayor George V. Voinovich, another moderate Republican, won a third term with more than 80 percent of the Black vote.
• If New Jersey Legalizes Mushrooms, East Coast Could Follow, Says Weed Lawyer, by Forbes’ Iris Dorbian: If the bill does pass, New Jersey would become the third in the country after Oregon and Colorado to legalize psilocybin. It would also become the first state on the East Coast to do so. Could this milestone cause a ripple effect, with other East Coast taking a closer scrutiny? Robert M. DiPisa, a New Jersey cannabis attorney at law firm Cole Schotz thinks so. He also speculates that for this bill to be re-introduced, there must be some support for the measure, paving the way for its eventual passage.
• Cheap Weed: NJ cannabis consumers find lean winter selection, by HeadyNJ: Good news: The most affordable legal weed in NJ this week is from a woman-owned small-business source. Brute’s Roots still has a $156 ounce of sun-grown, in-house ground/shake flower with tax included. The drawback is the deal is only found at their single store in Egg Harbor Township in Atlantic County. There is plenty of Multi-State Operator (MSO) Ayr and Ascend shake or old cannabis flower trimmings for about $240 to $280 an ounce at many New Jersey cannabis dispensaries. Similar products are $120 an oz in the Pennsylvania medical cannabis market and other states. Many cannabis dispensaries had nothing for sale under $300 an ounce. So, the price is mostly out of reach for the majority of NJ cannabis consumers.
• DEA, Attorney General Miss Deadline to Respond to 12 US Senators on Cannabis Rescheduling, by Cannabis Business Times’ Tony Lange: The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Attorney General Merrick Garland missed a Feb. 12 deadline to respond to 12 U.S. senators regarding the DEA’s cannabis rescheduling process, multiple congressional sources confirmed with Cannabis Business Times. Warren’s office confirmed with CBT on Feb. 13 that the senator had yet to receive a response from the DEA. Also, district staffers from Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J. and Alex Padilla’s, D-Calif., offices, as well as a staffer from one other signee’s office who spoke on background, confirmed that their senators, too, had yet to receive a response. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., spearheaded a Jan. 29 letter that she signed, along with 11 of her colleagues in the upper chamber, and sent to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram and Garland, who heads the Department of Justice.

For cannabis recruitment solutions please contact Deneen Wright, dwright@njadvancemedia.com or call 201-324-5092.