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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
13:34
Where’s the Proof of Systemic Racism? | Larry Elder
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Institutional racism, systemic racism, structural racism, pernicious racism.
Former A.G. Eric Holder says America is bedeviled by what he calls pernicious racism, something that America, he claims, is reluctant to address.
Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.
In a speech, Mr.
Holder cited three examples of pernicious racism.
Example one, the push for voter ID. Really?
Republican State Senate leader Phil Berger denies that.
He voted for a bill that passed on party lines.
Your state elections board said that they've only had one documented case of voter impersonation fraud in 2012.
You say...
The important thing is enhancing confidence in elections.
This is something that is about making sure that when people show up to vote, they are who they say they are.
So blacks are too confused, too stupid, too ill-equipped to get voter ID? Do you have ID normally?
Do you carry ID around?
Yes, I have state ID. Do you carry ID? Yes, I do.
Do you know anybody, any black person who doesn't carry ID? No.
Everyone that I know has an ID. Why would they think we don't have ID? That's a lie.
Why would they say that?
Do you have ID? Yes.
Because I have my ID, and my friends have their ID, so we know what we need to carry around.
Everybody that I know have ID. Like, that's one of the things you need to walk around with New York with, an ID. Do you know any black adult who does not have ID? No, I don't.
Is it a weird thing to even say that?
Yes, it is.
What is this, some type of trick candy camera?
I know, right?
That's the only thing I brought with me.
Those are legit IDs.
I heard a lot also that black people can't figure out how to get to the DMV. Really?
What does that say to you?
I know it's at 125th Street.
Do you know where the ID, the DMV is right here?
It's on 125th Street and 3rd Avenue, I believe.
You know how to get there?
Yeah.
Do you have a problem getting there if you have to get there?
No.
I know these sound like silly questions.
You know how to get to the DMV? Of course.
You know where it is?
Yeah.
You can get there?
Uh-huh.
No problem.
No problem.
Just checking.
Guess who supports voter ID? Blacks.
Though many of the arguments for early voting and against voter ID frequently cite minorities' voting access, non-whites' views of these policies don't differ markedly from those of whites.
Seventy-seven percent of non-whites favor both policies." The next example of pernicious racism given to us by Eric Holder is the disparate expulsion rates of black students.
There was a new report that shows African-American students are nearly four times more likely to be suspended from school than their white classmates, and that trend begins in preschool.
Eric Holder claims the reason for the disparate race has to do with racism.
Codified segregation of public schools has been barred since Brown.
But in too many of our school districts, significant divisions persist and segregation has reoccurred, including zero tolerance school discipline practices that, while well-intentioned and aimed at promoting school safety, affect black males at a rate three times higher than their white peers.
End of quote.
Here's the problem.
Jesse Jackson sued the Decatur, Illinois School Board claiming that they were engaged in institutional racism.
The school board expelled some several students after a football game for fighting, and Jesse Jackson sued them claiming that they were expelled because they were black.
The Decatur School Board defended itself by pointing out all around the country, no matter the race of the teacher, no matter the race of the principal, no matter the race of the school board, black boys were disproportionately kicked out of school for bad behavior.
The district judge threw out the lawsuit.
Moral to the story?
Maybe, just maybe, it was the behavior of these black kids.
Are you really prepared to accuse teachers?
The teachers union on whom the Democratic Party depends, you know, are you willing to accuse these teachers of engaging in systemic institutional racism against the various students that they signed up to teach?
Really?
Now, disparate sentencing.
In our criminal justice system, systemic racial disparities remain disturbingly common.
Disparate outcomes are not only shameful and unacceptable, they impede our ability to see that justice is done.
A criminal justice system that treats groups of people differently and punishes them unequally has a much more negative impact than misguided words that we can reject out of hand.
There is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal justice system.
It is true that a black criminal defendant will get a sentence 19.5% longer than a white criminal defendant who commits the same crime.
What's also true is that the U.S. Sentencing Commission says this disparity can be explained away by legitimate factors.
Judges make sentencing decisions based on many legitimate considerations that are not or cannot be measured." Now, another frequently cited example of the institutional racism that supposedly exists in America is the fact that would-be borrowers are turned down at a higher rate for mortgage applications.
According to a new report, black people in Baltimore received less than half as many mortgages as their white neighbors.
Black people make up the majority of the city's population.
White Baltimoreans looking to buy homes were approved for mortgages 75% of the time, compared to 61% for black applicants.
True.
Would-be black borrowers are turned down at a higher rate than would-be white borrowers, who in fact are turned down at a higher rate than would-be Asian borrowers.
Now are the banks discriminating against white people in favor of Asians?
And by the way, black owned community banks turned down would-be black applicants at at least the same rate as do the majority white banks.
Now, when Barack Obama was a private citizen, he filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 186 clients against Citibank who claimed that they were not getting mortgages because they were black.
The good news is that he got a settlement.
The bad news is he got a settlement.
Obama had 186 African Americans in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank.
Half of them have gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.
As few as 19 of these 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings.
In fact, one of Obama's then clients said, if you see some people don't make enough money to afford the mortgage, why would you give them a loan?
There should be some type of regulation against giving people loans they cannot afford." Now, another frequently given example of institutional racism is the alleged failure of the police to diversify its police force, to look like the community.
Well, in the case of America's two largest cities, New York and LA, mission accomplished.
Look at this.
New York City census.
29% Hispanic, 32% white, 24% black, 13% Asian.
NYPD, 29% Hispanic, 47% white, 50% black, 9% Asian.
Pretty diverse.
City of Los Angeles?
48% Hispanic, 28% white, 9% black, 11% Asian.
LAPD, 49% Hispanic, 30% white, almost 10% black, 7% Asian, 2.5% Filipino American.
Now, the LAPD and the NYPD reflect the diversity of their communities, and they're still being called institutionally racist.
For example, in LA, from 1992 to 2002, LAPD had back-to-back black police chiefs, including during the O.J. Simpson case.
It still did not get the LAPD immune from being called institutionally racist.
The diversity did not seem to matter.
Now, another example of systemic racism is the alleged discrimination that would-be employers give to resumes that have so-called African-American sounding names on them.
There is definitely a distinction between names for white people and names for black people.
Black names, we like Malik, Jaquan, Nashawn, Naheem.
Tasha and Shamika.
Shaniquas and the Nashawns and the Kayshawns.
I know this girl, her name is Treasure, T-R-E-Z-U-R-E. Struck me as typically a more African-American name.
I like the names that begin with S-H-A, like Shaheen, Shaheed, Shamar, Shaqeen, Shakur.
You know, Oprah is popular.
Now what about the fact that would-be black employers were just as likely to discriminate against these alleged African-American sounding names as would-be white employers?
And what about so-called white names like Gertrude and Penelope?
Turns out those names also faced discrimination.
But more important, is it even true?
And why are we focusing on first names as opposed to last names?
One study did just that.
One of the criticisms of the study that purported to show that African-American names were discriminated against was that Lakeisha and Jamal can denote socioeconomic class and that employers may have made assumptions about education and income rather than race.
So these researchers conducted an experiment using surnames that the U.S. sentence shows overwhelmingly belonged to whites, blacks, and Hispanics without using first names to signify gender.
The resumes from the fictitional black applicants bore the last names Washington and Jefferson, while those from white candidates bore Anderson and Thompson, and those from Hispanic candidates bore Hernandez and Garcia.
On average, 11.4% of resumes received a response from an employer And there were no statistically significant differences across race, ethnic, or gender groups, end of quote.
Or as Raven Simone then of The View put it...
Just to bring it back, can we take back racist and say discriminatory?
Because I think that's a better word.
Yes, it is a much better word.
That's a better word.
And I am very discriminatory against words like the ones that they were saying in those names.
I'm not about to hire you if your name is Watermelon Drea.
This is not going to happen.
Finally, we turn to the institutional racism argument of the deep-seated bias in the criminal justice system.
As mentioned earlier, a black person is two and a half times more likely compared to a white person to be shot and killed by the police.
What they don't talk about, again, are rates of criminality.
Without talking about rates of criminality, it is propaganda to talk about the fact that blacks are two and a half times more likely than whites to be killed by the police.
Discrimination just plain cannot explain.
It cannot explain the high crime rates which are devastating to the black community.
And black people huddled in their homes at night living under conditions, many times under conditions in poor neighborhoods that That the average American wouldn't believe or tolerate.
I mean, for example, in Washington, D.C., mothers serving their children their meals on the floor so as to avoid stray bullets, or fearing to come to the window because of stray bullets, worrying about whether their kids are going to get home alive when they're going to school.
And it's not the Klan rioting in the neighborhood causing this kind of mayhem.
So when it comes to voter ID, sentencing rates, expulsion rates, African-American sounding names and applying for loans, all of this can be explained in ways that have nothing whatever to do with racism.
Isn't this good news?
But no.
Somebody like me, for carrying this message, I'm called an Uncle Tom.
Which brings us to my movie that came out on June 19.
I don't remember the actual day, but I remember the emotion that I felt when it happened.
I'm often asked, was there an epiphany?
I started asking questions.
As I became more politically aware.
A lot of the way that I saw things began to change.
All of this information I've been taking in for several years.
A continuation of these kind of contradictions.
I had bought into all of these lies.
You begin to see what the real agenda is.
That's usually how that red-pilling process begins.
Black America is starting to get it.
People are starting to realize what's going on.
I am Larry Elder and we've got a country to save.
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