Episode Details

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the sharp rise in Black women’s unemployment in 2025, the backlash against DEI initiatives, and why efforts to elevate specific groups as “minions” of dominant cultural powers often backfire—leaving the broader group to face the consequences.

They discuss OkCupid dating data showing Black women receive fewer responses than even many incel-labeled groups, cultural tropes and archetypes available to Black women, historical patterns of favored minorities (Tutsi in Rwanda, Protestants under Cromwell, etc.), and the personal essay by Sesali Bowen (”Black Women Aren’t Just Unemployed, They’re Being Erased”).

The conversation covers financial habits, work ethic signals, shifts from “Black Girl Magic” to post-DEI realities, AI automation, government job cuts, and why merit-based systems might ultimately benefit everyone—including those previously disadvantaged by tokenization.

Provocative, data-driven, and unfiltered—watch for a deep dive into how “well-intentioned” favoritism can intensify backlash and what this means for cultural resilience and family formation.

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Show Notes

* If I were a black woman in America, I’d be going off the grid

* Right off the bat, black women have the cards stacked against them the worst in dating markets

* And now, whether or not they ever bought into it, black women may have the cards stacked against them

* Here are some choice stats from an article I came across covering this:

* “In December 2025, “Black women were spending an average of 29.7 weeks, or more than seven months, unemployed—the highest rate among every group of women and among all men except for Black men, who had a slightly higher average,” The 19th* reports.”

* “At the height of the summer volatility, Black women accounted for 54.7% of all female job losses, despite making up only 14.1% of the female workforce,” according to an analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

* What’s sick is that the racket that caused the backlash which may be hurting a lot of black women was due to special treatment that was largely exploited by a small subset of already-privileged women

* We’ll go through the experienced of one of those privileged women

* And look at examples of other instances in which well-intentioned efforts to help specific groups have backfired

One Women’s Experience of Lost Privilege

The Purse published a guest essay from Sesali Bowen titled Black women aren’t just unemployed—they’re being erased.

Choice quotes:

THE LANDSCAPE

* “Since last fall, general unemployment rates in the U.S. have ticked up to 4.4%, from 4% at the start of 2025. At the same time, the jobless rate for Black women has surged, from 5.4% in January 2025 to a high of 7.5% last September. Economist Katicia Roy estimates that “since 2020, the real unemployment rate for Black women is 10.23%.”

* “There have been several factors linked to this disproportionate destabilization. The huge AI push, which is automating jobs that humans were once pa