John Hope Bryant knows what Black people are capable of accomplishing.
After Operation Hope Global Forums’ Crypto + Digital Summit in Atlanta on May 20, which featured special guests like Tanya Sam and Killer Mike, Bryant spoke to rolling out about his passion for teaching financial literacy to the Black community.
How did you feel about today?
I think it was a historic day. I don’t normally say that about our own events. I think we often do things that are important. We push the envelope, we put one foot in front of the other as far as trying to create an economic infrastructure for Black America, which doesn’t exist. It has never existed. We have a civil society infrastructure, civil rights infrastructure and ecumenical infrastructure, educational infrastructure, social justice infrastructure, you go down the list of things that we have, we don’t have an economic infrastructure. We have the infrastructure for the arts, for the media, for professional sports, meaning there’s a system in place for the aspirational success, or the pushback on the defense of our community, not economics, but economics drives everything.
The piece that we had around crypto was really just about promotion. …We just don’t understand this space. We’re not dumb, and we’re not stupid. We’re brilliant. But it’s what we don’t know that we don’t know that’s killing us, but we think we know. No one’s educated us. We try to create an economic infrastructure for our people, Operation Hope, in general, that’s our mission, financial literacy, etc. That’s hard enough, this new frontier, and it is a new frontier of digital everything. Because there is no protection in place.
You break things into very simple terms for people to understand. How have you maintained being in touch with the average Black American doing this work and succeeding for three decades now?
I think it’s as simple as I care. I mean, I’ve got PTSD from being homeless. I was homeless for six months of my life when I was 18 years old. I got post-traumatic stress disorder [from] that. I’m paranoid about cash. Maybe that’s why I haven’t bought any digital currency. … I was homeless, that had an impact on me, I saw somebody murdered when I was 7, my play uncle, and then my best friend was murdered when I was 9, along with my next-door neighbor, Tweet.
This is all personal for me. My mother’s sitting over here, I saw her and my dad get into a fistfight, where he was beating her. Then, she turned around and beat him. I called the police at 5 years old, man. “Hey, my mom was getting beat by my daddy. Oh, no, hold on my mother’s beating my daddy.” I mean, this is not a conversation a 5-year-old should have to have. It was over money. Every one of these situations was over money.
