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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
13:04
KAMALA HARRIS - NO VACCINE AGAINST RACISM | Larry Elder
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Watch the DNC and out came the race card again and again and again, including this dinger.
And let's be clear.
There is no vaccine for racism.
We've got to do the work.
Actually, it's a good thing that there's no vaccine for racism for a couple of reasons.
Number one, there's a lot of racism in the black community and a lot of anti-Semitism within the black community.
An Anti-Defamation League study found that blacks were two and a half times more likely than non-black Gentiles to be anti-Semitic.
There was a 2013 Rasmussen poll of blacks, of Hispanics, and whites, and all three were asked, of these three groups, which is the most racist?
Whites said blacks more than anybody else.
Hispanics said blacks more than anybody else.
Blacks said blacks more than anybody else.
And there was a recent poll, 2020 also Rasmussen, asking Americans of blacks, of whites, of Asians, and of Hispanics which group is the most racist.
More people named blacks than anybody else.
Check out this 2020 Rasmussen poll.
Americans believe blacks are more racist than whites, Hispanics and Asians in this country.
18% say most white Americans are racist.
13% say most Asian Americans are.
15% say most Hispanic Americans are.
But a whopping 25% believe most black Americans are racist.
Would a vaccine against racism really solve the number one problem facing the country in general and the black community in particular?
I'm talking, of course, about the fact that a large number of kids are raised without fathers.
Well, in 1960, which would be almost 100 years after the end of slavery, 22 percent of black kids grew up in homes with only one parent.
Just 22 percent?
Yes.
Four out of five were in homes with both parents?
Yes.
Thirty years later, after the liberal welfare state, that number had more than tripled.
And so I say, well, let us compare.
If we can speculate on how much that 22 percent was due to the legacy of slavery.
But we know that that tripling was not due to the legacy of slavery.
Well, that's because of slavery, Jim Crow and racism, right?
Now, that can be blamed on somebody.
But it has very little to do with what happened 100, 200 years ago.
Slavery and discrimination in America, that is history.
Nothing can be done about it.
And I believe in that sense he's right that we need not focus all of our energies on it.
Moreover, I would argue that the discrimination, the problems that black people face today, for the most part have very, very little to do with the heritage of slavery, with the heritage of discrimination in our country.
You know, in 1925 in Harlem, 85% of black kids live in two-parent families.
Today, in Harlem, maybe you'll find 30% if you're lucky.
Now, this great change can't be attributed to slavery, it can't be attributed to racial discrimination, and that is, I think that too much of our focus is on discrimination and the heritage of slavery as opposed to how are we going to cope with the immediate problems that we face in our communities today.
On Saturday mornings, it was common in the housing project of this earlier era for parents to leave their doors unlocked, because some of the parents could afford television, some couldn't.
So the ones who had television would leave their doors unlocked, and the kids from the other families could come down there and watch television with them.
Well now, the latest figures show that most people below the poverty line have two television sets and cable, but they wouldn't dare leave their doors unlocked in a public housing project.
Okay, that's the what.
But what about the why?
Check out this quote by Thomas Sowell on liberals and slavery.
Liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed legacy of slavery they talk about.
As of 1960, two thirds of all black American children were living with both parents.
That declined over the years until only one-third were living with both parents in 1995.
Among black families in poverty, 85% of the children had no father present." So it's not the legacy of slavery that destroys the African-American family.
It's the legacy of the welfare state.
And by the way, we see illegitimacy rates rising among everybody.
And in other countries.
The very same thing in England.
And what's the mechanism?
Why does the welfare state dissolve the family structure?
For one thing, it makes it unnecessary for fathers to support their offspring.
And in fact, it makes it counterproductive in many cases.
I think one of the worst things about the welfare system is that it induces this psychology of fear of earning too much.
The prospect of having all your benefits cut off, or some or a significant part of your benefits cut off, makes people look on earning income as risky.
And the effect on not having a father in the home on education.
In 1993, the number of kids out of Dunbar High School who went on to college was less than it was 60 years earlier, which would have been in the depth of the Great Depression.
And then there are the policies that prevent teachers from actually teaching.
In California they have a law that prevents teachers from suspending or expelling students because of willful disobedience.
Now imagine you're a public school teacher and some kid mouths off or is otherwise misbehaving and you can't even send that kid to the principal because you'd be guilty of violating the rule against Punishing kids for willful disobedience and there's a lot of pressure not to punish black kids because after all black kids are disproportionately expelled and therefore teachers have been accused of racism.
Can you imagine?
And many Democrats are mandating that you send your kid to a school like that and Republican Party wants to give your parent a voucher.
Now, what about the effect of not having a father in the home on crime?
The housing projects in the first half of the 20th century, during that first hundred years after slavery, did not have the high crime rates, the murder rates, the graffiti, all the rest of it.
None of that was there.
Crime and violence.
Now we take it for granted that there's tremendous levels of crime and violence in the black community.
That was not always the case in the 20s.
It was very common for white celebrities, including George Gershwin and William Faulkner, to go up to Harlem, not only for entertainment places, but to go into private homes with people they knew.
And Gershwin would play Rhapsody in Blue in this home where Walter White lived.
Milton Friedman, when he was a graduate student at Columbia, he and the lady he later married would go dancing at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.
And he said we had no fear of being mugged or accosted on the street or anything like that.
Hey, not everybody in Hollywood is deluded about what the real problem is.
Well, it starts in the home.
You know, if the father's not in the home, the boy will find the father in the streets.
Yeah.
I saw it in my generation and every generation before me and everyone since.
It starts in the home.
You know, if the streets raise you, then The judge becomes your mother and, you know, prison becomes your home.
Now, Kamala Harris also said, we have to do the work.
And let's be clear, there is no vaccine for racism.
We've got to do the work.
We have to do the work.
What does that even mean?
You remember when Dylann Roof killed those black churchgoers in South Carolina?
The next morning, on Morning Joe, Martin O'Malley, who was running for president at the time, former mayor of Baltimore, former governor of Maryland, talked about this being an example of racism, and clearly it was.
And then he was asked what to do about it.
And listen to what this man, who's running for president, who was a former mayor of Baltimore, former governor of Maryland, had to say in response to the challenge, what do we do about it?
Guns, but the president also talked about it in terms of the history of race and racial violence towards blacks.
To what extent do you think that this was also something that gets at the core of some racial history that we still have?
From the reports I read, and let's To be honest with one another, the facts are still evolving here.
It would appear that the racial motivation was certainly a big part of what happened here.
How do we address things like that?
We do it by acknowledging the racial legacy that we share as Americans.
I don't know exactly how we 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 magic solution to that.
So this former mayor of Baltimore, who, by the way, has a crime rate three times higher than that of Chicago, when asked what to do about racism, had this to say?
We do it by...
I don't know exactly how we address this, Walter, but I don't think anybody's figured out the magic solution to that.
Put in the work?
What does that even mean?
Do you have any idea the sprawling number of institutions, organizations, laws that are right now in place to prevent institutional racism?
Peter Kersenow is a black member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
He wrote a piece about all of these organizations, bureaus, agencies, laws that have been set up to prevent institutional racism.
Let's go over some of them, shall we?
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Education.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
The FBI. State Civil Rights Commissions.
Local Human Rights Commissions.
But wait, there's more.
State Attorneys General, tens of thousands of investigators, enforcement and compliance officers, local prosecutors, private attorneys who enforce civil rights and equal opportunity laws.
These laws include, but are not limited to, wait for it, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Sections 1981, 1982, and 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 1871, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, the Fair Housing Act, the Voting Rights Act, And thousands of state and local equal opportunity and anti-discrimination laws.
This does not include tens of thousands of human resource officers and diversity and inclusion personnel who guard against systemic slash structural racism within their respective institutions.
So...
And let's be clear.
There is no vaccine for racism.
We've got to do the work.
So, were there a vaccine against racism, it would show that the major problems facing the black community have nothing to do with white racism, and its elimination will not solve those problems.
Years ago, when I was in law school, I was visiting my aunt in Detroit.
A man came over and watched my aunt and me have our conversation.
I was in law school at the time and I was telling her the courses I was taking.
And the man was just sitting listening.
He was about 30 years old, a friend of my aunt.
And after my aunt and I were speaking for a few minutes, I look up and the man was crying.
I thought I had said something offensive, although I couldn't imagine what it was I said.
And I asked him, what's the matter?
And he said, when I was your age, I wanted to go to law school, but I engaged in a bunch of jackassery, and I never did it.
I didn't ask him what he did to engage in jackassery, but whatever it was, it clearly bothered him to the point where he felt he couldn't go to law school.
But the point behind the story is this.
The man did not blame anybody but the person in the mirror.
And that is the fundamental distinction, I think, between Democrats and Republicans.
The latter is willing to take personal responsibility when things go wrong.
The former is looking for somebody to blame.
I'm Larry Elder, and we've got a country to save.
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