Stefan Molyneux breaks down the shocking historical facts behind 'white privilege' and discusses the recent debate between Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Bill O'Reilly of the O'Reilly Factor. Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/white-privilege
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| Hi everybody, this is Devan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| I hope you are strapped in to your politically incorrect truth bomb chair ready for some shocking historical facts and arguments. | |
| So I watched a what I guess you could loosely call debate between one Jay Stewart and one B O'Reilly regarding white privilege. | |
| Now white privilege, for those of you who don't know, who are unstained by the brainwashing of liberal propaganda of higher education. | |
| White privilege is the privilege that white people have as the result of being lords and masters of slaves in America in particular throughout the ages and imposing not only slavery but Jim Crow, voting restrictions, segregation laws and so on which were to a large degree repealed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and before and since then there has been a lot of Affirmative action, | |
| hiring quotas, racial quotas designed to bring the black families, black groups out of poverty in the United States. | |
| Black groups in the United States not doing fantastically well. | |
| The median household net worth for whites in 2010 was $110,000, $69,590 for Asians, $7,424 for Hispanics, and $4,995 For blacks, not particularly great. | |
| White Americans have 22 times more wealth than blacks. | |
| Median income for Asians was 68,636. | |
| 57,009 for whites, 39,000 for Hispanics and 33 and change for blacks. | |
| So 69 for Asians, 57 for whites, 39 for Hispanics and 33 for blacks. | |
| So this is why Bill O'Reilly was talking about Asian privilege because of course Asians are doing better than whites. | |
| As far as why the black community is doing badly, there are two fundamental reasons. | |
| One we will talk about in this presentation and another one we will leave for another time. | |
| But let's look at some of the historical realities behind this debate. | |
| So here we have a Jew, Jon Stewart, talking to an American Irish, right? | |
| A person of Irish descent, Bill O'Reilly. | |
| Okay, let's look at where, say, Jews and Irish stood in the slavery question, say in the 18th century. | |
| So on the one side you have the Irish and the Irish were serfs in Ireland. | |
| They fled the potato famine, endless British oppression and so on. | |
| And the British sold the Irish as slaves into North America and they were actually sold for less money than African slaves because they were less used to a warm climate, less hardy and so on. | |
| And they were treated worse in general than black slaves. | |
| So when John Stewart is talking to Bill O'Reilly. | |
| He's talking to a member of a group who were former slaves about how he has white privilege Because some whites owned slaves in the South. | |
| This is complete madness. | |
| On the other hand, we have John Stewart. | |
| Now John Stewart is a member of the Jewish persuasion. | |
| Now, members of the Jewish persuasion were kind of disproportionately high in the representation of people who bought and sold and ran slaves. | |
| So in the South, oftentimes you couldn't even buy or sell a slave on a Jewish holiday because the Jews were celebrating their faith rather than facilitating the buying and selling of slaves. | |
| In the South, in the antebellum South, during the time of slave ownership, about 5% of whites owned slaves. | |
| 5% of whites owned slaves. | |
| In the same country, in Jewish households, there are estimates that between 40 and 75% of Jews owned slaves. | |
| 5% of whites owning slaves, 40 to 75% of Jews owning slaves. | |
| I think that would be more accurately termed Jewish privilege than it would be generic white privilege. | |
| The whites in general didn't like the institution of slavery for three main reasons. | |
| Number one, they were taxed to pay for the government to enforce slave laws. | |
| You can't have slavery unless the government is going to go and grab the slaves and bring them back to the plantation if they try to escape. | |
| Unless the government is going to enforce slave contracts. | |
| So The whites were taxed to pay for the capture and return of slaves. | |
| So they didn't like that. | |
| Number two, they were press-ganked. | |
| They were drafted into forming these slave capture patrols. | |
| So you'd have to go out as a poor or middle-class white. | |
| You'd have to go out Roam around the streets and alleys and byways looking for escaped slaves. | |
| Did you want to do that? | |
| You really didn't. | |
| Number three, third reason why a lot of whites really hated slavery, because it drove down the wages for relatively unskilled whites. | |
| Hard to compete. | |
| Hard to compete with free labor. | |
| So this is another reason why whites hated slavery and did not economically benefit from slavery, but rather what slavery did was by putting everyone's money into human labor, it prevented the development of automated farm equipment, right? | |
| So at the turn of the last century, like 90 percent of Americans were involved in farming. | |
| Now it's like two or three percent because it's been automated. | |
| Why has it been automated? | |
| Because There's no more slavery. | |
| And so you have to pay your workers, which means it's more efficient to invest in labor-saving devices. | |
| Why did you never get capitalism and the free market in the Industrial Revolution in the ancient world, in the ancient Greece and ancient Rome? | |
| Because it was a slave-based society. | |
| So the rich people bought slaves, and so they didn't want to invent labor-saving devices because that lowers the value of their slaves. | |
| So it was not beneficial. | |
| It was not beneficial for whites to own slaves. | |
| There were a tiny percentage of whites who made some money from it and a significantly larger percentage of Jews who made some money from it. | |
| But for the average person, it's like the military-industrial complex. | |
| It costs you and I a fortune, but a few well-connected people with corporate power and with political power and influence make a fortune at our expense. | |
| So, the idea that there's this wonderful white privilege that everyone profited from is just absolutely false. | |
| So, what are some of the other facts with regards to how people overcome historical disadvantage, historical oppression? | |
| Well, let's look at our friends the Jews. | |
| Two major waves of Jewish immigration into the United States. | |
| Number one, at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, Jews fled pogroms and lynchings and murders by the thousands in Mother Russia. | |
| They fled to America. | |
| The second wave was the Jews fleeing Nazism, National Socialism, in Europe during the Second World War. | |
| They fled to America to escape the Holocaust and the genocides and the The ghettoization and the restrictions on travel and the having to wear various designs on your sleeve. | |
| They fled to America. | |
| Now, according to the theory of white privilege, 150 years ago, or hundreds of years ago with regards to slavery, 60, 50, 60 years ago with regards to civil rights problems and repressions, blacks are still doing extremely poorly, and it's a result of these ancient and horrifying and obviously immoral oppressions. | |
| Okay, so let's compare that. | |
| This is a theory that Jon Stewart, a Jew, was putting forward. | |
| So... | |
| After Jews came from Europe, after not speaking English, after Jews came from Europe, during and after the Second World War, it took, on average, 4.5 years for the Jews to reach the income level of whites. | |
| 4.5 years. | |
| Not decades, not centuries. | |
| 4.5. | |
| Less than half a decade it took for the Jews to reach the income level of whites. | |
| I think you could arguably say that the Holocaust was worse than slavery because the slave owners wanted to keep their assets alive and they wanted to keep them healthy, whereas the program of National Socialism was the extermination of the Jews or expulsion or extermination of the Jews in Europe. | |
| So the idea that blacks are doing poorly because of historical injustice when you compare this to Jews, it's incredibly racist. | |
| Because it's saying, well, we Jews, we can recover and match the income of whites, of Christian whites, in less than half a decade. | |
| But you see, you poor, childlike, benighted blacks, it's going to take you 50 or 100 or 150 years, and look where you still are. | |
| Pat, pat, pat. | |
| It's white privilege. | |
| You're just depressed. | |
| But that's not what Jews did. | |
| It's not what Jews experienced. | |
| It's not what they know. | |
| So why don't they say the same thing to blacks? | |
| I would argue because it's incredibly racist. | |
| It's an incredibly racist perspective to say, well, what we can do in four and a half years, y'all can't do in 150 years. | |
| No. | |
| A study of income levels in New Orleans in 1960, 43% of the Jews earned over $10,000 annually. | |
| This is back when $10,000 meant quite a bit. | |
| So 43% of Jews earn 10,000 annually, only 7% of the white population as a whole did. | |
| This is 15 years after the Holocaust, 15 years after mass exodus of Jews, when they still faced anti-Semitism, of course, in various places in America. | |
| When the Jews talk about white privilege, when anyone talks about white privilege, they're infantilizing blacks. | |
| They're saying, well, other groups have been able to do it. | |
| Look at the Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Second World War, had all their property or most of their property stripped from them. | |
| They refused to follow a political solution and very quickly returned to the level of wealth and in fact exceeded it of whites. | |
| So, this argument that historical injustice permanently scars a community for decades or centuries, and that is why they can't do better, is demonstrably false. | |
| Unless, unless, one is willing to argue that blacks are somehow genetically inferior to Asians or to Jews or to whites. | |
| And, okay, make the case if you dare. | |
| But, if you're not going to make that case, Then you have to accept that it's incredibly racist to lower your standards enormously for blacks relative to other races and cultural groups. | |
| Okay, so that's argument. | |
| The third argument is if we're going to say the blacks are doing badly because of prior injustice, then they must have done worse when they were closer to that injustice, right? | |
| Like, so if I say, uh, Chernobyl is producing radiation, a big Nuclear accident. | |
| So Chernobyl is producing radiation. | |
| Radiation causes cancer. | |
| Higher doses of radiation cause more cancer. | |
| So if you live close to Chernobyl, you get bad radiation, bad cancer. | |
| But if you live further away, it gets better. | |
| Well, then I would do the data, right? | |
| Crunch the data and find out if people who live closer to a radiation source get more cancer. | |
| If it turns out that people further away from a radiation source get more cancer, my theory is false. | |
| My theory is falsified. | |
| So, again, we'll just take a rough proxy of the early 1960s for the end of... | |
| Legalized racism in America, at least prior to the legalized racism of quotas and affirmative action. | |
| So, a lot has been talked about with regards to the disintegration of the black family, but it's okay because white families and other families are merrily following suit. | |
| So, black out of wedlock births in 1965 were only 28%. | |
| 28% of children were born out of wedlock. | |
| 1965, one year after the Civil Rights Act, when there had been legitimate and catastrophic oppression of blacks in America. | |
| By 1975, it went from 28% illegitimacy to 49% illegitimacy. | |
| 1990, it went to 65%. | |
| 1995, 70%, and it's a little higher than that today. | |
| So, this eviscerates It eviscerates the theory that historical calamities are the sole cause of black dysfunction. | |
| Because blacks were more oppressed in 1965 than they are in 2014, yet the illegitimacy rate is almost three times higher. | |
| How can that circle be squared? | |
| It can't. | |
| And therefore we must look elsewhere than purely historical oppression. | |
| And the reason why it's important is because the single greatest predictor of a negative outcome in life is being raised by a single mother, not a widow, a woman who is single by choice. | |
| That is the greatest predictor of a destructive long-term outcome for your life. | |
| The poverty rate for married black Americans is only 11.4%. | |
| The rate for black female-headed households is almost 54%. | |
| Again, almost five times higher. | |
| How can this be understood? | |
| The rise of illegitimacy is the rise of poverty. | |
| It's the rise of early pregnancy. | |
| It's the rise of drug use. | |
| It's the rise of problems with authority. | |
| It's the rise of antisocial personality disorders. | |
| It's the rise of criminality. | |
| These are all the effects of not having a father in the home. | |
| So the growth of illegitimacy in the black communities cannot be ascribed to slavery or racism. | |
| There are incredible stories of black men so devoted to their family under slavery that they would escape and wander the entire state or more than one state desperately trying to find their own families. | |
| Blacks were more oppressed in 1965 And had about a third of the illegitimacy rate. | |
| So that is not the answer. | |
| And it's not just blacks. | |
| Out-of-wedlock births were 7%. | |
| When the war on poverty began in the 60s, it's almost 40%. | |
| Today, in fact, I think on the East Coast in New York, for women under 30, the illegitimacy rate is more than 50%. | |
| It's completely catastrophic. | |
| For college-aged women, it's 5%. | |
| Now, if poor women who gave birth outside of marriage were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds of the poor women and the poor families would be immediately lifted out of poverty. | |
| Roughly 80% of all long-term poverty occurs in single-parent homes. | |
| So, blacks in the post-war period, incomes were rising, professional accreditation was rising, education levels were rising, and then... | |
| What fell on the emerging black experience was the welfare state. | |
| Which was instituted by a party on the left, the party of the Democrats, which, you know, the KKK was an offshoot of the Democrats. | |
| They have a strong history of racism, and I think that the war on poverty is an incredibly racist endeavor. | |
| It was supposed to help people no longer be poor, specifically targeted at blacks, and it's destroyed the black family almost entirely. | |
| And you can read more about this in Charles Murray's Losing Ground. | |
| And so it's created a near-permanent underclass of blacks. | |
| And the reason for that is not because blacks are any more prone to welfare than anything else. | |
| It's simply because when you are poor, welfare is proportionately more advantageous to you. | |
| So if you're in a neighborhood where everyone makes 10 or 15, the households, and they make 10 or 15 thousand dollars, and welfare plus benefits gives you 20 thousand dollars, Good. | |
| So you go on welfare and you're doing better. | |
| If you're in a neighborhood where people make fifty or sixty or seventy thousand dollars, then the twenty grand of welfare looks pretty bad. | |
| So those who have more money are less tempted by welfare. | |
| Those who have less money are more tempted by welfare. | |
| And blacks, for horrible, historical, tragic and immoral reasons, had less money when the welfare state came in. | |
| So the culture of dependency gets set in stone to some degree, to a large degree, I would argue. | |
| Also, Jon Stewart said, well, the blacks aren't here by choice. | |
| Blacks aren't here by choice. | |
| And he didn't really get a chance to finish the point. | |
| But so what? | |
| So what? | |
| How many people went to the New World because they just thought it was great? | |
| You know, they had a great life at home, you know, it was wonderful in Ireland during the potato famine, fantastic over there in Eastern Europe during religious wars and pogroms, absolutely charming. | |
| So, most people who came to America were fleeing oppression of some god-awful kind, And weren't here. | |
| It took this dangerous six-week voyage where a number of people died, risked scurvy, and got a whole new continent of weird little bugs to make you sick and pretty understandably hostile natives. | |
| I mean, language barriers. | |
| You went over young, often without family contacts. | |
| Who came to America by choice? | |
| And if not being in an entire continent by choice means that you're forever dysfunctional, how do you explain the relative wealth of Australia where significant portions of the population were unjustly arrested, imprisoned, and transported over in slave ships to colonize Australia? | |
| And is it really fair to compare blacks only to, say, whites or Asians or even Hispanics? | |
| The important thing also is to compare them to other blacks. | |
| So as the black commenter Larry Elder has pointed out, if black America were a country, it would be the 15th largest economy in the world. | |
| They've got, what, I think over $800 or $900 billion worth of spending power. | |
| Collectively, black Americans are the richest blacks in the entire world. | |
| The richest blacks in the entire world. | |
| Do you know what's not in any of those top 15 countries, the 15th of which would be black spending in America? | |
| What's not in any of those 15 countries are any other countries run by blacks. | |
| So, It's kind of hard to make the case. | |
| I mean, all you have to do is do a thought experiment, right? | |
| I mean, forget the Ebola stuff for the moment. | |
| But let's just say Liberia and America offered all the black citizenship. | |
| Which way do you think the airplanes would be flying? | |
| Full airplanes would be flying. | |
| I mean, I think it's pretty clear to understand. | |
| There is something that hugely troubles me about This charge of white privilege. | |
| And again, it's one of these soft bigotry of low expectations of the black community, which I think is horrible and racist and terrifying and terrible and destructive. | |
| So let me sort of explain what I mean. | |
| For blacks, the effects of slavery and the effects of Jim Crow and the effects of segregation laws and other disenfranchising laws, the effects of that are so long-lasting that they last decades or centuries after the end of these institutions. | |
| And we must give sympathy and leniency, perhaps even restitution, to blacks because they just, they can't move past it, they can't get past it because blah, blah, blah, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| Let's say that's true. | |
| Well, there's two sides to the racism equation. | |
| The blacks who were the victims and the whites who were the victimizers. | |
| If the effects of racism are allowed to continue with sympathy and leniency and restitution for blacks, then surely the case must be true for whites as well. | |
| In other words, if a white person is racist, We should give them sympathy and leniency because whites had a culture and a history of racism as well. | |
| Ah. | |
| Remember Paula Deen? | |
| This chef from the South, a cooking show host from the South who I believe may have had a little bit of hair dye and spray. | |
| So she said she used the word nigger when she was young after she worked at a bank and some black guy put a gun to her head and robbed the bank. | |
| And everybody goes insane. | |
| Everybody goes completely mental. | |
| But why? | |
| Because she was talking about the South in the 60s. | |
| And we're still saying, well, leniency and Sympathy for blacks because of the history of racism, but why is there no sympathy for whites for the history of racism, for the habits, the mental habits and all that that that engendered in whites? | |
| Ah, you see, because whites are supposed to be, what, 100% over racism. | |
| Whites are supposed to be completely and totally over racism. | |
| It's all completely done. | |
| You can't have any vestiges it. | |
| You can't use it as an excuse. | |
| You are racist. | |
| That is wrong. | |
| That is bad. | |
| No! | |
| No racism, whitey! | |
| Okay, so then the whites are supposed to have a clean break with the past and not be racist, have no effects of racism, no effects of owning slaves, no effects of any of that. | |
| But then why are the standards so much lowered for blacks? | |
| If whites are supposed to be completely over the legacy of racism, why is a break given to blacks? | |
| This is again, soft bigotry of lower expectations. | |
| Absolutely wrong. | |
| Absolutely wrong. | |
| The basic reality... | |
| It's that slavery around the world was a terrible human tragedy. | |
| And it had gone on for tens and probably hundreds of thousands of years. | |
| It was kind of the go-to position whenever you conquered anyone. | |
| You raped the women and you took the men as slaves. | |
| And you probably killed the kids. | |
| It's what the Native Americans did when they had wars with each other. | |
| They took the vanquished enemy warriors as slaves and sometimes sold them to whites and blacks. | |
| The very first slave owner in America was a black guy. | |
| The blacks participated in the slavery in Africa. | |
| Whites couldn't go into the interior of Africa. | |
| They got eaten alive by bugs and the average life expectancy was about 11 months. | |
| So the blacks captured the slaves. | |
| They sold them to the whites and to a significant proportion to the Jews. | |
| And then the Jews and the whites shipped the blacks over. | |
| The blacks also went east and whites went east into the Muslim slave trade where they were treated even more brutally than the transatlantic slave trade. | |
| It was a terrible human tragedy. | |
| It had been practiced worldwide by just about everyone and their daughter and their dog and probably the fish in their bowls as well. | |
| And the reality was it was not the Japanese who ended slavery. | |
| It was not the Inuit who ended slavery. | |
| It was not the Indians. | |
| It was not those little guys in the Amazon with the blowdarts. | |
| It was white Western Christian Europeans who, through a moral crusade, through the spending of blood and treasure, bribed and fought and bit and bought the end of slavery throughout the world. | |
| That is one of the great and crowning achievements of Western European civilization, was the end of slavery. | |
| And, like, life and in history, what good deed doesn't go unpunished? | |
| So the only culture that fought to end slavery worldwide in the greatest moral crusade in the history of the planet to date is really the only group that now gets blamed for slavery. | |
| This is ridiculous. | |
| It's embarrassing. | |
| It's stupid. | |
| And it shows a catastrophic ignorance. | |
| And you can read. | |
| Thomas Sowell has wonderful works on the end of slavery. | |
| He's a black economist, a fantastic guy to read. | |
| It's ridiculous that we continue to parade these lower expectations for blacks and think that somehow we're not being racist. | |
| So, look, I don't want to be Mr. | |
| Complaining Guy. | |
| I just really wanted to point out that this white privilege is an extraordinarily destructive concept and it is inherently racist towards blacks. | |
| There are lots of solutions to these problems. | |
| Now is not particularly the time to get into them. | |
| But we will do these perhaps at a future date. | |
| This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy issue in the world. | |
| Please like, share, get offended, tell me how bad I am in the comments, and donate if you can. | |
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