Instead of taking the position that institutional racism does not exist, we conservatives should agree that it does exist, and that the Democratic Party is almost exclusively to blame for all of the problematic institutions: our welfare system kicks black fathers out of the household, the public schools deny minority children an education, and our economic and foreign policy for the past several decades has been to export jobs, import the rest of the world’s poverty, and leave our borders undefended, allowing drugs to flow into our cities and destroy them. If we conservatives are serious about fighting racism and creating a fair, equal society for everyone, we must fight to promote our ideas, and explain how the Left’s ideas are causing the very problems they decry.
What follows is a transcript of the above video:
Hey guys, Jordan here. I hope you’re having a great week. I want to talk really quickly about the concept of institutional racism and why I think it does exist. And I just want you to hear me out on this, ’cause I know it’s a controversial topic we hear about all the time and we ran a poll on Conservative Opinion about a week ago, asking, “do you believe that African Americans are victims of institutional racism?” And 92% of you said “no.”
Let me suggest to you that there is institutional racism. And let me explain what I think that means. And let me say at the outset that the institutions that are causing this effect on African-Americans are almost all run by Democrats.
Institutional racism to me does not mean that America as a whole is racist. I know that the vast, vast, vast majority of us are not racist. And I don’t think that economic inequalities are the function of people not liking black people, but I think it does have a cause. And the most obvious causes are the various institutions controlled by Democrats, which are absolutely harming African-Americans. And there can be no serious debate about this. And the ones that come to my mind off the top of my head, number one are the welfare system, the school system, number two, and this sort of global economic policy we have where we import the rest of the world’s poverty, and we export our jobs.
And let me start with the beginning here. The welfare state, since the 1960s has absolutely destroyed the black family and there can be no serious doubt about that. In the 1960s, when Daniel, Patrick Moynihan, the great liberal Democrat Senator from New York, issued his report on the African American families, he was astonished to learn that 25% of black babies were born out of wedlock. And he said, “this is just untenable. How can we have an entire community of people where one of the four babies is born to a single mother?” Well, today it’s almost three out of four. And what’s happened? You know, in the 1960s, we were a hundred years past slavery already. This wasn’t a problem. This wasn’t a vestige of slavery. Between the 1960s, and today what happened was we created a welfare system that kicked black fathers out of the households. Lyndon Johnson, as part of his Great Society used to have bureaucrats going to people’s homes door to door to make sure dad wasn’t living there. That if you were receiving welfare, dad couldn’t be at home. And so we created, (well not “we”), but these Democrats with their welfare system created a culture of fatherlessness that persists to today.
Because if you have, for example, a single black woman, who’s trying to raise kids. Now she goes and gets married, “Oh, I’m sorry. We’re going to take those welfare benefits away from you.” Or let’s say, let’s say, you know, she tries to get a job. “Oh, I’m sorry, you’re getting a job? Now, we’re taking those benefits away from you.” And so the welfare system, which is an institution, has absolutely had a racist effect on [African-Americans] by destroying their families and punishing them, every time they try to elevate themselves by threatening to take benefits away. That’s number one.
Number two, you have these public school systems that are a total failure in every state. We have these urban public schools that consistently underperformed. Consistently! And some of them, you look in New Jersey where you’ll have school districts, where fewer than 5% of kids graduate college-ready. In Camden, we had one year where you had only three kids in the entire school district. Graduate college-ready. You see in the proficiency tests that extreme minorities of children are graduating college-ready, and that’s it. And the proficiency tests that we’re using today are the same ones we used to use to test ninth graders. So now we’re using those for 12th graders. So there can’t be any serious doubt about this.
We could send all of these poor African-American kids to the best private schools for as much or less money as we’re spending sending them to these public school failure factories. But you know, this is the problem, that the public schools get more money the more failure there is . To the extent that a school begins to succeed, it gets money taken away from it. And to the extent of school fails, it gets more money.
Well, we need competition. And when we talk about white privilege, the ultimate white privilege is parents being able to choose either what school district to live in or what private school to send their kids to. Okay, well, the public school monopoly, is strengthening white privilege to the detriment of black children. If anything, let black children be able to… Let’s empower black parents, to choose what school to send their children to, so we can get them out of these public school failure factories, put them into schools where they actually engage in learning, and start to solve this economic inequality problem.
And then number three, our whole policy as pertains to the rest of the world has been over the past several decades to export our jobs to foreign countries and to import cheap labor from other countries.
You know, we have a property problem here in the United States, and yet we’re importing the rest of the world’s poverty. It doesn’t make any sense. We need to take care of our own here. And it should really start with the African-American community who has been here longer than anybody else. To say that this doesn’t have a deleterious effect in the African-American community is just wrong.
And it’s not just importing the rest of the world’s poverty or exporting our jobs. Look at our open borders policy that allows drugs to flow freely into this country and into our cities, which have become distribution hubs for drug cartels in Central and South America. We have been so focused on the Middle East, and I’m not saying that’s not entirely worthy, although, I think we place too much of an emphasis on it, but we need to be focusing on Central and South America, our own hemisphere. Defending ourselves from these cartels, defending our borders from drugs, coming into them. So that they’re not going into the cities and fueling gang violence and all these sorts of things.
So when we talk about institutional racism, it doesn’t mean that you are a racist or I’m a racist. I don’t accept the blame for any racism. I’m not a racist, I’m not the cause of anybody else’s problems. But just because we Republicans aren’t causing the problems doesn’t mean that we don’t have the solutions. We do have the solutions: reform welfare to eliminate penalties, to encourage fathers to stay home, number one. Advance school choice, number two. Secure our borders, reform the immigration system, so we’re not importing the rest of the world’s poverty. Lower corporate taxes, so that business investment occurs here in the United States. We have the answers.
Honestly, if president Trump were looking for advice, what I would tell him is “you should package all of that into a new civil rights act.” So all of which is to say, I don’t believe America is racist, and I know you and I aren’t racist. We’re not the cause of other people’s problems. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t causes of other people’s problems and that we shouldn’t help solve them. We absolutely should. And we need to emphasize that we have the solutions, that yes, there’s institutional racism, and that all of these institutions are controlled by Democrats. And we Republicans have the answers. That’s how you build a big tent. And more than that, that’s how you really begin to end racial inequality in this country, which is something for which we should really all endeavor. All right, guys. Thanks for watching. I’ll talk to you later.
