All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
12:55
What Most ‘Experts’ Aren’t Telling You During Black History Month | Larry Elder Show
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
As for Black History Month, I'm not a fan.
I'm with actor Morgan Freeman on this one.
Black History Month you find ridiculous.
Why?
You're going to relegate my history to a month?
Oh, come on.
What do you do with yours?
Which month is White History Month?
Well, come on.
Tell me.
Well, I'm Jewish.
Okay.
Which month is Jewish History Month?
There isn't one.
Oh!
Oh, why not?
Do you want one?
No, no.
No, I don't either.
I don't want a Black History Month.
Black History is American history.
Now maybe Black History Month wouldn't be so bad if they actually taught black history.
Here are a few things that blacks are misled about.
Slavery, gun control, and the minimum wage.
First, slavery.
Now when I studied slavery in high school, I assumed the way a lot of people do, that slavery was something that just happened to black people in Africa.
One of the sad things is that we talk in this country as if slavery was something unique to the United States or to blacks and whites.
And in point of fact, slavery was one of the oldest institutions among human beings.
They go back as far as there is recorded history.
And in every single part of the world, Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians.
For most of history, People enslaved people who were the same races themselves for the simple reason that they simply didn't have the resources to go to another continent and take people from another continent and move them en masse someplace else.
Now slavery could not have happened without the complicity of African chieftains who sold Africans not just to European slavers but to Muslim slavers as well.
But when white captains came offering manufactured goods, weapons, and rum for slaves, African kings and merchants had little reason to hesitate.
They viewed the people they sold not as fellow Africans but criminals, debtors, or prisoners of war from rival tribes.
By selling them, kings enriched their own realms and strengthened them against neighboring enemies.
African kingdoms prospered from the slave trade, but meeting the Europeans' massive demand created intense competition.
Slavery replaced other criminal sentences and capturing slaves became a motivation for war rather than its result.
To defend themselves from slave raids, neighboring kingdoms needed European firearms which they also bought with slaves.
The slave trade had become an arms race, altering societies and economies across the continent.
Did you know that Muslim slavers took more blacks out of Africa than did European slavers?
The Muslim slave trade began centuries earlier and continued long after the European slave trade ended.
Slavery, yes, during the 9th up to the 13th century, slavery was still very much an Islamic phenomenon as compared to the West.
Of course there was ancient slavery in many other societies, but in terms of chattel slavery, in terms of slavery as an institution that was profitable, that was very much still an Arab Islamic preserve until the West came in sometime from the 15th, 16th century onwards.
Just how extensive was this Arab Muslim slave trade of Africans?
Slavery was a very important part of Islamic expansion in West Africa and in fact in the Sudan and from the very earliest period of Islamic penetration into Africa.
It was started by buying, purchasing slaves and trading in slaves.
And then it went on from purchasing to raiding for slaves and capturing slaves deliberately, especially mainly black Africans, and transporting them into North Africa and into Saudi Arabia, the Arabian Peninsula, and onwards to the Ottoman Empire to Turkey.
So slavery was a very endemic part of Islamic interaction with Africa.
And in West Africa, the jihad period of the 18th and 19th century involved massive slave raiding and slave trading.
And many of the slaves that were captured and sent and sold and taken into the transatlantic slave trade Most of those who were doing the raiding at the time were Muslim communities because they were the dominant tribes.
So a lot of that happened.
That is not to say that non-Muslim communities were involved in raiding, but the dominant tribes were the Muslim communities that were doing the raiding at the time.
Now I've heard that Muslim slavers and Muslim slave owners treated slaves better than did European slavers and European and American slave owners.
But is that true?
One of the themes I explored in my book is this perception that Muslims treated their slaves much more humanely than the Western slave trade.
And what I found out in my own research was that that is not necessarily the case and that there were very harsh treatments of slaves by Muslim groups.
It was just the damn deal at the time.
And one of the key Differences I looked at in my book was that whereas slaves taken to the West were able to marry and reproduce and have their families, and you can still find large populations of African Americans today in North America and in the Caribbean,
you go to the Islamic world and you find very few black remnants of the slave trade, which was very massive.
And one of the reasons is that many of the male black slaves taken into the Islamic world were castrated as eunuchs, which meant that they could not, of course, reproduce.
And the other factor is that many of the women were taken as concubines by their slave masters and they gave birth to mixed races and they were very much absorbed into the society.
So you don't have Black slave kind of descendants in the Muslim world as you would in North America.
And part of the reason is the castration and the way the slaves were treated.
Now, slavery ended in the West, in America, not until after the Civil War.
But what about the Arab Muslim slave trade?
When did it end?
In fact, has it ended?
Slavery persisted in Islamic countries far, far longer than it did in the West.
The West abolished slavery long before the Islamic countries ever abolished slavery.
And they did so under a lot of pressure from colonial governments and from Western governments and from all kinds of activist groups.
And in fact Saudi Arabia for instance abolished slavery in 1961 or 1960 there about.
Whereas Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981.
And these were done on paper and a lot of it is still being done.
In practice there are still a lot of slaves In Muslim countries and the Sudan during the Civil War there was a lot of slave raiding going on done by the Arab Muslims in the north against the enemies and the Christian Africans in the south.
So even after the 90s in this century there was still capturing of young African men, boys in the Sudan for sale.
So slavery continues even though it has been abolished on paper in many Muslim countries.
Now gun control.
Liberals, especially those living in the inner city where crime is high, often demand further gun control legislation.
We fought a good fight earlier this year but we came up short.
And that means we've got to get back up and go back at it, because as long as there are those who fight to make it as easy as possible for dangerous people to get their hands on guns, then we've got to work as hard as possible for the sake of our children.
We've got to be ones who are willing to do more work to make it harder.
Are black students taught that the gun control movement began in this country as a means to make sure newly freed black slaves did not get their hands on guns?
In the most infamous Supreme Court decision ever, Dred Scott, the Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney said, if blacks are anything other than chattel property, why, why, why, they may be able to get their hands on guns!
It was a horrible, racist, Southern Democrat judge named Roger Taney, and he determined that Dred Scott could not count for more than three-fifths of a person.
Why?
Because Dred Scott couldn't have a firearm.
In fact, Judge Taney later noted, and this is in a chapter in my first book, Hands Off My Gun, that in order for him to give Dred Scott full citizenship and count him as an actual law-abiding American, that meant that Dred Scott would have the, quote, full liberty to have and to bear arms.
And Judge Taney couldn't have that.
Next.
Democrats love, love, love them some minimum wage, don't they?
Tom Steyer wants a higher minimum wage.
The billionaire says that he would propose paying workers at least $22 an hour if he wins the White House.
Steyer floated the idea yesterday during a campaign stop in South Carolina.
Now, during Black History Month, are black students taught that the minimum wage movement in this country began as a means to make sure that blacks who are willing to work for less did not take jobs away from whites who are unwilling to work for less?
By the 1960s, many African Americans were employed as farmers.
This changed in 1967 when the government extended the minimum wage laws to American farmers as part of the war on poverty.
Black farmers who were accustomed to making a modest $3.50 per day were now legally required to be paid $1 per hour, a tremendous increase in wages.
The effect of this law was immediate and undeniable.
An estimated 25,000 farm workers were put out of work in the Mississippi Delta alone.
Black farmers were not oblivious to the cause and effect.
That dollar an hour ain't worth nothing, said the wife of one day laborer.
It would have been better if it had been 50 cents a day if you work every day.
50 cents per day, of course, was a lower wage than what her husband would have been earning prior to the law.
Her point was clear.
The federal minimum wage law destroyed their ability to earn a living.
End of quote.
The first minimum wage law in our country was the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931.
And the Davis-Bacon Act says that all workers in federally funded or federally assisted construction projects must be paid the prevailing wage.
And if you look on page 6513 of the congressional record on March 31st, 1931, You'll see congressional testimony where congressmen will say, see that contract over there?
He brings cheap colored labor up from the south, puts them in cabins, and it's labor of that sort that has to compete, that white Americans are competing against.
One of the things that my friends on the left think is just grand is the minimum wage.
And 100 years ago, the minimum wage came into being in the United States, state by state, and its declared purpose was to keep immigrants, women, blacks, and Chicanos out of the labor force, to drive them out entirely.
Newspaper editorials, economics profession, they all said, oh boy, this is good for the Anglo-Saxon race.
Thus the consequences of minimum wage rates have been almost wholly bad to increase unemployment and to increase poverty.
Moreover, the effects have been concentrated on the groups that the do-gooders would most like to help.
The people who have been hurt most by minimum wage laws are the blacks.
I have often said that the most anti-Negro law on the books of this land is the minimum wage rate.
I'm Larry Elder and we've got a country to save.
▲
Export Selection