All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
13:25
Today’s SJW Are Fighting Battles Already Won | Larry Elder
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Ah, today's social justice anti-racism warriors have no clue what racism is really like, have no clue how far this country has come.
Before he became president, Barack Obama spoke about how much racism he thought there was in America.
Here's what he said.
We're going to leave it to the Joshua generation to make sure it happens.
There's still some battles that need to be fought, some rivers that need to be crossed.
Like Moses, the task was passed on to those who might not have been as deserving, might not have been as courageous, find themselves in front of the risks that their parents and their grandparents and great-grandparents had taken.
But that doesn't mean they still don't have a burden that they have to shoulder, that they don't have some responsibilities.
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.
Now about that 90%, think about it.
There was a 2002 Fox Opinion poll that found 8% of Americans believe, quote, there is a chance, close quote, that Elvis Presley is still alive.
So we have to write off roughly 8% of America.
So maybe we can work on that additional 2% that he talked about.
And that was before he got elected, let alone re-elected president.
So don't you think that cut into that 2% just a little bit?
So unless we're looking for nirvana, I'm not sure how much better America can get in terms of race relations.
It's never going to be perfect.
Now this man, who later on became a historian, talked about what it was like growing up in the 50s.
He loved cowboy movies.
He grew up in Virginia and said when he was in the fifth grade, he and his friends used to go to cowboy movies.
And one time, they heard there was a black cowboy, and they were so excited!
In my hometown, Clifton Forge, Virginia, one of the major activities of young men, both black and white, In the late 30s and during World War II was to go to the Saturday matinee to see cowboy movies.
They would start, you know, around 12 o'clock and have two showing.
The black kids, we sat in segregated seats, of course.
The cowboys were all waist white.
They represented the good guys.
And, of course, the soldiers were always white.
The settlers were always white.
And then you had these bad guys, the Indians.
And then you had bad guys, the outlaws.
And it was the same scenario each Saturday, you know, some outlaw trying to take a farm or a ranch away, or some settlers moving across the frontier, and they were just trying to get to a new home.
These vicious Indians would attack.
And always the Indians would always be about to win when the cavalry would come and what not.
And we never saw, you know, any blacks playing any of these roles.
And I recall, this was yesterday, they showed the preview for the next Saturday show.
And We saw a black man in cowboy dress.
He was driving a wagon.
We didn't observe that it was really a mule.
He was pulling the wagon, you know.
And we were shocked.
A black cowboy.
Well, somehow it went through our mind that this black cowboy would Do what the other cowboys did, to be brief.
Well, we look forward to the next Saturday.
And on that particular day, an hour before the show, the streets were lined with young, you know, black males.
The theater owner and the police didn't know what to make of all of it.
I remember one friend of mine was shelved by a local policeman with the statement, you picaninnies, stop blocking the street.
And they couldn't imagine what was about this show that made us want to get there.
So when the movie started, sure enough this black guy shows up and they inform him that the wagon train's about to move out, he was part of a wagon train, and that there would be Indians, you know, out there.
And he made some comical statement which began to wonder, you know, because we had been accustomed to only seeing black clowns, but not a black clown who was a cowboy.
So he made some statements.
They hope he doesn't see any Indians and this, that, and the other.
And so, sure enough, as they got out a day or so, I suppose, someone came writing back that the engines are coming.
And that was great excitement, and the wagons were drawn into a circle.
And so they told this.
Now, his name bothered us also, because when we first saw him, Someone said Fat Meat, and we couldn't, you know, couldn't believe that was his name.
We found out later that was indeed his name, Fat Meat.
So we'll call him Fat Meat now.
Now when the Indians attacked, they proceeded to circle the wagons and just run around the wagon, you know, and the settlers shot them off the horses.
Now that wasn't quite the way the Indians fought, but that's the way they showed it.
And so they tried to get Fatmeet to take a gun.
And Fatmeet was trembling and he was afraid.
And so they insisted that you take a gun.
And so They actually forced a gun into Fat Meat's hand, a rifle, and he was so afraid of it that he dropped it.
Then he pulled out a, reached in his pocket, trembling, and pulled out a barber's razor.
And he was trembling and dropped that.
And he got down on his knees to try to pick it up with his teeth.
And about that time, an hour It went over his head.
And if he had, you know, been standing up, it would hit him, dead center.
And so he saw the arrow and was so terrified that they use that way they speed up a camera or slow it down.
I think it's slow it down to make it look as the person has superhuman speed.
And he took off.
You know, you could hardly see him running.
And he jumped in the wagon.
With the children.
And he was so terrified.
And a young little white girl, looked like she may have been six, seven years old, tried to comfort him.
And she told him that her daddy wasn't going to let the mean old Indians harm him.
And that the children were trying to comfort our black hero, you see.
And we were totally, you know, couldn't believe who we were seeing.
Then after the raid, now what happened, it was announced that ammunition was out, was about to go, and the Indians would surely come and annihilate everybody, and they prepared for it.
And just at the proper moment, a bugle found across the way, and it was the United States Cavalry.
And of course, the moment the bugle found it, the Indians took off.
Which wasn't always the case.
And so the wagon train was saved.
And so they brought fat meat out.
They had to hold him up.
He was still shaking.
And he saw a dead Indian.
And he fainted.
Now, I got back to school.
I was in the fifth grade.
My teacher was George Lenton Davis.
He's now Dr.
George Lenton Davis.
But anyway, I asked him about this.
And he told me that it was, this is what movies were doing, telling you, you know, trying to pass these stereotypes on to you.
But he told me something that shocked me, and maybe he got me interested in black history.
He told me that a third of the cowboys were black, and they were not like fat meat.
Other historians like Roger McGrath of UCLA puts the number of black cowboys at under 25%, more like 15%, but there's no question there were a lot of black cowboys, black soldiers, black law enforcement people, including the famed Bass Reeves.
It is tempting to celebrate Bass Reeves as the first African American U.S. Deputy Marshal, but he was not.
He may have been the first, or maybe he was just one of the first west of the Mississippi.
Our expert, Dr.
Burton, in fact, claims that the presence of black lawmen and soldiers in the Old West has been grossly underrepresented by historians and popular culture alike.
If we look at the real western frontier, you also found blacks who were in law enforcement across the west, in Montana and Colorado and New Mexico.
Twenty percent of the military on the western frontier were African Americans.
Further, the majority of the federal workers for the Fort Smith Court, Arkansas, in 1878 were African Americans.
So why do we celebrate and remember Bass Reeves today?
Not only because he was one of those who had overcome barriers imposed by prejudice, by segregation, and sometimes even by law, which today would count as crimes against humanity.
Not only that, but also because he was simply one of the best damn lawmen who ever lived, period.
Speaking of what it was like to grow up in America during Jim Crow, my father told me when he grew up in Athens, Georgia, if he was walking down the road and a white kid was coming towards him, there wouldn't be a fight.
If he was walking down the road and there were two white kids coming towards him, there would be a fight.
The white kids would jump in.
If there were two black kids and two white kids, no fight.
Three white kids, two black kids, a fight.
Can you imagine?
My father was called the N-word in open court.
He wanted to start a Jitney service, like an Uber service.
And apparently he had to go to a judge to get a license to do that.
So my dad went to a judge to get a license to do that.
He did not know that the judge already hired a black person to do what my dad wanted to do in the black neighborhood, so therefore he didn't want my dad to compete against him.
And he denied the license and referred to my father as the N-word in open court.
My father said when there was some time off he would go to the park, he went to a segregated park.
The park was run down, was not very well maintained, didn't have grass, had dirt.
This is the kind of life, day after day after day, that people like my dad, his generation, endured.
The people complaining about microaggressions have no clue.
Now, recently, the late, great Bob Gibson died.
He was a Hall of Famer pitcher for the St.
Louis Cardinals.
And he admits that when he grew up, he was very, very angry the early part of his career because of the racism the man endured.
And this is the man who, in 1968, had probably, arguably, the most incredible year any pitcher ever had, a 1.12 ERA, and struck out 17 people, oh, in the World Series?
Well, anger came from racism.
Of course it did.
But racism was a way of life that it was stuff that I had to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
I didn't every once in a while go somewhere and all of a sudden there it was.
No, it was there and it followed me all the way through my childhood and not just through the childhood, through the first part of my Major League career.
It was there.
a new World Series record!
He got it!
Suck him out!
Look at the scene on the field!
McCarver, the first one!
Now his infielders all over him!
A new World Series record of 17 strikeouts in one game!
Now, if anybody understands what America used to be like, it's Bob Gibson.
It's Randolph Elder, my father.
These kids do not have a clue.
And how insulting it is for people like my father, people like Bob Gibson, people like the so-called Moses generation to compare what they went through to the alleged microaggressions of what the young people are going through today.
It's insulting.
It really is.
I'm Larry Elder, and we've got a country to save.
▲
Export Selection