Civil-rights-era activist rejects 'systemic racism' claim

Former civil-rights activist Bob Woodson (screenshot)

A former civil-rights activist disputes the claim of the Black Lives Matter movement and Democratic leaders such as Joe Biden that "systemic racism" is at the heart of the problems black people face in America more than a half century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"I don't know what systemic racism is. Maybe someone can explain what that means," said Bob Woodson in an interview Tuesday with "Tucker Carlson Tonight" after a week of protests in response to the universally condemned actions of Minneapolis police officers in the death of 46-year-old George Floyd.

Woodson, a former head of the National Urban League Department of Criminal Justice, recalled the civil rights movement of the 1960s promised that if black people led institutions, "all of black America would be better off."

He said he left the movement because he "realized that many of the people who suffered most — poor blacks — do not benefit from the change."

"It's more class than it is race ... and now race is being used to deflect attention away from the failures of people running those institutions," he said. "The question is why are black kids failing in school systems run by their own people?"

Woodson pointed out that when the first African-American president, Barack Obama, had an African-American attorney general, Eric Holder, "a lot of young people were shot by the police, but they were black police shooting black kids and not one was prosecuted."

"But there was no public outcry because as long as illegality or evil wears a black face, then it escapes detection and that's what's wrong with looking life through the prism of race," he said.

Woodson, an Air Force veteran, said Democratic Party leadership is to blame for much of the black suffering.

"In the past 50 years, $22 trillion has been spent on poverty programs. Seventy percent goes not to the poor but those who serve poor people," he said.

"So many of those people taking office use this money to create a class of people who are running these cities, and now after 50 years of liberal Democrats running the inner cities, where we have all of these inequities that we have, race is being used as a ruse, as a means of deflecting attention away from critical questions such as why are poor blacks failing in systems run by their own people?"

Meanwhile, black activist and columnist Star Parker is hosting a virtual conference on Thursday at 11 a.m. gathering 200 pastors called "Pastoral Prayer for America: The Burden of Race and Rage."

"I don't agree that our nation is racist," Parker said.

"That mantra is the poison that entrenches resentment and division among us," she said. "The daily hunt for racism from top to bottom of our nation’s institutions have institutionalized the perception of racism in the post-Civil Rights Era."

'Great Society'

In a major speech Tuesday on race relations, Biden, charging President Trump has fanned the flames of hatred, vowed to address "systemic racism" if elected. Benjamin Crump, who has been involved in many high-profile cases and now represents George Floyd's family, says "legalized genocide" is occuring against people of color.

But Woodson's view is shared by African-American scholars who document the disastrous impact the "Great Society" poverty program of the 1960s and subsequent welfare initiatives have had on black families, particularly the absence of fathers in the lives of so many young men who have clashed with police.

Walter Williams, a veteran professor of economics at George Mason University, argued in his 1982 book "The State Against Blacks" that "there's a huge segment of the black population for whom upward mobility is elusive, and it's because of the welfare state — because of government."

He likened the welfare state to a "drug pusher."

"The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery (and Jim Crow and racism) could not have done ... break up the black family," he wrote nearly 40 years ago. "Today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Historically, from the 1870s on ... 75-90 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families."

In 2013, during the controversy over the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida, CNN host Don Lemon, who is black, got in trouble with his left-leaning allies when he spotlighted the family issue.

"Black people," Lemon said, "if you really want to fix the problem, here's just five things that you should think about doing."

The No. 1 item on that list, "and probably the most important," he said, is related to out-of-wedlock births.

"Just because you can have a baby, it doesn't mean you should," Lemon said. "Especially without planning for one or getting married first. More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock.

"That means absent fathers," he emphasized.

"And the studies show that lack of a male role model is an express train right to prison and the cycle continues."

A Washington Post blogger was among the many critics of Lemon's commentary.

"If Lemon really wanted to help the black community, he could start by adopting a deeper understanding of the history, sociology and psychology of his own people," wrote Rahiel Tesfamariam.

"Offering made-for-TV analysis about deeply complex social issues in the manner in which he did is irresponsible and lacks intellectual rigor."

Blacks 'suffered deeply'

Woodson wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Sunday that hostility towards the police has hurt black people.

He recalled the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, after the August 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown.

Eric Holder's Justice Department confirmed independently that Brown was to blame for the confrontation with a white police officer, concluding there was no "hands up, don't shoot." But local shops "were set aflame and stores were looted," Woodson wrote.

"Ferguson residents suffered deeply in the wake of the violence. Public bus service was suspended and people couldn’t get to work," he recalled. "Volunteers from churches in the area brought in donated food because so many local stores and restaurants were burned-out shells."

The charge of systemic racism in law enforcement is challenged by the Washington Post’s searchable database on police shootings.

It shows that nine unarmed black people were shot dead by police in 2019, while 19 unarmed white people shared the same fate, points out Conservative Review editor Daniel Horowitz.

He noted that "even before we examine whether these shootings were justified, there were more than twice as many fatal police shootings of white people than of black people."

He cited a series of tweets that analyze the nine cases and concluded that most of them appeared to be justified.

The Washington Post noted in 2016 that the conventional thinking is that black suspects are more likely to be shot than white suspects because of implicit racial bias.

But the paper cited a Washington State University study that found exactly the opposite.

Even with white officers who do have racial biases, officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.

'Inspirational alternative narrative'

Woodson, in an interview in March on the Fox News show "Life, Liberty and Levin," discussed his "1776" initiative, which was launched to refute the New York Times' "diabolical" "1619 Project" claiming America is fundamentally racist and oppressive.

"It's exempting [the African-American community] from any kind of personal responsibility," he said. "It's really white supremacy to assume that blacks have no agency."

Woodson said his 1776 initiative rightfully focuses on the "real birth of America" and demonstrates that the Times' collective assertion is a "lie."

"But we're not going to engage in vitriolic debate. What we're going to offer through our essays, though our scholars that we brought together, we are providing an aspirational and inspirational alternative narrative that presents facts," he said.

Woodson said one example is the relationship between the three-quarters of black children born are out of wedlock and crime.

"More blacks kill more blacks in one year than was lynched by the Klan in 50 years. And [the 1619 project is] saying that these present problems are directly related to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow," he said.

"We are providing evidence that that is not true."

In an article posted Sunday, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald pointed out that between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5% of all black-white interracial violent victimizations, excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white.

America 'strong enough to change'

Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, experienced systemic racism in his youth but believes America has changed for the better.

In his book "Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country," he recalled that in his early 20s, he adopted a "victim-focused" identity.

Such identities, which emerged in the 1960s, he wrote, "are premised on a belief in the characterological evil of America and the entire white Western world."

"Once America's evil became 'poetic' (permanently true), the formerly oppressed could make victimization an ongoing feature of their identity — despite the fact that their actual victimization had greatly declined," Steele wrote.

He wrote that the "charge of evil against the white West is one of the largest and most influential ideas of our age — and this despite the dramatic retreat of America and the West from these evils."

"The scope and power of this idea — its enormous influence in the world — is not a measure of its truth or accuracy; it is a measure of the great neediness in the world for such an idea, for an idea that lets the formerly oppressed defend their esteem, on the one hand, and pursue power in the name of their past victimization, on the other," he wrote. "It is also an idea that gave a contrite white America (and the Western world) new and essentially repentant liberalism."

After a trip to Africa in 1970 to explore his roots, he said, he "learned that America, for all its faults and failings, was not intractably evil."

He said, looking back many years later, he considers himself "lucky."

"After one of my radical kitchen-table rants against America toward the end of the 1960s, my father — the son of a man born in slavery — had said to me: 'You know, you shouldn’t underestimate America. This is a strong country,'" Steele wrote.

"I protested, started on racism once again. He said, 'No, it's strong enough to change. You can’t imagine the amount of change I've seen in my own lifetime.'"