Robert Johnson, one of the nation’s premier black leaders and the founder of Black Entertainment Television, had some hard and truthful words on Wednesday for the rioters, looters, arsonists, and vandals who seek to topple statues and erase American history.
He said to the media, people tearing down statues “have the mistaken assumption that black people are sitting around cheering for them saying ‘Oh, my God, look at these white people. They’re doing something so important to us. They’re taking down the statue of a Civil War general who fought for the South. You know, black people, in my opinion, black people laugh at white people who do this the same way we laugh at white people who say we got to take off the TV shows.”
Johnson points out that most of the vandalism against historical monuments is not done by African Americans, but by laughable guilty white liberals hilariously claiming to speak for blacks.
Johnson, who became America’s first black billionaire in 2001, said those who would take down statues, cancel televisions shows, and fire conservative professors do nothing to ameliorate the economic gap between white and black Americans that has persisted since slavery. It’s “tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic,” Johnson told the press. “It absolutely means nothing.”
“Look, the people who are basically tearing down statues, trying to make a statement are basically borderline anarchists, the way I look at it. They really have no agenda other than the idea we’re going to topple a statue. It’s not going to give a kid whose parents can’t afford college money to go to college. It’s not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it’s not going to take people off welfare or food stamps.”
Johnson rejected the criticism of public figures who say “all lives matter” instead of “black lives matter,” and the cancel culture that targets television shows like the “Dukes of Hazzard” and movie classics such as “Gone with the Wind.”
“You know, that to me is the silliest expression of white privilege that exists in this country. The notion that a celebrity could get on a Twitter feed and say, ‘oh, my God, I am so sorry that I am white.’ I don’t find any black people getting on Twitter and saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry I’m black.’ And we got the worst problems. … My thing is: embrace being white and do the right thing.”
Johnson cleverly concluded with a line from “Gone with the Wind,” saying, “White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a damn.”
This opinion piece was written by PoliZette Staff on June 25, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette [1] and is used by permission.