#073 | Understanding the racial wealth gap through coffee with John Onwuchekwa

December 7, 2020

Episode Summary 

We talk with John Onwuchekwa on everything from coffee to his top book recommendations.  John is a pastor at Cornerstone Church in Atlanta, GA, and he recently co-founded Portrait Coffee.  He is also a father, a husband, a podcaster, a voice for hope, a leader in his community, and so much more.  We so enjoyed our discussion with John!   We dig into attitudes about money, the history of coffee, how geography is never an accident, how luck favors the prepared, the importance of learning, his top book recommendations to better learn about the history and roots of systemic racism.  John teaches us the importance of learning history from the perspective of those that were shafted, how acorns turn into oak trees, the importance of truly understanding a problem, and how a well-defined problem is a problem half-solved.  John’s podcast titled four in the morning was inspired by his getting up early; he believes getting up early is an act of hopeful defiance.

Episode Notes

Maggie first met John O when she saw him speak at Plywood People, a nonprofit in Atlanta leading a community of startups doing good.  John spoke about how hope can make all the difference, and hopelessness can destroy communities.    

We discuss many topics with John Onwuchekwa:

  • John first and foremost describes himself as a husband and father.
  • How a lot of people come into disenfranchised communities and take but don’t give.  
  • John’s early years and what it taught him about money. John is the son of two Nigerian immigrants.  His parents were hard-working and frugal.  He then had friends who mentored him at a young age about money and budgeting.  They taught him to know where every cent goes.  
  • A lot of people think it’s about the amount of money you have versus your attitude about money.  
  • Most people think they have money problems, but really they have insecurity problems.  And money just becomes a tool for chasing approval from people. 
  • Logic isn’t what drives people. What drives us are our loves.  Until you find a security that’s more stable than money, you’ll constantly be in the same place.
  • Start with the attitudes and what drives you.  Your values!  
  • As his church, they require premarital counseling and financial counseling is one of their modules.  
  • The history of coffee.  It involves a goat.  John realized coffee was an area of injustice.  
  • John rode MARTA, Atlanta’s public transportation system, to observe the city and it’s trends.  The coffee supply chain is like watching the MARTA line drive north.  He observed that it starts heavily black on the southside of Atlanta, and turns more white as you go north.  Black people are getting off the train before it gets to some of the city’s most prosperous areas.  Coffee is the same in that it is often grown in and comes from historically black areas, but then it turns more white throughout the supply chain as it gets to an end customer.  
  • He learned from Willie Jennings that geography is never an accident.  Those observations that you make aren’t incidental, they are very intentional.
  • A more intentional pivoting for people to move into disenfranchised communities and invest in it.
  • In 2020 when covid first hit the US, he heard Andy Crouch talking about how this was the ice age and we needed to pivot how we did business.  He took this advice early on and pivoted how Portrait coffee started.  It’s proven to be an incredibly successful approach.  
  • Everyone’s story has a sense of luck, as in the right place at the right time.  
  • Luck favors the prepared.
  • The Black Lives Matter protests this summer, and how people were forced to sit back and understand the importance of 
  • Willingness to help without the requisite wisdom to know what to do always leads to a disaster.  Willingness met with wisdom.  
  • John has found that there are a lot of people that are willing to help, but willingness to help without the requisite wisdom to know what to do always leads to disaster.  Willingness needs to be met with wisdom. Things are complex and we need to process
  • The importance of learning.  
  • John shares his top three recommended books for those who want to learn and educate themselves on systemic racism better.  The book names are in the show notes below.
  • Reading history as written from the perspective of the people that were shafted, and realizing that the problem that we see goes deeper than what we thought that it was, so charity can’t be the way that we solve such a complex problem.
  • Part of what makes offering solutions before people have done the work to understand the nature of the problem is that even saying what you say in the solution can be misinterpreted if they don’t have the schema to place it in.  If people don’t know what has led to the nature of the problem, then we can’t start to solve it. 
  • The importance of buying from black owned or minority businesses and entrepreneurs.  People don’t know all that’s gone into it, so it can seem like this blanket affirmative action.  It seems discriminatory and miniscule at times.  It’s small like an acorn is small.  Acorns start off small, but they can become oak trees. 
  • Your actual dollars on where you spend them matter like acorns planted in the ground matter.
  • People have to learn.  
  • “A problem well-defined is a problem half solved.” – John Dewey
  • People often don’t want to really understand the nature of the problem.
  • The people who have done the most significant work are the people that have spent the most time understanding the nature of the problem. By the time they dive deep and see how far things go, they’ve got a million action items they can take.  They aren’t spending as much time saying what can I do.  
  • Step 1 – Learn.  Step 2 – Use your dollars wisely to support minority businesses.  Step 3 – Learn some more.
  • John’s podcast, launched in 2020, is called four in the morning.  To him, getting up at 4am is an act of hopeful defiance.  Each day he is reminded that just because it’s dark outside, it doesn’t mean that it’s not morning.  The sun doesn’t have to be shining for it to be a new day.  He just wants to get up and wait for your circumstances to catch up.  The sun is eventually going to rise.  You have the choice to rise up and inspire other people to hope. 

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