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Feb. 3, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:10
Why Trump May Be the First Post-Racial President: Bob Woodson and Joshua Mitchell
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Race is a very emotional issue with Black America, and it has been manipulated for decades by people who use it to direct Blacks to vote in a certain way.
In this episode, I sit down with Bob Woodson and Joshua Mitchell.
Bob Woodson is a civil rights leader, author, and founder and president of the Woodson Center.
Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University.
The partisan debate on race is driven by guilty whites who are seeking absolutions from crimes they never committed, and entitled blacks who are seeking absolution from injustices they never suffered.
What does Trump's election victory mean for black America?
Will Trump be the first post-racial president?
And how can America revitalize its ailing communities?
We have levels of despair and depression because the state has become this administrative behemoth, making citizen competence impossible.
So we've got this invitation to return to the founders' vision where we have citizen competence.
The only way you can have small government is if you have massive citizen competence.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Bob Woodson, Josh Mitchell, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Pleased to be here.
Glad to be here.
So, Bob, as someone who is deep in the civil rights movement and being a self-proclaimed radical pragmatist, what happened with the black vote this time around?
I think what you witness is liberation.
I think...
Race is a very emotional issue with black America, and it can be very easily manipulated.
And it has been manipulated for decades by people who use it to direct blacks to vote in a certain way.
But I think over the time it's matured to the point where people are more concerned about their personal safety.
And how much money they have in their pockets over what someone's race is.
And so I think you saw maturity there.
They became radical pragmatists and refused to allow race to dominate their decisions.
Fascinating.
So are we seeing a sort of post-racial movement here, Josh?
Well, I would add to what Bob is saying.
Black America has been, to put the matter baldly, the plaything of the state for a very, very long time.
And I think since the 1960s, the expectation would be the Democratic Party would deliver.
And since identity politics came to the fore, the idea the Democratic Party had, I think, was that there would be this vast alliance of people of color who would be known as the innocent victims.
And that this...
Political coalition would come to predominate.
But as Bob said, Americans, black and white, everyone, are preeminently practical people.
And I think a large number of so-called people of color woke up and realized it won't do simply to take the identity politics label, the innocent victimhood label, when in fact their bank accounts are faltering, when they don't have security.
So I think we've reached a cultural moment where Where identity politics is at least for the moment vanquished, and we have a whole new opportunity here.
In one sense, blacks have lived in a banana republic for the last 50 years.
I mean, all of the cities where there's major decline that has occurred over the last 50 years have all been run by liberal democratic administrations.
So if partisan politics alone were the source of salvation...
The question is, why are we witnessing all of this decline over the past 50 years?
I was born during the Depression in a low-income black neighborhood in South Philadelphia.
There were no middle-class people there.
But 96% of our households had a man and a woman raising children.
Elderly people could walk safely without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren.
Never heard of gunfire.
Children were not shot in their cribs.
It was unheard of.
We have the highest marriage rate of any group in society, even though jujury segregation was a rule.
So one can look at the circumstance of low-income blacks and ask yourself, how were we able to achieve in the face of these circumstances?
When the great promise of the Civil Rights Movement and political participation was, if you vote for us, these conditions will improve.
And I think now the blacks are waking up to that reality and beginning to migrate towards becoming swing voters.
I don't think they're moving to become Republicans.
I think they're moving more towards becoming swing voters.
Politicians are going to have to earn their vote.
Yes.
They have agreed to become competitive.
And that's wholesome for the country, and it's in the best interest of the black community to be competitive.
So, Josh, what do you think the opportunity is here?
Well, America is first and foremost a middle-class commercial republic, and we have to get back to building things.
And so I don't know that it's going to be easy.
I think there are huge...
The challenges to moving away from globalism toward a middle-class commercial republic.
But what we have to do is to recognize that the people who are working with their hands, and this is not only whites, but blacks and Hispanics and all the rest, have to be given an opportunity.
Craftsmen have to be thinking about how they can make sure that this group thrives from here on in.
Instead of thinking about global capital, we have to start thinking about the people who are living everyday lives among us.
And just maybe explain to me, what does this mean exactly, this middle-class commercial republic?
There's only one philosophical tradition in America that's ever developed, and it's called pragmatism.
Why?
Because Americans, unlike Europeans who are involved in very high-level theoretical debates, which led to the disasters of socialism and national socialism, by the way, Americans have always been a practical people.
And the disease of the last 20 years, at least, has been that we've been asked to think ideologically.
Are you pure?
Are you stained?
And what we have to do now...
Is put away all that.
We have to become a truly post-racial society.
And, of course, the word on the street was that Obama was the first post-racial president.
It will probably be Trump who's the first post-racial president.
So we have to be moving in that direction, I think.
I think President Obama was in the position to be the first post-racial president.
But as soon as he came out in that speech at Morehouse University...
Where he prodded young men to step up and be fathers.
And he was castigated by the civil rights leadership.
He retreated from that.
Never spoke about personal responsibility again.
And he eventually devolved with the Trayvon Martin situation by saying, Trayvon Martin could have been my son.
That was a death knell to ending racial polarization in America.
He became a...
A racial president from that moment on.
And it's ironic that President-elect Trump attracted 30% of black independent men and a large number of Hispanics because he spoke to the practical needs of people.
And so that's why I think he is the first post-racial...
President, he's not a guilty white person, which to me is refreshing.
Well, so what do you mean by not a guilty white person?
My young colleague Delano Squires, I think, framed it.
He said a lot of this partisan debate on race is driven by guilty whites who are seeking absolutions from crimes they never committed and entitled blacks.
Who are seeking absolution from injustices, they never suffered.
The biggest challenge that we're facing is a class phenomenon from both the left and the right.
You have racial grievance merchants.
The civil rights movement has dwarfed into a race grievance industry.
70% of all these $22 trillion that we've spent in the past 50 years on poverty programs, 70% of it goes to middle class people, black, white, who are providing services to the poor.
So we've created a commodity out of poor people.
And we wonder why we fail.
So they ask which problems are fundable, not which ones are solvable.
And going back to Josh's point, That any group's participation in the American economy isn't what government does for them.
It's their small business formation rates.
In a healthy economy, only 3% of Americans are entrepreneurs, but they generate 70% of the jobs.
And entrepreneurs tend to be C students, not A students, according to David Birch's study at MIT. A students come back to universities and teach.
C students endow.
Fascinating.
Is that really true?
Yes, sir.
That's amazing.
I didn't know that.
Yes.
Whenever I say this to business groups, they laugh.
I was freaking Miami, and they looked in the back of the room.
He said, yeah, this guy was the last person in our law class, and he can buy all of us.
Identity politics is built on guilt.
I think part of the reason why there has been such an unpredictable reaction to Trump, Russia collusion, all this stuff, is he's literally, the way I put it in print, is the wrong kind of white man.
Because if you're white, and I have no interest in defending blood and soil politics, so please don't misunderstand me, but if you're a white man, you have to be...
You have to be guilty.
You have to defend every innocent victimhood cause.
And if you don't, you're considered toxic.
And Joe Biden and Waltz, the Democrat model of a male, is this guilty white male.
And Trump literally cannot exist in that world.
This is why you have to invent a demonic source that brings him forth, like Russia or something like this.
And the victory of Trump is a...
Cultural declaration that America is done looking at people as if they're...
It does nobody any good.
We have a generation of men, black and white, who are told that they need to recede, and they are receding with drugs and violence and pornography and video games.
We need to bring them back.
It cannot be the case that the future is female, and so I have two sons.
It cannot be the case that all of us who have sons and grandsons have to tell them that they need to step aside.
We need to build a regime based on...
Competence, full stop, and give everybody an opportunity to develop along those lines.
And what's so wondrous about Bob's groups is that they're not interested in talking about guilt and innocence.
They are interested in demonstrating competence to themselves and to others around them, and they are looked up to by younger members of the community who are at risk.
And as one of Bob's people, Julia, had said, One of our meetings, the reason why people succeed is they have somebody they don't want to let down.
And that person is a person of competence.
And we have to stop thinking in terms of economic efficiency on the libertarian right.
We have to stop thinking in terms of innocent victimhood on the left.
And we have to focus singularly on developing the competence of our fellow citizens.
Gentlemen, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Georgetown Professor of Government, Josh Mitchell, and founder of the Woodson Center, Bob Woodson.
You know, this is a perfect opportunity to just talk a little bit about, maybe let's start with your background, Bob.
Of course, you've been on the show, we've talked about the work you've done at the Woodson Center, but just give us a thumbnail of, you know, how you came into this from the beginning.
Well, first of all, I was born in South Philadelphia, one of the youngest of five children, to a mother with a fifth-grade education.
My dad was a laborer, very strong.
She got a job at a time when men did not, blacks did not drive trucks from the dairies, I mean, from the train to the dairies.
He took the job, and he had to fight his way to keep it.
They said, you can have it if you can keep it.
He's a very strong-willed guy.
Because this is under Jim Crow, basically.
Yeah, this was in Jim Crow, 1937, in the midst of the Depression and also Jim Crow.
And he had some war-related wounds.
He fought in the First World War with New York Hellcats, Harlem Hellcats.
But he had some...
Chronic problems resulted in him dying when I was about nine, leaving my mother with five children to raise in this neighborhood.
But again, it was secure.
And so I had to rely upon my peers as an alternative family.
And so I gained an appreciation why kids joined gangs.
But I was blessed to be equipped with the kind of values that I chose good friends.
And there are three of us left today.
When they were a year older than me, and they dropped, so they went into college, and I was unaffiliated, and so I dropped out and went into the Air Force in 1954. I was in the space program, and the Air Force saw things in me, and I went to college while I was in the Air Force.
University of Miami, 12 credits.
Only I had to be taught on the base because I couldn't walk on campus.
I had 12 credits from University of Miami at a time, and I could not walk on the campus.
So I knew what racism was all about.
Long story short, after I got out, I worked my way through college, went to a black college.
Thank God there wasn't affirmative action that would have put me at Penn.
But I went to a small black college, Cheney.
Where I got the kind of intellectual nurturing that I needed that prepared me for a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania.
Got involved in the civil rights movement, but became very disenchanted when I realized that people, that there was a bait-and-switch game going on where we used the demographics of poor blacks to promote remedies.
And when funding came, it did not go to poor blacks.
It went to middle class providers.
So I left the civil rights movement following the death of Dr. King and began to work on behalf of low-income people of all races.
And so I have been singularly focused on serving the needs of the least of God's children, which means that I have to be clear and constant in that commitment.
And so, therefore, I thought it was necessary to be humble, but also, in the words of Dr. King, be open to self-criticism.
So those are the principles that have guided my work.
So I have worked now on behalf of low-income people since the late 60s.
I have worked on behalf of low-income people of all races.
I've worked with Native Americans on takeover of Alcatraz.
I've worked with Cesar Chavez and helped him get farm workers.
Help them to develop, acquire a medical facility, affordable, to help farm workers.
So my work has singly been concentrating on the class issue, and that's what's missing today.
And if I may add, through this unique approach of going into communities that are, you know, Let's call it disadvantaged.
I don't know what term you're supposed to use in finding people that are succeeding there and empowering them.
For many years, the name of my organization had the word enterprise in it.
It was only changed to the Woodson Center for the past six years because my name is more associated with the principles than the enterprise.
But the reason I selected it is because the same principles that work in the market economy work in the social economy.
And so what the Woodson Center does, we go into low-income communities.
We're sort of like a venture capitalist without capital.
We go into there and we look for social entrepreneurs, people who were in prison, people who had overcome tremendous odds in their lives.
They were alcoholics.
They were prostitutes.
Through God's grace, they became redeemed, and they used their redemptive qualities to influence others.
And this is where Josh and I come together, because a lot of conservatives believe that the way you change people is to teach them.
And so there's a great reliance on intellectual white papers, and if we just have the right policies, then people's practice will change.
Well, to me, I understood that values are not taught, they're caught.
And so grassroots leaders are able to redeem and promote redemption and reform of individuals by actually modeling the kind of values that they want people to emulate.
And as a consequence, I have been a party to the restoration of whole communities just based upon the enterprising work of...
Three or four people.
They're able to affect hundreds.
And so the Woodson Center has been there to not only document it, but also provide access to capital.
So two things that a venture capitalist brings to an enterprise.
They bring capital, but they also bring managerial expertise because entrepreneurs are poor bookkeepers.
And grassroots people are poor bookkeepers.
And so what the Woodson Center does is provide training and also access to capital so they can take what works for 10 people and affect 1,000.
But the qualities that make these grassroots healing agents effective makes them invisible.
And that's because elitism prevents.
Both conservatives and liberals looking to them, to untutored people, as a source of solution.
That's why I say there is wisdom that is learned and wisdom that is earned.
Grassroots people earn their wisdom and therefore what we as a society can benefit from them, but they're ignored as a source.
Of new insight.
And that's why this administration is poised, is in a position to really harvest that knowledge and put these people to work healing this society.
If a mother who lost two sons in a toxic, violent neighborhood were able to forgive the people who committed these crimes and turned that pain into purpose and caused 20 other violent neighborhood were able to forgive the people who committed these crimes and turned that pain into purpose and caused 20 other moms to find healing, perhaps they have
And so the biggest challenge we're facing is a moral and spiritual freefall that is consuming people of all races and all colors.
But we're not going to be able to find the source of this solution if we are separated by race, and that's why we must become post-racial.
So what should DOGE, in your mind, be doing, or what should other institutions be doing on day one to facilitate this vision?
Well, minimally, I think we have to ask the question, or people involved with it have to ask the question, what can be devolved back to the state?
Department of Education, for example.
The federal government has no business, in my view, being involved in education.
So decentralize, decentralize, decentralize where possible.
But with the full understanding that you don't just cut spending and then everything takes care of itself.
What it means is citizens are going to have to step up again.
And so what we have now is infantilized citizenry.
That's concerned with Instagram and X and the rest.
We're spending way too much time on that rather than engagement at the local level.
I tell my students, I would like every parent in America to go to sleep at night and wonder whether the educational system in the next school district or the next county is better than the one that they have.
And if they're worried about it, they need to spend their energies figuring out how to make their own school system much better.
As opposed to...
Well, Bob Woodson, Josh Mitchell, such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Bob Woodson, Josh Mitchell, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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