This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Esosa Osa, the founder and CEO of Onyx Impact. Before founding Onyx, she was the former deputy executive director at Fair Fight Action and senior advisor on Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign.
Esosa founded Onyx Impact with a clear mission — nonprofit research, media, and technology dedicated to amplifying Black voices and protecting Black communities in an era of deliberate, accelerating propaganda.
We talked about Aisha, the AI assistant Onyx Impact just launched — built from the ground up specifically for Black communities. That’s important because, as Esosa explained, the most powerful information tool of a generation was being handed to Black communities in a form that actively harmed them. And given its better sources, deeper cultural context, and more robust privacy protections than other AI’s, it has better results for everyone. Aisha launched last Thursday and has already been downloaded more than 50,000 times.
We did a live comparison right there on the call; I asked both ChatGPT and Aisha how a parent should talk to their son about interactions with the police. The differences were…telling.
We also discussed the fact that, as Esosa put, the opposition understands that their path to permanent rule runs through destroying Black political power — which is why they work so hard to do just that, from the Roberts Court’s rulings to the Trump regime’s war on DEI. The latter is documented exhaustively in the Blackout Report, where Onyx Impact tracked more than 15,000 sourced, concrete harms to Black communities — such as deleted historical information, funding cuts, or harmful policies — in just the first eight months of the Trump regime.
