don't you have the right to have your own opinion?

Especially if it's a well-thought-out opinion?

And why would you have a well-thought-out opinion

be denounced, because of your race,

as reflective of a sellout, of somebody who's an Uncle Tom,

who wishes bad things to happen to fellow members of his own race?

What is the logic behind that? And why is this going on?

And isn't this hurting the country? That's what the movie asks.

Are police actually using deadly force disproportionately against black people? And how does the focus

on police overshadow other monumental problems facing black America today?

Why is believing that black lives matter not the same as supporting the Black Lives Matter

organization? And why are black conservatives often excluded

from mainstream public awareness and discourse? In this episode, we sit down again with radio

talk show personality and bestselling author Larry Elder, who hosts The Larry Elder Show

for The Epoch Times. He is the executive producer of the new documentary “Uncle Tom.”

This is American Thought Leaders ??, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Larry Elder, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. As Charlton Heston once said to me, thank

you for letting me borrow your audience. Well, because we're going to talk about Uncle

Tom, on your shirt. This film that you and I have been talking about for a while now. It’s

coming very, very soon. I've been working on this film, Jan, for two years.

Most people are completely oblivious to the history of the Democratic Party, the party

of slavery, the history of the Democratic party, Jim Crow laws, they're erasing all

of the history of this country. They want to cover up history. The real history, not

the revisionist history. If you are educated. White people have been taught a narrative

that has been created. You're ctually miseducated. and that's when I realized that I've been

lied to. I had been misled. It unraveled everything that I knew to be true.

Along with the director, Justin Malone, and it is about the grief that people like Candace

Owens, Herman Cain, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Allen West, and Clarence Thomas

get for simply suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the policies that blacks have been

following, the democratic policies that blacks have been voting for, the left-wing policies

that blacks have been pulling that lever for, maybe we ought to rethink them.

It’s not an angry film. It’s not a film that says: how dare you call us these nasty

names? It’s a film that says: why can’t we have an intelligent discussion about whether

or not we should be supporting school choice? Why can’t we have an intelligent discussion

about whether or not we should be supporting Roe v. Wade? Why can’t we have an intelligent

discussion about whether or not we should be having stronger borders? Because the studies

suggest that unskilled illegal aliens take jobs away from unskilled black and brown workers

and put downward pressure on their wages. Can we have a discussion about this without

my being called an Uncle Tom, a self loather, or a sellout?

Dean McKay is the executive editor of The New York Times and happens to be black. He

hired a conservative as a columnist named Bret Stephens, a never-Trump-er, the kind

of conservative that the New York Times hires as a Republican. Bret Stephens’ first column

had to do with his skepticism about climate change alarmism. That’s all; he didn’t

say “I don’t agree with it.” He just said “I’m skeptical that these alarmist

trends that people are predicting are going to happen.” Mckay said that people contacted

the New York Times angry that they hired this guy, angry that he wrote this column. Mckay

was surprised at the ferocity of people, because he hired a conservative to write a column

that, in his opinion, was very intelligent. Stephens raised some questions about climate

change. Mckay publicly said that he found out “the

left as a rule does not want to hear thoughtful disagreement” [in an interview at Code Conference].

That’s a verbatim quote. I argue that the black left doesn’t even believe there’s

such a thing as thoughtful disagreement. Therefore, we’re not having discussions in the black

community that, in my opinion, are healthy and could lead to a better outcome.

The number one problem in the black community is not racism. It’s not bad cops, although

we both know both exist. The number one problem is the large number of blacks who were raised

without fathers. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later on became a democrat senator from

New York, wrote a paper called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”. At

the time, 25 percent of blacks were born outside of wedlock, a number that he thought was horrific.

He felt if we don’t do something, take some sort of national action, this is going to

get worse. We’ll fast forward. Now 70 percent of black kids are born outside of wedlock,

25 percent of white kids now are, and nearly half of Hispanic kids are. Forget about Larry

Elder. Barack Obama once said, “children who grow up without a father are five times

more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out

of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.” [Barack Obama’s remarks

at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago on Father’s Day] Now, this is something

that we’re not even having a discussion about.

In my opinion, if you look at the proliferation of kids born outside of wedlock, it parallels

the rise in social spending under the so-called war on poverty that was launched in the mid-60s.

Lyndon Johnson launched it with the best of intentions. He felt that it was going to make

people more self-sufficient. All it did was create dependency. What is done is to incentivize

women to marry the government and incentivize men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.

It is the number one social problem in America in general and the number one social problem

in the black community in particular, and we’re not having that discussion.

When someone like myself or Bob Woodson, another community activist who’s in the film, raises

these questions, instead of this igniting a healthy discussion, people like myself are

denounced and dismissed as Uncle Toms, as self loathers. Why? That’s what the film

asks. Why can’t we just have an intelligent discussion? Why are you assuming that I have

some sort of malintent behind it? All I’m trying to do is get people to realize their

God-given potential, the same as I assume you’re trying to do, and we just have a

different philosophy about it. I don’t consider you to be self-loathing. I don’t consider

you to be a race traitor because you’re advancing policy that I think hurt [us]. Why

are you making that assumption about me? You know, it’s a very fascinating time to

be talking about this. It’s almost crazy because of this horrible killing of George

Floyd that happened just a few weeks ago and the resulting protests. There are a lot of

very well-meaning people on the streets wanting to support black lives, right? At the same

time, there are a lot of concerns. I’ve heard from a lot of people that there’s

only one way that’s allowed to think about this, and people lose their jobs, their careers,

relationships, and so forth. The narrative is that racism remains a powerful

impediment for black progress in America, whether it’s systemic racism, a term you

hear a lot, structural racism, another term you hear a lot, institutional racism, or one

that I heard Beto O’Rourke come up with, foundational racism. If America were institutionally

racist, why is it that in the 50s if you ask white people, would they ever support a black

person president? The answer was no. Fast forward, Obama got elected. He got a higher

percentage of the white vote than John Kerry did. We’re [still] talking about institutional

racism. It’s crazy. In 2015, Freddie Gray died in police custody.

At the time of his death, the mayor of Baltimore was black, the number one person running the

police department was black, his assistant was black, all the city council members were

democrats, majority black, the state attorney who brought the charges against six officers

was black, three of the six officers charged were black, the judge before whom two of the

officers had their cases tried was black. By the way, he found him not guilty. The US

Attorney General at the time, Loretta Lynch, was black, and of course, the president of

the United States, at the time Barack Obama, was black. You have all these people running

the institution. I’m reminded of something that comedian

Wanda Sykes said shortly after Obama got elected, and she talked about what was gonna happen

down the road if and when things didn’t change. She said, “How are you going to

complain about the man when you are the man?” Well, these American cities where we have

these police chiefs that are allegedly racist have been run by Democrats for decades. Democrats

have picked these officers, and in many cases, the chief of police happens to be black. People

are still screaming about institutional racism. We were having this interview in Los Angeles.

From 1992 to 2002, L.A. had back-to-back black police chiefs. There was a black police chief

in charge during the O.J. Simpson case. You might recall all these allegations about evidence

planning and fabricating evidence and framing an innocent man. Because of all these allegations,

the then-police chief Willie Williams did a complete and total departmental review to

find out if anybody had done anything wrong at all in connection with the O.J. Simpson

case. This is during the trial now. The report came out and found no evidence

whatsoever anybody had done anything wrong. It didn’t matter. It didn’t move the needle

one way or the other. Those who felt that O.J. Simpson was an innocent man framed by

the racist LAPD continue thinking he was an innocent man framed by the racist LAPD, even

though the racist LAPD is run by a black man who just did a report that said nobody did

anything wrong in connection with the O.J. Simpson case. My point is it didn’t matter.

Part of the protesters are demanding diversity in our police departments. As if, once you

have diversity, magically these problems are going to go away. L.A. is about 40 percent

or so Hispanic, about 30 percent white, a little under 10 percent black, the rest of

it is Asian or Pacific Islanders. That’s exactly the percentage of the LAPD, and it

is still being accused of being racist. In the NYPD, it’s the same thing. If you look

at the racial demographics of the city and look at the demographics of the police department,

they mirror each other, and still recently, the officers of the NYPD are being subjected

with water balloons. [There are] urine-filled water balloons, trash cans full of water thrown

at them, cars set on fire. Never mind how diverse the NYPD is. The average person that

the average person on the street is going to encounter will be a person of color, [but]

it doesn’t matter, because of this false narrative.

The stats simply do not reflect the idea that the police are going after black people. If

anything, the stats show the opposite. There is a black economist named Roland Fryer who

teaches at Harvard. Because of all these prolific, high profile shootings, he just knew that

the police were disproportionately using deadly force against black people. He was kind of

surprised that no one had done a comprehensive study to corroborate that, so he thought he

would do it. He said that the results were the most surprising of his career.

Not only were the police not using deadly force disproportionately against blacks, they

were more hesitant, more reluctant to pull the trigger on a black suspect than on the

white suspect, presumably because they were afraid of being accused of being racist. That

same result was replicated in a study published in a publication put out by the National Academy

of Sciences, where researchers looked at every shooting in 2015 [and] every shooting in 2016.

[There was the] same conclusion: the police were not using deadly force disproportionately

against black people. The reason blacks are two and a half times

more likely to be killed by a cop than a white person is the crime rate, which is substantially

higher in the black community than in the white community. A young black man is eight

times more likely to be a victim of homicide compared to a young white man. The number

one cause of preventable homicide of young whites is accidents like car accidents and

drownings. The number one cause of death, preventable or non-preventable for a young

black person is homicide, almost always committed by another young black person.

It’s not cops killing black people, it’s black people killing other black people. According

to the CDC, the rate at which cops kill blacks has declined 75 percent in the last 50 or

60 years, while the rate at which police kill whites has flatlined. So arguably, if anybody

has anything to complain about, it’s white people, because if you look at the crime rate,

one would have thought that the rate at which police kill blacks would be even higher. If

anything, the cops are hesitant, as I mentioned in these studies, to use deadly force against

a black person because of a fear of being accused of being racist.

Now, nine unarmed black men were shot and killed by the police according to the Washington

Post last year [in 2019]. Nineteen unarmed whites were shot and killed by the police

last year, altogether fifteen unarmed blacks. That number is still smaller than

the nineteen whites who were shot and killed. If there’s a White Lives Matter protest

that was arranged, I never heard about it. It is not happening.

Isn’t this good news? That’s the other

thing about my movie I tried to stress. I’m suggesting that the problems that you’re

talking about in America can be explained away in a nonracial way. Isn’t that good

news? To know that the disproportionate number of blacks being killed by the police has to

do with our crime rate and not because the police are racist, isn’t that good news?

Then shouldn’t we start tackling what’s going on with our families that’s causing

all of this stuff? Instead of the reaction [is that] I’m a

sellout; I’m a self loather; I hate myself; I’m an Uncle Tom; I have never been called

the N-word; I’ve never been arrested by the police. These are the kinds of things

that people say. By the way, these are not true. I’ve been called the N-word; anybody

my age has been called the N-word. Yes, I was arrested once for mouthing off to an officer.