Entrepreneurs focus on wealth, fitness to promote health equity

By Pulane Choane Contributing Writer

“More than 30% of the black population in Minnesota is obese, and 72% are likely to have diabetes. In addition, 56% of Minnesota children are obese, and those numbers are significantly lower in the northern part of the state.”

This is according to Minnesota entrepreneur and founder of VF Solutions, Valerie Fleurantin.

Health equity has long been controversial in Minnesota. A report titled Advancing Health Equity in Minnesota, submitted to the legislature in 2014, highlighted that structural racism and unequal social and economic factors contribute to health disparities between African Americans, American Indians and whites.

While it’s true that socio-economic factors such as education, income and housing also contribute significantly to how healthy someone is, it’s also true that to become healthier, people should generally make healthier food, physical activity and mental wellness choices. .

Fleurantin, or Coach Val as she’s affectionately

Lee From 3

What’s in the proposals

Lee said the proposal includes $185 million from the General Fund and $94 million in bonding as placeholders for minority caucus and Senate proposals. These are listed as library construction grants. Among higher dollar projects proposed is $245.16 million for the Department of Transportation, which includes $79 million for local road improvement fund grants,

W.O.K.E

From 3 course was a hopeful-if-modest next step in elevating Black Studies in high school curricula.

Below, I have included an excerpt of The Act signed by Gov. DeSantis followed by my own opinion. I offer my perspective as a Black anthropologist who works on the interface of human biology and culture. For several decades, my research and scholarship has focused known, offers her training on a donation basis. She started her business in 2014 to reduce health disparities between Minnesota and its northern neighbours and curb the high rates of obesity and obesity-related diseases and improve the lives of people in Minnesota through health and fitness. These efforts resulted from an innovation she developed called “Afrokaribe”, a dance fitness class with a mix of reggae, Afro beats and hiphop.

In an interview with The Conversation with Al McFarlane, Coach Val explained that she wanted to create a culturally significant product that paid homage to her Haitian roots but also got people in Minnesota fit and healthy in a fun way.

“I wanted fitness to be something you don’t have to think about. It’s like just dancing and having fun while doing it. That’s how I got into Afrokaribe, which I created to celebrate my culture and have a thing for us where we don’t need a code switch and can just show up as ourselves and have fun.”

What started as a class of five has grown into a community of participants of all ages who understand that fitness is more than just physical

$67 million for local bridge replacement programs and $18 million for the port development assistance program.

Nearly $235.4 million in bonding would go to drinking water and wastewater projects. There is $10 million proposed for lead service line replacement.

The bill would provide $178.45 million in bonding and $5.5 million from the General Fund for the Department of Natural Resources. Of that, $36 million would be for asset preservation, $30 million for building upgrades, and $27.37 million for flood mitigation projects.

Also in the proposal on a critical examination of the social history of theories in anthropology and the sciences that connect biology, “nature,” social inequality, and behavior. I also look at the clear connections between human biology, racial ideology, public policy and the political economy of health in industrial society.

The Florida “Stop W.O.K.E Act

Below is an excerpt of the DeSantis law as presented by Howard and Miller in their article:

Florida Law

In April 2022,

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Valerie Fleurantin

activity and is also beneficial for mental and emotional wellbeing by reducing depression, anxiety and stress.

When she’s not offering community wellness classes, she’s helping to create jobs in Twin Cities communities by training trainers to teach Afrokaribe. She also helps small and large businesses develop a wellness programme focusing on employees’ physical and mental well-being.

Another entrepreneur contributing to the socioeconomic health of Black Americans in Minnesota is is $108.62 million in bonding for the Met Council, including $72 million for bus rapid transit projects. The Met Council would also receive $21.5 million from the General Fund for grants to more local projects, such as the Wakan Tipi Center in St. Paul and the Minnesota River Regional Greenway in Dakota County.

Higher education help Minnesota State would receive $177.33 million in new spending, including $49.58 million of a $173.68 million request for asset preservation and replacement. The University of Minnesota would receive

Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law known as the ‘Stop W.O.K.E Act.’ The bill was also known as the Individual Freedom Act (IFA). The law prohibits teaching or instruction that ‘espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels’ students or employees to believe any of the following eight concepts. Prohibited teachings include:

1. Members of one race, color, national origin, or sex are morally superior to members of another race, color, national origin or sex.

2. A person by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

3. A person’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.

4. Members of one race, color, national origin, or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, national origin, or sex.

5. A person by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex bears responsibility for, or should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.

6. A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.

7. A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.

8. Such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, national origin, or sex to oppress members of another race, color, national origin, or sex ( (Howard and Miller)

Trust No One: My Counterpoint to Florida

Governor DeSantis “The Stop W.O.K.E Act” In my humble

David McGee, founder of Build Wealth Minnesota. This company has since 2004 been working on addressing financial disparities between African Americans and their white counterparts.

A 2019 report by APM Research Lab revealed that 77% of whites in Minnesota own their homes, while only 19% of African Americans own their homes, making the gap between the two communities over 58%. Having been a banker for over 40 years, McGee is too familiar with these disempowering numbers, which

$132.13 million, including $92.6 million to renovate Fraser Hall on the Minneapolis campus for undergraduate chemistry teaching, and $39.53 million for asset preservation and replacement. It requested $200 million for the latter. Other projects to be funded in the bill include:

 $90 million for the Department of Veterans Affairs, including $77.77 million to update the Hastings campus;

 $72 million for public housing rehabilitation;

 $34.29 million for the Department of Corrections, with almost all slated for asset preservation; opinion, what Governor Ron DeSantis and his supporters really object to is the truth telling of African American history. They are clever enough in the language of The Act to not openly position themselves against the AP African American Studies course, since an overt obstruction of the truth would be too obvious. But if you read the law it should be evident that it rarely describes anything about the course itself. Instead, it is an accounting of White people’s fear of discovery, which I consider to be a defensive emotional panic predicated on their sense of entitlement that they have a God-given right to make others overlook their history.

People should be wary of this law. In a nutshell, it is simply saying, “Let’s forget about the past,” and it has been my experience that when someone suggests that we put the past behind us, it is quite probable that the person is up to no good.

Why We Need an Undiluted AP African American Studies in Schools

In The Stop W.O.K.E Act list above, Number 5 of the “Prohibited teachings” is worth noting; it prohibits teaching that:

A person by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex bears responsibility for, or should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex. This prohibition frames the act of telling the truth about the harms committed by enslaving, genocidal, and eugenical White people, as some type of cultural bullying, the latter word defined by Webster as “seek[ing] to harm, intimidate, or coerce someone perceived as vulnerable” (my emphasis). Yet, we know that most White people in this United States of America are anything but “vulnerable.” Thus, the high moral ground ascribed to the victimized White voice of The Act is false. What The Act is intended to do is legitimize Whites being able to reap present-day benefits of historic, and ongoing, economic, political, health, and other disparities, yet not be held accountable for those actions in the past that contributed to their current collective power and financial gain. In fact, White he says he was exposed to in his work as an underwriter who was also training underwriters.

“That’s the person who decides whether or not you’re going to get a loan. And at the time, when there were only 15 black ones in the nation, I was one of those. And so we really started Build Wealth Minnesota spun from a company that my wife and I started to start training underwriters to get into the financial services field,” McGee says.

Then while building their company, McGee and his wife became increasingly aware of predatory lending practices that were targeting people of color and in a sense setting them back and harming them. At that point, they began to teach people in Minnesota how to build sustainable, social and economic wealth through their Family Stabilization Plan.

“It’s a real comprehensive curriculum that we provide as well as. It’s a model where there are ten weeks of classes that families take, and then up to two years’ worth of coaching.”

Over the last two decades, Build Wealth Minnesota has helped thousands of families own homes. Now, through their initiative, 9000

 $31.48 million for the Department of Military Affairs, including $24.72 million for the Rosemount Readiness Center;

 $22.7 million for the Board of Water and Soil Resources;

 $22.47 million for the Department of Administration, including $9 million for security upgrades at the Capitol Complex;

 $18.03 million for the Minnesota Zoo, mostly asset preservation, but also $1.23 million for its animal hospital;

 $17.42 million for the Department of Public Safety with most for increased costs at the state emergency operations people have been the historic and present-day aggressors, the encroachers, the poachers, the enslavers, the bullies, staunch defenders of White Supremacy, segregation, and the ongoing oppression of Black and Indigenous people, all bolstered by laws and systems like Jim Crow and racism that define their group privileges. It is really ludicrous to accept the premise of The Act, which is that America’s White majority can be “harmed,” “intimidated,” and “coerced” by the simple truth telling of America’s history in the AP African American Studies course. When Black people seek only justice, White people often project their fears of retribution upon it.

According to The Act, no “White person” (who DeSantis disguises as “members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex) “…bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part.”

The societal group whose point of view DeSantis chooses not to define as “White people” in his law, however, was invented as a group identity long ago, according to archaeologist, Terrence Epperson. In his article, “Critical Race Theory and the Archaeology of the African Diaspora,” (https://link. springer.com/article/10.1007/ BF03376636 ) he notes that the ancestors of those defined as “white person[s]” were first identified as such in 1691. That is the moment when the designation of “white” is invented and comes into law.

Says Epperson, “white” replaces “Christian” as the term to describe those in Virginia with full human rights, giving all its members a unique entitlement to normal lives.

Because families are continuous, those in that privileged category of whiteness continue to pass down the spoils taken from Black and brown people whose own inheritance was legally denied (through slavery, Jim Crow, de facto segregation, and today persistent racist discrimination) by White people who have a vested interest in maintaining systems of inequality. Like other White Americans who live in denial, DeSantis’ shifting of fault and responsibility to the transient individual – a dead slave-holder rather than his living descendants who carry his stollen booty across generations center;  $10 million for the Pollution Control Agency for capital assistance in Olmsted County; and

Equities, the company aims to take this to another level by helping 9000 families in Minnesota become first-time homeowners. Through a loan pool and an excellent partner program with stakeholders such as the Bush Family Foundation, North West Area Foundation and others, the company aims to do its part by closing the disparity gap with at least 15%. As stated earlier, personal choices make up one’s destiny. Still, it is also true that structural hindrances such as prejudicial lending and underwriters make attaining that destiny harder. However, with community leaders like Coach Val and the McGees, there is evidence that communities need to work together to make better choices and build organisations that empower and educate the communities they service too to make better choices.

To join in on Coach Val’s Afrokaribe classes, visit her website at https://www. vfhealthfitnesssolutions.com/. Or if you’d like to find out more about the 9000 Equities program for Black Homeowners, visit the website at https:// www.9000equities.com.

 $9.6 million for the Amateur Sports Commission for asset preservation.

Paying Cash

About 50 projects managed by nonprofits and local units of government would receive a one-time cash infusion for capital projects. This can get to projects that are ready to go, so they can serve their purpose in helping out local communities, Lee said.

– is evasive of the facts, shady. The anxious behaviors described in The Stop W.O.K.E Act, whose causes are now criminalized by DeSantis, is what any social psychophysiologist would call the “normal” response when a human being recognizes that he or she has committed a wrong and seeks to make things right. Like the victim who justly cries rape (as Harriet Jacobs does in her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) is made to appear to be the bully (framed as those who claim “moral superiority”), anyone who promotes telling an authentic African American history are also called bullies.

Under the institution of slavery, White men were presumed to have a special legal right to rape Black girls and women. This is the history that DeSantis wants removed, and yet must be taught.

The Stop W.O.K.E Act promotes a form of false White vulnerability or what Robin DiAngelo calls, ”White Fragility.” In her popular book of the same title, DiAngelo defines it as a “range of defensive moves” by whites to “…reinstate white racial equilibrium,” in which they ALWAYS have the advantage.

The Act is intended to deny that White people ever did anything seriously wrong and have no responsibility to the past, even as they benefit from it. To accomplish such a denial of facts requires preventing any serious high school student from reading the complete stories of Black people in America. Our stories reflect a historical and continuing legacy of inequality, and serve as factual evidence of the wrongs perpetrated by Whites in the past and the present. They also make clear who is the vulnerable group.

Silencing Black History— Whose History is Next?

In my estimation, The Stop W.O.K.E Act is nothing less than an educational silencing and intellectual lynching designed to simply shut Black people’s mouths and deny the facts of their full humanity and White people’s abuses This political muzzling infringes on the free speech of Black scholars who have presented rigorous and welldocumented critiques of White America; it also limits Black students’ access to a history in which they have a voice. The