Ep 106 | Segregation Survivor: How to Counter BLM's FALSE Racial Narrative | Bob Woodson | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse, and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Today's guest is a genius, certified genius.

In 1990, he won the MacArthur Genius Grant,

and it has been non-stop his entire life.

All the odds have always been against him.

But his mother told him to strive for excellence, and he did, and he has made quite an impact.

You may not know his name, but once you meet him, you'll never forget him.

It is

a long journey.

He was a civil rights activist in the 1960s.

He went to jail.

He devoted his life to improving the lives of low-income people.

He was also the director of the American Enterprise Institute.

He founded the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.

He founded then the Woodson Center.

He is a guy who you probably don't know because he's not out there trying to drum up spotlight.

He's a guy who lives in the communities and does everything he can to fix them.

He is a perfect example of a person with solutions in an era that is inundated with difficult questions.

He goes through all of this and much more in his upcoming book, Red Wright and Black, Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.

Today on the Glenbeck podcast, the one and only my good friend, Bob Woodson.

Hello, my friend Bob.

How are you?

I'm just fine, man.

Always good to see you.

You're inspiration to me.

Oh, please.

I wanted to start this podcast with how you inspire other people.

It was the day after the Chauvin verdict came in.

Sorry, President Biden had gotten up and said that

we're a systematically racist country, et cetera, et cetera.

And a lot of people, they even agreed with the verdict that something was wrong there and he should be punished for it.

A lot of people felt pretty down in the mouth.

And that morning I came in and the first call I took was this call.

I want you to hear it.

What the president did yesterday was so irresponsible.

And so I woke up angry and then I called my good friend Bob Woodson, who you've had on your show several times.

And

he talked me off the ledge.

He said, we need to do is Mother Teresa, we need to increase our faith.

And he reminded me of the story of David and Goliath.

And he says, we are the David.

He indicated that the low-income black American who's been used as a pawn in all of this

is a sleeping giant.

And we need to cultivate.

them and help them rise up to counter this false narrative that's, by the way, being promoted by people who are probably making six figures or more, who have made it, who have been successful, and now crying racism.

Bob Woodson, I've wanted to talk to you ever since that phone call came in because I think there's a lot of people that are losing hope.

America is just being beaten down into the ground.

Everything is racist, and the people who are the race baiters, if you will, seem to be profiting off it it and buying houses and nobody's being held accountable for it.

It's shameful what is happening because there are real problems in America that we can solve.

So help us, Bob, help us.

Well, the best metaphor for what you're talking about, the fact that Al Sharpton flew in on a Learjet.

Maxine Waters left a $3 million mansion.

and requested Capitol Hill police escort.

And she was rallying to the leader of Black Lives Matter that just bought about 3.4 million in

big estates, one at 3.1.3 mansion in a white neighborhood patrolled by white police officers.

So what do we do with that information?

I know.

Well, Marxists, as you know, always become rich themselves once things have turned.

But

it's almost as if we're standing in a country and we're like, am I the only one seeing this?

How come

nobody else is seeing this?

But you know, what the caller was saying, that I believe that the sleeping giant are low-income blacks.

First of all, if you look at the numbers, 80% of low-income blacks who are losing their children in this savage carnage that is going on in the inner cities as the police are demonized as an extension of the white supremacy, and therefore they are pulling back in these communities.

And as a consequence, the murder rate is soaring.

Glenn, on Easter Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama, a thousand blacks were picnicking in the park.

Six black thugs discharged 100 bullets, killing a 32-year-old

daughter of a local pastor that just finished singing in her church.

And they shot 16 other people and killing a a four-year-old boy.

I never even heard this.

How come I hadn't heard this?

And three days after that, in Syracuse, a 32-year-old mother was killed, an 11-month-old was killed, and two other toddlers were shot.

And just two days ago, a three-year-old in Dade County

was killed at his third birthday.

And so, where is the outrage?

Whereas where,

but this goes unicknotic, but low-income blacks are the ones who are suffering this carnage and they are speaking up.

I think this is the same.

I mean, history just replays and replays and replays until you learn the lesson.

The taking away of guns was a Klan thing.

The

making sure that you were boxed off from everyone was a Klan thing.

Segregation was a Klan thing.

All of this stuff,

I look at, and I remember talking to Black Lives Matter members who did not read the website.

They were not Marxists.

They were not, they just wanted someone to finally listen to them because their community was under attack.

By their own community, I had one grandmother say, I don't trust my grandson.

And she said,

that's new to our community.

And we need help.

And nobody is actually paying attention.

This is all politics and all about power and money.

And what do we do to actually help the people who need help?

Because honestly, we're demonized.

You're white.

Bob, you know this.

I go into a black community.

I'm going to be called all kinds of names and I'm only doing it because of this or that.

You can't be charitable and white.

You can't can't go actually and help people.

But Glenn, you see, but

the voices of dissent who are protesting, they do not represent the majority of black opinions.

The Woodson Center,

we have organized 2,500 black mothers, voices of Black Mothers United, who all lost children to urban violence.

They took out a full-page ad saying we support the police.

They just had a conference in Birmingham where half of the participants were police officers so that they were demonstrating their common community with the police.

And so there are other neighborhood organizations around the country.

60% of blacks polled do not believe that racial discrimination is their principal barrier.

But you would never know that by listening to the people that the left-wing media puts on as spokesperson for the black community.

I don't know if you saw 60 Minutes, but with 60 Minutes, they interviewed,

what's his name?

The

Attorney General in

Keith Ellison in Minnesota.

And he said, and this is one question I've been asking the whole time.

Look, I think Chauvin, what he did, was wrong.

I think he should be punished.

I think he should go to jail.

I wasn't in the jury box.

I also don't know Minnesota law, so I don't know what he should have gotten, but I'm fine.

I trust the jury and the system to get it right.

However, I've been asking,

nobody even brought up that he was a racist in the trial.

Nobody brought up any evidence that this had anything to do with race.

So why have we even been talking about race when it comes to Chauvin?

That was not, even Keith Ellison said, no, not a shred of evidence this had anything to do with color.

Well, then what do we do?

The president of the South is pushing pushing this narrative.

Even in the shooting in Columbus, Ohio, the first thing he says, well, we know the systemic, what is systemic racism?

I don't know what it is.

And I live through segregation.

And in fact, I'll tell you,

I would almost rather deal with an honest bigot from the 60s.

than to deal with the kind of patronizing

pandering that they're doing that really

is destroying our community from within.

But there are elements pushing back against it.

We've got voices of black mothers.

We've got thousands of people who are longing for a decent education for their children, choice in education.

We released our first series of

curriculum.

for

curriculum to counter 1619.

We had 10,000 downloads.

when we testified before two boards of education.

A lot of people are being misled and hoodwinked by this racial.

All of us want freedom and justice for everybody and justice.

But the left is really a weaponizing race.

And so that's why it's important.

We're raising the resources necessary to give voice to the voiceless people in these communities who are losing their children.

There have been 70 people killed since George Floyd.

You wouldn't know about it.

20 of them were children.

And so what we need to do is we need to counter this false racial narrative with examples of resilience, of perseverance in the black community that really defines

the content of our lives.

So then how can we help empower you?

Because there's a lot of Americans, white, black, Asian, doesn't matter.

There's a lot of Americans that are tired of this and want to do something positive and help people who are actually helping.

So how can we help empower you?

What you can help do is walk with us.

We need funding.

We need your ability to, what you're doing right now is giving us a platform.

I would love to bring some of those voices of Black Mothers United on.

I'd love to

have some of them.

So there are a lot of powerful powerful voices

out there who believe, as I believe,

in the content of this America's character.

And we are patriots.

But we need to come together

and provide the means for us to speak the truth to power.

So we need a kind of partnerships,

I call it the Pharaoh-Joseph relationships.

So

here's the deal I'll make with you.

You tell me when, and let's bring the moms in.

If you bring voices in, I will air it.

I will put it on my radio show.

It'll go across the country and online.

Millions will hear them.

You tell me when you can gather them together.

And also, Pika, go online, 1776, your ninth, you'll see our book that's coming out, that's come out on the 15th of May.

It's called red white and black it's a compilation of all of our essays it it it it gives a lie to the to the uh to the fact that

that we're told that the problems of out-of-wedlock birth violence in the black community is a consequence of a legacy of slavery and discrimination and Jim Crow and it's not true but a lot of people believe it because they don't have the facts.

So our essays,

if your listeners would go read our essays, it will give them the kind of information that they need to push back against it.

But where people on the right have missed the vote, Glenn, is frankly they think the problem is just information.

And a lot of our think tanks are just pushing out papers condemning what the left is doing.

With the Woodson Center, we believe you must show examples of American virtues and values and actions.

Amen.

You see how when whites were at their worst, we were at our best.

We have pictures of hospitals.

100 schools and colleges were built by the 1930s in America.

We had hotels.

We had our own railroad.

So these stories of blacks achieving against the odds will show and give evidence that America is one of the greatest countries on earth because even people who

suffered the sting of slavery were never defined by that oppressive system, that they were defined by resilience

and the desire to self-sufficiency.

I think, you know, Bob, I was talking to an atheist a few months ago, and I said to him, I hate to use this word.

I said, because I know you don't believe in God, but it is the only word that I can use to describe what's happening right now, especially with critical race theory.

It is evil because it is trying to break the spirit of people.

And once you break the spirit of them, there's nothing left.

And that's what I feel like is happening all across America.

There is this attempt to break the spirit of whites, of blacks, of anyone, saying you can't do it, which is the opposite of what God teaches.

It's the opposite of everything America is supposed to be and has set out to be.

It doesn't break the spirit.

It only does that when it's at its absolute worst.

And that's what we're pushing right now.

It's just this,

you can't even have salvation by yourself.

You really can't.

But you see, Glenn, The left derives us moral authority as being the legitimate representatives of so-called marginalized groups.

But when those mothers and others begin to stand up and say they don't speak for us,

then you're going to see the resistance

change.

But you see, we've got to stand a Pharaoh-Joseph relationship, a pact.

But there's nothing worse than self-flagellating, guilty white people

and rich, angry black people who profit off the misery of their people.

I call what Sharpen and some of those are doing

is worse than bigotry.

It's treason.

It's moral treason against their own people.

That the only time you hear about them is when a white police officer

kills a black person.

And it happens maybe 20 or 21 times a year, but 6,000 blacks are killed each year by other blacks.

So in other words, the message is black lives only matter when it's taken by someone white, which means that you're betraying the black community when you turn the back on 20 children that are slaughtered and you don't march in that community and demand that those killers be turned over to the police.

So, Bob, you're the president of the United States.

Just go with me for a second.

And

you have the ability to enact any kind of program or anything.

What is it that you say

would help the black community with the incredible crime and death rate in the black community?

First of all, I would say the problem is not racial.

The problem is the challenge of upward mobility.

Anytime you generalize about a group of people, blacks, whites, Native American, and then you try to apply remedies, it always benefits those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom.

Coca-Cola offering jobs for black lawyers at certain percentage, what does that have to do with the black mother in public housing?

It's a bait and switch game where you're using the demographics of the worst of these to give resources that helps the best of these

or the or those who are prospering at the top.

And so if I was president, I would say an end to the race grievance business, that America should concentrate on the moral and spiritual freefall that is consuming people at the bottom.

You look at the

white, I had a seminar with J.D.

Bance and Clarence Page.

And the purpose is to desegregate poverty.

That the challenges facing low-income whites in Appalachia are the same challenges facing inner city blacks.

But elites on both sides keep them divided.

And so what we're trying to do at the Woodson Center is bring about a multiracial coalition

based upon the strategies to overcome brokenness in our lives.

So when we bring together our grassroots leaders, as we have over the years from 39 states, 2,000 of them, we bring them together.

In 40 years, there's never been any racial conflict.

Because when you're a drug addict, you're not a black junkie or white junkie or brown, you're just a junkie.

And your challenge is how to overcome

this

challenge in your life.

And so what I would do is bring Americans together where we concentrate on on upward mobility for those who are struggling at the bottom.

Bob, I would bet that there are a lot of Americans who think, and I don't care what color that is, that they are really oppressed right now, that they just are so oppressed and they just can't make it.

You actually lived through

some dark days in America

and you were there when the civil rights movement was happening.

You were part of it.

Tell people who think they're suffering now

what you went through and what others went through.

What was that about in the 1960s?

Well, in the 1950s, I was in a military station in Mississippi and in Florida.

Holy cow.

When

you had the big water fountains, blacks only,

white drinking fountains, when you were more afraid of the police than you were the Klan.

You live in a state of anarchy.

I was arrested twice in a small town of Florida because I was raising civil rights issues on the base and they would conspire with the local police.

So I would come through on Friday night going 10 miles under the speed limit and I'd be pulled over and thrown in a nasty jail.

because I couldn't come up with $35

bond.

And they always did it the weekend before payday

because they knew it would be difficult for your friends to raise that kind of money on a military base.

And I remember being in a cell, a hot cell, next to the junk tank where roaches are on the floor with a mattress there and hundreds of roaches and you lock your arms around the bars and try to sleep.

And the blood runs out of your arms and your whole standard of hygiene deteriorates to the point where you take the mattress up, scoot all of the roaches underneath and put the mattress on and jump on it, and then take your coat off and lay down and try to get some sleep.

Jeez.

I've been through that.

But I still never gave in to bitterness

at all.

Because Dr.

King said, and I firmly believe it, racism and discrimination wasn't bad because it was visited upon blacks by whites.

It's bad because it was evil.

And we must come together to fight against evil.

I will tell you,

in the last 20 years, I've read a lot about the civil rights and what people did and

Martin Luther King.

And he was right all the way along.

He was right.

And now we are being told the exact opposite.

We're being told that we should see color, we should be anti-racist,

and that color does make a difference.

And

everything that Martin Luther King worked for and

taught and died for is all being thrown out the window.

And it's almost like Malcolm X is back

before he, you know, before he realized he was wrong.

It's almost like he won.

But you know, I saw a

tape

of Bishop Sheen 50 years ago, his predictions about what's happening today.

He said a statement at the end.

He said that what the eagle does is makes his nest up high.

And when his chicks get to the point where they need, he pushes them out the necks and they fall to the ground.

And just before they crash, comes down, picks them back up, and tries it again until he flies.

He says, God is doing this to America.

We seem to be crashing down, but he's going to grab us just before we fall and we're going to rise again.

I believe that in my heart, but we can only do that when we come together and link to America's new patriots.

And trust me, they are the low-income blacks.

who do not believe that the nuclear family is Eurocentric and therefore racist.

They do not believe in burning Bibles.

They don't believe in burning the flag.

So they are, the left is misrepresenting those folks.

That's why what we're doing at the Woodson Center is giving voice and a platform for these dissenting voices to stand up to defend themselves and defend this nation.

But we just need the partnership and the resources to do it.

Well, I will tell you this, Bob.

I see, I just saw again today,

people in Minneapolis,

black businesses that are right there where the killing happened.

And the police, it's a no-go zone for the police now.

And, you know, all the BLM people are saying, don't come, don't come.

And the businesses, the black-owned businesses are like, we've been deserted.

It is chaos down here.

And the police won't come.

But, you know, when a police officer shows up and has to make a decision in 15 seconds, getting out of the squad car, seeing one girl being kicked in the head by a full-grown adult, and then another girl standing over

another teenager and brings a knife up and says, I'm going to kill you.

In 15 seconds from getting out of his car, he had to decide what the real problem was, and it was the person with the knife.

The family is now suing the police.

officer.

The police officer, I think, was heroic.

I mean, to be able to discern in 15 seconds where the threat was, I couldn't have done that.

But, you know, I read a great article from a cop who said, look,

we'll come now in emergencies, but we don't feel like we're backed at all by anybody.

So all of the favors, you know, hey, my cat's in the tree, or hey, this is going on, unless it's emergencies, we're not going to do anything.

We're not going to risk our lives to break up something that's happening in your backyard.

We're just not going to do it.

And I think they're right.

But again, Glenn, the people who are suffering are the people in those streets.

I know.

They're not the people on CNN talking about defund the police.

They do not live in those communities at risk.

So therefore, what we're trying to do is raise the resources so we can begin to honor good police officers.

We should be looking for examples of police doing it the way we need to publicly help

to

support people like that, just like with Smith College, where those cafeteria workers were falsely accused of racism.

Well, we, as 40 blacks, stood up in defense of white cafeteria workers who are falsely accused

of

racism.

That's the kind of action that must be taken

to challenge the status quo.

It is.

And we have a GoFundMe for those workers, and we are the first to contribute to them.

But that's the kind of cross-racial kind of stand that we must take in support of justice and fairness.

As, you know, to paraphrase what you said earlier, because it's right,

not because of color, but because it's right to do,

to stand up against injustice.

Injustice is,

and again, I mean, I'm just, you know, verbally vomiting what has been said so eloquently before, but injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.

If an injustice is being done to you, it's an injustice for me, too.

We have to look at it that way.

And I fear

we're not.

Let's talk a little bit about

the

reaction to people on critical race theory.

When people

are having their kids come home

and they're talking about what they've been taught in school and it's critical race theory,

what should the reaction from parents be?

What should they do?

What should they say?

They should express outrage.

They should do what we're getting calls every day from parents.

Some of of them in Austin, Texas, a town near Austin, they're running for the school board and they're running against the race grievance industry.

They asked us, my friend and colleague Ion Rowe, who was one of our 1776 scholars, we did a two-hour seminar with over 120 parents and others who are looking for an alternative understanding.

And

we shared with them that what is doing is damaging to not only whites, but also blacks as well.

A lot of parents are following it and accepted it because they don't know any better.

And so I think that the fact that we had such a

a positive response to, we've had three or four of these seminars that reach hundreds of people.

So one answer is really combat these lies with the truth.

And some of that has to come from people who look like me

so that the public understands.

Quite honestly, Bob,

I think I told you this over a year ago.

The answer is the African-American community.

If there's going to be an answer, it is going to come from the black community saying, that's not who we are.

That's not what we want.

Sit down and shut up.

Well, we're organizing such a force.

That's why we're doing outreach every day

with our essays, our scholars.

And it's just not, we're not, Glenn, presenting alternative arguments.

We're presenting alternative narratives.

We're telling stories to young blacks to confront the lie that you are exempt from any personal responsibility because of what happened in slavery.

That's a lethal message for people.

because people are motivated to achieve when they see victories that are possible, not stop constantly reminding them that somehow that white America must change before you can change.

That's the foundation of white supremacy.

You cannot attack racism by being racist.

You know,

I just finished a painting of Joe Lewis.

I don't know if you know this, but I'm a painter, and I finished a painting of Joe Lewis, and I call it the birth of a champion.

And he is actually on the mat, and the ref is calling him out, and Max Schnelling is behind him with his arms up.

And if you would look at the painting, you would think, well, Schnelling is the champion?

This is not a good message.

No, it's because Joe Lewis.

It was so easy for him to knock people out, knock them out cold.

When Schnelling came, who was the, you know, the Uber child from Nazi Germany, when he came in, Lewis thought, he's an old man, I can knock him out.

Well, he went for 12 rounds until Schnelling knocked him out the first time.

Because Schnelling did the work and

found the hole in Joe Lewis's fighting strategy.

The second time, Joe Lewis did not take anything for granted.

And you know his story, and he knocked him out in, I think, two minutes in the next fight.

It takes,

you know, you can lay down on the mat and whine about it, or you can get up and apply yourself and really

think it through and do the hard work and take the next opportunity to change things.

But I guess that's my white privilege talking.

No, when you mentioned Joe Lewis, I consider him a philosopher because Joe Lewis says something was very instructive.

He fought at a time when many of his opponents were racist, the judges were racist, and so were the fans.

So Joe Lewis said, when all of the odds are against you, never trust your faith to a decision.

Knock the bastard out.

That's great.

That is great.

So no one has to question.

So the best...

The best antidote to disrespect is performance.

Well, isn't that really kind of the Martin Luther King philosophy, too?

Absolutely.

I mean, that's why he was so disciplined in the marches.

That's why everybody wore ties and jackets.

You present the absolute best so no one could say anything.

They have to knock the narrative out that they're at all,

you know, rabble-rousers, dangerous, or anything else.

You have to be able to see and go, hmm.

Rosa Parks was not the first person

who refused to move to the back of the bus.

Six months before a woman refused, but she was nasty to the bus driver.

She was pregnant out of wedlock.

Yep.

And

she was drunk.

And they said that is not the proper

character around which we can launch a movement.

But now it seems as though George Floyd, and look, I'm a recovering alcoholic.

I've changed my life.

I mean, I've made all kinds of mistakes.

We all have.

We all have.

And nobody deserves to be killed for anything.

But we're making people into heroes

that aren't necessarily heroes.

You know, they might be good at making this point that no one should be killed like this, yes.

But we can't dismiss

who the people are and make them into these gods.

It's just, it's incredibly dishonest.

It really is.

and

that's why it is important for us to keep our eyes on the prize.

That's why it's important

to cultivate the opportunity for the right messengers to speak for themselves.

And that's why that's what we're doing at the Woodson Center.

The very fact that we had 10,000 downloads in the first two weeks of our curriculum from 1776,

We have testified before school boards.

There are a lot of people who are acting out of ignorance.

And so for them, we want to supply them with the right information.

But again, Glenn,

the voices of Black Mothers United,

we want to bring them together with the mothers who lost their children in Appalachia to

prescription drugs

and the moms in Silicon Valley where the suicide rate for children is six times the national average.

I believe that we are trying to at the Woodson Center bring the moms from Appalachia together with the moms black and brown from the inner city who lose in their suicide.

I mean, who homicide, and bring them together with the mothers from

Silicon Valley

because it's different sides of the same coin.

If you don't value your own life, you'll either take it or you'll take your own.

But that kind of conversation can only take place if we can take race off the table.

That's why part of the purpose of the Woodson Center

is to deracialize race.

and desegregate poverty.

That's our goal.

Is that why Martin Luther King

marched with the sign, I am a man?

Yes.

Just so it's, I'm a human.

I'm not black.

I'm not white.

I'm just a human.

That's what he did, but he also demonstrated radical grace.

The very fact that his

Heis wife escaped his home

almost burned up, and he's surrounded by 200 armed blacks who are ready to tear the city apart.

And even in the face of this horrendous

challenge,

King counseled peace.

He led by example.

It is the same message that we got from Nelson Mandela.

Nelson Mandela, Most people in America, if you're white, you probably don't, you know Nelson Mandela, but you don't know

what they thought he could do and what I think he really easily could do.

He could have set that country on fire and started just slaughter like we've never seen.

And

he did the exact opposite, radical grace.

And now we're seeing, again, the reverse of all of this.

Is this being taught anywhere,

Bob?

I mean,

it is being taught in churches.

It's being taught in

not-for-profit organization by my good friends Willie Peterson in Youngstown, Ohio, Pastor Gary Wyatt in Akron, Ohio, Paul Riddell in Eleari, Ohio.

I can give you hundreds of names of people that are teaching

American virtues and action and all.

But again, they are the silent voices.

They are the Josephs that are.

and that's why one of my favorite characters that wrote my book, The Triumphs of Joseph, think about Joseph and Dr.

King.

Joseph was betrayed

and sold into slavery by his brothers.

But in the end,

he provided the means to save the brothers who betrayed him and the Egyptians who enslaved him.

But if he had succumbed to bitterness

and resentment,

everyone would have been.

Well, that's the challenge that leadership has today.

We have to put aside the sins of the past, old resentments and old antagonisms, and understand

that America can only have a prosperous future if we could put aside these differences, these antagonisms.

the birth defect of slavery and discrimination

and look ahead the way Joseph did.

He came together with the good Pharaoh and together

the country prospered.

That's what we've got to do today.

And that's what the Woodson Center is working on.

That's our operating model.

Tell me a little bit about the book, Red, White, and Black.

It is a commentary.

Give me some of the stories from it.

Part of what what our essays,

one of our essays, for instance, looked at the black family.

They looked at

the records of six plantations at the end of slavery,

at the composition of the slave family.

75% of slave families had a man and a woman raising children.

Many of them formally married right afterwards.

And so we document the fact for 100 years, a century,

blacks had two-parent households up until the 60s.

So, what about the

wait, wait, wait, before you go on, what about the, I mean, I learned this from Roots when I was a kid.

What about the selling of one parent or another and intentionally splitting those families apart?

That happened.

And it didn't say that slavery was horrendous.

It didn't try to gloss over any of that.

But what our

essays try to portray is that we were not totally defined by oppressive circumstances.

Frederick Douglass said

that when he finally started, he fought against his slave master and beat him.

He said, on that day,

I was a

man

who was a slave instead of a slave that was a man.

Right.

Right.

And so what we tell is that when whites were at their worst, we were at our best.

There were 20 blacks who were born slaves who died millionaires.

We tell the story of how they achieved that.

We tell the story.

Have you seen the latest?

Sorry to interrupt.

Have you seen the latest edition of Booker T.

Washington's Up From Slavery?

No, I haven't.

Okay, so I have original copies, and then I have one that was printed back in the 90s, I think, that says

in the foreword.

Yeah, look, in the foreword, in the 90s, it started to say some scholars are not sure that this is entirely a true story,

that he was an actual slave.

The new one says this is a work of fiction.

A work of fiction, Bob?

Well, again, 1619 revised our history.

We're not surprised at that.

But our scholars and our essays document the fact that in 1920 to 1940, the education gap in the South between whites and blacks closed within six months, from three years to six months, because of the 4,800 Rosenwald Bookerty schools.

So we have, our essays have all of these successes documented.

Biddy Mason, a woman who was born a slave

in 1818 and walked behind a wagon out to Salt Lake City and then ended up

in LA and purchased property and died a millionaire.

She was a founder of the AME Church.

So again, we tell the story.

We are five black high schools, Glenn, at the turn of the century in all of our five major cities.

that had used textbooks, 50 students to a class and half the budgets of white schools, but every one one of those black high schools out-tested all of the white schools in those cities.

So it is important

for not only black children to understand

how we achieved against the odds under these circumstances,

but all of America needs to know that blacks were never defined by oppression,

that it was by resilience

and perseverance in the presence of

these are important messages that our essays in red, white, and black tell.

We're told now that

Asian Americans are just embracing the white lie

and they are

They're working hard and that's why their grades are so high.

I have news for you.

They're not stealing anything from me or my white neighbors.

I mean, I look at Asian families and say, what is that family doing that I should be doing?

You know, there is, it is a cultural thing.

And when it's a good cultural thing, we should try to emulate it.

I don't care what it is they're doing, but they believe in education.

And, you know, some of the Asians that I know might be a little intense with

their kids on their education, but it is a friend of mine and I were just driving down the street and we were just talking about it.

A friend

has a child that he just drives and drives and drives and drives and drives.

And we were talking about how he was almost Asian in

his

stance or

the way he was doing things.

And we discussed, so is that a good thing or a bad thing to drive your kids

like that?

No, no, no, no.

Race theory says that meritocracy is racist correct and and what they're doing though is in the name of equity they're dumbing down the standards correct look if racism glenn if racism were the the biggest culprit in america then how you explain the fact that 3.5 million black africans and blacks of caribbean descent

have a higher marriage rate than whites, higher education, higher income,

almost non-existent in our prisons.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a Nigerian or Ghanaian in our jails.

Why is it that racism passed over them?

I don't.

Why isn't it a problem elsewhere?

I mean, I was talking to a good friend of yours.

I'm trying to remember his name.

He's in Africa, a great guy.

He was a pastor here in America.

And he talks about how America, how American blacks look at America.

He said, come over here to Africa, where, you know, blacks, he said, until recently, everyone knew America was the best chance of success for any black person anywhere in the world.

It doesn't get better than this, generally speaking.

He said, now he's afraid that Americans have so bought into this and are just sharing this everywhere that they are actually

spreading that lie all around the world.

Well, when you have your Secretary, UN representative saying America is a racist country, that's a very,

but again,

I tell you, I am full of

optimism,

I guess, because I spend most of my time walking among

some of the greatest heroes in America, and that is my low-income grassroots Josephs,

who have overcome challenges much more difficulty than anything racial

and it is because of their resilience

and their their example

of

perseverance

and also their steadfastness that I am I am enthusiastic about the future

Bob if people wanted to get involved with you how do they do it they can get our website is is woodsoncenter.org or go on our 1776uniteswithan S dot com

and there's a donate button.

But you can also, my book,

Lessons from the Least of These is out and it gives you a step-by-step

understanding of how to properly

understand

the race and poverty situation.

And you can also volunteer with us so just but but your listeners should help us

come and join us

okay

Bob

I'll have somebody in my office reach out you reach out to us when you want to put that together I will dedicate the airtime to you and I'd love to hear these I'd love to hear from these women love to hear from them we'll make that happen you got it as always

God bless you.

As always, God bless you.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

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