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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
14:14
The Truth About Systemic Racism in America | The Larry Elder Show
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When we talk about race relations in America, I've noticed something.
Race relations in America really means how do black people feel about white people, and how do white people feel about how black people feel about white people.
And when it comes to matters of race and racism, Democrats are all over the place.
Check out then long-shot candidate Barack Obama, 2008.
How important is race in defining yourself?
I am rooted in the African-American community, but I'm not defined by it.
I am comfortable in my racial identity, but that's not all I am.
You think the country's ready for a black president?
Yes.
You don't think it's going to hold you back?
No.
I think if I don't win this race, it will be because of other factors.
It's going to be because I have not shown to the American people a vision for where the country needs to go that they can embrace.
I thought that was a refreshing and honest answer.
Look, if I don't win, it won't be because I'm black.
It won't be because America is racist.
It will be because I have failed to articulate a view that the American people can embrace.
And Senator Obama said something very similar on the anniversary of what has become known as Bloody Selma, 2007.
Listen to this.
The previous generation, the Moses generation, pointed the way.
They took us 90% of the way there, but we still got that 10%.
In order to cross over to the other side.
And so the question I guess that I have today is, what's called of us in this Joshua generation?
What do we do in order to fulfill that legacy, to fulfill the obligations and the debt that we owe to those who allowed us to be here today?
But then, after that horrific massacre of those black churchgoers by that white racist in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama said this.
The massacre in South Carolina shocked a nation and jolted the first African American president to speak with unprecedented candor about racial tensions and gun violence.
Racism, we are not cured of.
In an interview with podcast host Mark Maron, a frustrated President Obama used the N-word publicly for the first time as president.
Out of sensitivity, NBC News has decided to bleep out the word.
And it's not just a matter of...
It not being polite to say nigger in the public, that's not the measure of whether racism still exists or not.
It's not just a matter of overt discrimination.
Societies don't overnight completely erase everything that happened two to three hundred years prior.
Wow.
We're not cured of racism.
So is that the goal?
To be completely, totally cured of racism?
That's not very realistic.
That's nirvana.
Nirvana is not achievable.
The question really is whether the racism in America can hold somebody back if he or she is prepared and willing to work hard.
You know, there's something called the millennial success sequence.
Have you heard of it?
You're writing that one path is more likely to lead away from poverty.
You call it the millennial success sequence.
What is that?
Basically, it's getting an education first, then working full-time in your early 20s, then getting married and having kids.
And so we're finding that millennials who are putting marriage before the baby carriage are much more likely to be avoiding poverty and sort of on the road to the American dream in terms of getting at least a middle-class income.
Okay, that gentleman is affiliated with a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute.
What about the liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution?
What do they say?
Pretty much the same thing.
Let politicians, school teachers, and administrators, community leaders, ministers, and parents drill into children the message that in a free society they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities.
At least finish high school, get a full-time job, and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.
Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2% are in poverty and nearly 75% have joined the middle class.
End of quote.
That's a somewhat different perspective than the one offered by this high school teacher in this movie called Menace to Society.
Being a black man in America isn't easy.
The hunt is on.
And you're the prey.
All I'm saying is...
All I'm saying is...
Survive.
Really?
Survive?
All I'm asking you to do is survive?
Notice the very subtle siren in the background.
Get it?
The police.
The man.
The school to jail pipeline.
Nonsense.
I just mentioned the millennial success sequence offered by think tanks on the left and on the right.
Notice they didn't say, this only applies if you're white.
But that's not the vision of today's Democrat, is it?
This is a violent country that loses more than 40,000 of our fellow Americans every year to gun violence.
And this is a country that has been defined by foundational systemic endemic racism since the very founding of this country, August 20th of 1619.
The first time that a kidnapped African was brought here against his will and made to serve as a slave to build the greatness and the success and the wealth of this country, which his descendants would never be able to fully participate in.
This is the reality of the United States of America, and sooner or later, it was going to find us.
It wasn't a matter if, it was a matter of when.
And then there's Mayor Pete.
We are by no means even halfway done dealing with systemic racism in this country.
And I hope over the course of this campaign you will see how I speak about these issues not only with mostly black audiences, but with mostly white audiences.
because if there's anything we've learned in the last few days, systemic racism is a white problem.
Thank you.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Systemic racism.
After the massacre that took place in Charleston, South Carolina, presidential candidate Martin O'Malley, the former mayor of Baltimore, former governor of Maryland, talked about how they got to the core of racial issues in this country.
Then he was asked What to do about it.
Here's what he said.
We do it by acknowledging the racial legacy that we share as Americans.
And I don't know exactly how we address this, Walter.
I mean, look, we as Americans all share a very painful racial legacy.
And we need to acknowledge it and we need to take actions to heal it.
But I don't think anybody's figured out the Huh?
And when Joe Biden was asked a similar question, what is the responsibility of Americans to deal with the legacy of slavery, here's what he said.
Vice President, I want to come to you and talk to you about inequality in schools and race.
In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather.
I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.
You said that some 40 years ago.
But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?
Well, they have to deal with the...
Look, there is institutional segregation in this country.
And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that.
Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where...
Look, talk about education.
I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year, give every single teacher a raise to the equal raise of getting out the $60,000 level.
Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home.
The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today.
It's crazy.
I'm married to a teacher.
My deceased wife is a teacher.
They have every problem coming to them.
We make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three-, four-, and five-year-olds go to school.
School.
Not daycare.
School.
We bring social workers into homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children.
It's not that they don't want to help.
They don't know quite what to do.
Play the radio.
Make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone.
Make sure the kids hear words.
A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.
Thank you, Mr.
President.
I'm going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay?
Wow.
Let's put aside the word salad and how inarticulate Joe Biden was for a moment.
What he was really saying when you sort it all out is, look, follow the millennial success sequence.
It's not about reparations.
It's about the home.
It's about how hard you're willing to work.
Finish high school.
Don't have a kid before you get married and get a job.
Keep a job.
He said, follow the millennial success sequence.
But then there is the co-host of The View, Sonny Hoskins.
Listen to this.
I think the other message that he said, which was we are past kneeling, is inappropriate in the sense that if you think about it, the leading cause of death for young black men, one of the leading causes of death between 2013 and 2018 is police brutality.
And that's what he was kneeling for.
And that's what he was kneeling for.
So the mere suggestion that we are past kneeling is ridiculous.
And I think it was very insensitive for him to say that as the mother of a young black man.
What?
Police brutality?
Still a leading cause of death for black males?
Are you kidding me?
In 2016, according to the Huffington Post, you know how many blacks were killed by the police?
233.
Now, how many blacks were killed altogether in 2016?
Almost all by other blacks?
7,881, according to the FBI. Now then, what's the line?
President Trump got elected by appealing to white racists.
But check out this honest admission by Trump-hater Chris Matthews of MSNB Heehaw.
I do understand President Trump as much as any of us do.
He always shoots the moon.
He does the thing in the contest of ideas and politics that the other people don't do.
Here he is sitting with a hip-hop guy who apparently has got some sort of bizarre politics.
Fine.
I think also it runs against the idea that he's a racist.
It runs against the idea that Trump doesn't like minorities, that he's going after Girona, going after Maxine Waters, going after the usual suspects, if you will, in politics in a sort of a racial way.
And here he is flipping it and confusing people.
But mainly it's for white people.
Because white people won't vote for a guy, most of them, if they think they're racist.
Chris Matthews is simply being honest, even though he's a Trump hater.
What he's saying is, look, white people will not vote for a racist.
White people will not vote for David Duke.
So by calling Donald Trump a bigot and a racist and saying Donald Trump is appealing to racists, is using a dog whistle to racism, would be counterproductive.
It is nonsense.
Let's knock it off.
Now let's talk about some real racism.
How about the kind of racism experienced by the great Satchel Paige, who didn't make it into the so-called major leagues until he was 42 years old in 1948?
Listen to this.
What kind of racial abuse did you get when you were with Cleveland?
Did people ever yell any nasty race stuff at you?
Well, one or two of the baseball clubs did it, not the people in the fan.
I got a couple of cracks from the baseball clubs.
What did they say?
Oh, they said nigger.
I used to try to get my goat.
I don't much blame them.
I know what it was all about.
There's some people I rarely know, too, that I wouldn't call their name for nothing in the world.
Because they're two bigger men, and they're still living, too, right now.
And you know them, too.
You know them well, too, and you wouldn't think they'd say that.
But they was trying to say anything to get my goat to keep me from beating them, see, because I didn't drop it one game there, you know.
That first year I got in there, and that was kind of hard for a stranger to come in there and strike out the men like I was striking out in there, you know, understand me?
That's pretty rough to take.
So they'd say anything.
They didn't care what they say.
They could have got me roused up, you know, where I'd walk somebody, I had to come out.
That's what they were trying to do.
And finally, we're in trouble when things are so PC that witnesses to a crime will not tell the police the race of the suspect for fear that the detective who is black will call them racist.
Watch this scene from a movie called Sour Grapes.
You heard her scream.
And saw a man run down the block.
Can you describe it?
Well, he was, uh...
Yeah?
He was, uh...
Black?
He happened to be black.
I'm sorry.
Next time, we'll be white.
Maybe Chinese.
I'm Larry Elder, and this has been the Larry Elder Show for Epic Times.
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