-
When you have a civil unrest like this, there
are three types of people in the streets.
-
There are the protesters, there are the rioters,
and there are the looters.
-
The protesters are there because they actually
care about what is happening in the community.
-
They want to raise their voices, and they're
there strictly to protest.
-
You have the rioters who are angry, who are
anarchists,
-
and then you have the looters.
-
And the looters almost exclusively are just
there to do that—to loot.
-
And some people are like, “Well, those aren’t
people who are legitimately angry about what's
-
happening, those are people who just want
to get stuff.”
-
Ok, let's say that's what it is.
-
As long as we're focusing on “what they're doing”
we're not focusing on “why they're doing it."
-
Let's ask ourselves why—in this country
in 2020—the financial gap between poor blacks
-
and the rest of the world is at such a distance
that people feel like their only hope and
-
only opportunity to get some of the things
that we flaunt and flash in front of them
-
all the time is to walk through a broken glass
window and get it?
-
That they are so hopeless that getting that
necklace, getting that TV, getting that phone,
-
that's their only opportunity to get it.
-
We need to be questioning that “why”.
-
Why are people that poor?
-
Why are people that broke?
-
Let me explain to you something about economics
in America.
-
Economics was the reason that black people
were brought to this country.
-
We came to do the agricultural work in the
South and the textile work in the North.
-
If I decided that I wanted to play Monopoly
with you, and for 400 rounds
-
I didn't allow you to have any money, I didn't
allow you to have anything on the board—
-
I didn't allow for you to have anything—you
don't get to play at all.
-
Not only do you not get to play, you have
to play on the behalf of the person that you're
-
playing AGAINST!
-
You have to play, and make money, and earn
wealth for them.
-
And then you have to turn it over to them.
-
And then we played another 50 rounds and everything that you gained and you earned was taken from you-
-
That was Tulsa.
-
That was Rosewood.
-
Those are places where we built black economic
wealth, where we were self-sufficient,
-
where we owned our stores, where we owned our property, and they burned them to the ground!
-
So if I played 400 rounds of Monopoly with
you, and I had to play and give you every
-
dime that I made, and then for 50 years every time that I played, if you didn't like what I did, you got to burn it,
-
how can you win?
-
How can you WIN?
-
You CAN’T win!
-
The game is FIXED!
-
So, when they say, “Why do you burn down
your own neighborhood?”
-
It's not OURS!
-
We don't OWN anything!
-
We don't OWN ANYTHING!
-
There's a “social contract” that we all
have, that if you steal or if I steal,
-
then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation—
-
but the person who fixes the situation is KILLING US!
-
So the social contract is BROKEN!
-
You BROKE the contract when you KILLED us
in the streets.
-
You BROKE the contract when, for 400 years
we played your game, and built your wealth.
-
You BROKE the contract when we built our wealth
AGAIN—on our own—by our bootstraps in Tulsa
-
and you dropped BOMBS on us,
-
when we built it in Rosewood, and you came in and you SLAUGHTERED us!
-
YOU broke the contract.