Today we have a great conversation with Monica Wisdom

A vibrant and engaging conversation unfolds as Monica Wisdom takes her listeners on a journey of self-empowerment and collective strength for Black women. With a warm and inviting tone, she expresses gratitude for her podcast community and reflects on the importance of sharing personal stories in safe spaces. The episode carries a profound message about recognizing one’s own power and the necessity of standing tall in one’s identity amid a world that often seeks to marginalize. Monica articulates her vision of empowerment as a holistic experience, encouraging listeners to embrace all facets of themselves — the creative, the passionate, and even the angry — as valid expressions of their identity.

As the podcast progresses, Monica provides compelling examples of Black women’s influence in various domains, from business to politics. She reflects on the Shea Moisture incident and how the backlash from the Black community led to significant changes in the company’s direction. Similarly, she highlights Dapper Dan’s resurgence in the fashion industry as a testament to the creative genius and resilience of Black culture. The episode wraps up with a powerful reminder that Black women have the ability to create something out of nothing, urging her audience to embrace their potential and build their own empires with confidence and pride.

Takeaways:

• Black women have the power to create and lead their own empires in life.
• It's essential to recognize our accomplishments and share our stories with pride.
• The importance of building safe spaces where our voices and stories can be shared.
• Being aware of our unique place in society allows us to advocate effectively for each other.
• The journey to empowerment includes embracing all aspects of ourselves without fear.
• Black women historically push progress in society, shaping the future through collective action.

Links referenced in this episode:

• blackwomenamplified.com

Hello and welcome to the Black Women Amplified podcast.

This is your girl, Monica Wisdom, and I hope that you are doing incredibly well.

I tell you what, I have a great conversation in store for you today.

It's going to be me and you having a conversation about becoming your own empire.

And I'll get more into that a little bit later.

But I just want to say thank you for supporting the podcast.

I hope that you were able to listen to the previous episodes with our incredible interviews, as well as if you were able to venture over and listen to the Shaping Freedom podcast where I was interviewed by Lucian Basquiat.

Lisanne Basquiat, I had a very incredible conversation with her.

I told my story, things that I've never shared before in life.

And oddly enough, I wasn't nervous or scared.

She created a safe space for me.

I know that there are lots of podcasts out there that are very iffy and salacious and trying to get people.

But I found someone who was equal to me in the understanding that people need safe spaces and open hearts in order to share their stories.

So I'm truly grateful for Lisanne Basquiat for asking me to be on her podcast.

And I can't wait for you to hear our conversation that'll be available in the next couple of weeks.

It's like I told you before, it's gonna be a two parter.

So if this is your first time listening to the Black Women amplified podcast, welcome.

Make sure that you go over to blackwomenamplified.com and check out our Internet home.

We have a shop there.

We have a blog there.

We have services.

It's a fully expanded experience into women's empowerment.

So that goes from.

I look at empowerment from a holistic perspective.

First, owning our power and expressing our power.

I'm not the girl who believes in the soft life.

I'm a girl who believes in ease, but expressing our power as well.

All the things we are, all the things.

I don't want to diminish any part of who we are as black women.

So feel free to express your creative side, your business side, your sexy side, your angry side, your pissed off side, all your sides.

Live it.

Live it out loud.

Let them know you are here, honey.

Yes.

So make sure you check out the website.

I tell people, just bookmark it.

And if you can, be a black women amplified warrior and email it or text it to some of your friends and let them know that you found this great space to hang out that is safe, welcoming, and just full of love for black women.

Now, today's conversation, be your own empire.

Now, I was going to talk about something completely different, but y'all know God be downloading some stuff, and so I'm here to share the information that was downloaded to me.

What do I mean by be your own empire?

Here's the thing.

I've been thinking about this whole election thing and how people have labels on who is what, what side you're on.

Are you the left, the right, all the things.

And I had to sit and ask myself, now, what am I on a side?

I am.

I'm on the side of black women and black people and black communities.

I'm on the side of humanity.

So I think about when I vote.

Now, I'm a registered Democrat, but I vote for us.

I vote for me.

My God kids, my baby cousins, my cousins, my aunt and uncle, my community, and just marginalized people.

I don't like to use the word marginalized, but people who look like me, that's what I vote for.

And typically, the Democratic Party is closest to what I desire.

Now, do they give us everything?

Absolutely not.

But at least I know that, my God, kids can live their fullest life from this perspective.

Not so much from that perspective.

So when I thought about it, I said, what does that mean, Monica?

It means that we are a special force that most people don't know about.

You know, most of us, many of us don't know ourselves.

Let's start there.

But most people, we're misunderstood as black women.

And I think about that in the context when people say, hey, I don't really know Kamala Harris, but here's the thing.

Gen X women, she's just like all of us.

We don't talk about ourselves.

We don't walk around like Josh and talking about, look what I did over here.

Look, I'm this and I'm that.

What we talk about is our work.

We talk about our families, and we talk about the people that we love.

That is typically our conversation.

Well, hey, guess what?

It's time to change that.

That is my mission.

For us to get louder, to really stand in who we are, because we deserve to be in these spaces.

Why?

Because we have a lot to do with why these spaces are created.

The one thing I know for sure is that black women are incredibly special.

The way that we think, the way they respond, the way that we take care of people is very unique.

And here's the thing.

People want to label us strong black women.

But what?

We are survivors.

We every day are surviving a nation that looks to diminish us.

But we are thriving anyway.

And we're a young nation.

I mean, if you just think about it, the civil rights act was passed in the mid sixties, and from then, our community has thrived.

When they leave us alone, we thrive.

If they give us the space to grow, we thrive.

And that is something that is very special and unique about us, that we are able.

We're modern alchemists.

We're able to create something out of nothing.

And I love that idea.

And it's a philosophy.

If you read this book called the Blue Ocean Strategy, blue Ocean strategy talks about in a sea of red, be blue, because there's nothing over on the blue side.

Everything is crowded.

Ideas and duplications and imitations and replications are over here on the red side.

Why fight and compete?

Black women are always on the blue ocean side because we weren't given the tools and the legacies and the inheritance that other communities are given.

And this includes black men.

But we're going to talk about black women right now, because we often talk about our men.

We are there for our men, we support our men, we love our men, and we fight for them fiercely.

So right now, I'm going to talk about us.

So if this is uncomfortable to you, just sit, get your glass of wine.

A glass of wine.

I'm just going to be about 15 more minutes.

But I really want to get into this conversation of how we have the ability to create something out of nothing.

And we have a very unique vantage point of life.

We were in proximity to the people, right?

We have worked for the people throughout the generations, and we had to have a unique vantage point in order to be safe.

And when I think about why we have this unique vantage point, it's because I know people always talk about enslavement, but we were raised by the kids of Jim Crow where looking somebody in the eye could be the end of your days, right?

When saying the wrong thing could destroy your whole family.

So I understand why we just don't talk about ourselves.

But that is also a part of our trauma, our generational trauma, not speaking about our accolades about what we've accomplished, how we think, how we do things, all of those things.

We will talk about our family, our friends, our job, our sorrows, our organizational people or church all day long.

But let somebody ask you about yourself, or let somebody ask you about what you need.

Silence.

And I get it.

I'm one of those people.

I mean, being on a podcast, talking about myself has been like a great leap for me because I'm comfortable not saying a word.

Now, I can help you build out your thing, but me building out my thing, it has been a great emotional olympics over here.

The great emotional olympics.

It has been twists and turns and flips and dips and swimming laps and crying and all the things.

But what I know is that God gave me a vision, and I'm fully on that path right now.

It took me a couple of years to get here, but I am here, and I'm ready to go.

And I know that is the same for many of us, especially Gen X people.

We have given so much to everybody else because we were given that assignment.

Go.

The civil rights busted down the doors, but now we had to go create the path.

Keep your head down, be seen and not heard, and do everything in excellence.

My father always told me, if you can't do it right, don't do it at all.

So I am fiercely working on every detail of everything to make sure that it's right, to my own detriment.

I should be winding down, but I'm like, okay, let me just put in one more hour.

And I've been working all day, so I say all that.

To say that that is a generational thing for us.

Millennials don't have this problem.

And Gen Z is like, after 20 minutes, it's time for a break.

So when they say that, they don't understand Kamala Harris, I understand her, because she's just like us.

So here's the thing.

In order for us to move forward, you know, we have a big election to get through.

Big election.

And I invite everybody to get in there early if they can.

If you can take your ballot early, I would suggest you do that.

But we live life from a very unique vantage point, and we are the ones who push progress in this nation.

Every bit of this place was pushed because we pushed it, you know, from Harriet Tubman to Rosa Parks to Fannie Lou Hamer to many women who courageously stood up and said, no more.

That is also what is in us.

And it's time for us to move from this idea of living a life of service to being our own empire.

It's time for us to build a new vision for ourselves, one where we fully recognize our power.

And here's the thing.

Let me give you three examples of our power so that you can kind of understand what I'm talking about.

I'm going to talk about sham moisture, dapper Dan and vice president Kamala Harris.

The first one, Shea moisture.

We all love Shea moisture.

Shea moisture was a product line.

We can get it at the Walgreens, at the CV's, at the target.

And it had the story about the owner's grandmother and how these were products that she formulated.

Had the beautiful story, had the picture of his grandmother, beautiful ingredients, all the things.

Well, there came a time when he wanted to scale his business, which is normal.

In order for you to have more, you have to be bigger.

In order for you to be bigger, you have to acquire money.

So he went after venture capital money.

And when you go after venture capital money, that's similar to, like, shark Tank or, you know, you see all these VC people.

So VC people, what they do is, like, philanthropy for business.

So they give you these.

Well, not us.

Don't give it to us.

Look at the stats of what they give to us.

They give us, I think, less than 1% of all the money that's given out.

So he was going after the VC money, and in order for him to get the VC money, he had to appeal to a broader, more general audience.

What does that mean?

White folks?

You had to make sure that these products were good for white people.

So nobody knew that this was going on.

Everybody just knew that there was a new ad campaign coming up.

So we're all gearing up.

We can't wait to see what they're going to do next, because this is a product line that was made for black women, marketed to black women, and grew because of black women's money.

Multimillions of dollars went directly from black women into shea moisture, period, full stop.

So he hires instead of using a black company that knows the brand, is familiar with it, and has connection to it, he hires Vaynermedia.

Who is Vaynermedia?

Vaynermedia is Gary Vaynerchuk.

And if you're anytime online and you see this russian guy cussing, talking about he wants to buy a base, football team, all the things.

So he's considered this marketing guru.

Well, he made a huge mistake, okay?

In the owner's attempt to diversify his company, he had to diversify his marketing.

So they created this huge marketing campaign, and everybody could not wait to see it, because we knew it was just gonna be the bomb.

This is our company, built by us, and we're ready.

So we're all, you know, they're amping us up.

This is gonna happen on this date.

You can't wait to this.

You can't wait to that, the day comes, everybody opens up their apps to see what it is.

And this company, built by black women dollars.

Here we are looking at a white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Now what?

Now?

So, the ad campaign was cool, but it didn't speak to us.

So black women went crazy.

By the time we got finished tweeting, facebooking, blogging.

This is before TikTok was popular.

So instagramming, all the messages, all the anger, all the rage, and all the pain, it devalued the company.

Shea moisture.

Shea Moisture had now been devalued.

So the man who owned it was forced to sell it.

We did that.

I don't think it was our intention to make him sell it, but we also didn't know he had investors that were interested in partnering with him or giving him this money to expand his company.

So he came on, he came out, he apologized, and then he explained that there was this full 40 day campaign that gave a.

Each week or each day or whatever, there was gonna be a different photograph of a different woman who used the products.

And everyone's like, why don't you just say that?

You know, just like, we have a rapport.

Just be honest with us.

But Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't hurt.

From what I've seen, I I don't see black people on his teams, so they wouldn't have known that this would bother us.

And he hires a bunch of young people so generationally, they probably wouldn't have thought anything of it.

So I don't blame the team.

So, anyway, long story short, he had to sell.

But what he did in order to make it up to us is he took the money from Shea moisture, and he went and he opened up two entities.

He opened up the.

He went and bought Madam CJ Walker's house and opened up an institute for entrepreneurship for black women.

And then he bought Essence magazine, so it would be back in black people control, which I was fine with him buying it, because Essence magazine was started by Black Mendez, and he gave equity into the.

He hired the women to be on the board and to run the company, and he also gave equity to black women.

So it was.

It's black women owned again.

So that's the first example.

Shea.

Moisha.

The second example is Dapper Dan.

Dapper Dan is a designer, an incredible designer.

And he is responsible for these iconic hip hop looks in the eighties and the early nineties.

And he is the man who created the iconography for Gucci.

So you see all the G's on the purses and you see all the lvs on the purses and the different brands.

Well, he actually created that.

So years into this, the company sued him and he had to go underground to do his designs.

So first he started working with gangsters, and then he started working with hip hop.

I'll just leave that.

I'll just, I'll just leave that right there.

So anyway, years later, everybody watches the fashion shows.

Now the fashion shows are online, so we can all see them.

So if you go to Louis Vuitton on YouTube, you can watch their fall show, their spring show.

Same thing with Gucci.

So then you've got all of these fashion bloggers who go to the shows and take the pictures.

Well, Gucci did a line, and everybody was like, oh, my God, that's so fly.

But if you know hip hop, you know that that's dapper Dan's work.

They didn't give him credit for it.

They literally copied his iconic work, put it under the name of Gucci, and they didn't think anybody would know.

Black women knew black women.

Got on the Twitter, the Facebook, all the social media, and started blasting Gucci.

Blasting Gucci.

Gucci had to apologize.

And let me tell you what happened.

Now, remember, we're speaking about the power of black women.

We've got Shamoitster had to sell a company, and then he apologized by buying two more companies.

Second thing, dapper Dan Gucci gets called out.

Gucci is an italian designer.

They were like, oh, my God.

They honestly probably didn't know.

It was probably one of their young designers was like, I'll just.

They won't know.

Well, they knew.

The Gucci family flew to New York to meet with dapper Daniel in Harlem.

And not only did they apologize to dapper Dan, now, mind you, remember, he got sued out of business 30 years prior.

Not only did they come back and apologize, but they gave him an atelier.

What is an atelier?

An atelier is the ultimate design house for a designer, meaning he has access to all things Gucci to do whatever he wants to do.

So they send him fabric.

They set up this beautiful place for him, designed for him to design and do whatever he wanted to do.

So now he's a part of Gucci, and Gucci's a part of him.

Was a full circle moment.

But remember, I'm talking about the power of black women.

Let's talk about number three.

Number three is Kamala Harris.

Now, is it because she's black?

Well, yeah.

Is it because she's worked hard for everything she has?

Yes.

But the reason that she is vice president, and I don't know if everybody knows this story.

I think I've told it before, but in the context of this, we're talking about the power of black women.

And he got to the south.

Black people, predominantly black women, showed out.

Once he got to North Carolina, he swept through the southeast.

Because we said, this man, the orange will not be president again.

Not on our watch.

The same thing we're saying now, not on our watch.

Everybody else is like, oh, I'm undecided or I'm not going to vote.

I'm not going to do this.

We're not going to talk about that today.

We're talking about the power of black women.

So he swept through the southeast, wins the nomination, and we say, hey, Joe, hey, that is when win with black women was born.

There was a gathering amongst black women, of women who were in media, women who had positions, all the things.

They wrote a letter to Joe Biden and said, hey, you won this nomination because of us, and these are our demands.

They demanded that he choose a black woman as vice president, that we will no longer be bypassed for this position.

They gave him a list of women, and there's a group of girls called the colored girls.

This is their choice, their name.

It's not a racial thing.

This is just what they call themselves.

They're of a certain age, and I think it's five of them, and one of them is Donna Brazil.

They have a book coming out.

I need, I need to get her on the podcast.

She's funny as hell, but there was a letter of 130,000 women signed this letter.

And they said to Joe Biden.

Joe Biden, here's the thing.

We got you the nomination, but we will turn our back on you for this White House.

He chooses Kamala Harris, power of black women.

And then when he steps down, the same thing you better not.

Everybody was saying, well, we need to have an open, open process.

Now, let me say this.

The process was open.

The other people running did not qualify to be nominated.

There's a whole process you have to go through in order to be able to be nominated.

You have to be able to be, I think I'm using the wrong word, but essentially certified in each state to be able to get onto the ballot to do this.

So nobody else qualified but Kamala Harris.

Why does she qualify?

Because 100 could, because 81 million people voted for her to be vice president.

United States.

So she already had the ground game.

She had already run for president.

She was already a senator.

And now she's vice president, United States.

And people like Nancy Pelosi and others were saying, well, we need to maybe look at some other people.

We got three months, people, 90 days.

Who else we gonna look at?

Okay, let me, let me regress, because we're talking about the power of black women.

Black women.

The night that Joe Biden stepped down.

And then he recommended, he didn't nominate Kamala Harris because that's not the process.

He endorsed her.

And when he endorsed her, there was a tweet put out.

There's a call.

When with black women, again, puts out a call.

44,000 people showed up to the call.

And let me tell you, I was one of those people.

So let me tell you what was going on.

If you were not on the call.

If you were on the call, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

But there was only room for a thousand people because, and this, this is the twofer.

Zoom only allows so many people.

This.

They had room for a thousand people.

Zoom opened it up.

They got on the phone and woke the CEO of Zoom up and said, we need this space open.

It still wasn't enough.

They opened it up to 50,000 people, I believe 44,000 people on that call that night.

We were on that call all night.

And in the midst of two and a half hours, less than 2 hours, there was $1.4 million raised for Kamala Harris.

Star Jones headed up the fundraising piece.

She set it all up because that's what she does.

That's part of what she does for a living is she raises funds for different organizations.

And then Donna Brazile, who was the head of the DNC twice, who is politically just rooted in politics, gets on the phone and starts calling delegates.

Hey, this is what's happening.

This is what's happening.

This is what's happening.

Do we have your support?

And everybody said, we'll think about it.

So the process began that night.

That night it was evident that Joe Biden had better had.

Because remember, we're talking about the power of black women.

Then that call from black women has spawned out to almost 200 other factions around the nation.

Cat ladies for Kamala.

Asian people for Kamala, south asian people for Kamala.

White dudes for Kamala, republicans for Kamala.

Da da da da da da.

Power of black women.

And so I give you three examples.

Shea Moisture, dapper dan, and Vice President Kamala Harris.

These are three, just three, of many examples that show our power when we collectively come together and work our magic.

And so what I'm saying to you is, while everyone is telling you to take your cape off, I just want to tell you it's time to exchange your cape for your throne and sit down and rule your own empire.

Ladies and the men who love us, thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Black Women Amplified podcast.

Please be a black women amplified warrior and share this episode with a couple of your friends.

Put in your group text and let the people know that there is a place that loves, adores, sees and acknowledges us in a very special way.

Have an amazing evening and take the time to take care of yourself.

Take off your cape and have a seat on your throne.

Until next time, this is Monica wisdom and have an amazing day.

God bless.