The Daily Signal - Bob Woodson on Challenging ‘Racial Profiteers’

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

The national tragedy of more drug overdose deaths, suicides, and homicides won’t be solved “if we have to look at each other through the prism of race,” activist Bob Woodson says. “There are people who are profiting from the grievance of our society, and we must challenge these racial profiteers,” says Woodson, an author and founder of the Washington-based Woodson Center. Some “try to promote” the racial challenges in America, Woodson says, citing two examples. “Black Lives Matter ... comes along and collects $100 million in white guilt money," he says. "Ibram X. Kendi at Boston University collects $48 million to do anti-racist research.”  In Woodson's view, "race has been a distraction” to addressing the real problems confronting poor communities. Since the 1980s, Woodson, who is black, has worked to address issues plaguing poor communities across the country. As a young man, he was part of the civil rights movement. But, finding himself in disagreement with some aspects of the movement, Woodson says he “began to work on behalf of low-income people of all races.”  Now, at 86, Woodson says, The Woodson Center gives a voice "to the voiceless grassroots leaders who are laboring in these communities confronting drugs and violence and out-of-wedlock births.”   Woodson joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to expose the harmful effects of a focus on race on black communities and to explain how the strategy of The Woodson Center transforms lives and entire neighborhoods.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, February 26th. I'm Virginia Allen. Bob Woodson says that race has become a distraction from addressing the real problems that poor communities are facing. In fact, Mr. Woodson goes so far as to say that governments and many NGOs have created a commodity out of poor people. And this has only served to make the problem much worse that these communities are facing. Mr. Woodson has been working to give a voice to the grassroots leaders who are on the ground in poor communities who are seeking out real solutions since the 1980s. Woodson is the founder of the Woodson Center and he joins us on the show today to explain the work

not only of the Woodson Center but that so many grassroots organizations and individuals are doing to address the problems that poor communities face and, to explain why exactly race has become a distraction within these communities. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels find employment in key positions in Washington, D.C. and across the country. We can help you connect with positions in the administration on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations and in the private sector.

To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to heritage.org slash job dash bank. It is my distinct privilege and honor today to be joined by author, speaker, the founder of the Woodson Center, Mr. Bob Woodson. He is also the founder of 1776 Unites and the Voices of Black Mothers United. Mr. Woodson, thank you for your time today. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks for inviting me. I want to begin by asking you just to share a little bit of the background and history of the Woodson Center. I think the first time I ever learned about the Woodson Center and the model that you all have. It was several years ago, and I was just blown away by how practical your model is as an organization. If you would just share a little bit about why you founded the Woodson Center. and how it came to be what it is today. Well, thank you. Yeah, it goes a little bit back when I started in the civil rights movement.

As a young civil rights activist in Westchester, Pennsylvania, has 30 miles west of Philadelphia, the home of Baird Rustin. And we used to leave demonstrations. But when I found that I was opposed to force integration, force busing for integration. And so that put me at eyes with the civil rights movement, because I believe the opposite of segregation is desegregation. not integration. And so that put me at odds. But also another issue that separated me was that we led a demonstration outside of a pharmaceutical company when they desegregated. They'd hired nine black

PhD chemists. And when we approached them about joining our movement, they said they got these jobs because they were qualified, not because of the sacrifices that we made. So I realized there was a real class division. And that what, as Dr. King said, what good does it do to have the right to live in a restaurant, in a restaurant of your choosing or neighborhoods if you don't have the means to exercise that right. So freedom isn't just defined by opening the doors of opportunity. Freedom is also defined in preparing people to walk through the doors of opportunity. And the civil rights movement had little interest in addressing the class dimension of the movement. And so I left the civil rights movement at that point and began to work on behalf of low-income people of all races.

The biggest challenge we faced back then and now is those that are at the bottom, and race has been a distraction. And so I started the Woodson Center to give voice to the voiceless grassroots leaders who are laboring in these communities, confronting drugs and violence and out of wedlock birth. So I sought an alternative to the traditional approach to these problems, which is to pour more government. money into it, $22 trillion in the last 50 years on programs to aid the poor, when 70 cents of every dollar didn't go to the poor, but those who serve the poor who asked which problems are fundable, not which ones are solvable. So we created a commodity out of poor people, and I wanted to challenge that approach with ones that restores community and helps redeemed individuals. That's a sobering sentence. We've created a commodity out of that.

of poor people. That says a lot. How are things going for the Woodson Center? You all have been laboring for many years. What are your key focuses right now? What have been some of the wins and victories over the years? Well, we're excited that one of the thing that we had that guided us is the words of Mother Teresa. When she was asked by Senator Packwood, isn't she more frustrated that she can only walk in in Bombay, that you can only help 300 people when three million need you. And she said, God requires faithfulness of us, not success. And so that has helped guide us that we must be faithful to what we do. And then God will determine when success will come. Well, I think right now it's harvest time. And a lot of things, the seeds that we have planted,

we have demonstrated over the four decades that the Woodson Center has been in existence, that the real problems of poverty and despair can be found among the people suffering the problem. So we've had some models over the year where residents of public housing and dangers sent 680 kids in 14 years to college from a really violent public housing development, reducing teen pregnancy, eliminating violence in the community. So we've been blessed to have supported models over each decade that demonstrates that when you invest in people and don't look at them as victims, when you inspire them with victories that are possible and not injuries to be avoided, that amazing transformations can occur in some of the most desolate, isolated communities.

So we are pleased that the Woodson Center has documented and been associated with some major victories as models of what the society can do to pursue a pathway of prosperity and peace. We've got models. The Woodson Center has active models both past and present that demonstrate that solutions do exist. And that's good to hear. It's encouraging, I think. We tend to, when you work in news, you hear a lot of bad news. And so it's encouraging to hear you say that there's models that truly are working and that going into those local communities and partnering with the folks that are already on the ground doing good work, the fruit that comes from that. You have been so vocal recently and for a long time about the issue of crime and we're seeing rising crime in communities across America. And this is an issue that you all at the Woodson Center have really faced head on of how do we actually go to the root of what's driving this increase in crime and address the real issues.

What are the real issues that are driving the problem? Well, first of all, let me tell you what is not the driving. some, and that is, as some of the progressive left says, that it's being driven by a legacy of slavery in Jim Crow. And that, according to 1619 Project, America is incurably racist and that all white people are villains and all black people are victims. Well, that's just not true. I tell people I was born in 1937 in the midst of the Depression in a low-income black neighborhood in South Philadelphia, but 95% of the households had a man and a woman raising children, elderly people could walk safely without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren, never heard a gunfire,

never heard of a child being shot to death in their cribs. So what we're witnessing today has nothing to do with America's birth defect of slavery in Jim Crow. But it has, everything to do with policies of the 60s that decimated those institutions that have helped the blacks and low-income people to thrive in the midst of oppression. They have been undermined also since the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, where the black officials in Baltimore through the police under the bus. Because the question is, if racism were the issue, why are these problems of violence and out of wedlock were occurring in cities that have been run by black officials for the past 50 years?

And so rather than address this problem of the enemy within, what they do is trying to find scapegoats. And the police have been a scapegoat over the past 10 years with the consequence that they have been vilified to the point where they no longer are aggressive in enforcing the laws in low-income neighborhoods. And as a result, the violence is. soaring. The so-called progressive advocates who talk about defund the police, they are living in secured condominiums where there is security, while low-income people are the ones suffering

the problems. But the answers are, like I said, we go into some of these neighborhoods and we look for healing agents. If you say 70% of black families are raising children that are dropping out school in jail and drugs, it means that 30% are not. And so we go into the 30% of the households in these communities that found a way to persevere in the presence of these challenges to find out what is the magic sauce. And so the Woodson Center comes in and learns from these healing agents and applies what works for the 30% and we apply it to the 70% with some amazing results. new approaches and the leaders of these transformational efforts have moral authority and social trust. But this is important that the qualities that make them effective makes them invisible.

Because they are not whining and complaining. They're not protesting. They're not screaming racism. They also are working with the police, like the voices of Black Mothers United. We have a group of moms who lost their children a homicide. They're working with the police. We took out a full-page ad promoting cooperative relationship. We're having events all over the country where the police are cooperating and healing the wounds of the distrust that exists between the black community and the police. So we're reaching out to moms in Silicon Valley, who the suicide rate among moms there is six times the national average. And drug overdoses are in, in Appalachia and Homicide.

So the Woodson Center convened what we call a mother's consortium where for three days, moms from these three venues came together to talk about how do we come together and heal the hurt that is in the hearts of our young people to the point where the meaning of life has been demeaned. And if you lose your sense of value of life, then you'll take your own or you'll take someone else's. So it's a different side of the same coin, but we'll never come to a remedy for that challenge.

If we have to look at each other through the prism of race or continue with this tribal conflict, there are people who are profiting from the grievance of our society, and we must challenge these racial profiteers. You advocate for what you say is deracializing race. Yes. What do you mean by that? I mean, America is not the America it was 60 years ago. We not have the same racial challenges that we had back then. But then there are those who tried to promote this.

So you've got Black Lives Matter that comes along and collects $100 million in white guilt money. Abraham Kendi at Boston University collects 48 millions to do anti-racist research. And the scandal just revealed that he's done no research. search. Hannah Nicole Jones can collect $25 million at Howard University to teach people to search for racism. If we were to take a fraction of those dollars that are spent vilifying the country and invested instead at the Piney Wood School, a 115-year-old day school in Pineywood, Mississippi that takes in children from some of the most challenging families throughout neighborhoods around the country, and 96% of them graduate and go on to post-secondary education.

And while at the same time, in the Baltimore schools and Chicago school system, not one child graduates reading at grade level or performing proficient in math. So it's not the children is the problem. It's the debilitating circumstance in which we find these children. And so what we're trying to do is say to these folks, stop incentivizing destructive people like Black Lives Matter and Hannah Nicole Jones and others, Abraham, Kendi, and all these race grievance people. Instead, for a million dollars invested at Piney Wood, 50 children can be housed in a new dormitory. So we're working closely to try to redirect the public's attention and its resources, a way to. from grievance-oriented approaches and instead invested in restorative approaches that are being

carried out by people in these neighborhoods. Very practical. You recently weighed in on X, on a situation out of New York City. New York has just established a reparations task force. You commented on this on X writing. It is a, you said, what a waste of time and money. You said Kathy Hockel is completely missing the point. What good is a handout if the people can even take care of their own community, New York, invest in your local healing agents? Why do you think we continue to see these kind of actions where you have a state like New York

that's setting up a reparations? Task Force, as you've pointed out, we've seen that these kind of government initiatives long-term are only causing more harm. Because they can appear to be pursuing social justice while not doing anything. I mean, everybody knows that it's not going anywhere. You know, as I have said, the whole issue of reparations is ridiculous. First of all, there were free blacks who owned slaves. There were Native American tribes that owned slaves. They're there. They're the send its pay? Yeah.

You know, what about the whites who died who are abolitionists? Do they pay? I mean, it gets to be ridiculous. Plus, also, look at any time you separate work from income, it has an horrible effect on the recipient. Look at the people who won the lottery. Look at what we've done with the $22 trillion in welfare payments that was offered as a form of reparations.

Anytime you separate work from income, it has a consequence of being destructive to the people who are the recipients. But again, it's a distraction. It's something that well-meaning, guilty white people can say, oh, this is what we're doing to pursue justice. Reparations is not going anywhere. It's just going to be talked about. It's going to be used to deflect attention away from real work that needs to be done to support the grassroots leaders that I call Josephs that are indigenous to these communities. So we just need to set that aside and recognize it for what it is. It's a subterfuge. It's a deflection.

Yeah. You mentioned those grassroots leaders. And as you said, those are the folks that often remain nameless and faceless because they're not on the forefront shouting their name or getting contracts to speak at big universities. But I want to give you the opportunity to Just to honor some of those folks, who are the people that are doing incredible work that you think more Americans should know about, whether from the past or alive and working today? Well, certainly, you know, Ron Anderson and Lyndon, Louisiana, a man who's one of our grassy leaders who's helping kids. Terrence Staley, Alliance of Concern Men in Washington, D.C., that organization went into a gang with our help. we went into an area where there was 53 gang murders in a five square black area in two years. And we helped them negotiate a truce with the result that violence, those murders went down to zero in 12 years for 12 years.

And Sylvia Bennett Stone, who heads up our mothers for voices of Black mothers United, who lost her 16-year-old daughter. Now she commands the respect and following of thousands of moms. So they're just all over the country. I could take all day just celebrating them in their efforts to revitalize. But the Woodson Center is trying to raise major dollars so we can invest in these healing agents who are applying old values to the current challenges that we face. And everything that my grassroots leaders on it, they're used the fundamental values that defines this nation

as the moral and spiritual foundation on which they're restores. efforts are being done. So for people on the left who the naysayers are talking about, oh, American capitalism and our society is corrupt, yet everybody all over the world is crashing our borders to get here. If we're so bad, why are people risking their lives to come here? Yeah. Good question to ask. Mr. Woodson, I want to thank you for your time. I was thinking back to the last time we had you on the show, which I think was in 2021. We talked about what was then your brand new book, Red White and Black, rescuing American History from revisionists and race hustlers. Any new books

coming anytime soon? We also had lessons from the least of these that published at the same time where we've taken 10 principles that defines effective grassroots leaders. And we do have a sequel to Red, Red, White, and Black coming out probably in May or June. And its tentative title is, pathways to prosperity, red, white, and black. And there you'll read actual essays from grassroots leaders that gives personal testimony as to how and why they were able to progress in the presence of oppression. And I think that people are inspired to improve and change when you give them victories that are possible, not always reminding them of injuries to be avoided. So we challenge the naysayers. I call them the crucifixionist. We are resurrectionist.

I love that. Well, I want to encourage all of our listeners to follow your work and learn how you can get involved with the Woodson Center by visiting Woodsoncenter.org. Again, that's Woodsoncenter.org. Mr. Bob Woodson, thank you for your time today. This has been a pleasure. Well, thank you for the opportunity. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Again, if you want to learn more about the work of the Woodson Center, you can visit Woodsoncenter.org to learn how you can get involved. But thanks so much for being with us this Monday. If you have not had a chance, make sure that you're checking out every weekday, our

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