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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
13:15
Larry Elder Debunks Michelle Obama on White Flight and Racism | Larry Elder Show
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Michelle Obama recently complained about white flight from her old South Side Chicago neighborhood when she grew up.
And she implied it was totally because of anti-black white racism.
But unbeknownst to us, we grew up in the period, as I write, called white flight.
That as families like ours, upstanding families like ours, you know, who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better, as we moved in, white folks moved out.
of what our families represented.
And I always stop there when I talk about this out in the world because, you know, I want to remind white folks that y'all were running from us, you know, because...
This family.
This family.
This family, with all the values that you read about, you were running from us.
And you're still running from us.
Now, I'm 12 years older than Michelle Obama, and I witnessed my neighborhood transitioning from white to black as well.
We were the second black family on my block in 1959, when my parents moved from Pico Union to South Central.
And within a few years, as happened apparently in Michelle Obama's neighborhood, virtually all the whites moved out.
Now, I got to tell you something.
I went to a high school, a Washington high school, where maybe a third to fifty percent of the students were white.
And I was just there one semester, but I saw several instances of black-white altercations, verbal taunting, physical abuse, and near as I could figure out, whenever I could determine who started it, it was a black person.
Now, I'm not saying whites didn't start fights.
I'm just saying in that one semester when I was there, I saw many instances in which whites were picked on, verbally taunted, verbally abused, pushed around.
I never saw it the other way around.
You're a white kid.
You come home to your parents and you tell them you got beaten up or put down or verbally taunted by black kids.
What are your parents going to do?
They're going to move out.
Now, I'm not saying that all of the moving out had to do with that, but to ignore the fact that a lot of times there was friction between blacks and whites and a lot of times the friction was started by a black person is to ignore a much more complicated picture and Michelle Obama is ignoring the reality.
Let me give you another example.
First day high school, Washington High School, I'm eating lunch by myself.
There's a white kid not too far from me eating lunch by himself.
Three or four black guys come up to him.
And one black guy carefully removes a white handkerchief from his pocket, lays it on the rail that the white kid was leaning against, and says, clean my shoe.
And the white kid says, excuse me?
And the black guy said, I said, shine my shoe.
And the white kid said, why should I shine your shoe?
I don't even know you.
I haven't done anything to you.
And the black guy looked at the clock, pointed to it and said, when that clock strikes one o'clock, the bell's going to go off.
If that bell goes off and you haven't shined my shoe, I'm going to kick your you-know-what.
Tick, tick, tick.
More and more people started gathering around and the white kid refused to shine his shoe.
The bell went off and the black kid balled his fist up and hit that white kid in the face.
Let me tell you something.
When somebody gets hit in the face in real life, it doesn't sound like television.
It sounded awful.
But this white kid knew some form of martial art or something and he assumed some sort of fighting position and started beating the crap out of this black kid.
And then the black kid's friends jumped in and pretty soon the white kid was fighting off two or three people and then pretty soon more people jumped in and pretty soon the white kid started running and a stream of all black people were following him.
Now again, I saw lots of things like that over the course of that semester.
Nothing quite that dramatic.
Now how many white kids went home to their mothers and fathers and said, look, I got bullied.
I got picked on.
I got pushed around.
I got hit for no reason.
How many times did that happen?
And when it did happen, how many parents do you think said, okay, we've got to move.
All I'm saying is to ignore this is to ignore a much more complicated picture.
I had a very good friend who was an amazing athlete, but he had an attitude.
And the coach, white coach, did not know how to deal with him and with the black kids who moved into the neighborhood.
Many of them were very disrespectful.
In one case, my friend came to practice late.
He was the best player on the team.
The coach dressed him down verbally, and my friend took off his jersey, threw it in the coach's face, and the coach started him.
Now, when all the major colleges came, when Notre Dame came, when UCLA came, when Marquette came to recruit this guy, The coach told the truth about what happened.
And my friend did not get recruited at any of the major schools and blamed it on the coach's racism, as opposed to the way he treated that coach.
All I'm saying is there were a lot of instances like that when I was growing up, which is why there was also in my neighborhood black flight.
A lot of black people moved out or sent their kids to Catholic schools because of the growing violence that was going on in some of these public schools.
And this is well before busing.
Another thing about white flight.
Eric Holder, Obama's AG, complained about what he called pernicious racism.
One example he gave was the fact that black boys are suspended and expelled from school disproportionately more compared to their percentage in that given school student body.
Jesse Jackson made the same argument back in 1999 when Decatur, Illinois, a school district there, kicked out a bunch of black kids for fighting after a football game.
In comes Jesse Jackson, files a lawsuit against the all-white Decatur school board, and accuses them of racism.
The Decatur School Board, however, defended itself by pointing out, irrespective of the race of the school board, irrespective of the race of the teacher, all across America, black boys are disproportionately kicked out or suspended from school.
Even in Oakland, where the Oakland school board was predominantly, quote, people of color, black boys were substantially more likely to be kicked out or suspended than non-black boys.
You cannot blame it on racism.
Now, if you're a white kid going to a school where there's more violence and black kids are disproportionately kicked out, and you go home and you tell your parents about this, what do you think your parents are going to do?
Back to Michelle Obama.
In 2008, when her husband was running for president, they were interviewed by Steve Croft of 60 Minutes.
Croft asked her the following.
This is a tough question to ask, but a number of years ago Colin Powell was thinking about running for president, and his wife Alma really did not want him to run.
She was worried about some crazy person with a gun.
Has that been a factor?
I mean, have you talked about that?
Is that something that you think about?
I don't lose sleep over it because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.
So she's admitting that her neighborhood is dangerous.
Again, does that at all contribute to what she complained about, white flight?
Now let's talk about education.
Michelle Obama says that she went to a public school, and that's true.
However, she did not go to the local public school.
She was on a bus three hours a day to go to what essentially was a Chicago magnet school in order to avoid the inferior local school.
Does that at all contribute to white flight, the quality of education, the quality of local schools?
I saw the same thing when I was growing up.
There were families in my neighborhood that put their kids in Catholic schools because they thought the academic curve was better and because they thought there was less violence.
Does something like that contribute to white flight?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez inadvertently also made the case for white flight when she talked about what her family did in order for her to avoid going to an inferior local government school.
They looked at the quality of education in the Bronx.
And they looked at 50% dropout rates.
They looked at the inequity of education, the inequity of education funding, the fact that teachers weren't paid, the fact that kids weren't given their tools to succeed, and that, frankly, it not only had to do with their income, but it had to do with their melanin, too.
And so they made, and my family made, a really hard decision.
And my whole family chipped in to buy a small house about 40 minutes north of here.
And that's when I got my first taste of a country who allows their kids' destiny to be determined by the zip code that they are born in.
Now let's take a look at another factor, interracial violent black-white crime.
Here's what the Manhattan Institute's Heather McDonald says.
Just this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization.
According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations, excluding homicide, between blacks and whites last year.
Including white on black and black on white attacks.
Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies or 90%.
Whites committed 56,394 of them or less than 10%.
Finally, Michelle Obama says about whites, you're still running.
And you're still running.
Then why did Reverend Al Sharpton tee off on whites from moving into Harlem, calling them interlopers?
And why did Spike Lee do this epic rant against white people moving into certain areas of New York?
Check this out.
Gentrification.
You mentioned gentrification with some slightly native connotations.
And I wondered if you've ever looked at it from the other side.
Which is that if your family was still in that $40,000 home, it's now worth three and a half or four million dollars.
Alright.
Let me just kill you right now.
Okay.
Go for it.
There was some bull**** article in the New York Times saying the good of gentrification.
I don't believe that.
Here's the thing.
I grew up here in Fort Greene.
I grew up here in New York.
It's changed.
And Why does it take the influx of white New Yorkers in the South Bronx and Harlem and Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?
The garbage wasn't picked up every month on the day.
What I wanted is the 165 Washington Park.
PS20 was not good.
PS11. Wolf Show, 294.
So why not what?
The police run around.
When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers 3 o'clock or more into 125th Street, that must tell you something.
And I know disputes.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
And even more.
Let me tell you some more.
I'm coming back.
Can I talk about that?
No, not yet.
And then comes the mother****** CRISPR-Columbus syndrome.
You can't discover this.
We've been here.
You just can't come and bump up.
And you're still running.
So which is it?
Whites are racist because they left neighborhoods that became all black?
Or whites are racist because they're moving into mostly all black neighborhoods?
And by the way, when it comes to discrimination, nobody has clean hands.
Check out this 1999 article from the Los Angeles Times.
Despite being one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the world, Greater Los Angeles remains a hotbed of racial and ethnic housing discrimination.
Two recent studies of rental practices found that Latino landlords are discriminating against African Americans and black landlords are discriminating against Latinos at levels comparable to those practiced by whites against minority groups a decade ago.
End of quote.
Moral to the story, no group has a monopoly on hate and on fear.
Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering.
So, when it comes to white flight and black flight, the picture is a little more complicated than the one Michelle Obama painted for us.
I'm Larry Elder, and this has been The Larry Elder Show for Epoch Times.
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