Phil Vischer's Dishonest "Race in America"

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. If you are an evangelical elite living in the

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United States of America and your name is not John MacArthur, you have most likely been doing an awful lot of virtue signaling about how much you care and are deeply concerned with the plight of Black Americans living in this country because of forces outside of their control, like police brutality and systemic oppression and discrimination and housing, education, etc.

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You've used words like redlining and slavery and Jim Crow and Holocaust to describe the current state of affairs in the

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United States. You've signaled your support for Black Lives Matter, maybe even marching with them, but you've been silent on their anti -Christian positions and beliefs.

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You've also been silent on what's happening throughout the world as far as Christian persecution, like in places like Nigeria, where it's happening at very high rates right now.

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And guess what? Those people are Black, but you haven't said much. You haven't said much about the skyrocketing homicide rates in areas where the police have backed off because of, well, the protests that you're helping fan the flames for.

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Those are Black people as well. You've also been silent, relatively speaking, on abortion and the plight of Black babies in this country because of a system set up by someone who wanted specifically to annihilate them.

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Haven't said much about that. But what you have talked about are cures for the problem of systemic oppression that involve taking down symbols of the nation's past and figures, creating multi -ethnic spaces within churches, in other words, doing what the

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Lord Jesus Christ said he would do in building his church. And instead of just seeking people who are unsaved and don't know

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Christ and sharing the gospel with them, specifically trying to attract people of a certain caliber, a certain minority status into your church to make it a place of quote -unquote reconciliation.

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Perhaps you've even talked about political solutions to this problem, like reparations and other socialized mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth to correct the problems of inequities from generations past.

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You've taken it upon yourself to bear the responsibility of quote -unquote white people and Christians who lived even hundreds of years ago and somehow, in your mind, contributed to the current state of affairs.

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The one thing I really wish you would do, but you haven't, is talked about what the Bible says about this kind of a situation and what kind of remedies we can glean from biblical principles.

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Instead, you've forwarded the same kind of talking points and the same myth that the

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New Left critique has been giving for, well, since the 1960s, really. You've been partnering with radicals,

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Marxists, in order to disband and eliminate the hegemony which exists in this country without really having much to replace it.

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You stir up anger among especially young people who are my age and younger in the church about how bad the church has been and how bad

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Americans have been while failing to offer biblical solutions. Well, consistent with the

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New Evangelical tradition of partnering with evil and trying to find wisdom among the Marxists, Phil Vischer, the creator of the popular children's television program

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Veggie Tales, enters the scene. Now you'd think he'd know better because just a little over a year ago, this was a headline at Fox News, Veggie Tales is racist and dangerous for children

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California student claims. That's right. Phil Vischer was the target of cancellation. But this doesn't seem to faze him.

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Instead, he accepts the New Left systemic racism critique and even takes responsibility for it because of the fact that he is white, which if you think about it is consistent with critical race theory.

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Now, Phil Vischer is a master at weaving a narrative. I mean, he's a producer. He created Veggie Tales. He can connect with you emotionally.

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He can connect facts in a sequence to create a really tight narrative. And he does so brilliantly in this video.

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But the problem is he's either not a very good researcher or he didn't do good research for this particular video because the picture he paints is distorted.

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He draws lines between facts which do not correlate with one another, at least in a one -on -one relationship. He also attributes causes and motivations to certain state of affairs without considering other contributing factors.

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In fact, factors you'd think a Christian specifically should notice and talk about and address.

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And then at the end of the video, he doesn't even have a solution for any of the problems he brings up. He just says we're supposed to care.

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So he put all this work into this video just so we could care, which I guess that could give you a sense of moral superiority, but it doesn't feed or help anyone.

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And so I actually think the Bible gives us principles that can actually address this situation. I mean, at the very least, you can pray,

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Mr. Vischer. But it actually gives us principles for what we can do, not just in the political scene either, but of course in the political scene as well.

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And so I want to point out the glaring oversights in his historical analysis. I'm going to walk through this video piece by piece.

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And then at the end, I'm going to offer some biblical alternatives to the lamentation of Phil Vischer, which really doesn't get you anywhere.

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And so let's start at the beginning. We need to talk about race. Why are people protesting?

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Why are people angry? Slavery ended 150 years ago. The civil rights movement was 60 years ago.

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Racial discrimination is illegal now. Heck, we even had a black president. So why are people still upset?

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Okay, this is really important. He made a switch in a few seconds from let's have a conversation about race to let's have a conversation about why people are angry.

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And that's because there's an assumption that any discussion about race is going to be about conflict along racial lines.

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And this is why whenever someone says to you, well, you're just not afraid to have a conversation about race, you should probably respond with,

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I would be more than happy to have a conversation about race. Let's get our Bibles out. Let's talk about what race is or people groups are, ethnicity is, sociolinguistic groups are from a biblical perspective.

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If you buy into this idea that any conversation about race is necessarily a conversation about conflict, you're already in systemic oppression land.

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And so they want to get the conversation started in that direction from the beginning and define any discussion about race as that's what it is.

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It's a discussion about conflict or reconciliation, which is also related to conflict somehow.

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We're going to go through history and we're going to look at some data and we're going to go quickly so this video doesn't get too long.

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So hang on. These are two households in America. One is black, the other is white.

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Today, the average black household has 60 % of the income of the average white household, but only one 10th of the household wealth.

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Why does that matter? Well, household wealth helps send kids to school, helps launch small businesses, stabilizes loss of income, and helps families survive catastrophic events like divorce or unemployment.

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What's amazing about this number is that there are lots of extremely wealthy African -Americans, movie stars, pop stars, 75 % of the

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NBA, 70 % of the NFL, Oprah, Tyler Perry, Ben Carson, Morgan Freeman, and there are a lot of extremely poor white families.

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Think of Appalachia and other parts of rural America. But even when we factor all that in, the average black household still has only one 10th the wealth of the average white household.

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How did that happen? Now that's a fair question, but probably a better question is why is it that after the civil rights gains of the 1960s, black unemployment went up, homicide rates went up, the black family started breaking down more.

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I mean, maybe some of these things can be factors that were significant in contributing to the disparities that Phil Vischer is talking about, but he never brings them up in the whole video.

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And I'm going to talk a little more about that later on, but it's still a fair question. But just because there's a disparity doesn't mean injustice is necessarily going on.

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Firstborn people tend to do better than their siblings. People in geographic areas like the suburbs tend to do better than those in rural and urban areas.

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In fact, Asians tend to do better than quote -unquote white people. Now, did I say Asian? Yeah, I did.

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And let me show you some charts on that because I think this is a good comparison to make because they also faced discrimination and barriers when they came here, just like every immigrant group did.

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In fact, some people, I've heard this said that the barriers they faced were worse than the barriers that existed for African Americans.

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And I don't know how you quantify that, but they were certainly pretty bad. Now, here's a chart showing the median household income by race in 2016.

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You'll notice Asians are at the top, much more than white people. They're making more money. Now, the white people category there, this includes more than just Americans of European descent, which is what

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I put in the title there because we are accustomed to thinking white just means that. But this could also mean

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Jewish people who identify as white who actually are very wealthy.

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So the Asian population is even making more income than the whole entire white population.

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Here's Americans of Asian descent. Median income is rising faster than any other ethnic demographics.

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This doesn't mean that Asians are just doing better. It means that their upward mobility is rising at a faster rate.

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They're doing better and they have momentum in more than white people,

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Hispanic people, black people. They're increasing their income at a higher rate than other demographic groups.

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Here's another chart for you. Educational attainment varies by race, ethnicity, and nativity.

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This is a study that was done in North Carolina in 2014. And what it shows is that Americans of Asian descent are more educated than other ethnic demographics.

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Do you think maybe education level could have factored in? Yeah, maybe that could be a contributing cause.

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I mean, in the Asian culture, there's a high premium placed on education. And so their performance financially may have something to do with that.

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Here's a very interesting chart. This gets directly into what Phil Vischer was talking about. Average wealth. All right, so this isn't income, this is wealth.

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You can see that in the Asian population, it was rising. And by 2010 to 2013, it almost caught up with the white population, quote unquote.

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And according to the study, it actually now has surpassed in 2020, the white population.

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So Asians of American descent actually have more wealth. They've achieved this than other ethnic demographics.

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And they came here much later. So they came, they, I mean, and they suffered discrimination.

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The Chinese and working on the railroad when they first came was basically slave labor. You had Japanese people were put in internment camps, for goodness sake.

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And this shows you some of the books that are written about this on anti -Asian racism.

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In fact, just recently during the COVID crisis, I mean, that was a really hot topic and evangelicals are talking about it.

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There's a whole statement crafted on it that big evangelical leaders signed about anti -Asian racism. But yet when you look at the population and what they've done in the

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United States, they've overcome these barriers and they've actually surpassed quote unquote white people.

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Now, I did not find as much information on this, but what I did find was very interesting. Americans of Jewish descent in 2005 had a net worth of 443 ,000 compared to the average

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American household, which is 99 ,500. That's incredible. And it's more incredible when you think of the fact that Jewish people also more often than not got to the

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United States later than Europeans. And many of them were fleeing persecution from Eastern bloc countries,

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Russia, Germany. They have a history of oppression in Europe and the Muslim world going back to even Egypt and their enslavement there.

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And when they arrived in the United States, they were primarily coming to urban areas, living in ghettos.

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And this is what they had to show for it. It's truly an incredible American story about the land of opportunity and about how they were able to flee to the

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United States and do well for themselves. In fact, Forbes puts out every year their top richest

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Americans. I think it's top 40. And in 2018, five of the top 10 were

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Jewish people. And I'm not sure because I'm not familiar with the ethnicities of those who are on the current list, but I think

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I saw three of these guys at least on that top 10. So, I mean, very much overperforming if we're trying to look at them in contrast to other ethnicities in the

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United States. And yet there's books. There are a lot of books on antisemitism in America. In fact, I grew up in an area in the

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Catskill Mountain region, or near there, I should say, in New York, in which I was very familiar with this because the

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Catskill Mountains were actually referred to, they used to be referred to as the quote unquote Jewish Alps because Jewish people would go to the

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Catskills instead of the White Mountains or the Green Mountains where discrimination prevented them from going there.

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And in fact, there's a resort I know of, it's where Hillary Clinton went after she lost the election in the Catskill Mountains that used to have a sign, no

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Jews allowed. And that was very common for even, you know, 100 years ago. And so for Jewish people to get in these urban areas and then to do well for themselves like that is a truly

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American story. Now, here's another factor that I probably could have looked into more, but the data that I did find was very interesting because it shows that if there's a discrimination taking place against people in this country who are black because of the color of their skin, then it's not happening at the same rate at least among people that are black who are foreign born.

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Let me show you what I mean. Nielsen said in a poll, a study I should say that they did, median household income for foreign born blacks is 30 % higher than US born blacks.

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Here's a study that was done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2015 and it shows, and this is very sad,

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US black people had a net worth of $8. And Caribbean people who also happen to be black who moved to Boston had a net worth of $12 ,000.

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Now, this is fascinating to me. The Caribbean born black people are doing better than Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other

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Hispanics as you can see from that chart. Now, of course, there's a lot of rich white people, quote unquote white people who are

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Jewish, people of European descent in Boston, and I mean, $247 ,500 net worth.

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People have been there, their families have been there, etc. But you can see that Caribbean people who also have the same skin color, probably even darker in some cases than many

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US black people, they're doing better financially. And I'm assuming I would probably find upward mobility as well if we were able to track this over time.

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So what makes sense of that is why would white supremacist, quote unquote, or systemic racism discriminate more against people from the

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United States who are black? That doesn't actually follow or make sense. There's got to be some kind of another factor or complicated numbers of factors involved to make sense of that.

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I'm saying it's not all simplistic. Now, of course, we could also talk about religious groups. We could, I mean, there's so many ways you can cut this pie, but you could talk about how

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Jewish people do significantly better than other religious groups, financially speaking. Hindu people are second.

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You know where Southern Baptists are? They're way, way, way down on the list. Go towards the bottom of the list. That's where you'll find the

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Southern Baptists. So it's very interesting. Are we supposed to say that Hindu and Episcopalians and Presbyterians and atheists and agnostics and Orthodox and especially

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Jewish people, that they're being favored by the system and the system is racist against Southern Baptists?

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Of course, it wouldn't be racism. It would be on the basis of religion. So it's some kind of bigotry. Not necessarily.

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There may be other factors that are involved in this. Well, here we go. What happened after we freed the slaves, after the

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Civil War ended? Nine states enacted vagrancy laws, making it a crime to not have a job.

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The law was applied only to black men. Eight of those states then allowed prisoners, the black men who'd just been arrested for not having a job, to be hired out to plantation owners with little or no pay going to the prisoners themselves.

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So that's right. Men who had been freed from the plantations found themselves right back on the plantations.

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I want you to see at the outset what Phil Bisher's doing and notice it throughout the rest of the narrative. What he's doing is he's weaving a story in which white people have oppressed black people.

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And that is the only contributing factor to the current state of affairs for black people in the United States of America. So it's a victimization narrative.

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Forces outside of the control of black people have oppressed them and that's why they are in the situation they're in now, according to Phil Bisher.

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And it's our fault if we're white. Now he starts it interestingly in the slavery and chain gang scenario.

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Instead of going back farther, he could talk about Africans who had set up slave markets before Europeans even got there, and tribal warfare.

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But if he did that, he would have to acknowledge some kind of complicity that existed in Africans.

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So it would actually kind of threaten the narrative he's trying to weave. And so he doesn't do that.

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He makes his starting point right when the civil war is ending. And to me that is significant because I was thinking about my own family and not that it's an apples to apples comparison because it's not.

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And if someone wanted to take me out of context and say that I'm making that argument, I'm not saying it's apples to apples.

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What I'm saying though is that most people can, if they look back in their history, find some persecution against members of their family.

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They stand in a tradition of some kind that has at one point or another gotten the short end of the stick.

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And so in my family, I think of some of those who came here because they were persecuted by the

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Church of England. They were pilgrims who came here. If I go back farther than that, I have reformers in my family.

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I'm a direct descendant of John Knox and other reformers who were persecuted. I can see on my southern side, those who came here as indentured servants in Virginia and lived in poverty through the civil war.

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They were burned out of their homes by Sherman's army. And then, you know, we get to really the 20th century before my grandparents finally make it into the lower middle class.

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My parents finally have bachelor's degrees. I mean, there was poverty before then.

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And so I could try to focus on these things and really weave a narrative that these things were just really barriers that were outside of the control of people in my family.

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And I could start to take on a victim mentality. That wouldn't do me any good though. And I don't see that being emphasized in scripture anymore.

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I mean, I can only deal with the things that are in my control. And this is where I think God's sovereignty comes into being.

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This is the story of Joseph we usually use regarding this. Someone who really was a victim who rose because of God's grace upon him.

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But God does have a plan. And I don't accept this narrative that replaces

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God's sovereignty with white privilege. It really looks at white privilege as this deterministic element that punishes those who don't have it.

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Now, are there things like privilege for white people? Were there things like that in this country?

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Absolutely, there were. Does it explain everything we see today? No, it doesn't.

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Is it helpful to understand those things? Yeah, I think it definitely is. But should it be used as a wedge to divide people against one another?

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No. Because remember, Phil Fisher started this whole thing with, this is just a discussion about race. Well, no, it's not a discussion about race.

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It's a discussion about how bad white people are for oppressing these black victims.

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And that's it. Not taking anything else into consideration. That's the story that he's weaving for you.

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Now, let's get into some of the specifics. I'm going to be pulling some information from these two secondary sources.

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There's some others, but these are the two main ones. Philip Lee's Southern Reconstruction and the Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Van Woodward.

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If you'd like to look these up for further study, I do recommend it. I'll also be quoting some secondary sources to you just to understand what

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Phil Fisher's talking about, and then see how he is using the narrative to fit his purpose.

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The way in which the Civil War and Reconstruction were handled has implications that even affect us today.

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There's no doubt about that. One of the tragedies is how former slaves and even poor whites in the

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South had to live in unbearable conditions for years, poverty for generations.

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By some estimates, I've heard about a million former slaves died after the war.

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So these are the worst kinds of conditions to be freed into if you're going to free slaves.

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Robert Summers was an Englishman, so not Northern or Southern, an Englishman who traveled to Southern states in 1870 to 71.

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And he recorded his experiences in the book Southern States. And on page 153, he talks about how black people after the

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Confederate surrender were disorderly. His words, not mine. Then he says, many of them would not settle down to labor, but roamed about with arms in their hands and hunger in their bellies.

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And the governing power, with the usual blind determination of a victorious party, was thinking only all the while of every device of suffrage and reconstruction by which the freedmen might be strengthened and made under Northern dictation, the ruling power in the country.

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In other words, he's saying that people from the North had come down to take advantage of the situation, and some of them wanted to get freed blacks on their side to rule the former

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Confederate states. He continues, he says, agitators of the loosest fiber came down among the towns and plantations and organizing a union league held midnight meetings where these black people were in the woods and went about uttering sentiments which were destructive.

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A real terror reigned for a time among white people. Now, of course, that's not the full picture because situations like this ranged according to what region you were in.

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And that's one of the things that I think modern students of American history get wrong an awful lot is they assume that the modern state of today with top -down solutions for everything that apply across the board was always in existence.

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And that's just not the case at all. And reconstruction, that period, is a really good example of that because there were a lot of differences between regions.

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But this is the kind of thing what Summers describes that gave rise to organizations like the

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Ku Klux Klan. And they were trying to fill what they consider to be a vacuum in law and order, etc.,

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in certain regions. And so it was a terrible situation and one that I wish could have been avoided.

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I think we all wish that. But this is part of our history. This did take place. And so one of the reactions to this kind of thing was also black codes and which included, in some cases, vagrancy laws.

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Stephen Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow on page 23 says that the provisional legislatures established by President Johnson, so he succeeded

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President Lincoln in 1865, adopted the notorious black codes. Philip Lee says in Southern Reconstruction on page 41 that these codes itemized discriminatory rights of conduct for freedmen.

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They were, however, also adopted ostensibly to impel the many ex -slaves who had mistaken freedom for vagrancy to seek employment.

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I remember when I was reading Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington even talks about this, not in his family, but in a group he had come across that they had been freed and then they really weren't working.

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They just thought that they didn't have to work anymore. And so this was a problem in some areas. And Philip Lee also says on pages 43 through 44 that these codes were based partially upon the vagrancy laws of northern and southern states and upon the regulations of the

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Freedmen's Bureau as well as statutes in the West Indies governing free blacks. And he even talks about how Abraham Lincoln, in some ways, had approved of this kind of thing in a sense.

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And so that's the situation that existed at the time. Now, I couldn't find anything that said that these laws specifically only applied to blacks, but I'm sure that was probably the intention based on some of the sources that I've been reading, mostly because of the unique situation of being enslaved and having a job to do in that and then not having that anymore and being in a war -torn economy in which you didn't have that as an option, but there really weren't a whole lot of other options.

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And so they were trying to prevent idle hands being the devil's playground, but there really just weren't any good options.

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Now, Phil Bisher wants to make out that this is a re -institution of slavery, vagrancy laws, and then leasing prisoners out.

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And he's actually jumping kind of like 20 years to do that because there were the

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Black Codes, which were actually struck down immediately during Reconstruction, and then it was about 20 years later when you started seeing the actual

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Jim Crow laws appear, which were actually based on Northern laws that had already been in existence.

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And so this was a period of time initially during these Black Codes, when these

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Black Codes were set up, when you had a population that was freed, but they weren't citizens of the

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United States yet. And so this was the provisional, like, here's who you are in our region, according to state by state, really.

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And some states didn't even adopt those, but the states that did. And so those were struck down, and then in that intermittent period, there's an interesting thing that takes place.

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Stephen Woodward states on page 33 through 34 of The Strange Career of Jim Crow that there was a study by Charles E.

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Wines called Race Relations in Virginia, and it found that the state had the most distinguishing factor in the complexity of social relations between the races was that of inconsistency.

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From 1870 to 1900, there was no generally accepted code of racial mores during those three decades, according to the study.

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At no time was it in the general demand of the white population that Black people be disenfranchised and white supremacy be made a law of the land, until 1900, when a law requiring the separation of races on railroad cars was adopted by a majority of one vote.

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The Black people sat where they pleased and among the white passengers on perhaps the majority of the state's railroads.

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There were exceptions, but they became fewer and fewer towards the end of the period. The same was true of the streetcars and other public accommodations in the places of entertainment.

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The Black patron often met with the rebuff and sometimes eviction, but not always, for occasionally

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Black people met no segregation when he entered restaurants, bars, waiting rooms, theaters, and other public places of amusement.

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There were risks, but no firm policy of exclusion, and this led many

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Black people to keep trying for acceptance just as it led at least some whites to accept them.

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And there's many other similar quotations that I could read you. And again, the point is that there isn't one particular narrative.

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This is what Phil Bisher keeps pushing, that white people, Black people, cross the board, that's it, no complexity to it.

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And the reality is that after Reconstruction governments were done away and the

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Redeemer governments came into place, they called them, which were mainly led by landed aristocrats, people who were former slave owners, a lot of them, there was actually a trajectory in many instances towards more harmony.

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You would have thought if you lived in certain regions back then that some barriers, social barriers, were coming down.

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That all changed though, and here's where it changed. As Freedmen and poor whites started competing for substantive employment and the populist movement gained influence, poor whites voted for anti -planter and anti -Black candidates.

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This is during a recession essentially. It is no coincidence that the first seven southern states to require segregated rail cars adopted their statutes in the years 1887 to 1891.

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So these are the Jim Crow laws, and look how many years after the end of the war this is.

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When the pre -populist farmers alliance started to gain strength. So this is when these laws start coming into place.

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Historian C. Van Woodward concludes, the barriers of racial discrimination mounted in direct ratio with the tide of political democracy among whites.

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In fact, an increase in Jim Crow laws is almost an accurate index of the decline of the

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Redeemers and the triumph of white democratic movements. So there was an economic concern.

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Another thing that you'll realize though, the more study you do, is how during this time leading up to the progressive era, southern and northern understanding of race was actually converging, and the south had resisted this for a while.

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But if you look at a lot of sources in the 19th century, you'll find words like white, western,

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Christian, all kind of being used interchangeably when talking about civilizations. I know that's offensive today, that's just what you'll find.

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In fact, the term race, you'll even see that term used of genders. I mean, it just meant people.

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And so when people talked about a white race or a European race, western race being superior to an

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African race, Mongolian race, etc., oftentimes what they were talking about was civilization differences.

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You see this even with like Lottie Moon, you see this with like even Robert E. Lee talks about this kind of thing.

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I mean, some of this thinking even went into the 20th century, where people weren't necessarily talking about scientific racism, they were talking about civilizational differences.

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You go back far enough, you'll see terms like barbarian or savages being used sometimes, especially about like Native Americans.

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And it wasn't necessarily always saying that they are genetically inferior, it was saying their civilization is not advanced.

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It needs Christianity, it needs education. I mean, Jonathan Edwards talks about Native Americans kind of in this way, that they're capable, but they just don't have, they weren't raised in the same way we were.

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And so we need to give them what God has given to us, we need to try to help them along kind of thing.

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And of course, these are terribly racist things in today's modern conception. But one of the problems with like critical race theory is they will take civilizationism and scientific racism and they just put them in one pot and say that they're all the same thing.

31:11

Well, they're not actually. And towards the end of the 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th century, more and more people started taking those civilization differences and saying, well, that's just because of their race and assuming genetic determinism.

31:31

These are Darwinian ideas, essentially, that we're talking about. And of course, Phil Vischer doesn't really talk about this, but this is around the time that these

31:40

Jim Crow laws are adopted, and then they have teeth in them, a lot of them.

31:46

And so this, to try to make it, it's just slavery and then Jim Crow, which I hear a lot of people make that jump.

31:53

It's not just the legacy of slavery, you're missing another piece of the puzzle when you just make that jump.

31:59

In fact, slavery, one of the legacies of slavery was black people and white people living together, raising each other, taking care of each other in many cases.

32:09

And I mean, there's a number of books I can recommend to you on this primary source researched books.

32:16

Doesn't mean it was across the board in all places. It just means that there was a general living together, being in close quarters together.

32:25

And so segregation is not something that was natural for the South. That's why, partially why, these laws came into effect.

32:33

They had to keep people separate because people just naturally wouldn't do that. And of course, sharecropping is happening.

32:39

White people, black people, both living in poverty, sharecropping together for years to come.

32:46

That happened in rural areas. A lot of these Jim Crow laws were in cities. They were in urban areas that they had any teeth.

32:54

If they had teeth at all, you get out to rural areas, it didn't always function that way. So it's a complicated picture.

33:01

And that's kind of my point is that to say that just all white people, this is what white people did to black people.

33:08

That is a way overly simplistic explanation. Now let's talk about this reinstituting slavery under convict leasing, which apparently is a one to one comparison.

33:20

Michelle Alexander, author of the new Jim Crow says that, and then so does based on her work, Bill Vischer. What led to this?

33:26

Because it was a really bad thing. But again, it was a problem that had to do with conditions at the time.

33:34

Carl Schurz writes a report to President Grant in 1865 and says, hey, vagrancy is a real problem among slaves who have just been freed.

33:42

They're not doing anything, is what he's trying to communicate to President Grant. His words, not mine.

33:49

And what takes place is in the state of Louisiana, especially you can find this story in Southern Reconstruction on page 141.

34:00

The union general there, Benjamin Butler, allowed union loyal planters in adjacent parishes to hire ex -slave as salary workers.

34:10

So he's rewarding in a sense, just those who are loyal to the union. And Major General Nathaniel Banks takes over for him in 1862, and he extends the practice throughout the entire state.

34:21

So it was in New Orleans under Butler. Banks extends it to the whole state. And it was terrible.

34:28

Ex -slaves were induced into years of contract with planters. They didn't really have a lot of laws.

34:34

Federal marshals would round up vagrant blacks and it functioned like the slave patrols.

34:41

So historian Lawrence Powell writes that the entire apparatus was really a system of vagrancy laws that left black people with the choice of working on the plantations or laboring in the public works.

34:51

So really bad situation. Now, this was during the war itself that this gets established in Louisiana.

34:58

So what takes place afterward? What happens and why does this system sort of expand?

35:03

Well, you can find this in C. C. Van Woodward, Origins of the New South, a different book, page 212.

35:09

He says, among the institutions of the old order that strained to meet the needs of the new, none proved more hopelessly inadequate than the old penitentiaries.

35:16

The state was suddenly called upon to take over the plantation's penal functions at a time when the crime was enormously increasing.

35:23

The strain was too great. One after another of the states adopted the expedient of leasing the convicts to private corporations or individuals.

35:29

In Louisiana, the convict lease system had an antebellum origin. In other southern states, it was introduced by provisional or military governments and retained by the carpetbaggers and redeemers.

35:40

And so of course, we just read about what happened in Louisiana. So this system gets set up and it's financial. It's because they're overwhelmed by the conditions in the prison system.

35:50

They don't have a good option of what to do. And so this is what they set up.

35:56

And it's not just black people. And that's one of the things that I think is missed here. This affected whites and blacks.

36:02

Of course, those who have been enslaved that now they're free and they don't have places to go, it's going to affect them more, but it affected both.

36:10

And this has become part of southern lore, the chain gang, you know, that you even hear songs, you know,

36:16

Johnny Cash singing about the chain gang and stuff. Well, this is where this kind of thing kind of started. Additional laws prohibited mischief and insulting gestures, which allowed more black men to be arrested and created a huge market for convict leasing.

36:31

Working conditions for these leased convicts could be worse than slavery because the plantation owner leasing the black prisoner had no long -term interest in his well -being.

36:42

So Phil Vischer is probably right that the conditions on a prison farm would be worse than the conditions of slavery.

36:48

And that would be for whites and for blacks who wound up there. He does talk about this concept of mischief, which is actually it's malicious mischief.

36:56

I don't know why he said just mischief. I looked at his source and it's malicious, which is actually, there's a legal definition for that, which

37:02

I'll give you in a minute and insulting gestures. And he says that these two things were set up,

37:07

I think he's saying to broaden what could be convicted of so they could get you on something minor and then, you know, put you on a prison farm.

37:14

And maybe it would work that way. Maybe there are people who did that, but here's the thing. These are antiquated in our minds terms, which actually have real meaning.

37:24

And in the 19th century, these things would have been taken seriously. Malicious mischief is the willful destruction of personal property of another from actual ill will or resentment towards its owner or possessor.

37:34

Though only a trespass at the common law, it is now a misdemeanor in most states. That is from the West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition two, copyright 2008.

37:43

And insulting gestures, you know, I thought of Washington's army and how he didn't allow profanity. And so many states did not allow profanity during the colonial period, up through the federal period and into the antebellum, postbellum periods.

37:57

This is something that we've lost in our culture. Our blasphemy laws now are hate crime legislation.

38:04

You can't say certain words that are, I mean, we have this blasphemy laws. They're just not, they're according to a different standard.

38:12

But for Phil Vischer to use these things, I think he's playing a little bit on our presentist understanding of the terms mischief and insulting gestures.

38:21

Those things are no big deal. Well, in the 19th century, those things could have been a very big deal. By the turn of the 20th century, every state in the

38:28

South had mandated racial segregation by law. Jim Crow laws, which supported a social ostracism for blacks that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, and restaurants, hospitals, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries.

38:46

White politicians competed with each other to be more strict and specific on segregation.

38:51

For example, a law prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together. No interracial chess playing.

38:58

That might lead to lawn darts. So it's important to remember, once again, this is not during the modern state. This isn't one size fits all, big brother's going to come crash your door down if you don't obey the law.

39:08

There were different customs and traditions and ways these laws were enforced depending on where you were, urban versus rural.

39:15

In fact, the farther west you went, it was more severe. The farther east, probably the more lenient.

39:21

Let me read for you. This is from a hardcore abolitionist, member of the Secret Six, right?

39:27

So he wanted slave instructions in the South. His name is Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and he went down South in 1878.

39:36

And he was in Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida. And this is what he said. He said he found a condition of outward peace and wondered immediately if there did not lurk beneath it some covert plan for crushing or re -enslaving the colored race.

39:48

If so, he decided it would show itself in some personal ill usage of the blacks in the withdrawal privileges and legislation endangering their rights.

39:55

But he reported, I can assert that carrying with me the eyes of a tolerable, suspicious abolitionist,

40:01

I saw none of these indications. He had expected to be affronted by contemptuous or abusive treatment of black people.

40:09

During this trip, however, he wrote, I had absolutely no occasion for any such attitude, nor was this due to any cringing demeanor on the part of the blacks, for they show much more manhood than they once did.

40:22

He compared the tolerance and acceptance of black people in the South on train and streetcars, at the polls, in the court and legislatures, in the police force and militia, with attitudes in his native

40:32

New England, and decided that the South came off rather better in the comparison. How can we ask more of the states formerly in rebellion, he demanded, than they should be abreast of New England in granting rights and privileges to the colored race.

40:46

Yet this is now the case in the three states I name, or at least if they fall behind in some points that they lead at some points.

40:54

And so six years later, so that would be in 1884, in a review of the situation in the

41:01

South, Higginson found no reason to change his estimate of 1878. So this is in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, pages 35 through 36.

41:13

Here's one more, I'll just read this one more to you, in the year 1879. And there's some testimony from Sir George Campbell, a member of Parliament, so English, traveled over a large part of the

41:26

South with race relations as the focus of his interest. So he's looking for what conditions are like.

41:33

He says that he was impressed with the freedmen, freedom of association between whites and blacks, with the frequency and intimacy of personal contact, and with extent of Negro participation.

41:43

Again, I don't use that word, he used that word, in political affairs. He commented with particular surprise on the equality with which

41:51

Black people shared public facilities. He reported some discrimination, but remarked that the humblest

41:58

Black rides with the proudest white on terms of perfect equality, and without a smallest symptom of malice or dislike on either side.

42:05

I was, I confess, surprised to see how completely this is the case, even as English radical is a little taken aback at first.

42:12

In the first year of redemption, a writer who signed himself a South Carolinian in the Atlantic Monthly corroborated the observations of the

42:18

Englishmen regarding Black people's equality of treatment on common carriers, trains, and streetcars.

42:24

Black people are freely admitted to the theater in Columbia, and no exhibitions, lectures, etc., though whites avoided sitting with them if the hall be not crowded.

42:32

He added, in Columbia, they were also served at the bars, soda fountains, and ice cream saloons, but not generally elsewhere.

42:38

Pages 36 through 37 of The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Again, this didn't hold throughout time in every place, and it wasn't in every region at every time, but these conditions did exist.

42:52

This is even, uh, uh, Higginson is writing, uh, he's even reviewing some of this stuff while Jim Crow is in effect, and he's saying,

43:01

I'm not seeing it, not, not like I would have expected to. And I was even reading, uh, recently a book on the

43:08

Scopes trial, and you had northern reporters from New York going down, uh, to Tennessee, and they were shocked to see

43:16

Black and white people talking together, socially, uh, fraternizing, and that was just something that they didn't see as much in where they came from in the north.

43:24

And so, is this to paint the south as none of this is true, and Vischer's lying? No, not at all.

43:30

Vischer's, he's telling you the truth. He's just not telling you the whole story. Just because the laws were passed, just because, uh, people even in an abstract way believe that this is the way society should be governed, doesn't mean they function that way, um, on a personal level.

43:47

And, and so there's a lot more I could say about this, and this confuses, I think, a lot of students of this time, um, in history, uh, but, but it wasn't more complicated.

43:58

If, if all I can get you to understand is that this is more complicated than you probably were first, um, thinking, then

44:04

I will have done my job, uh, as someone who's interested in history and wants everyone else to be interested in history.

44:09

This doesn't justify anything at all. It just says that this isn't a Black people did this, white people did this, and white people oppressed

44:17

Black people. It's not, not quite that, um, that, that simple. In 1896, the

44:23

Supreme Court ruled that these Jim Crow laws were perfectly legal because they, quote, reflected customs and traditions and, quote, preserved public peace and good order.

44:34

At this point, I just want to point out one of history's ironies. Uh, this is from Southern Reconstruction, the forward, um, but Phil Lean points out that Justice Henry Brown of Michigan cited a

44:43

Boston precedent upholding segregated schools. Six other justices joined him in the seven to one decision. The lone dissenter was from Kentucky, while six of the seven justices voting with the majority were from states that were loyal to the union during the civil war.

44:54

So the interesting thing that I thought was interesting is that, um, this really wasn't about the customs and traditions of the people because those, those are actually fairly new and they, uh, during slavery, people lived with each other.

45:09

And so, um, so the decision says that, um, gauged by the standard of preservation of public peace and good order, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races and public conveyances is unreasonable or more obnoxious to the 14th

45:26

Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools or colored children in the District of Columbia. So their, their problem was that if, if they would have ruled, um, with, uh, the, the railroad and Homer Plessy who were challenging the rail, the, the, uh, laws against, um, integration, then what they would have done is they would have struck down or at least created precedent for striking down, um, laws in the

45:54

North that did the same kinds of things in other public accommodations. And that would have created a problem.

46:00

So it's just one of history's ironies, wanted to point it out. These laws stayed in place until 1954, when the idea of separate but equal was struck down in the ruling known as Brown versus Board of Education.

46:12

Don't miss this. Don't miss this. Don't miss this. Phil Vischer just skipped over about 50 years of history and he's going to skip over a long period of time again.

46:20

And in both instances, he skips over history that is very inconvenient for the modern

46:25

Democratic Party in the United States. Uh, early labor unions and trying to keep black people out, the racism of the labor union movement, uh, in the early 20th century, he doesn't talk anything about scientific racism, all the publications that were coming out about that eugenics, um, abortion,

46:42

Planned Parenthood. That's when that got started. It doesn't talk about the race riots, um, of, uh, the

46:49

World War I era either, which is peculiar to me a little bit, but, um, but the modern Democratic Party has ties to labor unions and has ties to abortion and Planned Parenthood.

46:58

So you would expect a progressive not to talk about those things. Why would a Christian like Phil Vischer though, not want to talk about those things?

47:06

Those are pretty significant things, wouldn't you say? I mean, how many, let's just compare the numbers, how many black people have died as a result of abortion versus other, uh, ways in which lynching or, you know, whatever, uh, other, um, uh, ways that black people have died, police shootings.

47:23

I mean, there's no contest. There's no comparison. He just, he doesn't talk about it. It's interesting to me.

47:28

Uh, the other thing that's interesting that he doesn't talk about is yes, though there were Jim Crow laws on the books. Very true.

47:34

Uh, actually conditions were improving in some ways for black families. And I just want to point this out.

47:41

This doesn't whitewash anything. This just shows though, that despite, uh, laws, um, that, that were not good, uh, this was actually starting to happen before the great society and minimum wage and civil rights and all of that.

47:59

Um, this is from 1867 to 68 to 1900 black income per capita.

48:05

And, uh, you can see that it grew a whole lot. Um, you can also see that growth rate, the growth rate of income per capita, uh, actually black people were, now they had farther to go, but their growth rate was greater than that of the general population, which is fascinating to me.

48:26

And you could say, well, maybe, maybe it was black people in areas where those laws didn't take effect or something.

48:32

Well, those laws, there were barriers just about everywhere, but I just want you to look at this. This is from density of black population, 1918.

48:38

They're mostly all still in the South, mostly. And so, um, so it's interesting to me that, uh,

48:48

Phil Vischer just skips over this. Another point I wanted to make is that, um,

48:53

I was, I was studying Elvis Presley not too long ago. And some of the kind of early rockabilly, uh, figures like Jerry Lee Lewis and, um, just,

49:03

I can't think of all their names now, but you know, that whole scene and the vast majority, like I think every single one of those early rock and roll guys is from the

49:14

South. And the reason that, um, they, their style picked up and gained popularity was because a lot of these guys that were, they were poor white people in about every single case.

49:26

Uh, so the life of Elvis, I mean, he's growing up in Memphis and I mean, his friends are black people.

49:32

He dresses like the black preachers. And he was, he had a Pentecostal background, which is already more integrated.

49:38

Um, he copied their style and their music. And it wasn't, he didn't think he was copying anything.

49:43

That's just what life was like in Memphis. They just lived side by side. They listened to each other's music.

49:50

And, um, and this is, you know, why he, one person explained why he shook his hips was because he was imitating, uh, some of like some black musicians and how they would dress and how they would, uh, dance on stage.

50:05

And this was offensive. This actually wasn't even an issue until Elvis became mainstream and Northern audiences started seeing what he was doing.

50:12

He was touring the South and no one had, hardly anyone had a problem with him shaking his hips or anything. And I'm not taking a stand on that either way.

50:18

I'm just saying that it was the, it was the integration of, uh, the, the mixing of these styles, you know, country and Western and, and, you know, blues and soul and Elvis's is,

50:29

I mean, that's early rock and roll right there. And if you read the history of these guys, there's integration going on at their concerts.

50:37

There's, there's literally, there's laws in place to segregate that the rules of these concerts are, it needs to be segregated by the end of the show.

50:44

No one's segregating anything. Everyone's in the front and they're all looking at Elvis and they're all black and white.

50:50

I mean, these are the kinds of things that we're bringing, um, culturally black and white people together.

50:56

And it started in the South, um, in ways that, uh, you know, that challenged the

51:03

Jim Crow system, like really challenged it. I mean, you hear a lot about, uh, what happened legally during civil rights and the protests and stuff, but you don't hear a lot about what happened before that.

51:15

And Phil Vischer, of course, doesn't talk about any of that. But, um, I think it's important at least to tell the truth about it.

51:20

If we're going to have a discussion about race, right, which is what Phil Vischer says he wants to talk about, not just white people oppressing black people, but actually instances where they came together, uh, where there was economic mobility starting to increase where, um, good things, positive things were happening.

51:36

I mean, we should also pay attention to those, right? Should we not? So I just want to point those out. So what happened next after Brown?

51:42

Well, in 1956, the Southern Manifesto was signed by 101 out of 128

51:48

Congress members from the South pledging to maintain Jim Crow by all means possible.

51:54

This is another situation where Phil Vischer is oversimplifying things to forward his narrative. Now there's some truth in what he said, no doubt, but he gives the impression that anyone who would want to oppose

52:04

Brown versus the board of education was just doing so because they wanted Jim Crow. And, and that's, that's it.

52:12

And, and so this isn't exactly the case. In fact, Eisenhower himself was very slow on this whole issue to force integration.

52:21

Um, both the Democrat and Republican national conventions in 1956 debated the public school desegregation.

52:28

And both of them came up with really weak statements about it. And neither of them really wanted to take a stand.

52:33

There was kind of a general sense that, um, like I was talking about before with the young Rockabilly guys, that culture was going to get rid of these things, but hearts needed to change.

52:44

And that's even what Eisenhower said. You'll hear Billy Graham saying things like that from this time. And, and that forcing it wasn't the best way.

52:51

The other issue was that, um, and I'll read for you part of the Southern Manifesto here, but there was a constitutional issue that,

52:58

Hey, wait a minute. Was Brown versus the board of education actually constitutional? Even if it's morally right, is it legally correct?

53:05

And if we can just start doing things illegally because they're morally right, then that can open

53:10

Pandora's box. And so let me read for you something. This is from the Southern Manifesto. This unwarranted exercise of the power by the court, contrary to the constitution is creating chaos and confusion in the

53:20

States, principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and, um, and black races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races.

53:32

It has planted hatred and suspicion where there had been a friendship and understanding without regard to the consent of the governed outside agitators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public school systems.

53:44

If done, this is certain to destroy the system of public education in some of the States with the gravest concern for the explosive and dangerous conditions created by the decision and inflamed by outside meddlers.

53:55

We reaffirm our reliance on the constitution as the fundamental law of the land. We decry the Supreme court's encroachments on rights preserved to the

54:01

States and to the people, contrary to the established law of the constitution. We commend the motives of those States that have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.

54:09

Forced integration is the key word there to resist force. They're not saying States. Now, maybe

54:14

I don't know the hearts of all the people, probably a lot of them wanted segregation, but their issue in the

54:20

Southern manifesto is that this should not be forced. This is illegal. Um, and, and that this is going to have bad consequences.

54:26

And there, some have made the argument that there were some consequences by pushing this as fast as it forced busing and everything, pushing it as fast as they did, that it helped create conditions where, uh, there was white flight and formation of, um, suburbs.

54:44

And it actually stuck black people with bad failing school systems because of the way that this was approached.

54:51

I'm not telling you that is correct, but I'm telling you that is a reasonable argument.

54:57

I think I don't, it doesn't sound racist at all to me. It just says that maybe there was a different way to approach this and a more progressive way, perhaps.

55:06

And maybe there wasn't, I'm not telling you either way. I'm just telling you that Phil Vischer isn't giving you the full story on this.

55:13

He's giving you an impression, which isn't a hundred percent accurate. Five States passed nearly 50 new

55:19

Jim Crow laws after 1954. Private whites only schools dubbed segregation academies popped up all across the

55:27

South, many of them Christian. One minor footnote. There's a book called the Christian America restored the rise of the evangelical

55:33

Christian school movement in America by Robert Glenn Slater. You notice the dates on this book, 1920 to 1952 is the scope.

55:40

This is before the civil rights movement. And, um, so he's trying to show that there's actually already an exodus of Christian schools from the public school system, uh, because of secularism.

55:53

And he traces this all out before the civil rights movement even started. So I'm not saying there weren't segregation academies, but what

55:59

I'm saying is when this is a common thing that you hear that Christian schools were started because of segregation, that's not true.

56:06

There's a whole book written on it that charts this all out and it doesn't even approach, uh, when integration started taking place.

56:14

So, uh, just wanted to throw that out there as a reference for you all, if you're interested in that. But now widespread civil rights protests combined with anti -war protests that were occasionally becoming violent, inspired the political rise of law and order rhetoric.

56:30

Richard Nixon became the first candidate to campaign specifically on a platform of law and order.

56:35

All right. It's time for me to call a spade a spade. This is Democrat party propaganda that Phil Bisher is repeating here.

56:42

Let me show you this one chart, homicide rate and the spike that happened, uh, in the sixties, seventies, and, uh, and then started coming down after there was some tough on crime measures.

56:57

But here's what I want to show you. This is 1965 Johnson's war on crime.

57:04

That's the first arrow there. If you're watching, look at the spike that happens, right.

57:09

It's starting right when he's saying that it needs to be a war on crime. That's Johnson, the

57:15

Democrat guy, right before Nixon, 1968 law enforcement assistance administration and bureaucratic, uh,

57:23

Bureau of narcotics and dangerous drugs is formed. Interesting. That's before Nixon's war on drugs.

57:29

Nixon's speech, where he says there's a war on drugs is 1971. And anytime you hear someone start to blame

57:37

Richard Nixon and say, yeah, this, all this incarceration and all the problems that are happening is all just, it's

57:43

Richard Nixon's fault. It's the Republican party. And then it was Reagan. And, um, they, why in the world do they ignore

57:50

Johnson? Johnson's the one that started this. And, and so I just need to point that out.

57:56

In 1968, 81 % of Americans agreed that law and order had broken down in this country.

58:02

And the majority blamed communists and Negroes who start riots.

58:07

All right. So I need to talk about this poll because I think he's being very inaccurate on this. And, um,

58:13

I'm gonna explain my thought process, but he has some citations he put out online, uh, on a

58:18

PDF and the citation for this one goes back to the book, new Jim Crow. I traced it back there. Someone, an editor, someone,

58:24

I think got this wrong. That's just my hunch. But, um, I think there's a bigger, um, a bigger narrative that, which he's partially right about, which is that public punitiveness, uh, rises as crime, the crime rate rises.

58:38

So in other words, people want crime punished. And, and of course this, uh, this chart shows this, that public opinion, um, goes, you know, more for punishing people committing crimes, more policing, et cetera, as crime goes up.

58:54

Now there's a book called locking up our own crime and punishment in a black America by James Forman jr.

58:59

Which kind of makes this point that actually black people in urban areas wanted there to be more policing wanted there to be harsher punishments.

59:07

He talks about like people like Al Sharpton saying we need more police in this neighborhood, things that they never say.

59:12

Now they've changed their tunes so much, but it's, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thought, um, that this was once, um, the, the, the concern, but was it the major concern, which is really what he's insinuating is that, uh, this many, this large percentage, 81 % of people.

59:30

So as most, he's kind of insinuating mainly white people are okay using this racially charged language.

59:35

And it's, it's, um, it's, it's in his words, not mine Negroes who start riots. And, and that's just,

59:41

I don't know that that's accurate. And, and, and so I want to share with you, um, this is some information

59:47

I found. I tried to look for this. It was a Gallup poll in his citation. So I found a Gallup poll from 1969, which was a

59:55

Gallup poll of black people. And it asked the question, do you think there'll be riots by their word

01:00:00

Negroes in our cities in the months ahead or not? Nearly two thirds, 64 % responded. Yes.

01:00:06

So I guess black people were okay with that kind of language. And then Gallup administered three polls, um, in 1968, and they all showed about 11%, 12 % concern with riots.

01:00:19

Guess what they showed was the concern level for Vietnam, 40 to 47%, significantly higher.

01:00:26

And, and so this, the, these riots, even the civil rights movement itself, for many

01:00:31

Americans, this was a tangential issue. Um, and, and so they were much more concerned about nuclear

01:00:37

Holocaust at that time. And that's what played a prominent part in the 1968 presidential campaign.

01:00:42

And a lot of, uh, Democrats like to go back and say, Nixon was just, it was racially coded language, law and order.

01:00:48

And that's, and they make that as like, that's all Nixon was about. They ignored what Johnson said and they ignore the actual big issue of the day, which was

01:00:56

Vietnam and communism. There's a Harris poll. And this is a poll

01:01:01

I think he's referring to that shows that 81 % of American respondents agree that law and order has broken down. Now there's a flaw in this poll.

01:01:08

And I got this from a book called social sociology of globalization, uh, by, uh,

01:01:13

Carrie, um, Yali Smith, I believe is how you pronounce it. And what she says is that this was actually a rigged poll.

01:01:23

Uh, it's the, probably the most outstanding example of pollster misbehavior on crime on the crime issue in the 1960s, because they began by asking respondents a series of questions.

01:01:32

Um, like, uh, I want to ask you about some things, which some people have been, have said are causes of the breakdown of law and order in this country for each.

01:01:42

Tell me if you feel it is a major cause of a breakdown of law and order or a minor cause. So they're starting off with the assumption that, uh, certain things are the causes of the law and order.

01:01:52

So they're not giving you the option of thinking maybe this isn't a cause, or maybe the breakdown of law and order isn't an issue.

01:01:58

They're not giving you that option in this particular poll. That's the poll Phil Vischer uses.

01:02:04

I'm about 95 % sure to forward this idea that Americans are basically racist.

01:02:11

Um, it's sick. It's disgusting for him to use this kind of logic. And hopefully he's just ignorant. He's repeating things that he doesn't know anything about, but this is a rigged poll.

01:02:20

And you can look at other polls that are more accurate that show that, yeah, that, that wasn't the perception of Americans during that time.

01:02:27

Let's go back to household wealth. The average black household has one 10th, the wealth of the average white household.

01:02:33

Why is that? Okay. He's switching now to make a connection. He's trying to say that the reason there was civil unrest, protests and riots, et cetera, is because black people have been racist against white people and they can't get homes and that kind of thing.

01:02:47

Because the number one source of intergenerational wealth in America is home ownership. And from the 1930s to well into the 1960s, the federal government enacted policies to actively encourage white families to own homes and discourage black families from doing the same.

01:03:03

In 1934, the federal housing administration created a risk rating system to determine which neighborhoods were safe investment for federally backed mortgages.

01:03:13

Black neighborhoods were deemed too risky, marked off in maps with red ink in a practice now known as redlining.

01:03:21

After World War II, a boom of new suburban housing was built all over the country. Much of it restricted by deed to whites only.

01:03:29

In 1948, 40 % of new housing developments in Minneapolis, for example, had covenants prohibiting purchase by African -Americans.

01:03:37

So blacks couldn't live in white neighborhoods and couldn't get federally insured loans for black neighborhoods.

01:03:44

Until 1950, the realtor's code of ethics specifically prohibited selling a house in a white neighborhood to a non -white family.

01:03:51

You could lose your realtor's license if you helped a black family buy a home in a white neighborhood.

01:03:58

In the 1930s, the FHA's underwriting manual said incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.

01:04:07

The FHA went on to recommend that highways would be a great way to separate black neighborhoods from white neighborhoods.

01:04:14

The FHA funded huge white -only suburban housing developments, leaving blacks behind in inner cities.

01:04:21

After World War II, the GI Bill provided subsidized mortgages to help millions of men returning from war to buy their first home.

01:04:28

While technically eligible for the GI Bill, the way it was administered left one million black veterans largely on the outside looking in.

01:04:37

In New York and New Jersey, the GI Bill insured more than 67 ,000 new mortgages.

01:04:43

Fewer than 100 of those went for homes purchased by non -whites. In 1947, there were 3 ,200 mortgages in Mississippi guaranteed by the government for returning veterans.

01:04:54

Of the 3 ,200, only two went to black veterans. As a result, white families after the war were able to build home equity, growing wealth for retirement, inheritance, and college education for their kids.

01:05:07

One historian has stated that there was no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in post -war

01:05:14

America than the GI Bill. All right, let's talk about some of this because that's a little complicated.

01:05:19

What he's saying is that there's an interlocking web of forces converging to help white people get ahead and black people stay behind.

01:05:28

Essentially, what he ignores, number one, is that a lot of these racial covenants, which started in California as I understand, were actually applied to all sorts of minority races.

01:05:40

It was pretty much anyone who wasn't white. It wasn't just black people. These are barriers that other racial groups had to deal with and overcome as well.

01:05:49

Redlining itself, which is a term coined by a sociologist in the 1960s, was actually about investing.

01:05:57

The federal home loan bank board wanted to look at lending, at backing mortgages, and it only wanted to do it if it could get a return on the investment.

01:06:13

It asked the homeowners loan corporation to look at 239 cities and create residential security maps to indicate the level of security for real estate investments in each surveyed city for mortgage support.

01:06:24

This is about investing. I can't find any language anywhere that says that this was to help whites get ahead or to put blacks down or anything like that.

01:06:33

This doesn't mean that there weren't people that maybe had some of those ideas who are working in these areas, but it's not something that you see in the legal code anywhere.

01:06:45

Now, a better question I think to ask on this is why is the government in the mortgage support business anyways?

01:06:52

Why should that be a function of the government, especially the federal government? Where in the constitution does it allow for that?

01:06:58

The answer is it doesn't. So this was wrong from the beginning for another reason, and that was because it's unconstitutional and it does not fit in with even the biblical understanding of what government ought to be doing.

01:07:11

That is not for the government. That is for the church, for individuals who want to engage in welfare. Phil doesn't talk about that, but that would be the way that I would approach this and say, yeah, that's wrong.

01:07:21

Of course it's wrong. And I can look at principles in scripture that would show me that.

01:07:29

So that's part of the issue there is he's kind of painting with a broad brush.

01:07:35

And redlining was actually made illegal. I should say this because he acts almost like this is still kind of something that's happening.

01:07:42

It was made illegal though in 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal. And then the

01:07:47

Home Mortgage Disclosure Act in 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act in 2011 kind of furthered us down that path to ensure that there's some kind of equity or equality that exists in those lending practices.

01:08:02

Let me show you something that this is kind of an inconvenient fact in a way, but let me show it to you.

01:08:10

I don't know how Phil Vischer would deal with this, but this is the mortgage lending in Boston, a 1992 study.

01:08:18

And this is what the study said, the information gathered in the study provides some insight into how this outcome emerges.

01:08:26

Many observers believe that no rational lender would turn down a perfectly good application simply because the applicant is a member of a minority group.

01:08:33

The result of this survey confirmed this perception. Minorities with unblemished credits are almost 97 % certain of being approved.

01:08:41

It was in 1992. And I'm sure the study was looking at previous years.

01:08:49

Let me look at something else for you that you'll find interesting. This is another study from 1997, black -owned banks lending practices.

01:08:59

Guess what? Black -owned banks rejected more black applicants and accepted more white applicants than even white -owned banks did.

01:09:11

As far as the rejections, at least, they rejected more black applicants than white -owned banks did. Well, that's really interesting.

01:09:17

These are banks owned by black people, and they're rejecting at higher rates their own people, black people, than white -owned banks are.

01:09:24

So these are financial calculations that are being made. They're not necessarily all racially motivated calculations.

01:09:34

I'm sure Phil Vischer's probably, he's right about the GI Bill in some ways, but we should see it in the data.

01:09:42

I want to show you this. Owner occupancy rates by race.

01:09:48

This is white households and black households. Who owns a household? The middle chart is just in general.

01:09:58

The one on the left, if you can see that, is ages 25 through 34. The one on the right, ages 55 through 64.

01:10:04

You can see that there's always been a gap. The one on the left does show that there seems to be in the 60s, kind of increasing throughout the 50s, the gap kind of widens.

01:10:18

That could be a result of the GI Bill. I don't know. That's very possible. But you look at the 1970s and especially in the 80s, it seems like it starts to narrow a bit, and then it kind of stays almost the same.

01:10:34

You see in the middle chart that the gap has essentially decreased.

01:10:41

In the 1980s, the gap was tightest. Then on the one on the right, you can see for those that are ages 55 through 64, that gap is really decreasing quite a bit more than the others.

01:10:57

This is very interesting to me because it's not a black and white picture like Phil Vischer wants us to believe.

01:11:04

He speaks in such absolute terms. You look at these charts and you realize it's not absolute. This is even more interesting to me.

01:11:10

Racial gaps in owner occupancy and family income.

01:11:16

The more income, the more likely someone is to own a home if they're black.

01:11:23

It approaches the same rate for white people. Same thing with years of schooling.

01:11:30

The more schooling you have, the more likely you are to own a home.

01:11:36

There's other factors here that Phil Vischer just doesn't even talk about. Are there contributing circumstances which would maybe break down family income?

01:11:47

Well, yeah, there might be. The Great Depression actually disproportionately affected white homeowners.

01:11:56

There's just a lot of factors that go into this that Phil Vischer is not talking about.

01:12:02

In 1968, the Fair Housing Act was passed. For all intents and purposes, the studies that I've just shown you seem to demonstrate that the problems that did once exist in this country, they don't exist anymore.

01:12:17

We can thank God for that. That's a great thing. Why is Phil Vischer bringing this up for today? And why people are angry?

01:12:23

Why is he doing that? Haven't these things been corrected? And that's something that he doesn't really address, whether they've been correct or not.

01:12:30

He seems to assume that they haven't been. And then came the war on drugs. Inner -city blacks were extremely vulnerable economically.

01:12:38

The overwhelming majority of African -Americans in 1970 lacked college degrees and had grown up in fully segregated schools.

01:12:46

In the second half of the 20th century, factories and manufacturing jobs moved to the suburbs.

01:12:52

Black workers struggled to follow the jobs. They couldn't live in many of the new suburban developments.

01:12:58

And as late as 1970, only 28 percent of black fathers had access to a car.

01:13:03

When a white man in Cicero, Illinois, just outside Chicago, sublet an apartment to a black family, the white community rioted, setting fire to the apartment building and smashing windows until the

01:13:15

National Guard had to intervene. The result of all of this. In 1970, 70 percent of African -American men had good blue -collar jobs.

01:13:25

By 1987, only 28 percent did. All right, that's it.

01:13:30

I'm calling it. This video is paid for by the Democratic Party. It has to be. I want to read from the source that Phil Vischer is referring to here.

01:13:42

Social Theory, Continuity, and Confrontation by Roberta Garner and Black Hawk Hancock.

01:13:51

And there's a few quotes. This is, he's jumping around a lot. He's going, here's a riot in 1951 and here's 1987 where black people were in service jobs in urban areas and they weren't in manufacturing jobs as much.

01:14:06

Well, let me, let me try to clarify some of this and show you kind of what's going on.

01:14:12

Here's the book Social Theory. Here's a quote from it. The pattern of black migration to the suburbs in the 1970s was similar to that of whites during the 1950s and 1960s in the sense that it was concentrated among the better educated and younger city residents.

01:14:26

So that means there's some upward mobility going on. However, in the 1970s, this was even more true for blacks creating a situation in which the education and income gaps between city and suburban blacks seemed to expand at the same time that the differences between city and suburban whites seemed to contract.

01:14:43

What the author is saying, and this is again, this is from the book that Phil Vischer is talking about.

01:14:49

She's saying that there's actually a gap between blacks who live in suburban areas and blacks who live in urban areas.

01:14:56

Here's another quote in 1987, the average annual earnings of 20 to 29 year old males who held jobs in the retail trade and services sectors are 25 to 30 % less than those of males employed in manufacturing sectors.

01:15:08

This dramatic loss in earnings potential affects every male employed in the service sector, regardless of color.

01:15:14

So he's making it out like this is a black white thing when really he's, what he's talking about is a urban suburban thing.

01:15:22

And this is again, after a time when black people can get the necessary loans and move out and other ethnic groups along with them who were discriminated against because of some of those practices.

01:15:38

And so he's trying to create, to keep his narrative going.

01:15:43

It's on life support a little bit. And so what he's doing is he's saying, well, let's just talk about urban black people right now.

01:15:50

And from a book that's comparing urban black situation with the suburban black situation.

01:15:58

So I thought that's a little disingenuous. Now, why do I say this is paid for by the democratic party?

01:16:03

And of course I'm joking. The reason for that is because black versus white unemployment and so teenage unemployment has been going up and you can see the spikes take place ironically when federal minimum wage goes up.

01:16:17

And so there's a correlation there potentially. And I know Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have argued this.

01:16:25

And so I'm not saying that they're right, but Hey, there might be something there. And minimum wage is one of the planks.

01:16:30

I mean, the democratic party loves minimum wage. They want a living wage, right? They can't give this up. And if that's adversely affecting black teenagers, that means that they're not getting the kind of opportunities that would be good to have early on so that they could actually have experience.

01:16:44

And with that experience, get better jobs, et cetera. And so minimum wage law is actually something that we could actually overturn that.

01:16:50

That's still in effect. Unlike some of these other things, minimum wage law is still, and it's going up in some places and I've seen those places and it's worse economically where it goes up.

01:17:03

Marriage also decreases the likelihood of poverty immensely. Look at this single parent, female headed families, and then versus married two parent families.

01:17:13

And look at the percentage of families with children that are poor, 36 .5 % for single 6 .4 % for married and family breakdown has been happening in the black community for years since really, uh,

01:17:27

Lyndon Baines Johnson's great society. Uh, that's another thing, Walter Williams and Thomas. So I'll argue, but I wanted to just show you some of these numbers.

01:17:34

Um, I mean, if you really care about black lives and you want to have a conversation about race, which is what, uh,

01:17:40

Phil Fisher said he wanted, then these, these should play into it. Wouldn't you think? Um, look at the rate for black, non -Hispanic, uh, unwed birth rates, 72 .3%.

01:17:50

That's immensely high. Uh, 1973 to 2016, a general social social survey showed that black

01:17:59

Americans in general were more likely to view pornography than whites. And they were increasing in their pornography viewership at a higher rate than whites.

01:18:05

Um, 36 % of abortions are black babies, even though they make up what? 14, 15 % of the population there.

01:18:12

That's a lot higher. Here's a growth of unwed child bearing by race, 1930 to 2008.

01:18:19

Look at the rate for black, non -Hispanic. And I put a there where the great society programs in 1964 and 65 started taking place.

01:18:28

And you can see right after that huge spike in out of wedlock births that contributes very significantly to success.

01:18:37

But the villain of that story would be the democratic party and Lyndon B. Johnson and policies that the democratic party is still trying to expand.

01:18:45

These are things that are currently with us, not things that have been done away, which is what Phil Fisher wants to talk about.

01:18:52

So pay attention to that. As unemployment skyrocketed in African -American communities, so did drug use.

01:19:00

As drug use increased, so did crime. A dynamic today that we see playing out in white rural communities hit hard by unemployment and opioid addiction.

01:19:09

Throughout the 1970s, white America became increasingly concerned by images of black violence shown on TV and in magazines.

01:19:17

Drugs were the problem. Drug dealers and drug users were the enemy. So we decided to treat the drug epidemic not as a health crisis, but as a crisis of criminality.

01:19:28

All right. Did you catch what Phil Fisher just said? Because it has important worldview implications. He said, he insinuated that we should treat the drug issue like a health crisis that takes out the moral component.

01:19:39

I mean, we just had a health crisis. You could get COVID and you didn't do anything evil to get it. You just got it.

01:19:46

But if you're taking illegal drugs, you're making a choice there to do something wrong.

01:19:51

And so I think that's important to recognize what Phil Fisher is doing. He's separating personal responsibility from this to create the idea that yeah, black people who have done drugs and gone to prison for it or gotten in trouble for it.

01:20:08

He's separating the personal responsibility component from that. And so they can be the victims of circumstance even if we treat it like a health crisis.

01:20:17

So I think that's kind of significant. And we militarized our response. During the

01:20:23

Reagan -Bush years from 1981 to 1991, how we invested money in anti -drug allocation completely changed.

01:20:31

The anti -drug budget for the Department of Defense went from $33 million in 1981 to more than $1 billion in 1991.

01:20:41

The Drug Enforcement Agency's budget to fight criminality and drug use went from $86 million to more than a billion dollars.

01:20:49

Then we came to the 1986 Anti -Drug Abuse Act, which carried mandatory minimum sentences, much harsher for the distribution of crack cocaine, which was associated with blacks than powder cocaine, which was associated with whites.

01:21:03

Mandated evictions from public housing for any tenant who permitted drug -related criminal activity to occur on or near premises.

01:21:10

It eliminated many government benefits, including student loans for anyone convicted of a drug crime.

01:21:16

The 1988 revision set a five -year minimum sentence for possessing any amount of crack cocaine, even if there was no intent to distribute.

01:21:25

Previously, it had been a one -year maximum sentence for possessing any amount of any drug without the intent to distribute.

01:21:33

Now it might seem like we're picking on Republicans, so now it's time to pick on some Democrats. During the

01:21:38

Clinton presidency, the funding for public housing was cut by $17 billion.

01:21:44

At the same time, the funding for prisons increased by $19 billion.

01:21:50

The number of Americans imprisoned for drug crimes exploded. In 1980, there were 41 ,000

01:21:57

Americans imprisoned for drug crimes. Today, there are more than a half million, more than the entire 1980 prison population.

01:22:05

Most arrests are for possession. In 2005, 80 % of the arrests were for possessing drugs, not selling drugs.

01:22:12

All right, Heather McDonald says in the book War on Cops that cities with large Black populations had the greatest homicide increases, 54 % in Washington, D .C.,

01:22:21

72 % in Milwaukee, and 90 % in Cleveland. An additional 900 Black males were murdered in 2015 compared with 2014, bringing the

01:22:29

Black homicide toll in 2015 to over 7 ,000, which is 2 ,000 more than the number of White and Hispanic homicide victims combined.

01:22:37

She's saying that there's a problem in the inner cities, and that's what's causing this kind of militarization we're seeing.

01:22:45

It's not necessarily drugs that are causing this. It actually could be violent crime that's causing this.

01:22:51

You remember this chart that I showed you earlier, punitive and composite crime rate?

01:22:56

Well, this is the homicide rate right here and homicide spikes, and people demanded some answers to that from the government.

01:23:07

Of course, as the crime rate increases, people want some of these measures to take place.

01:23:16

I'm going to read you a quote from Locking Up Our Own. This also happened in the Black community. This is from page 10 of that particular book, and it says that to a significant extent, the new

01:23:27

Black leaders and their constituents supported tough on crime measures to understand why we must start with a profound social fact.

01:23:33

In the years preceding and our punishment binge, Black communities were devastated by historically unprecedented levels of crime and violence spurred by a heroin epidemic.

01:23:41

Homicides doubled and tripled in D .C. and many other American cities throughout the 1960s. Two decades later, heroin would be eclipsed by crack, terrifying drug whose addictive qualities and violent marketplace caused some contemporaries to label it the worst thing to hit us since slavery.

01:23:59

Especially in some of these urban communities, the crime rate was on the rise. Here's the percentage of Black violent crime arrests in 2018 according to the

01:24:09

Bureau of Justice versus the percentage of Black inmates 2017 Pew Research and Black population.

01:24:16

You have a population of around 14 % and robberies, assault, weapons, total violent crime is around 38%.

01:24:27

Inmates are below that. So this is the situation that's happening right now.

01:24:34

Now Bill Clinton got tough on crime in 1994 and to fill Vischer's credit, he vilifies

01:24:41

Bill Clinton a little bit even though he's a Democrat. And I've noticed that's been like a popular thing now. People like to dump on Clinton more than they used to.

01:24:48

I don't know why exactly, but maybe they're going to meet to him. I don't know. But 1994 was criminal justice reform.

01:24:55

Now look at the homicide. This is the homicide rate, how it plummets among Black people during that time.

01:25:03

That's incredible to me. But that was the effect. I mean, this is why the militarization occurred.

01:25:13

Here are the latest statistics on the number of people being held on drug charges in United States jails.

01:25:20

It is 16%. 120 ,000 people. I do not know.

01:25:25

I tried to find out where he gets that number of, what did he say, 500 ,000, half a million people.

01:25:31

It's 120 ,000. And you can check out the notes in this video if you want to see where I got that number.

01:25:38

But to blame this whole police ramping up there, which they have, which

01:25:44

I'm frankly a little uncomfortable with. But if you want to blame the whole situation of police ramping up their efforts with new equipment and so forth on the drug war, that's not exactly accurate.

01:25:58

That could be contributing to it. But that's certainly not the full picture of what's going on here.

01:26:04

He talks about crack cocaine being more prosecuted,

01:26:11

I guess, than regular cocaine. And the question that I have is, what about crystal meth?

01:26:17

Meth is associated with white people, and that carries very high punishments. So I don't think it's as simple as he's making it out and saying that this is kind of a racially motivated thing,

01:26:28

I guess, because there's more punishments associated with crack cocaine.

01:26:34

Yeah, once you compare that to crystal meth, I just don't know that that's the case. Crack cocaine is also different than regular cocaine.

01:26:40

It is more powerful. So it would make sense, possibly, for there to be more punishment for it.

01:26:46

So don't attribute everything just to race, which is what Phil Vischer is doing here. In a bizarre twist, we also militarized our police forces.

01:26:54

Between 1997 and 1999, the Pentagon handled 3 .4 million orders for military equipment from more than 11 ,000 police agencies, including 253 aircraft, including

01:27:06

Blackhawk and Huey helicopters, 7 ,800 M16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, grenade launchers for the police, 8 ,000 bulletproof helmets, 1 ,200 night vision goggles.

01:27:20

We also changed policing tactics. A no -knock entry is when a SWAT team literally breaks down your door or smashes in through the windows, like in E .T.,

01:27:29

when the SWATs come flying in from every direction looking for E .T. So back to Minneapolis. In 1986,

01:27:34

Minneapolis SWAT teams performed no -knock entries 35 times. Ten years later, in 1996, they performed no -knock entries 700 times.

01:27:46

That's two every day. There were financial incentives for arresting more drug users.

01:27:52

Federal grants to local police departments were tied to the number of drug arrests. Research suggests the huge surge in arrests from increased drug enforcement was due more to budget incentives than to actual increases in drug use.

01:28:06

So what was the result? An explosion of our prison population. In 25 years, the

01:28:11

U .S. prison population went from 350 ,000 to over 2 .3

01:28:16

million. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We imprison a higher percentage of our

01:28:23

Black population than South Africa ever did during apartheid. Data shows that the increased prison population was driven primarily by changes in sentencing policy.

01:28:35

There was no visible connection between higher incarceration rates and higher violent crime rates.

01:28:41

If you are a drug felon, you are barred from public housing. You are ineligible for food stamps.

01:28:47

You're forced to check the box on employment applications, marking yourself as a convicted felon.

01:28:53

A criminal record has been shown to reduce the likelihood of getting a callback or job offer by as much as 50 percent.

01:28:59

The negative impact of a criminal record for an African -American job applicant is twice as large as for a white applicant.

01:29:06

In 2006, 1 in 106 white men was behind bars.

01:29:12

For Black men, it was 1 in 14. For Black men between the age of 20 and 35, the age where families are built, it's 1 in 9.

01:29:24

Overall, African -Americans and white Americans use drugs at roughly the same rate, but the imprisonment rate of African -Americans for drug charges is almost six times that of whites.

01:29:36

Okay, we're getting to the end of the video and Phil Vischer is trying to seal the deal. He's repeating himself a lot more.

01:29:41

He's focusing, he's harping on disparity, which I showed at the beginning. Disparity doesn't necessarily mean that there's some kind of bigotry motivating that disparity.

01:29:51

There can be other reasons. For example, he's talking about, you know, white people use drugs at the same rate as Black people, right, but Black people are imprisoned more for it.

01:30:01

Well, it could be that there's more policing being done in areas where there's more violent crime, being urban areas, and there's more drug deals taking place in the sight of police officers.

01:30:12

And there's more knowledge because there's more concentration of people than out in, let's say, Appalachia, where there's also drug use going on, but it's so spread out and police aren't as aware of what's going on.

01:30:26

I mean, there's things that you can attribute this to, which Phil Vischer, he's just saying it's race, race, race, race.

01:30:32

That's the narrative. And that's the narrative we're getting from Black Lives Matter and from liberal Democrats and from the media and from like every voice of authority, it seems like, that is in our culture right now, wants to say that that's the reason.

01:30:46

But that doesn't mean it's the reason. It just doesn't. It may be true that there isn't explicit racism in our legal system anymore, but it doesn't mean justice is blind.

01:30:57

A study, a law in Georgia, permitted prosecutors to seek life imprisonment for a second drug offense.

01:31:04

Over the period of the study, this law was used against 1 % of white second -time offenders and 16 % of Black second -time offenders.

01:31:14

As a result, 98 % of prisoners serving life sentences under this law were

01:31:20

Black. Study, African -American youth in the U .S. make up 16 % of all youth, but 28 % of all juvenile arrests, 35 % of youth sent to adult court instead of juvenile court, and 58 % of youth admitted to adult state prison.

01:31:38

Study, Blacks on the New Jersey Turnpike make up 15 % of all drivers, but 42 % of all stops by police and 73 % of all arrests.

01:31:49

Among all drivers stopped, white drivers were two times more likely than Black drivers to be carrying drugs.

01:31:56

Study, Volusia County, Florida, 5 % of drivers were Black or Latino, but 80 % of drivers stopped were

01:32:04

Black or Latino. Study, Oakland, California, Black drivers are twice as likely as white drivers to be stopped and three times more likely to be searched.

01:32:15

In Minneapolis, Philando Castile had been pulled over 49 times in 13 years, mostly for minor infractions.

01:32:23

The 49th time he was pulled over, he was shot by the officer while sitting inside his car.

01:32:29

He'd been pulled over for a broken taillight. Okay, he wasn't shot for a broken taillight.

01:32:35

He was pulled over for that. The police thought he was reaching for a gun. The police shot him. The police was convicted. I didn't look into all these studies.

01:32:41

One of them, the New Jersey one I saw, was actually a court case in which the prosecution won against the police department.

01:32:46

So I've never seen anyone deny this, that there may be the possibility that there are police departments and there are police officers who are working off of partial, ethnically partial motivations sometimes.

01:32:59

I think more often than not, it's probably because they're profiling even if it's subconscious and they're looking for factors that may give them a probable cause and then it might lead to an arrest or something.

01:33:11

That's what they're looking for. And so sometimes those kinds of things do happen. It's not always because of racism.

01:33:18

There may be other factors that are involved, but maybe sometimes they are looking at race and they know maybe in this population there's a higher degree in this area of this kind of activity and so maybe

01:33:28

I'll find something. That is possible. So how do you, if that is the case, how do you remedy a situation like that?

01:33:37

Because just showing disparities doesn't actually prove it. There are no racist laws on the books as far as I know.

01:33:44

You can show it to me. I'll oppose it with you. That leaves human hearts. So human hearts may be looking to be ethnically partial and maybe there are evil motivations in some human hearts.

01:33:59

That is perfectly possible. And so what do you do with that? Do you create more laws?

01:34:04

There really is nothing you can do. You can make more severe penalties, I guess, but you're in danger of creating a situation in which police officers are doing what they're doing now, backing out of communities because of protests and so forth and they're not policing as much and now more people are dying because of crime.

01:34:23

That is not a good outcome. I want to give a personal experience of my own real quick. I used to date my wife in a town that was very liberal in New York.

01:34:33

We would meet there. It was kind of a midway point and I remember getting pulled over there frequently, very frequently, even before I was dating her.

01:34:41

When I would go through that town, I got pulled over. I bet you that I've got pulled over probably 10 times at least in that town.

01:34:50

It's not like I went there all the time. Probably actually more than that. I remember

01:34:57

I was searched twice. My car was searched. I was physically searched. I was asked if I had crack on me once.

01:35:05

I mean, look, I'm a white guy. I had a Second Amendment bumper sticker on the back of my truck at the time.

01:35:11

I mean, I look like a conservative and maybe they were profiling me because it was a liberal town. I don't have any way of proving that.

01:35:17

I never really gave it much of a second thought, but there was something about my truck or my appearance or something that made officers want to pull me over.

01:35:29

I can't tell you what it is. Now, the wheels could start turning in my head and I could say, well, look, this region seems to be more liberal and I'm going to create,

01:35:38

I'm going to do some work. I'm going to create disparities. I mean, I know, I happen to know some other people in that town who had more, they drove commuter cars or Priuses, that kind of thing, or even people of other ethnicities who did not get pulled over, not once, even going to college there.

01:35:57

But I got pulled over all the time. Why was that? I don't know. And there are differences.

01:36:04

I used to do a job driving around a lot. I know there's a lot of differences in even police departments from town to town.

01:36:11

And there's a lot of corrupt towns. I've seen that. So how do you deal with an issue like that?

01:36:16

Phil Fisher wants to kind of make out like this is just a one size fits all across the board. White people don't like black people.

01:36:22

The police have been used as an instrument of white people to suppress black people. It's essentially what he's saying. And I just don't see the evidence for it.

01:36:31

I don't. If you show me a disparity, it doesn't prove that. Chuck Colson's organization,

01:36:36

Prison Fellowship, recently organized a manifesto that was signed by evangelical leaders asserting that our over -reliance on incarceration fails to make us safer or restore the people in communities who have been harmed.

01:36:50

Unconscious bias seeps into schools too, as white teachers often assume black students are less intelligent than they actually are.

01:36:59

A gifted student usually has to be recommended by a teacher to move to a gifted track.

01:37:05

When a teacher is black, an equally gifted white and black student have comparable chances of being recommended.

01:37:12

When the teacher is white, the black student's odds of being recommended are cut in half.

01:37:18

Are white teachers racist? No. Are they affected by bias? Yes. And it affects black students every day.

01:37:27

The study Phil Fisher refers to is called Discretion and Disproportionality Explaining the Underrepresentation of High Achieving Students of Color in Gifted Programs, published in 2016.

01:37:36

And it says this in the findings, the black -white gap in gifted assignment cannot be fully explained by the relatively large number of control variables including in our models.

01:37:44

The persistence of this gap points to the need for additional research. Asian students are overrepresented in gifted programs relative to other students, particularly in math, even after including extensive control variables in the models also highlights an avenue for additional explanatory research.

01:38:00

So those who did the study aren't sure exactly what it means. I had a hard time reading the study, concluding what it actually means.

01:38:08

But Phil Fisher knows exactly what it means. It means that I guess there are white supremacists and people who aren't even white who've adopted ideas of white supremacy,

01:38:17

I guess, or black inferiority, who are changing the outcomes of kids' lives because of the implicit bias that exists within them.

01:38:27

And he's bought into the new religion. That's what he's doing here. He's bought into that it's the new kind of providence.

01:38:33

It's not God's providence. It's white privilege directs everything. I mean, he's making leaps and bounds here that he shouldn't really even be making if you want to be honest with the data that we actually have.

01:38:46

But he is so slanted into wanting to project this narrative. And the question is why?

01:38:53

Why does he want to project that narrative? Why does he keep using the personal pronoun, we, as in, I guess, white people have been oppressing black people, that black people are victims perpetually of things outside of their control.

01:39:05

And it's been that way since slavery and Jim Crow. It's still that way. Nothing's really changed. Racism doesn't ever go away.

01:39:12

It just changes form. Why is he bought into that? I mean, it would stand to reason that there's nothing you can do if that's the case.

01:39:22

I all the barriers that have been taken down and still there's this huge problem.

01:39:28

Then what's where's the beef? What do you do at that point? I mean, you can only change laws or change hearts really.

01:39:36

So, unless socialism is the third way, start creating a rigged system to punish people who are supposedly the ones benefiting.

01:39:47

I don't, where's Phil Bisher going with this? So, where are we? The average black household has one -tenth the wealth of the average white household.

01:39:56

This didn't happen by accident. It happened by policy. We, the majority culture, told them where they could live and where they couldn't.

01:40:05

Then we moved most of the jobs to the places we told them they couldn't live. When the predictable explosion of unemployment and poverty resulted in a predictable increase in drug use and crime, we criminalized the problem.

01:40:19

We built 19 billion dollars of new jails and sold grenade launchers to the police.

01:40:26

As a result, a white boy born in America today has a 1 in 23 chance of going to prison in his lifetime.

01:40:33

For a black boy, it's 1 in 4. And that is why people are angry.

01:40:41

Many people care deeply about these issues. Many have suggested solutions. Some of those have been tested with results ranging from moderate success to abject failure.

01:40:51

I'm not here to tell you what the right solutions are because I don't know. I'm just here to ask you to do one thing.

01:41:00

It is the thing that begins every journey to a solution for every problem. What am

01:41:05

I asking you to do? Care. Now we get to the crux of the issue.

01:41:19

Mr. Vischer is making converts to a new religion, a new religion that says white people have original sin because of whiteness, and that providence is determined not by the will of God but by white privilege, forces outside of the control of even individual white people apparently.

01:41:41

It's a block group that has even the power to choose where to put jobs so that they're out of reach for black people.

01:41:49

The free market apparently doesn't have anything to do with any of that. Geographic considerations. It's white people and the big conspiracy that white people have concocted to keep others down and to benefit themselves.

01:42:01

This is 1619 Project. This is Critical Race Theory. This is what the

01:42:07

Southern Baptist Convention has been tangled up with now for a while. It takes the power of personal responsibility and volition away from people who are quote -unquote victims and forces that should be at least talked about in this case, like the free market, like God's providence.

01:42:28

Even smaller things though like regional, cultural, family life considerations.

01:42:33

How about government policy, minimum wage, great society, welfare programs. Apparently those things have nothing to do with the situation that we see today.

01:42:42

Phil Vischer is dishonest. He doesn't want to have a conversation about race. This isn't about race.

01:42:49

This is about the formation of a new religion and he wants to make converts.

01:42:55

You just watched an evangelism video. If you watched his video unedited by me, that's what that was.

01:43:06

Let me give you some solutions. Phil Vischer claims to be a Christian. Let me give you some solutions because I have to wonder, does

01:43:13

Phil Vischer believe black lives really matter? Doesn't even have any kind of proposal, any kind of solution, just care.

01:43:21

The laziest thing I guess he can do, but it doesn't move the ball in any direction.

01:43:27

Do we or do we not have a revelation from God that gives us answers to some of these things?

01:43:35

Let me paint for you a picture here. Here's the poverty correlation. Most people in prison are poor and the poorest are women and people of color.

01:43:47

People who are in prison also happen to be poor people. You could look at it along those lines.

01:43:53

You don't have to look at it along it's just racial or ethnic. Marriage decreases the likelihood of poverty.

01:44:02

Stable families lead to successful children. Family breakdown,

01:44:08

I showed you this early, is happening in the black community and it has happened, especially skyrocketing since the 60s.

01:44:16

What are some solutions? I'll give you actually one last quote, if I may, before I give you those.

01:44:25

This is from Brookings Institution, which isn't exactly your conservative think tank. If an

01:44:31

American teenager at least finishes high school, gets a full -time job and waits until the age of 21 to get married and have children, they have a less than 2 % chance of ending in poverty and an almost 75 % chance of entering into the middle class.

01:44:46

So what can we do to actually help the situation? These disparities, right?

01:44:53

And I don't think the goal should ever be to necessarily eliminate a disparity. There will always be disparities based on all kinds of different factors, cultural factors being one of them.

01:45:03

But we can certainly help people in their condition. I think scripture looks at people that way.

01:45:10

It's not looking at status as much as it is condition. How are people doing?

01:45:15

How are they living? Are they leading a decent and quiet life so that they can glorify

01:45:21

God and fulfill their responsibilities to him? Because that's the most important thing more than anything else.

01:45:28

There is violence in our inner cities right now more than ever with these protests.

01:45:34

So what are some of the solutions? I don't have all the answers myself, but this took me about three minutes to jot down.

01:45:42

Just some ideas of where to get the ball rolling based on really biblical understandings and principles.

01:45:48

Stop family breakdown. Yeah, family is pretty much, that's the building block of society, right? God created family.

01:45:54

You have a culture that has over 70 % of their births out of wedlock. That's a problem or I shouldn't say culture, but a demographic.

01:46:01

So stop family breakdown. Make abortion illegal. Make sure that's not an option. It's not an easy option, at least.

01:46:11

Keeping the child is important. Sexuality is not something to just fling around.

01:46:17

It's something that God made and it's serious. White people aren't causing out of wedlock births.

01:46:26

They're not causing people to do drugs. They're not causing people to engage in violent crime. That's not something white people do.

01:46:33

Jesus actually had a lot to say about this because he said evil does not come from without, but it comes from within the heart of man.

01:46:41

You either believe that or you don't. It doesn't sound like Phil Bisher believes that. Make abortion illegal.

01:46:49

Murder is wrong. Anti -pornography profanity measures. And I'm not saying exactly what those would look like.

01:46:56

I have my own ideas, but I don't have time to expand on those. Progressively end the welfare state.

01:47:03

Welfare state is wrong, especially on a federal level. This is something that real people in real communities should be taking care of.

01:47:11

Something the church should be taking care of. It's something that should be taken care of on a local level. Making people numbers in the system and incentivizing them to have children out of wedlock has led to generational welfare.

01:47:25

It's almost like a new kind of slavery. End minimum wage. It's an economic solution.

01:47:32

End minimum wage. It is wrong. Jesus had a lot to say about this too. He had parables about a parable of the vineyards, one that's coming to mind.

01:47:42

It's up to the employer what he wants to pay someone. Let the free market decide. And so you can give people that are in the inner city opportunity to gain experience so they can go ahead and get better jobs.

01:47:55

Employers aren't going to hire someone without experience if they have to pay an exorbitant amount. End minimum wage.

01:48:02

Education. Promote charter schools. Bring choice back into education so parents can take the responsibility for their children.

01:48:10

This isn't the government's responsibility. It is the responsibility of parents to educate their children.

01:48:17

So at least bring some choice back into the equation. Create alternatives to negative culture.

01:48:25

I don't really know what to call this exactly but there's a culture that glorifies the demonization of the police and calling women crass terms and treating them terribly.

01:48:38

Create alternatives. If you're an artist, get on it. Start glorifying things that are worth glorifying.

01:48:46

I don't have all the answers to that. I don't know exactly how to do that but if that's your field then go for it.

01:48:52

Send missionaries into these inner city places to start churches. And not to do the the thabonics thing that we talked about in the last episode of trying to identify with someone based on oppression.

01:49:05

No. Preach the gospel and then disciple people into what Jesus has commanded. How about criminal justice?

01:49:13

We could make more severe penalties for certain crimes so it'll be a deterrent.

01:49:20

I think bringing back the death penalty is a perfect example of this. But make it so things aren't tied up in court for years.

01:49:28

If it's clear cut, you had the two or three witnesses, someone killed someone else and it was murder, bring back the death penalty.

01:49:35

Make it so people won't want to kill others because they know what that's going to do to them.

01:49:42

And bring back restitution based punishment. So not rotting in a jail cell, working out so you can beat up police more or just losing all self -respect while you're there and feelings of self -worth just being a number in a system.

01:50:00

How about bring back restitution based? If you've stolen from someone then create a mechanism whereby you can repay that person what you've stolen them.

01:50:09

Have some success, take some pride in a way in what you've been able to accomplish and return that which you have stolen.

01:50:17

These are just some of my ideas off the top of my head based on biblical principles. Phil Fisher created

01:50:23

VeggieTales. He's a Christian, right? He should know that there's some actual practical things we can do.

01:50:30

Instead of complaining about things that have been either legally corrected or socially unacceptable for years, which is what he wants to do.

01:50:40

That doesn't get anyone anywhere. You really love people? You really love black people? Mr. Fisher?

01:50:48

Well, that's all I have. I hope you enjoyed.

01:50:54

As hard as it is to hear some of these things, I hope you enjoyed the critique because we do need to be critiquing some of these things.

01:51:02

Lots more coming, guys. I appreciate the support. God bless you all. Goodnight.