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In this raucous episode of From Chains to Links, hosts Ify and Kelly are joined by technologist and long-time social justice advocate Jamaa Bickley-King who rips the band aid off and shares his thoughts on the role media has played in our democracy, the limitations of artificial intelligence, and makes bold predictions about what will be extinct in the next decade. Along the way, he offers advice on how we can best harness the power of technology to advance the Black community. Buckle up for a lively and insightful conversation that will have you laughing and shaking your head the entire episode!
Welcome back to the show. I’m here with my sister wife.
Everybody’s trying to wake me up. How are you?
I’m wonderful. How are you? It’s been a great day.
It’s been a great day. I’m having a little wardrobe malfunction.
What’s your shirt say?
It says Decoration 26 because ain’t nobody scared of Project 2025.
Ain’t nobody scared. Not near a person.
Nobody scared. The words looked a lot smaller on the shirts but you came to the revolution. The words are small. It’s just that other things are big. We thank God for where all big things come from. All things big and small.
All good and perfect come from above.
James 1:17.
Listen from the father of life.
It’s a big message. We have some big topics.
That’s right. We have a big platform for this message. Don’t we?
To join us on this big message platform, we have a power conversation with Mr. Jamaa Bickley King.
Welcome.
Thank you all so much for having me. I appreciate it.
The Intersection Of Technology And Social Justice
Kelly gave me permission to share very quickly how I met Jamaa. When I met Jamaa, one of my clients was an organization called Moms Rising. One of their leaders also happened to be advising the movement for Black Lives. A new friend of theirs space, she was like, “Would you like to come into this place about how we build data inclusion among movement leaders?” I was like, “Who’s doing this work?” Now this was way back, I guess at this point during the Man That Shall Not Be Named 45 administration.
2016.
I met Jamaa and he had this amazing program called Change the Game. The theory was, got to stop talking about this conversation about why wouldn’t we get more black people to vote, but on the flip side, we were seeing a record number of people in the streets responding to protests and movements and what have you.
History was like, if we get those people that people trust to be connected to the data tools like the van and all these things that are super expensive and not necessarily readily accessible to people that are not in traditional data and civic engagement spaces, then we can really change the game. We were like, bet.
We started doing all the stuff, press, and everything’s looking great. Identified all these like top movement leaders across different races and causes. Charlottesville happened. Charlottesville happens and the question is, are people going to travel? Are people going to come to DC to do this thing? Nobody backed down. Like that tells you, movement people were, it’s also 2016. We were like, “You don’t have to come. We don’t know about safety or security.”
People were like, “I ain’t never scared.” Everybody showed up and we all showed up during the week when it was a week after Charlottesville. DC was on high alert because they said that white supremacists were going to be coming and marching that weekend, literally where we were doing the training. Jamaa showed up and was like, “I want everybody to just know that if we’re going to ride until dawn, we’re going to do this together.”
I was like, “What’s happening?” Now open up your IBMs. That is Jamaa in a nutshell but then on the flip side, he also comes from a very respected civil rights family. His aunt was the statistician in the Brown versus Board of Education case. His grandfather was a Brown attorney. We’re beyond excited for you to be in this conversation about the future of black politics because I think you come into this space with a lot. I know that was a lot. Feel free to tell us whatever formal title you want to tell us, but we don’t want you to lose your job.
That’s important, you got to protect that badge.
The Future Of Black Politics And Tech
However you like to describe yourself, but as you think about the cross between data, tech, movement, and politics, what does the future of Black politics look like for you? For us?
I get in that, just like, I wear many hats in the progressive movement. It’s like I’ve done all the tax statuses, partisan, C3, C4, even corporate, even international. On domestic daylight, they call you in to like to do the data stuff and build out systems and stuff like that. That’s one of the few actually classically trained engineers that was in politics because most people come to this stuff. They come in from the field and they evolve into data which isn’t a problem actually favor those people over the people who come in from the Ivy Leagues because they usually tend to perform better believe it or not.
Where I sit because I support a lot of C4 organizations that do the organizing work that are doing racial and social justice, the ones that are the intersection of underserved communities and data and technology and infrastructure. While everybody’s trying to go to the next big tech thing and they jump on different hype trains Two years ago is like, “Everything’s going to be blockchain.” I’m like, “Blockchain is dumb as dog shit, but okay good luck with that.” Now everybody’s on the hype train like, “AI is going to fix everything that shit can kill a terrorist.”
I’m like, “That’s the dumbest shit ever but okay.” As we get to these that we’re still on the hype train for AI, I don’t believe it’s going to do those types of things. It will have some purchase I believe in some respects, but we’re still trying to figure out how does this fits into the program. How does it fit into engagement? How does it improve things? Does it provide force multiplication of effort in order to implement any type of political, civic engagement, policy, whatever had? I think we’re still trying to figure that out.
I actually don’t believe we’re going to get to those moments where like even where we revisit blockchain and we’re going to revisit AI after I think the hype train is over. That’s usually when black people like to take it and then they make it really dope. Once the like profit movement out there and somebody like what a clear mind looks at them like, “I think this thing can do this.” People say, “Jamaa, why do you say that?” I’m like, “People forget.”
They’re like, they invented QR codes in the ‘90s. It took a whole ass pandemic and huge leaps in cell phone technology for camera phones in order to make it as widely available and useful as now. People like, “They putting QR codes on billboards in the car, but people like click.” They’re like taking pictures while driving because the technology is that evolved. We’re going to need to have other things catch up to it and try and have actual use cases on it instead of people imagining and making leaps in their minds where it’s not connected to reality.
The Rise Of AI And Its Impact On The Market
I love where this is going because I can rip off this all day long. I love what you said about the comparison between blockchain and AI. For me, the big difference is the ways that the market has responded to AI is very different than any emergent technology that I have seen in recent years. The other piece of that is I’m keeping an eye out for the emerging technology that’s going to allow Back people to get in on the ground floor. I’m curious if you have thoughts about that.
I do. There’s usually such a high wall that they have to come financially in order to be the first and then even get resources to make the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4rth and 18th mistakes on that stuff, as opposed to non-melanated counterparts who seem to have just endless resources and people let them just futz around forever. When you have a conversation around the AI stuff and blockchain, all that stuff comes down as actually hardware. People don’t realize there have been no improvements in coding for AI in decades.
The only thing that’s changed is the hardware computing power and it drafted off of the blockchain stuff. When blockchain came out there, you couldn’t even get a graphics card or any Nvidia stuff and they kept trying to make more and more powerful cards and more and more powerful processors so people could do more bitcoin mining. When bitcoin dropped they realized like, “We got all this excess hardware and computing power.” All of a sudden they’re like, “We can use this on AI.” They just have parallel computing power.
That’s what’s making AI work. We have so much powerful hardware and everybody who’s coming up with the AI whatever company is like a GPT API call dressed up as a new thing. All it does is like API GPT and now it can tell you if a dog is thinking it’s like all this stupid shit. It makes no sense to me, but people are giving a lot of money for it. I’m not going yuck there yum, but I have said at my company they come to me like, “Jamaa, we got this great idea. It’s going to be like we’re going to put AI on top of a blank voter file then a question mark. Democrats win.” I’m like, “That makes no sense.”
I’m like, “I’m just done with those people now.” I got to the point where I told my CEO, “I’m not taking any more of these calls. These people are dumb as dog shit. We just need to let this shit go.” Like you said, but what if somebody actually said something good? I’m like, “Look, I will take that hit and I will own it but I have a really good feeling that I’m going to be okay.” It’s not impressive whatsoever.
The Real Opportunities AI Presents, Beyond Just The Hype
Let me ask you this. When you wade through the hype, what is the real opportunity for Black folks if we’re able to early on board? At BIA, we are an AI power organization and we’ve seen how just the utilization of chat GPT has increased productivity across our team exponentially. I’m curious beyond the hype, where’s the opportunity?
The opportunity I think is with, it’s going to be in, I was thinking I was telling us like earlier when I had a conversation there, I said the thing about AI, the big thing is training data sets. The conversation about that is making sure that if we are going to be providing those data sets to AI to improve it, there’s a conversation around data sovereignty. This is where African Americans and African American data need to really figure itself out. We haven’t been able to be sovereigns on our information and data.
I think we are so firmly integrated and for lack of a better term, colonized with our data when it comes to these things. When they feed it into an AI, it’s owned by another firm. It’s going to be your data basically pushed in the machine because somebody else owned it. The good news and bad news is that a lot of our data is actually institutionalized. It’s not a whole bunch of it is actually like written down because historically we used to like we tell stories. That’s how like a lot of our information is shaped from generation to generation.
I learned my great great grand aunt’s sweet potato pie recipe from my aunt. You cannot write it down. She showed me the written down version and it was like mountain measurements and like a handful of sugar, a pinch of nutmeg. What the hell does that mean? It’s like not a tablespoon, it wasn’t a cup, but this is how we pass on that information. If we ever got to a point where we can actually take a census of ourselves and collect the data, then we can go ahead and start training AIs and try to be a counterbalance to the biases that I believe are going to be caked in.
I think that the Black community does have to be engaged in this conversation because the fight now is going to be over algorithms, it’s going to be a fight over training datasets, and also about data sovereignty and communication of how people are holding our information and using it. One thing we don’t look at is the terms of conditions. I’m trying to find a therapist. Everybody’s like, “Why don’t you use better help as the app online?”
I’m looking at terms and conditions, I’m like, “I cannot use this.” I don’t know who’s owning this data. Particularly my therapist data, where I’m going to be saying something I pretty sure don’t want to be held somewhere. I don’t care if you’re trying to build a therapy AI. You don’t know. You don’t know what’s in there. Zoom finally fixed their terms and conditions on a lot of this stuff. You have to read the front page, and nobody looks at that stuff.
Nobody does.
This is the conversation you have when people are saying these things, and when you even talk, it’s packet data that’s stored and the servers, where is it held? Who is holding it and what they’re using it for? For the longest time, I wouldn’t even use ancestry because I’m like, I don’t want them to hand it over to police unless they got a warrant. I don’t want you arresting a distant cousin of mine because you think that he did something, and you all been trolling through all the Black DNA wants to figure out where is. I need protection. I am harping back to the data conversation in many ways, but it is very much like when you have a conversation about AI, the coding piece is not where it’s going to be at. It’s the data that feeds it and it’s the algorithms that figure out how to do stuff.
Wait, can I? I do want to say that there’s a large range of issues that people are concerned about when it comes to that protection piece. I do believe there’s that we cannot get so lost in the conversation around biases that it prevents us from growth and participating and actually doing something. I’m glad that you brought up Ancestry.com because I first came intimately into AI when I was working at the Innocence Project and upon learning about wrongful convictions and even evidence that is placed in these spaces we would give advisement to people not to use Ancestry.com.
This is before the big commercials came where they’re talking about some, “I love looking back and seeing my grandfather in the military.” All these heartfelt ways of connecting with family but that conversation about who owns it, it wasn’t clear that law enforcement was not going to be using that information. Now, obviously, and Kelly talks about this a lot, that has a particular sting for Black communities in ways that may not be felt with other communities because of the history of the way our information is used in general and the way that wrongful convictions and various forms of public and social lynchings happen when it comes to our information.
I love that you’ve raised data sovereignty because there actually are a few BIA members who are interested. I think BIA is also as well as to the ownership of our data, the housing of our data, which also could come with its own input practices and behaviors around data that I think could look dramatically different, but also I think it is the merge of like there’s a problem, but that’s also a market. What it would look like for us to own data sovereignty and it’s a normalized practice. I don’t think people are saying, “I willfully give my stuff to X, Y, and Z.”
It is the passive practice of because this is the way we’ve been learned to engage in these tools, then that must be the way that is done. That’s not necessarily the case. We just don’t bring up that other forms of behaviors and storage are possible. I just appreciate that when you said data sovereignty, I just wanted to make sure that is a space that people feel like they should feel they don’t need permission to go into it and not stop in the bias, but then it’s like, what can we do about it.
Yeah, and they need to understand that data sovereignty is a very broad topic. It’s like music, art, all of these things that go into it. When you put it online, it becomes into the data sovereignty conversation. There was a guy out there who just got busted by the feds because he was basically taking music and then running it through an AI, and then he was running up Spotify stuff. This dude was like basically just trolling, taking over people’s music, doing fake music, and then putting it out there and making a whole bunch of money and like, fleecing Spotify.
Personally, not too mad but still it’s the idea that somebody could be out there, you could create a song, and then somebody could come to buy it on the internet, run it through as a training data set for AI, and build off of the top of your labor, and you would not know about. You got like, “This song sounds slightly familiar. I thought it was something like I did.” The computer is actually just juzzing it up. Again, I don’t want to be like, “AI is all terrible.” It can be used to help shorten things, prompts for documents, and stuff like that. I have another organization and we had interviews for candidates.
Sadly, some of these young brothers were like, “I’m going to use chat GBT to answer the questionnaire.” We’re at the point where you use the GPT search thing where you run it through there and it’s like 70% of this document was GPT. It’s like, “Brah.” You ask them, “Did you use any of this for GM?” “Of course not.” I’m like, “You lying muck.” Clearly not going to be endorsed. It’s like this is where we are now where it’s like the cat and mouse game to figure out what’s out there. While GPT does shorten time like that, you got to understand because of how it is, you lose individualism.
You lose the uniqueness of the conversation because GPT is trolling across all these different documents, synthesized into like this is common amongst all of them. You should do what’s common to them. After a while, like, you basically are now just parodying everybody else out there. As a prompt to start it is great, but you need to put the individualism on there. It’s like at a certain moment, I think when we come full circle where creativity becomes a premium which is where Black people live. The unique creativity of coming up with something new.
We’re going to let all these people like, sure, you can do the whole like, mic document thing and you’re going to have mass produced like thousand documents that are basically like everybody else on the internet. You can get this nice bespoke artisanal document that has some creativity in it. They got some new shit you ain’t never heard before. They got a little special sauce. Like, “There’s a lot of flavor in this document.” I’m like, “Yeah, I made it myself. I let that motherfucker bake.” Instead of that person out there like, “I’ve just hit GPT and just like run these joints out.”
I think that there is like, it’s going to be interesting to see how this flows moving forward. I think that I’m interested like what happens to the workforce. Where it’s like are they doing more or are they getting lazy? We don’t know the answer. It’s great if they’re using this to like save time to do more but as somebody who was raised on like encyclopedia Britannica is in the house. Watching Britannica generation give way to the Wikipedia generation, which is now giving way to the Google generation and now the chat GBT generation. It’s like, “Are we going in the right direction? I don’t know yet.” It’s going to be interesting how that plays out.
I have so many thoughts.
What Needs More Attention
I see the similarity in that. I’m a sister who travels with many soapboxes. I always have a soul box in my bag, but I love to get up on my soul box and go to town. I have the sense you are like a kindred spirit.
Did you say light-skinned?
No, not light-skinned.
It sounded like a light-skinned kindred spirit.
You beige brother.
That is true.
It was a long day.
Yes. It was.
It is all good.
Many other light-skinned too. That’s what they thought they heard. I was trying to find my words. My brain is crunchy.
It’s been a long day. It’s all good.
Kindred spirits. I would imagine you have multiple soul boxes that you likewise travel with. I’m sure you have several in your bag pocket right now.
I have never had an unexpressed thought. I don’t think I’m going to start now. You just like, “Where do you want to go?”
I want to know, tell me about the thing that you wish people would stop talking about and the thing you wished got more airplay and you’re like, “Why are we as a community not talking?” Those are two questions.
In a political context?
Whatever is in your heart.
I would like to hear it in a political context.
Yes. That’s the thing.
You might want to direct this because he can get ugly.
Let’s go.
In a political, what do I want people to know?
What do you want to stop talking about and talk about more?
We’ll say stop talking about it. There are so many. I need to focus and come up to one. Let’s start with what I wish they would talk about more. I think they need to talk more about how there is the media’s inability to truly ask the failure of the fourth branch of government. It is literally at the point where it’s like, we need to have a real strong conversation about the people who are there to help give us our information. How it’s changed over. It’s like it’s the evolve like we’ve done focus groups, there are people who are Zoomers, they only get their news from social media, which is scary.
What it means is they’re already getting just curated information. Curated information to get them to hold attention, not to inform them, not to make them better, not to make them more intelligent. It’s not a very sexy conversation. It’s very much like a get off my lawn type of conversation but is at the crux of so many issues. Watching the news media do the stuff that they do is very painful. I think people are having misconstruing how it’s done. It’s like, there’s this point in the electoral cycle where you’re going to have people saying they’re trying the bag for this person or they’re in charge of that for a Democrat or they’re in the bag for a Republican.
What you have to understand, the media is there for the horse race. They’re going to load balance it. They’re always like, if one group goes up, they’re going to try and shit on the one going up and then try to boost the one at the bottom because what they want is a photo finish. They don’t get any purchase off of a blowout. They want it to be close. That’s problematic to me when it gets to the point where you guys are overindulging on the crazy shit. I watched that Trump question on childcare that happened recently, he had an economic form.
It was the craziest shit I’ve ever seen in my life. The AP news from Reuters was like, “Trump says tariffs could help with childcare.” It’s like, “You’ve been backward so far to obfuscate how crazy that shit was to the point where I’m like you’re in the bag for that person.” I’m not the person that throws that in like, “You guys in the tank.” It’s like, you tried to be so impartial. You worked so hard not to tell people the truth on what happened to the point where you look like you’re working for that dude. It’s like, “Look if they made like a quip or they stuttered or some shit.”
You can like you got to say that stuff, whatever. They made like a foible or a hot mic or they might’ve said something and pronounced it incorrectly. You don’t have to get into that but to watch a good three minutes of just straight gibberish of repeating themselves and sounding absolutely bad shit crazy. You’re like, “He said tariffs and shit in childcare.” It’s not even close to what happened there. Similarly, you have the Pavlovian words that they give to get a rise out of people. You want to get a rise out of Black people and voters, you say voter suppression.
You can say like, “Take away their vote.” We immediately are going to go onto the offensive. Whether that’s real or not, we won’t know it, but they know how to say certain words that we key off to make us go. We try to make fun of the writing, saying like they just say this one word, and they go all crazy. I’m like, no, we got our own words too, that could just set us off in a second. This is what they use, and they do this stuff to sell papers. They don’t do it to better the economy, they don’t do it to inform. It used to be that reporters were some of the smartest people in the country.
They had to take information and synthesize and write it down. Now you get like, this person looks attractive. That’s literally the bar, and they can actually read words and even they don’t have to do that very well, to be honest. We saw some just stuttering like, “She’s hot.” I’m like, “Really dude?” That’s the only line they got. I’m like, this is bullshit. I’m watching this going there in a conversation about politics. What’s happening now, as I think, as we’re getting into like the next generation that, people are conflating being famous with power.
That’s really a problem, especially when you’re younger. It’s like, they’re saying like, I’m being seen, thus I’m powerful. That’s not true, but that’s how they’re seeing the world because they’re like, in their defenses, like we saw this dude become president and the only thing he had for him was famous. He wasn’t smart, wasn’t intelligent, he wasn’t nothing. That person was just famous and he became president. I can see how you make that connection, but it’s wrong. This is where we are and I’m seeing like when you saw these kids going for likes, being on social media, going on YouTube, being on Twit, being on Insta, being on insert thing that my old ass is not on right now, but I’m sure the kids think it’s dope.
All those things. They’re just going into it and they conflate it with power and I’m like, “No, it’s not.” In fact, in many ways, it’s the opposite. Sometimes they’re not even the only ones. Like how many people we know in politics, especially Black politics, they go from organizing the street, talking head, now I’ve made it. There are so many of those people, not going to no names. There are so many of those people in our own space where they have that issue.
Part of it is because it’s easy to be on TV, but it’s hard to organize and do the work, raise money, organize a team, implement the program, do quality assurance, pay everybody, make sure they have healthcare, do all the other people stuff. I can be on TV and say, “This is what I think.” Probably get paid more for less work. I get it, but we need more of the unsexy hard work. Our systems for cultivating have been at your feet and died.
Why don’t you tell us how you really feel?
I mean, you did ask me. This is what I do.
What Might Become Outdated In The Next Decade
Tell us something that’s going to be obsolete in ten years.
Obsolete in ten years?
Let’s bring in the futurism piece.
Let’s see. Obsolete in ten years. Possibly linear television.
Say more.
Even though people say that radio’s dying, I think there’s still a place for radio and people said it’s dead. I think that linear television is going to be “ghettoized” is like this is the place where you put like the cheapest of things.
What is linear television?
It’s like cable where you have like the television on there and like you actually watching it like my grandmother. It’s like regular cable, regular broadcast TV. It’s like where you actually have a schedule thing along or the SVU is now on from noon to midnight on TBS. That type of stuff. That’s linear television. You have the on-demand television, which is more fractured and it’s like Netflix, it’s Peacock, it’s YouTube, it’s all these other things out there. I think that linear television is going to be, as programmatic, it’s going to be more difficult to access, and in ten years it’s going to be like move away because more people are cord-cutting.
Definitely, there may not be any landlines talking about. I’m like, people are telling me that because we sell voter file data and when you register, you got to put your phone number on it. Like, “Jamaa, do you have any cell numbers?” I’m like, “Who is putting down their landline on the voter registration form? Does anybody know anybody who got a landline?” They are kept around for nostalgic purposes and sentimental reasons. Like my grandma, like, “I got to have a landline.” I’m like, “Sure, granny, knock yourself out.”
For reasons, I just want you to be happy because everybody else is like, “You got a cell phone.” It’s like 97% of the country has a smartphone, and 99% has a cell phone. It’s ubiquitous now. I think it’s going to be linear television. I think that we’re going to be looking at things like phone booths. We don’t have those anymore, like talking about. Answering machines that actually have machines. I did a phone bank like five years ago and it was a whole bunch of zoomers and stuff like that. They’re like, “We had to stop the phone back multiple times because they were calling the ARP.”
They’re like, “I think this thing is broken.” They never heard a busy signal before. They didn’t know what it was. They’re like, “We had to stop them.” Like, “When you all hear the sound, that means it’s busy.” We had to stop it a second time because they had like the old answering machine where it was actually a cassette tape. It’s like beats and it’s like spooling it. The kids were like, “I don’t know what this is.” I’m sitting there and I’m thinking to myself, “I find your youth offensive to me at this moment.”
I’m wondering if our Gen Z content team is like, “What is that busy tone?” Like, I know you all thinking that.
This is so young but yes, these are things that you find to see them being outmoded. You’re wondering if they’re going to come back. I mean, I found out that people still sell pagers. I didn’t even know that was still a thing.
It’s a little retro. I think it’s fun to have a pager.
Do you have one? Is this a confession?
How Technology Impacts Mobilization Strategies
There’s nothing wrong with a pager. I had to be careful. There’s nothing wrong with a pager. I think it’s fun sometimes to see 911 or whatever but this isn’t about me. I just feel uncomfortable. As you’re talking though, obviously we’re all going to age, and you work in civic engagement, then it really has me thinking about what mobilization strategies, as Kelly was talking, I was like from like this GOTV conversation that we always have.
What then modes of organizing are also going to be outdated. Who’s preparing for the new form of advanced digital? Also advanced like door-knocking strategies because it’s in some weird way, we’re also going to need a lot more in-person engagement still there to deal with some of the complications that come with digital technology, including a lot of the different types of bots, fraud, whatever that are having people distrust these tools as a form of engaging for civic engagement purposes.
We’ve gone full circle now. It’s like you’re seeing even sales come like Verizon and then they go door to door now. When files came to my neighborhood, they sent people door to door like, “Do you want this type of stuff?” We’ve come full circle and they’re like they’re a whole ass tech company. It’s like being online is their thing. It’s like literally their business. It’s like, “Do you want to be on file?” I’m like, “Sure.” We’ve come full circle with that as we’ve gotten more digital and analog is coming back because digital is so crowded.
It’s gotten so cheap. You have to understand, like when you’re sending a message or a video, an ad, you’re in competition literally with the entire internet. What you can get in front of somebody when you’re in their face the door. When you can get them drive time to work. People were shitting on billboards. Like billboards work. People see that stuff because it’s on their path out there and it can get really sophisticated. Now I have seen programs where people have cluck track the GPS, clustered their model people’s cell phones, find what roadways they go on, and they put the billboards right there.
It has gotten to the point where there’s a high level of sophistication to even get to the analog conversation. Usually, if you do it right, there’s this virtuous cycle of like bricks to chips and chips to bricks, where you go to analog ads, where you send in the flyer and it feeds the digital stuff, and you keep on having this virtual cycle where you churn it back and forth into like real world to the digital, instead of these full digital pieces, which are becoming more and more expensive. Now on the flip side in the African American community, we often have two over-indexing analogs.
We got yard signs. Our advertisement is I got business cards and I’m sending them to my church. I’m like, “You all need to get on this programmatic ad stuff quickly.” It’s like, I question your model of business development when it’s going to be like yard signs on the following corners and out there with like business cards to people who are already in your circle. That lack of sophistication is limiting our ability to make it to the next level, to even become like these mid-tier, ultra-high net worth people of color who are in the $3 million to $8 million range, which is where we want to be.
People say that’s a whole lot of money, but if you think about it, that is a car garage with a gas station in New York. That is a person with like five coffee shops in a mid-time city. That is somebody who owns 2 to 3 McDonald’s. This is something that a black person can get to with two hands in a dream with saving, scrimping, and a little bit of luck. You can build up to that, but you cannot get that with yard size and card. You need to actually do some advertising.
I feel like we just got it started and now we got a rep. Man, my mind is still spinning a little bit.
These are all my conversations like we’re going to talk for five minutes. Three hours later.
To be clear, his sweet potato pies are like a DC staple. It’s a cult.
You ain’t bring us none?
I just came in.
The Challenges Of Funding Innovative Ideas
It’s a cult. It’s actually but you already knew if you were going to drop it, shout out to your auntie, but we’re going to eat some sweet potato pie. You have literally 30 seconds to answer this question. Move the beard out of the way. When you hear the term right to innovate, what comes to your mind?
Right to innovate? Money.
He’s like, that was easy.
Money always comes to his mind.
I mean, it’s like, how are you going to innovate without cash? It’s like, everybody talks trash to treasure. I’m like, that trash still costs money.
Trash is actually a lucrative business.
For real but it’s like finding access to capital and resources in a way where we don’t have to give up the store and we don’t lose our ability to self-determine.
That’s a good way to stop the conversation for now, but I feel like we’re going to continue this at some point in time. Thank you, Jamaa.
You’re welcome.
Next time over sweet potato pie, obviously.
Literally and some milk, oat milk.
We lactose intolerant.
This is my friend, Jamaa. That is it.
It’s been a pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you guys so much.
Thanks everybody for joining us. This episode of the show. As you can see, we’re having way too much fun and we’re completely sober, which is the interesting part. Join us next time as we traffic in all things, innovation, opportunity, self-determination, liberation, and economic justice, and apparently not be as scared of Project 2025. Thanks you all. We’ll see you next time.
Important Link
About Jamaa Bickley-King
Jamaa Bickley-King, is the Chief Solutions Officer for TargetSmart Communications LLC and has worked in progressive political data and technology for nearly 2 decades. He got his start working for Mark Warner’s 2001 gubernatorial campaign.
He worked in his administration developing new and different ways to display the data of the Virginia Government. After leaving the Warner Administration, he has worked at all levels of politics and civic engagement from partisan players to non-profit organizations for the next 20 years. His clients range from the NAACP, to the DNC, to the Prime Minister of Trinidad Tobago.
In 2012 for the NAACP, he was chief technology architect for their 2012 voter registration program that yielded 800,000 registration card submitted, with 600,000 completed. He developed a gap closing political data and technology training in 2017 targeted towards people of color, in order to get them entry level jobs in electoral work. The training had an internal goal of having 50% or more those trained be women, and we ended up with over 70% of the attendees be women with all involved employed.
He is also the Co-Founder, President, and Chairman of the Board of New Virginia Majority, and thanks to its talented staff and leaders it is the premier community and progressive movement centric organization in the country.
Jamaa holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech. Jamaa is a huge science fiction literature, fantasy literature, and comic books fan, and in his spare time he bakes pies.
