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Robert Woodson...Racial Economics In America · Gil I Am

• 0:19
  Speaker 1: I'm Bob Woodson, president of the Woodson Center. I'm here
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: to talk about race and economics. These two issues in
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: America did not converge until the nineteen sixties, with some
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: pretty devastating effects that I'll discuss in my remarks. But
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: the character of any nation or any individual is determined
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: by how we treat the least of us. In America,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: the moral barometer is how we've treated blacks in America
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: and also low income people, just a little history of that.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Prior to the nineteen sixties, the responsibility for caring for
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: those who are in need and various ethnic groups and
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: racial groups was the responsibility of private institutions within those groups.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Immigrants coming from their backwaters of Eastern and Southern Europe,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: they came here. The first requirement was to become acculturated,
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  Speaker 1: and also they must be assimilated, and assimilation meant they
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  Speaker 1: had to learn the language and learn the customs and
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: the culturation had to learn the customs of the country
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: as well well. The large cities proved to be a
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: melting pot and a place of assimilation took place, and
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: the civic institutions within these communities. These cities did a
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: great job of producing Americans out of these immigrants. In
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: a black community, the same process emerged that even under
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  Speaker 1: segregate and discrimination, there was a rich array of civic institutions, churches,
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Masonic organizations that rose up within the groups to provide
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  Speaker 1: for those in need. One of the largest was in
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  Speaker 1: Philadelphia doing free blacks in seventeen eighty nine Mother Bethel Church.
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  Speaker 1: But even among free blacks who sought assistance from their church,
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  Speaker 1: there were high moral standards for people who qualified for aid.
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  Speaker 1: You couldn't get assistance if your poverty or your situation
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  Speaker 1: was caused by your own slothfulness or immorality. So high
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: standards were always required for those receiving aid, and this
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: continued up until the nineteen thirties. With the crash of
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  Speaker 1: the stock market, pressure mounted on these institutions that they
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: could not continue to provide for their people, and so
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: government intervened for the first time in the economy on
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  Speaker 1: behalf of low income people and people who are struggling.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: But intervention was largely government to individuals, and so as
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: a result, these civic institutions pretty much stayed intact until
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  Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. This all changed for the Black community
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  Speaker 1: up until nineteen sixty five, eighty five percent of all
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: households had a man and a woman raising children. But
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: a lot of that changed in the sixties after the
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Voting Rights Act passed and we had to watch riots
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: occurred and Lyndon Johnson announced his War on Poverty. As
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: a result of these events, social science and liberal social
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: scientists at Columbia University School, the social work, Clown and Piven,
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  Speaker 1: came up with this social construct that says that the
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  Speaker 1: black community, if we want to really emphasize the contradictions
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: of capitalism, that one of the ways that we can
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  Speaker 1: do that is to insist that blacks welfare to blacks
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  Speaker 1: be given as reparations. And at the time, public aid
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: to blacks was really stigmatizing the black community. To overcome
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: that stigmatization, the social scientists at the time began to
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  Speaker 1: promote the notion that the nuclear family was eurocentric and
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: therefore racist. They concluded that if we can separate work
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: from income and replace it with welfare, it would make
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  Speaker 1: the fathers redundant in homes well. This social construct was
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  Speaker 1: supported by the Black power movement that saught the nuclear
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  Speaker 1: family as eurocentric. Also, welfare policies were destigmatized. It was
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  Speaker 1: considered reparations. But just having a social policy alone was
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  Speaker 1: not enough. The federal government, through the Opportunity offices or
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  Speaker 1: the poverty programs, actually opened government offices and actively recruited
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  Speaker 1: blacks into the welfare system. Privacy laws suits were filed
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  Speaker 1: so that women who were pregnant out of wedlock no
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  Speaker 1: longer had to declare paternity as a condition of them
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  Speaker 1: getting welfare. And so's the combination of the events that
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: you saw the explosion of welfare people. Millions began to
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  Speaker 1: flow into the welfare system. The liberal social scientists concluded
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  Speaker 1: that if we could only bankrupt our cities, then the
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: federal government would be compelled to change how we address
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  Speaker 1: poverty by having income redistributions. So there was really socialist
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  Speaker 1: aims at time, and the black community was the agent
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  Speaker 1: through which they would promote this dramatic change. And as
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  Speaker 1: a consequence, millions of black slowed into the welfare system
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  Speaker 1: at a time in New York when the unemployment rate
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  Speaker 1: for black men was under four percent, and so what
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  Speaker 1: was predicted actually came true. There was an explosion of
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  Speaker 1: outer wedlock births, and so that number of Black Americans,
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  Speaker 1: the black family formation rates went from eighty five percent
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  Speaker 1: to out of wedlock versus seventy percent, and all the
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  Speaker 1: company's social pathology followed dropout, race violence, of this integration
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  Speaker 1: of families. All of these pathologies occurred at one time
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  Speaker 1: in the black community, and in seventy three New York
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  Speaker 1: City did in fact go bankrupt because of the explosion
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  Speaker 1: of welfare. And this decline was used by the left
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  Speaker 1: to justify racial antagonism. They said now that these changes
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: that are occurring were a direct result of racial discrimination.
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  Speaker 1: Sixteen nineteen came along in August of twenty nineteen. This
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  Speaker 1: was really the fulfillment of the policies that started in
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  Speaker 1: the sixties that the sixteen nineteen project from the New
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  Speaker 1: York Times began to look at the problems facing Black
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: America to day, the out of wedlock birds, the explosion
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  Speaker 1: of black on black crime. More Blacks were killed in
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: one year by other blacks than were killed in forty
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  Speaker 1: years under the lynchings in the South. In other words,
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  Speaker 1: Black Americans hoods had a nine eleven every six months,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: and so the architects of sixteen nineteen associated those changes
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  Speaker 1: with a legacy of slavery and discrimination and they said,
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  Speaker 1: because the real birthday of America is sixteen nineteen. That
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  Speaker 1: was a date that in Jamestown twenty African slaves arrived,
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  Speaker 1: and so America should be defined not from seventeen seventy six,
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  Speaker 1: but sixteen nineteen at the rival of slavey, and America
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  Speaker 1: is incurably racist, and all white people are villains and
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  Speaker 1: therefore to be punished, and all blacks are villains, I
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  Speaker 1: mean victims to be compensated, and that became the dominant
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  Speaker 1: narrative that replaced the civil rights proposition that we should
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  Speaker 1: be judged by the content of our character and not
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: the color of our skin. But that has now been
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: replaced with intersectionality and race grievance is the primary definition
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  Speaker 1: of what social activists are engaged in today. And so
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  Speaker 1: what we at the Woodston Center are doing with our
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: six seventeen seventy six pro a campaign, but we're doing
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  Speaker 1: with the seventeen seventy six campaign, is we're challenging this
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  Speaker 1: notion that America should be defined by its birth defect
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  Speaker 1: of slavery, but America should be defined by its promise
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  Speaker 1: of equal opportunity. And what we're doing by assembling scholars
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  Speaker 1: and activists because it's not enough to challenge the intellectual
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  Speaker 1: framework of what sixteen ninety don because we believe that
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  Speaker 1: experience will always triumph over an argument. Therefore, what we
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  Speaker 1: have recruited is not only black scholars that are presenting
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  Speaker 1: essays to refutiate the statements in sixteen nineteen, but also
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  Speaker 1: we bring a long activist whose lives are the embodiment
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  Speaker 1: of the founding principles of personal responsibility, and so to
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  Speaker 1: challenge this notion, we have given evidence. For instance, in
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: nineteen twenty to nineteen forty, the education gap in the
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: South between blacks and whites was eighth grade for whites,
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: it was fifth gade for blacks. But because Julius Rosenwald,
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: the Jewish CEO of Sears, partners with Booker T. Washington
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: and Rosenwald put up four million dollars and the black
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: community raised four point eight million, and together this partnership,
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  Speaker 1: the black community built five thousand Rosenwall schools in the
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Deep South to provide education to untutored and uneducated blacks.
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  Speaker 1: And as a consequence of this effort, within between nineteen
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  Speaker 1: twenty and nineteen forty, just twenty years, the education gap
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  Speaker 1: in the South closed from three years to six months.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: When blacks were denied access to hotels, they built their
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: own hotels in every major city. There was a major
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  Speaker 1: hotel in Chicago, Illinois. For instance, in nineteen twenty nine,
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  Speaker 1: in the Bronzeville section, blacks owned seven hundred and thirty
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  Speaker 1: one businesses. We had one hundred million dollars in real
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  Speaker 1: estate assets. So all over America, in the presence of discrimination,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: black Americans, using the instruments of the free enterprise system,
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  Speaker 1: pulled their money together in our church's burial societies and
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  Speaker 1: capitalize their own businesses and thrive. They had black wall
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  Speaker 1: streets all over America. Throughout the history of this country,
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  Speaker 1: Black Americans have fought in every war in defense of
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  Speaker 1: the founding principles, and what we should celebrate is their
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  Speaker 1: success within the context of this system. If we're going
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: to talk about the legacy of slavery, we should also
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: talk about the legacy of resistance and resilience that blacks
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  Speaker 1: resisted by being resilient. For instance, in nineteen forty three,
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  Speaker 1: there were no black naval officers, so Eleanor Roosevelt, the
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  Speaker 1: wife of President Roosevelt, insisted at the Navy train naval
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: officers blacks naval officers. The Navy selected sixteen college educated
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  Speaker 1: black cadets for training, but they decided to give these
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  Speaker 1: black cadets in eight weeks what they would give white
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  Speaker 1: cadets in sixteen weeks. And once the black cadets found
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  Speaker 1: out what the Navy was about, they put blankets up
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  Speaker 1: over their windows and stayed up all night and studied.
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  Speaker 1: And when they were tested, they all scored in the
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  Speaker 1: ninetieth percentile. Well, the Navy, believing that they had cheated,
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  Speaker 1: tested them individually. The second time they scored in the
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  Speaker 1: ninety third percentile, and after a few months of hesitation,
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  Speaker 1: thirteen of them were made officers for the first time.
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  Speaker 1: To this day, the scores of these cadets set a
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  Speaker 1: record at the academy because they have the highest record
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  Speaker 1: highest score in the history of the Naval Training Academy.
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  Speaker 1: Another example from history that we're presenting is a man
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  Speaker 1: named Robert Smalls who was born in eighteen thirty nine
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  Speaker 1: in Sumpton's, North Carolina. He was a slave working on
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  Speaker 1: the ship and one night when his masters went to leave.
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  Speaker 1: One night when they left the ship, he commandeered the
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  Speaker 1: ship and along with his five other crewmen. They sneaked
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  Speaker 1: out of the port, picked up their families and put
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  Speaker 1: their master's hat on and waved and went past five
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  Speaker 1: different garrison and turned the supply ship over to the
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  Speaker 1: Union Navy. Robert Smalls was celebrated throughout the country, and
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: as a consequence of his heroic actions, link and admitted
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  Speaker 1: blacks in to fight for the Union Army. Well after
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: the war, Robert Smalls became a successful businessman and got
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  Speaker 1: elected to the Congress during reconstruction, and he went back
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  Speaker 1: and purchased the plantation on which he was a slave,
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  Speaker 1: And because the family of the slave master had become destitute,
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  Speaker 1: in an act of radical grace, he took in the
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  Speaker 1: wife and children of the slave master and even allowed
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  Speaker 1: her to remain in the master bedroom as she had
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  Speaker 1: become delusional and didn't realize that the war was over.
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  Speaker 1: And I think that's a marvelous story of the resilience
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  Speaker 1: of black Americans to thrive and achieve against the oys,
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  Speaker 1: to be born a slave, and through the free enterprise system,
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  Speaker 1: earn enough money to come back and actually purchase the
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  Speaker 1: plantation of which he was a slave, and exhibited the
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  Speaker 1: kind of radical grace that enabled him to take in
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  Speaker 1: and care for the family of the slave master. And
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  Speaker 1: so we are taking these experiences that are ignored and
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  Speaker 1: overlooked by sixteen nineteen and presenting these as evidence that
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  Speaker 1: America should not ever be defined by its birth defect
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  Speaker 1: of slavery, but it should be defined by the promise
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  Speaker 1: that he tells. And that's why people of color from
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: all over the world are risking their lives to get here.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: And so it is important because the message that is
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: coming from liberal radicalists and the Black Lives Matter movement
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  Speaker 1: is really sending a very dangerous message to not only
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: blacks but whites. And what the message that is being
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: sent to blacks is that they are defined by slavery
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: and discrimination, and therefore, if white America doesn't change, it
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: is difficult impossible for blacks to change. That's making an
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: assumption that blacks have no agency and therefore are totally dependent. So,
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: but our society is out of crossroads right now where
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: race as dominating everything. Contracts between law firms now require
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: that companies sign on to the race grievance training school
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  Speaker 1: systems are being taught history that are America is defined
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: by slavery, and so our culture is being polluted by
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: this notion that America is defined by slavery and that
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: it is an exploitative nation at capitalism is to be disavowed.
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  Speaker 1: The Black Lives Matter movement promotes itself as being seeking
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: social justice in wake of George Floyd being murdered or
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: killed by the police. But what they have done is
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: hijack the civil rights movement and migrated it from justice
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  Speaker 1: for blacks to burning Bibles in Portland, to attempting to
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: desecrate World War II memorials, taking down statues not of
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: southern generals but of luminaries like Frederick Douglas. And so
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: there really is a crisis in America where the radical
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: left is using race an America's birth defect as a
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: bludgeon to tear apart this nation. And so what we
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: believe that should happen as a defense of this nation
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  Speaker 1: is that the majority of low income blacks who are
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: suffering the most in this turmoil that we're predict they
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: are also the greatest allies in the restoration of this nation.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: I think there's a myth that the so called spokespersons
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: for Black Americans speaks for their everyday Black American it's
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: just not true. Many of those who command the microphones
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: and are on the talk shows supposed to be representative
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: of the poor. Many of these leaders are against I
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: mean or against the police of the black America supports
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: more police and communities. There's always been a bifurcation between
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: the interests of so called spokesperson and low income people.
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  Speaker 1: For instance, on the issue of vouchers and choice in education,
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: only eight percent of the so called civil rights leadership
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: supports vouchers. Sixty five to seventy percent of low income
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: blacks support vouchers. And this is true for instance, in
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: Florida the two thousand eighteen election guminatory election with de
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: Sante's ran against Gillam, the liberal black former mayor of Tampa.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: The margin of victory was thirty two thousand votes. And
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: that's because one hundred thousand low income blacks voted for
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: the Republican Descantes because of his position on choice and
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: vouchers and education. Even though Gillam brought into pain for
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: him ex President Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Even with Oprah
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: Winfrey and Obama coming to campaign for the black candidate,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: one hundred thousand low income blacks voted the other way
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: because they put the interests of their children's education ahead
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: of race. And I think that is an opening and
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: you're going to see the same divide as you take
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: specific issues into communities. As for all, many of those
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: who are advocating the defunding of the police do not
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: live in neighborhoods that have high crime rates. Many of
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: them live in gated communities, and therefore they don't have
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: to suffer the consequences of their advocacy. What is it
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: they're trying to do, because they have no solutions. All
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: they're talking about is what they're against, what they want
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: to abolish, what they want to deconstruct. They offer no remedies.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: They are saying that the problem of black America is
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: institutional racism. My challenge to them is that what does
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: that mean? Give me an example of institutional racism, and
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: then I want to know what remedy would they apply,
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: And then how would that remedy stop, for instance, the
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: hemorrhage or black on black death in the inner city.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: How would it reduce drug addictions among vulnerable populations living
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: in our inner cities. So one of the ways that
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: America can be restored is that if we mobilize within
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: low income neighborhoods, those people that stand to lose the most.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: Because now what the left is saying to Black America
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: that you are exempt from any personal responsibility for control
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: of your life, that you can never be agents of
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: your own uplift, that the bourgeois values of hard work, sacrifice,
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: delayed ratification are somehow associated with colonialism or white suppression,
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: and therefore to be legitimately black, you must abandon the
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: bourgeois values that enabled Frederick Douglass and many of those
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: who came before us in the past who successfully fought
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: against racial discrimination and oppressing by building their own schools,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: building their own mental hospitals, hotels, educational systems. So the
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: true deliberators of this country will be those in whose
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: name black lives matters have defamed by their actions. The
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: Golden Thirteen example and the example of the life of
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: Robert Small are just a few examples of what I
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: call radical grace in action, and they really exemplify the
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: best that is America. We must come together and deracialize
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: race and desegregate poverty, and try to assist all Americans
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: to be the best that we can be. Thank you