This evening on The Rock Newman Show, Dr. Claude Anderson coined the term powernomics, the intersection of race and economics. He joins us today to discuss his views on reparations, self-sufficiency, and closing the racial wealth gap. That's coming up right now on The Rock Newman Show. Welcome to the Rock Newman Show from the campus of historic Howard University located in the nation's capital. I'm Rock Newman and it is my desire to inspire you with personal stories of extraordinary achievement.
My next guest, Dr. Claude Anderson, has written numerous books and produced several videos to help black folks move up from the bottom of the economic ladder. And he's not shy about saying how far we still have to go. You have not moved one iota in acquiring the most significant and the most important thing in our society.
It is not civil rights. It is not integration that will give you equality and equal opportunity. It is what you own and control that makes a difference in your society.
If you own and control nothing, you'll get nothing. There is no equal opportunity without having the equal amount of resources and power and wealth to be able to carry it out. Dr. Anderson, thank you so much for joining us this evening. Thank you very much, Rock, for inviting me to be on your show.
I look forward to being on your show because it... I can't think of a better person to be with, particularly one who used to train boxers. Well, I'll make sure I leave all those skills underneath the table as we talk here today.
Dr. Anderson, I would like to start this discussion and try to frame it for those who know you and for those viewers who may not know you. Oftentimes when proponents of black equality and liberation Express strong views. They may be telling a strong and accurate truth, but they get criticized, you get criticized, for talking that black stuff and the sense that when you talk about black empowerment, you are in some way discriminating against White people or others, how do you address that? Well, very simply, Rock, first of all, let them know that every group on this earth understands that you're in a team relationship. Racism is a team sport.
It came into existence as a team. You play as a team or you lose by default. And only with black folk do people get upset when black folks start talking about coming together and uniting and working together and cooperating together, buying from each other and supporting each other. You know why? For a simple reason that everybody understands, when you come together and unify, that signifies strength.
And right now, everybody right now is pimping and hustling black folk. They've been pimping and hustling black folk for four or five hundred years. We spend approximately 97% to 98% of all our money outside of our own community, as an example.
And we don't practice group economics, we don't practice group politics. When we spend 98% of all our money outside of our community, what that does, it makes the other groups... Enriched.
They now are living off of two incomes. They live off of 100% of their money and 98% of our money. And what are we left with?
It's 2%. Where everybody else is living off of 100 and 98% of everything, we live off of 2%, which makes it impossible. And so you start talking about unifying black folk, that's a threat. They're saying, you're going to cut off your money from us? You're going to cut off, we're living off of two incomes.
You're going to reduce us down to one income? That's a threat to them. Also, it's a threat when you start talking about unifying blacks and looking out for your own people. That means political possibility of uniting as a political force in this country, which nobody wants to see. That's a threat because all the rest of the people in society are living privileged lifestyles based on what they came in here and got as immigrants.
Black folk never had those lifestyles. So, yes, it's a threat to them. You have forcefully suggested that that is by design, that where black folks are in America today. And to some extent throughout the diaspora. Let's talk about America today.
It's clearly by design. How do you defend those who simply say, look, we come here, you're here, and in America... There is the pursuit of happiness, life, and liberty. So you, sir, are dwelling on the negative and dwelling in an area of impossibility as opposed to possibility. Well, your first statement was right on point.
First of all, it was by design. Your Constitution itself boxed black folk in. We've been boxed in by the United States Constitution.
Because the original Constitution spelled out specifically how black folk would be treated in this country. You just mentioned something about we come here searching for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. That was not what it was talking about originally in the Constitution.
Originally, when Jefferson and Madison wrote the U.S. Constitution, they were talking about life, liberty, and pursuit of property. Because in the Constitution, black folk were defined as property. Three-fifths of a human being equal to a field animal, and we were treated as property. There's nothing in the Constitution that addresses the issues for black folk.
We are locked in box into the Constitution. And until we go back and address that issue, black folk can never get out of it. And you can't get out of it secondarily, out of this box, because the United States Supreme Court put the lock on the box. The United States Supreme Court right now says, let's go back to the original intent of the Constitution, which says black folk should be three-fifths of a human being, property, and equal to a field animal. That's throughout the Constitution.
It's never changed. And the United States Supreme Court then, in the Madison and Ballper decision of 1803, says that we're going to make sure that we abide by that. And then later on in 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, says black folk have no rights, the white folks are bound to respect.
The Constitution has you locked in a box, and the United States Supreme Court can make sure you never get out of that box. That is the most racist organization in America. Fifty-seven of the first people appointed to the United States Supreme Court were slave owners.
And subsequently most of them have been racist. So you're not going to get out of the box unless you go back and address these issues structurally on behalf of black folk. I like to think that I'm a relatively aware and conscientious individual. I kind of have to be trying to do what I do.
But I've read a couple of your highly illuminating, informative books. This one here is Black Labor, White Wealth, The Search. for power and economic justice.
And you have an appendix in this book that sort of blew my mind as I was reading down it. And that was, it's titled Boundary Safeguards and Restrictions in Southern States. And you mentioned many things like in 1619, the Maryland segregation policy, which we're right here on the doorstep of Maryland, recommended that blacks be socially included in so many other things in. in this particular appendix here.
But when I got down to the year 1775, there was something called the Virginia Runaway Law that allowed the sale or execution of slaves attempting to flee slavery. And I thought that I would bring this up in this discussion because oftentimes there are people who say, oh my God. Why are you still talking about slavery?
And I think that in 2015, there is, for the most part, a wholesale lack of appreciation for the impact that slavery, for the hundreds of years that it was practiced, has on today's world. Right. And see, black folk are still under the impact.
Of 360 years of slavery and another 100 years of Jim Crow semi-slavery. I didn't hear the first part you said. They're still being burdened, they're overburdened by slavery because no one has addressed the negative impact of slavery on black folks. It's never been addressed.
Because what was the purpose of slavery? The purpose of slavery was to systematically socially engineer black folk into the lowest level of a real-life monopoly game that was based on wealth, power, and control, what you own and control. And slavery itself then maldistributed almost 100%. Of all this nation's wealth, power, resource, privileges, and controls of all levels of government into the hands of the dominant white society.
And black folk, they don't have enough resources to be a competitive group. When black folk came out of slavery, let's say before they even went into slavery, they owned and controlled nothing. When they came out in the 1860s, a few blacks, about 250,000 black folk, had successfully acquired one half of 1% of this nation's wealth.
And that was in 1860, Rock. Here you are 150 years later, black folks still only control one half of 1% of this nation's wealth. And it's wealth that controls what you get, what your opportunity is going to be. And that one half of 1%, what does it equate to today? That means...
That means that the typical white person right now has 3500 times more wealth than black folk. And when you tell black folk to go out and compete, compete with what? What are they going to compete with? They don't own and control anything.
They still only control one half of 1% of anything that is of value in our society. While they are being burdened down with 6 to 7 times their fair share of everything that is negative. Now all the social pathology is being inflicted on them. They are the ones bearing the burdens. of low-income housing, poverty, food stamps, welfare, dysfunctional families, no businesses, no opportunities, failing school systems.
They're the ones that's being negatively impacted. Nobody has ever addressed the real issues. The civil rights movement didn't address the issues.
They started talking about social integration. Social integration was not the problem with black folk and even the concept of civil rights. They twisted and corrupted that concept. Civil rights was initially talking about what you're going to do for black folk in the country when it came out in 1865 and 1866. and its first civil rights laws.
And what those civil rights laws were trying to address was correct the Dred Scott decision of 1857. And what I mean by that, that black folk had no rights and they could own and control nothing. And so when you had, and here in Washington, D.C., you had some congressmen called radical Republicans like Congressman Benjamin Thaddeus and Charles something, the rest of them, they said this, that the only things that black people can ever be in America, they either gonna be free or they're gonna be slaves, minimumly. to be free, they must have 40 acres, a mule, and $100. Now, immediately, Andrew John, who replaced Lincoln when he got assassinated, he vetoed it. Yeah.
And after he vetoed it, when the conservatives took over the control of black folk, the northerners walked away from them and left them, abandoned them. They, black folk, were forced into Jim Crow segregation and peonage, and they corrupted the whole concept of civil rights and made it a civil issue for everybody. Nobody's ever enslaved the gays, the midges, the humpbacks, women.
Asians, Arabs, Hispanic and American, they enslaved black folk. That's why it's critically important, go back to one of your earlier questions, for people to understand, when you start talking about issues, about rights, the Dred Scott decision said the black man has no rights. It didn't say the Asian man, the Arab man, the Mexican man, the Indian man.
It says the black man. So what's happened now is that the whole concept of civil rights and social integration and all this has been maldistributed. And it's been corrupted into what we call fabricated classes.
They're getting all the benefits that black folks should be getting today. And it's intentionally being designed to make sure everything is moved away from black folk and the lock and the box stays on black folks so they never get out of it. There are those that would challenge you to say that you discuss about civil rights because it almost sounds as if you're saying that the struggle of the civil rights movement didn't yield fruit.
And one thing that those who challenge you... Lord knows as we look at, you know, the different people who have addressed some of the things that you've said, is that, for example, the civil rights movement in itself is in large part for Black Obama sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue today. Do you discount the importance of him sitting, or is it as important as proponents would say it is? that he sits there in the White House?
Oh, yeah, it's most definitely important in a social context and in a symbolic concept. Very important, because, and unfortunately, that's what black folk have been fed for 150 years, is symbolic achievements, symbolic success. Well, you got a black president, you got Martin Luther King Boulevard, you got Rosa Park Boulevard, but you didn't touch the structural issue. You did not go back and redistribute some of the resources back into the hands of black folks so they can be a competitive group and a self-sufficient independent group in America. I mean, what are the benefits, direct benefits, do black get from having, in terms of rectifying the structural problems, by having Obama in the White House, by having, we got four or five black billionaires like Oprah, Tiger Woods.
How does that translate over to black people? If Oprah and Tiger Woods lost all their money tomorrow, how does that disadvantage black folk? It doesn't hurt black folk one way or the other, because there's no connection between Oprah and Tiger Woods having.
billionaires and helping all these poor black folk when 38% of all the black people in America in the poverty level having Obama in the White House, how does that translate to benefits for black folk? You write down on a piece of paper, on one side of the paper, all the symbolic issues, then write down how black folk are going to get, have been benefited. Write down right now, what direct specific sole benefits have gone to black folk by putting Obama in the White House? But, and so that's important. You, you, you mentioned the word redistribute.
the wealth right and we have a clip I think we are shown we have here about you speaking to the issue and on the issue of reparations because to some extent when you say redistribute the wealth That I think incorporates some form of reparations. So we're going to show that clip and we'll discuss it. You're going to have all kinds of black folk in this country who are going to be opposed to reparations for you.
They're going to be jumping out of the woodwork. They're going to be jumping out of the woodwork because they're scared to death. They're just as scared now as they were in 1860. They can say we don't have anything and when we ask for something they take away what we got and we don't have anything but they take nothing away from us. And so you're going to have that group that's always scared and they're always going to say it's better for us to have nothing than you try to get something because that way they'll take us back to nothing which is where we are already. John Congressman from his perch there at Capitol Hill, on Capitol Hill, started a long time ago.
Maybe as forcefully as anyone within the political structure talking about bills for reparation and a need for reparation and people yawn and almost say you know you know go away go away little boy with that with that noise. So I want to talk here today about reparations. When you say that blacks deserve deserve Reparations.
One, tell me what you mean by that and take your time and give us, to the extent that you can, a blueprint of what reparations would look like if Dr. Anderson were a part of the architecture of that structure. I would be delighted to. First, let's start with the basic premise is that black folk are exceptional people.
They're exceptional people. And they have some exceptionality in this country that everybody overlooks. Black folk have not been treated like all the other people coming into this country. Black folk have been disrespected and disenfranchised and everything, excluded out of everything. Now let's talk about it in the context of reparations.
See, all the immigrants came into this country. They came here looking for some form of benefits. The entire American dream is structured on coming to America to get two things, free land and free labor.
That's the basic. That's the basis of the American dream and we have an unending influx of immigrants in this country going all the way back to 1790 with the first immigration naturalization law which set up a ranking order instead of a ranking order in skin color running from white yellow brown black from the highest to the lowest in terms of color of skin color and They would and that was the immigration law that was set up based on that Every immigrant that came to this country was entitled to benefits to get unearned benefits in terms of the American dream Everybody talks about the American Dream, but nobody ever defines it for you. It's in the, and every nation was alerted to the fact that America was now open for immigrants to come in. And every immigrant came to this country through the homesteading and through head rights, they could get free land in whatever quantities they want, they could claim. When Thomas Jefferson came, Thomas Jefferson got, he had got over 100,000 free acres of land.
Thomas Jefferson and Washington, they all got over 100,000. Patrick He got over 65,000 acres of free land. They got free land.
When the big land rush came after the end of the Civil War, and we had 26 million Europeans poured in this country, and they opened up the Oklahoma Territory, white immigrants picked up over 2 million acres of free land in 24 hours. They didn't pay for it. Now that land has been passed on. Let's use that.
All that land, all the resources, the timber, the gold, the silver, the chrome, the ball site. Has multiplied in value and double in value to triple in value every 20 years and has been passed on through inheritance from one white generation to the next. So consequently, they have control over the land, the resource and everything has been passed on from generation to generation and shutting black folk out.
That's why the average white person now has thirty five hundred dollars wealth compared to black folks. One and a half percent. OK, let me ask you, because you talk about this land, this land that was originally inhabited.
Columbus didn't define it. Okay, address if you would the role that the US government, this wasn't willy-nilly cowboys running wild. This was a US government and its policies that ultimately bastardized, took away from, stole from the Native Americans. made treaties that ultimately were broken.
You want to say Willie Neely, that's where Willie Neely came in. So if you would address that for a moment. Well, yes, it started at one of the first treaties, it was the New York Treaty about 1516 that came in. That was one of the first treaties.
But in every one of those treaties that they set up with the Indians, they put an inclusion in there saying this, that if you were to cooperate with us and be able to help us maintain the slavery system we set up in this country, you know, and we will reward you and compensate you. We'll give you clothing, we'll give you food, we'll give you weapons, you know, and we'll even call you civilized if you help us maintain slavery. Every treaty contained a clause to help Indians to shut down black folk. Slavery could never have existed in this country and been maintained without the full participation of the American tribes. That's why they started calling them civilized rock, because they began to say, you quit hunting in the woods and running wild and get yourself some land and get yourself some slaves.
So Indians became slave hunters, slave traders, and in the final analysis, all civilized tribes, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole Indians, they all fought with the South to maintain slavery. And so therefore, and they got benefits from it. And that led to going back to the earlier question you asked me about reparations.
And even after the Civil War ended, the Choctaw and Chickasaw were still holding about 12,000 or 15,000 slaves even after the Civil War ended. The United States government sent in troops saying you got to get rid of slavery and let set black folk free and they set up what's called the 1866 Indian treaties with these five civilized tribes, which says that black people in this country must not only turn them loose, they must get benefits. They must get forms of reparations.
Going back to your earlier question, you must you must first of all set them free to you must give them an option. And this is for all black freedmen and all black who lived in the Indian territory and all black Indians. You must set them free, allow them to have membership.
in the tribe. You must let them have access to all the resources on the reservation. You must let them also be tax exempt.
You must let them have free education. You must also let them be able to give them $150 in cash. You must give them 160 acres of land. And in present day time, those black Indians under the 1866 treaty should be getting, they could also hold gambling casinos. Now this country has never carried out the full mandates, but yet we are still honoring it for Indians.
Right now all the benefits that Indians are getting in this country are getting it from the 1866 Indian Treaty. Because they took up arms against the United States in the Civil War, they killed off, wiped out all previous treaties. Now every year in the White House we get about 560 some white Indian chiefs, which in history they called $5 Indians, because 90% of the people calling themselves Indians nowadays are not really Indians, those are whites passing as Indians, because they paid $5 to the Dawes Commission to get their name on the Dawes Roll so they can get all these advantages. But every year they get invited to the White House.
And every year they got an approximate $3.5 billion every year, even though Obama's been in office. They got money into the Federal Indian Bureau. Now, see, if you were to talk about reparations, black folks should have been getting all this money all these years, too.
But they got shut out because the Indians in 1938, they sent a letter to the Department of Bureau of Indian Affairs saying, how do we shut black folks down and make sure they never get into reparations? And that letter. Floated around in the federal government from about 1938 to about 1941. Then it went to the secretary for the Department of Interior. And the Department of Interior looked and says, aha, said how did I come up with a scheme to shut down blacks so they get no reparations in this country? He said, what you do, you Indians come up with a new concept called a quantum blood law, which says that black folk are not entitled to any of the benefits of the 1866 treaty in terms of reparations unless they can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it got one quarter Indian blood in them.
And we make Indian blood sacred like Jesus Christ's blood. And therefore, they've been shutting blacks out all these years. That's why they didn't get any reparations.
Go back to your earlier point. And the last point on reparations, you asked me earlier about a blueprint. This country has always given reparations to all groups except black folk, even though black folk were the ones who built the country. They built the bridges.
They picked the cotton. They built the highways. They built the government buildings. They were the backbone of this nation.
But now, so in the Marshall Plan, we gave billions of dollars to Germans. After World War II, we got under what's called a point four program. We gave reparations to Japan, Japanese. We gave reparations to American Indians.
We gave reparations to everybody but black folk. Yet black folk are locked into the bottom of a vertical order and a descending order of wealth, owning, and poverty, I mean, and control of resources, and nobody wants to address the issue. As you articulate your position on reparations, redistribution, Redistribution of wealth.
Again, those looking in, the pundits, if you will, might say, well, are you, you know, a Bernie Sanders acolyte? Are you socialist? Are you, do you propose practicing socialism when you start talking about redistributing the wealth? My question for you is... What do you think it is that has prevented a groundswell behind something that seems as if is such a logical, practical, and fair idea?
Not revolutionary, not radical. When you look at the facts and you look at the history, then it would seem that most... Fair-minded people might consider this something that they could get behind put their shoulder to the wheel on Why do you think that just hasn't been the groundswell even amongst black folks most black people don't talk about reparations?
Well, yeah, because because simply a lot of them want to be identified with anything It's black because right now see in this nation everything that everybody Dreams of is identified with an associated with white skin. That means privilege wealth power, income, and privileges associated with white skin. Nobody's right mind will identify with anything black that's negative.
If black folk are caring six to seven times, their fair share of everything is bad, why would anybody want to identify with blackness when they can identify with whiteness and get all these advantages? Now, in terms of what they should be doing for that, black folk, for instance, right now, these young black folk that need leadership in these communities, like this thing about Black Lives Matter, they're floundering around because they don't have any black leadership out there. Now, black leaders will say, well, what can we do to help these blacks, give them some leadership?
And at the same time give them some mild form of reparation that's not violent, not committing themselves to violence and then kind of overthrow revolutionary activities. They should go into all these urban areas. You got 70% of all the black people in America live in and around 10 large metropolitan areas. Why don't you go in and re-industrialize those areas and build industries in there.
But what this country should-What does that mean? That means that back in 1960s when you start the integration process, see- These urban areas didn't deteriorate because of black folk being there. They deteriorated because at that point in time, to avoid integration, the power structure in this country used the 1952 Highway Act to build expressways out of these urban areas and to build what we call suburbs. Suburbs didn't exist.
Once they built those suburbs, they then made a commitment to relocate and all the resources out of those cities, to abandon those cities on what we call a burnt field process. Let's destroy it. And let the cities deteriorate. They moved to the suburbs.
They moved out the industries, the businesses, the wealth, the power, the banks, everything moved to the suburbs. And they abandoned those cities. That's why those cities deteriorated. You should do just the reverse thing now. Go around and think those big cities like Detroit, Gary, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, where you have heavy concentration of blacks, and you do an industrialization program.
What that means, you start awarding incentives. You set up redevelopment banks in those cities. Where now the government puts special funds into there, revolving loan funds, like about a 2% interest rate that's revolving and subordinatable to regular loans, where blacks and old citizens can start building their own businesses and rebuilding their own communities.
Rather than socially integrating, stay where you are and build your own communities. And in those communities, start building industries and factories where you can create jobs, an income base, a tax base, wealth base, an employment base, and begin to build functional schools in those communities. And set up these development banks, and the government should put the money into it. Secondly, you should go- Let me stop you there.
And John Sixpack driving into work at one of the factories in Detroit from the suburbs where he still lives. John Sixpack, the white guy. Yeah.
He's going to say, well, wait a minute. My tax dollars, in order to do what you're talking about and redistribute some of this wealth, my tax dollars, my hard-earned tax dollars, are going to have to be- Touched and I'm not looking to make that happen. Well, that's good.
It should be touched You know why he came here his ancestors came here to get free handouts. That's why they came here No immigrant cross spent three months crossing perilous oceans to get the United States looking for happiness They came here to get handouts to get free benefits seen Understand this rock and and I want your audience understand it to 99% of all the black people in America are the direct descendants of slaves Which means they were here before 99% of all the other people arrived. All these people are coming to this country boasting about my family came from Germany, my parents came from Ireland, my parents came from Greece or Italy. They came here for a specific reason, to get benefits. They get unearned benefits to profit and enjoy the fruits of black folks'labor and the Indian land.
They've already gotten theirs. And now what they're saying is that now that we've gotten everything, we've got control of it, we've got it free and passed it from generation to generation. We're not going to let you have anything.
And see, that's grossly unfair, and it's immoral. And the worst thing that our society is doing, and they should cease in doing it, is they start equating black folk to all these fabricated groups, like minorities and poor folk and people of color and Asians and Hispanics coming into the country. These people coming into this country today get unearned benefits to enjoy the fruits of black folks'labor.
Nobody shut them down. The Chinese started pouring into California after the Civil War to get benefits. And the Mexicans, there were no.
In the Civil War, you had about 6,000 Hispanics in the United States. And now you got about almost 50 something million. They came here looking for benefits. I heard Jesus John say one day that, you know, all other groups came here seeking a thrill. That's right.
Black folks came here, obviously, against their will. See, as a black folk are the only non-immigrants. Our country is structured on immigrant rights to give them benefits. Black folk are the only non-immigrants in this country.
I know people always say, well, Indians were the original people. No, they were not. The original people in this country were black folk.
Folsom people that came in this country about 16,000 years ago. The so-called American Indians or Asians that came across the Burbank Straits about 6,000 years ago. So what I'm saying is that everybody comes to this country to get benefits except black folk.
Nobody wants to stick up for and fight for black folks. You cannot solve the racial problem in this country unless you create a circumstance where black folk can acquire the wealth, power, decent communities, functional schools, and be able to take care of their own people and be self-supported and competitive and independent. Malcolm X was quoted as saying, and I don't know if my quote will be exact, but something to the effect of, to allow your oppressor to educate your children is to be a fool.
Talk to me about, in all of your study and scholarship and research, the role that education has played in depriving... Enhancing and or depriving the pursuit of happiness of black individuals. That's a good one.
That's a good one. See, and the education system as we presently know it, Rock, came into existence. It didn't even exist until after slavery.
The present system came into existence, and one of the primary reasons it came into existence was to educate the offsprings of slaves, to be able to give them an educational opportunity. And they structured it so that basically that it would be, even though it would be a manual education, you know, manual art training, but it did come into existence. And to a large degree, black folk contributed to the development of those schools.
They worked hard to build those schools, selling flowers, pies, cooks and cakes and building with their own hand. And that was like in 1866. In 1866, keep in mind that up until that point, we had laws in this country that forbade the educating of a black person. You get caught.
teaching a black person to read and write would cost you $100 and 39 lashes with a whip to be caught teaching a black person to read to read and write we black folk was suffering from imposed ignorance they would they would they would be mandated to be ignorant and if they weren't physically or in in fact ignorant they had to act and pretend they were dumb they had to dumb down right but between 1866 and let's say 1896 in that 30-year period even though 96% of the black folk could not read and write in 1866 In a 30-year time period, those black folk almost by themselves educated, reduced their illiteracy rate in this country from 96% down to about 44%. Nobody has ever done that in the history of this world. No group that had been enslaved for 300 or 400 years could in a 30-year time period set a record for educational achievement. And they did it.
So let's jump and show how that worked, though. By 1950, a black person with an education was still not getting the benefits of having an education. Education usually has benefits that follows it, based on the achievement levels of a group of people. Achievement benefits never followed black folk in education.
So in 1950, the average black person with a college education could not earn as much as a white high school dropout because they were not getting the benefits of having an education. And what you have to do nowadays is go back to those, when I say you go back to these urban areas where all these black folk are, you've got to rewrite the curriculum. You cannot...
have a curriculum that is designed for the educated white children and all these other groups who've not been oppressed denied and and and and rendered dysfunctional you cannot use the same curriculum on them you need to shut down all these schools in these urban areas shut them down close them down and say now we're going to rewrite the curriculum based on the needs of black children okay you say shut them down close them down right and any administrator ty henderson who's superintendent of school chancellor of schools here and Anybody else would said that's so impractical that would destroy our children. No, I mean that wouldn't now I don't know about Anderson. I was over education for the state of Florida I'm the only one only black person in America It was over an entire education system for seven to eight years for the whole state of Florida I was everything from the first grade of the nursery school all the way to the universities in both the public sector and the private Sector you got to be realistic black kids need a special kind of education We are the only people on this earth that for instance never enjoyed the fruits of an industrial revolution.
Everybody's done it. We have never had those kind of values, those kind of experiences. You gotta go in there and say, now what are the things that black children need? They need things that are different from the white child.
They come to school with different emotional, physical, and financial baggage than the regular kids do. You've got to modify your curriculum based on the needs of black folk in this country. As an example, suppose right now I was to tell you that we all know that the world is coming to an end, we've got to go to the moon.
What you should do is say, now, how does that impact your school and your curriculum? You've got to say, we need to go into our schools and shut down our curriculum and begin to teach our kids how to survive on the moon. What kind of expertise and training would they need? We're going to need pilots, we're going to need astronauts, we're going to need chemists, we need biologists, we need people in physics, physical science. You need to rewrite the curriculum so it includes all these things to help bring, elevate black folk up so they can be a competitive group along with all the other people.
The other kids that are coming into the school system, they come from families and from cultures that have already enculturated certain kind of values, skills, and amenities into their lifestyle. We never had that. You've got to bring those black kids up and make schools worthwhile.
Right now... Most of the schools, like in Detroit, Michigan, they are dysfunctional. Half the black kids that graduate from high school can't read and write. Why do you keep passing these kids through school talking about, well, we're going to shut the schools down? Shut them down and restructure them.
Now, that's what I recommend. But here's what's happening. In Florida, when I was in Florida doing integration, here comes whites now and say, well, Dr. Anderson, what are we going to do with these schools?
We're not going to integrate our schools. What we're going to do is create charter schools. We're going to shut your schools down.
But we're going to create charter schools to replace the public schools. We're going to set up segregated academies. We're going to set up religious schools and shut your schools down. Because we're going to make sure our kids get what white kids need in the South. And it's the same thing, black teachers and principals say we're going to close our schools for a month or whatever time it takes.
Or during the course from June until September, let's rewrite the curriculums. And start providing these kids with some education that will qualify them to do what? To make sure that they never graduate from school without either a scheme in their head or a skill in their hands. Every black child should be taught economics. and basic training and business development from the first grade to the eighth grade.
And by the time he gets to the eighth grade, he should be stimulated to be able to learn how to create things and modify things and produce things. When he gets to high school, he should at least be taught some basic skills, at least two years of skill training like it used to be. Why aren't they graduating being plumbers, electricians, tools and dye makers, or sheet metal, woodwork, carpentry?
Right now, if you go call Sears out to your home, most of the people coming now doing all that basic work, Not black folk. There are immigrants coming into your house doing the work for plumbing and electric work and woodwork and brick land. Look at the construction companies.
Blacks used to have that. You've got to make sure these black kids do not graduate from high school ill-equipped to compete. Quit sending so many black kids to college. You don't need all them black kids in college.
Black kids now graduate with a master's degree working in McDonald's and Wendy's stores because they master nothing. Quit getting black folks master's degrees so they can't master anything. Let me ask you about people know you.
There are videos of you with thousands and thousands of people, you know, eyeballs on your videos. I didn't know that. Paying attention to what Dr. Anderson has to say, you know, theorizing, making very strong suggestions, advocating, you know, black empowerment.
What didn't come across so much In the public domain was the business, businesses that you operate. One, tell us about what you're doing in the world of business and how what you're doing in the world of business gives backbone to the things you're saying. So how are you practicing what you preach? Well, now, because I'm spending most of my time being a speaker going around the country and most of the resources...
From those engagements go to the Power Numbers Corporation, which I don't own. Now, my wife owns that. That's her company, the Power Numbers Corporation.
But in the course of my life, before I got, I've been to the highest levels of government. At every level, I run campaigns for presidents, for governors, for mayors, for congressional people. I run, I didn't run any campaigns.
I was a campaign manager for them, okay? I've been in all levels of education, from everything from special education to elementary schools to university, community college. I've been at the highest level of everything you can think about. And I heard you talking earlier about the fish business.
Yeah. Well, let me get to that one. Now, in terms of business, the first thing I built, I built a radio station, WWD in Tallahassee, Florida.
I built that. That was one of the first FM stations in the country for black folk. I think it was about the second or third with James Brown and myself.
I also had on a radio station in the top of the Superdome in New Orleans. I owned radio stations. And that was what period of time?
That was back in the 70s. Okay, and in the 70s, you also came, you were in the administration of the peanut. Peanut farmer from Georgia.
Yeah from Georgia. What role was that? Well that I was a campaign manager in Florida for Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter had been in two primaries early in the in the in the in the campaign season And he lost in all both those campaigns and then he was on the wing and that point in time people like Andrew You Julian Bond and some other people in high levels of his campaign in Atlanta.
They called me said doctor I said the next campaign the primary would be in Florida And I organized the blacks of the state of Florida on what's called a state action council to empower them. And we were very strong then because we were united, played as a team. We voted as a block on issues. We moved as a block.
We lobbied as a block. So let me, because I did know, I did want to get in that, you know, you were a part of that. Well, he pointed me to be the first assistant secretary in commerce as a black secretary.
I also, I was the only black that got appointed to be a chairman for economic development. for eastern and southern governors most people don't know that no black has ever been a chairman for governors and they appointed me over that okay so i i plus i had up trade missions in third world countries including africa venezuela colombia and all around the world and back to your business we started to talk about the fish business um tell us about that how did you get into that and and well we're hitting up trade missions in different countries the uh the classical seafood industry came to me and said dr anderson we're getting killed off At that time they set up what's called a Kobe plan where we went over in the China, Kobe, Japan and we're trying to figure out how to help some of these third world nations and we encouraged aquaculture, started raising fish in those countries but those people within a short period of time got very good at it because they didn't have a labor cost and a food cost because they weren't feeding their fish the appropriate diets that they needed to be clean and harmonious. And so... And so it was killing off our classical seafood industry.
So I went and set up several programs to try to help our local seafood industry. I set up what's called the John Island Crabbing Facility for Blacks in John Island. I set up the Hilton Head Seafood Corp.
I started what's called the Midwest Seafood Distribution Program. And I was taking surplus, I had a surplus fishing program. I was taking fish to third world countries, particularly Africa, to give it to them.
But then I said, in my basic principles of powernomics, I said black folks should dominate. in business wherever they dominate in population or in spending patterns. And since black folk eat three to four times more fish than anyone else in the country at that time, and we spend $9 for every $1 white spend, then blacks should be dominating in seafood production. In other words, from the boat to the throat, they should be controlling the seafood industry.
So I decided to open up a fish and aquaculture facility here in the Washington, D.C. area. And we set it up, and we operated for about six or seven years. But the problem was most of my clients were Asians.
Almost 99 and 99% were Asians. No blacks ever got into the vertical integration. I wanted blacks to not only learn how to produce, but to retail, wholesale, all the way up.
So your business, you're sort of manufacturer almost, if you will. I'm a manufacturer. And what you were looking to do was to be able to have other blacks to be introduced in that ladder, as you say, wholesalers, retailers, whatever they might have been. Right.
And that never happened? Never happened. And why? I'm not sure.
I guess some because they didn't have the money. I'm not sure why, but we just waited for them and waited for them. And I became totally dependent on Asians to buy all of our product.
And so Asians began to start taking over. Then they started dominating the seafood industry. Right now they dominate it because they play as a team.
I was going to say, which seems as if that would be a classic economic example, that even if you... are the manufacturer. If those that are practicing group economics can ultimately, if they are continually and majority the ones that purchase from you, they ultimately can sort of take your place, can take your position, which speaks to ultimately the lack of cohesiveness and working together within the black community. And that's why I go back to an earlier point I made.
If we had gone to these urban areas, for instance, and I told you about industrializing these urban areas, you could have set up distributorships and wholesalers in those areas. Those people would have gone down and borrowed low-interest funds and built wholesalers and warehousing of seafood. And then all the way up to the retail level where they have a chain of black restaurants. And that's why I talked to Clarence Otis, who was head of Red Lobster at that time. And I wanted to be able to put blacks in a position where they could buy a lot of these red lobster restaurants and get ready to close down.
And instead of having red lobster restaurants, they could have had black lobster restaurants all over the country. But unfortunately, we weren't able to do it because Clarence Otis, he resigned as the head of the Darden restaurant chain. But black folks should be heavily engaged because they're the major eaters of seafood. You go to any seafood restaurant, a large significant number of people are going to be black folks.
But unfortunately, now Asians have pretty much locked down the seafood industry in this country now. I was the only one that was out there doing it to a significant degree. But again, I could not set up the distributorship that I wanted in warehousing, wholesaling, and retailing across the country for black folks. You know, we've spent a lot of time talking about... What are the maladies?
What is the plight? You know, sort of the bad condition of blacks being on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. For someone who has been addressing these issues for as long as you have, can we talk about the possibility of some solutions? I mean, I saw a speech of yours where you... You know, you hit the bell and said that blacks in America are at serious risk of seriously becoming an underclass.
Well, now they are officially, as of 2013, they are an underclass now. And you've been supplanted and displaced by what we call fabrication of classes across the country. The emphasis now is on those new fabricated classes. And that came out of the benign elect policy that was put in place by Richard Nixon back in 1969, 1970. And benign elect said this, the way you shut down the black civil rights movement in this country and the black power movement in this country is to take the focus off of black folk and put it on minority women, children, and immigrants.
And when they did that, it means make black folk become invisible. Do not exclude black from any public policy. And over the last 50 years since the 1960s, it has now morphed into what they call political correctness.
Political correctness means do not address anything pertaining to black folk, do not include black folk in anything, and at best you can do is put them in some very broad, ambiguous category that nobody can determine. A classic example of that was the fine line that Obama had to walk, not putting an emphasis, perhaps in a public way, unable to put as much emphasis as maybe someone before him or someone that might come after him. That is not black. That's right.
He's prohibited from addressing the issues of his own people. He can't do it. They got him blocked and blocked. He can't address his own people, and that creates despair in the black folk because black folk, after Jim Crow segregation died, they were looking forward to social integration as being the rainbow, the golden goose, you know, the pot of gold, and then they looked for symbolically, then they looked for another symbol, which would be to have a black man in the White House or a black man in Supreme Court.
But all these individuals have been unable to be able to address significantly the issues of black folk. What I told you is the maldistribution of wealth and resources and controls of things in the country. Black folk are non-competitive. They can't compete. Right here in Washington, D.C., in Chocolate City, all these cities are going to be gentrified.
All these major urbans that I'm telling you about, these big cities, they're going to be gentrified. And here's a scene that they're going to use six schemes to wipe black folk out. One of them is called gentrification, which means come in there and dilute black folk down.
When I came here... To Washington, black folk were about 78% of the population. You're down about 40% now. The second thing is privatization.
You're going to take all the public resources and put them in the hands of the white dominant society. They're going to buy it. They got the wealth, the money. They can buy as much as they want. That's why in 1996 when Clinton lifted the tail cap act in communication, saying that anybody can own as many radio stations and television stations that they want based on their money.
If you know that whites only control 99.5% of all the wealth, Why would you say that knowing that black folk can't out compete them and buying up the media in this country? So out of 12,000 radio stations, blacks used to have about 100 and something down to about 70, 80 now. And out of 12,000 in cable systems, 5,000. Blacks don't own any. In daily newspapers, blacks don't own any.
In television, blacks might have one out of 5,000. You don't have the wealth to be a competitive people because nobody wants to address your issue and get back and figure out how do we go back and redevelop this country. So the black folk will have decent communities, and in those communities they can have an economic base, they can have a tax base, they can produce jobs for their own people.
So rather than having our schools training black folk to go look for jobs, they should be training black folk how to create jobs for their own people in their own communities and through functional schools. Now, again, having a good amount of time to look at your books here. As I had said earlier, we've addressed, spent a good amount of time talking about the condition of the patient, of the black patient. Several people who endorsed your book basically endorsed it and in different ways they said the same thing. And I'll read Congressman Claude, a member of Congress, who said, Dr. Anderson methodically outlines and articulates strategies for blacks to become a self-empowered people in America despite.
The obvious injustice imposed on them throughout much of their history in this country. This was 20 years ago. And in the five minutes that we have left, I'd like to see if we could spend some time talking about where there is hope and what can be done to change this dire situation, and it is dire. It is a dire situation. And the first thing we need to do is we're going to have to have a new mindset with our people.
To understand that nobody's going to come rescue black folk and that and quit depending on other people to ally with you We're the only people that want to go to the bathroom, but want everybody to go to the bathroom with us We know we have we see and that's a problem We have no we have we don't have enough enough confidence in ourselves to be a competitive people And so we have once we get this new mindset then we have to say there's nothing wrong with having black We got to build black communities rock It is it is it is impossible in theory and in practice for you to be a competitive group of people in a capitalist society without having Either a physical community or a broad sense of a community that you can identify with your people if you don't live together. We have neither physical communities anymore, neither we have a sense of community. Everybody in every immigrant group coming to this country, within a matter of a few days to a month after they land here, they will build a physical community. They'll have Japan towns, China towns, French towns, German towns, Greek towns, Pole towns, Hockey towns, Cork towns, Mexican towns.
Something occurs to me in line with what you're saying. Statistically, we are somewhere 12% of the population. And you say one half of 1% of the wealth. That's right.
And if the black community were able to achieve an equality of wealth to the percentage that it is of the nation, what a different conversation we'd be having. It would be a totally different issue. And they would do that by practicing once you build up.
This is what I want to hear Yeah well And when you do that once you build that community then you start practicing group economics and and typically see that the rule of thumb In group economics is this is that your money should bounce eight to twelve times before it leaves your hands and spin around within the group Right and so in in this country right now Hispanic money typically is bounces six to seven times white money bounces eight to twelve times Asian and Arab money bounces twelve to thirteen times. I mean thirteen to fourteen times Jewish money bounces eighteen times black money doesn't bounce once. Yeah. And what you mean by that bounce? It means that you get a dollar from a job or a business that you are operating and you go spend that money with somebody that looks like you.
That's right. You got it. That's what you spend it with your own people first.
And see, what's happening right now is that everybody else does this but us. And see, right now, as long as you've been on this earth, you've never seen, for instance, a white person get in his car on a Saturday morning, drive down to a black neighborhood, go into a black store and buy something produced by a black people. It's being sold by a black person.
They boycott you everybody's boycott in black neighborhoods and black products and and we go to Chinatown But Chinese don't come to black towns to buy anything. We don't produce anything. We are zero produces 100% consumers Nobody's bringing money to our communities.
So our money is not bouncing around But what I recommend the black folk to do is that once we build these communities and go back to what we used to be See one time black folk had business. We had some fine businesses before integration Integration destroyed black communities and black businesses. We We used to be able to walk around in any black community. You could find grocery stores, party stores, liquor stores, discount stores, hotels, nightclubs, buses, cab companies, everything.
We have nothing now. We got to go back and rebuild these communities. Then then then then start marking your money and say, now I got I got a dollar bill.
I'm going to put a checkmark on this dollar bill. I make sure that before this dollar bill leaves a black hand that leave black, it must have at least 12 marks on it. And once you start doing that, you can start practicing group economics because right now we don't practice that group. Now. Group economics.
As soon as a black person gets paid rock, he'll run immediately to a suburb or to a non-black home store and spend his money. But nobody's rushing to spend money with you. So we got a balance of trade deficit. Everybody's coming into our community, setting up McDonald's and Burger Kings and taking the money out.
But nobody's bringing any money in. And we're not going to anybody else's community and bringing any money back to the black community. You got a balance of trade deficit. And that is totally destructive for black folk.
You're not living off enough money to be able to be a competitive people. Because you're giving your money away. And again, like in Detroit, Michigan, I told Detroit, Detroit is way back that they're going to become impoverished and go into bankruptcy.
I see you got about a you got about 11 million dollar billion dollar worth of annual income in this city you know in terms of tax revenue and for what you put into your food service your university your schools and running your city you got 11 million dollars and right now but you're going bankrupt because if you're not practicing group economics had you circulate that money ten times in Detroit rather run into the suburbs you have a hundred and ten million billion dollars you know we're just about out of time well let's leave it here that we may both Try to practice what Cornel West said and remain prisoners of hope. That's right. Well, that's it. Thank you so much.
And thanks a million for inviting me on your show. Absolutely. And invite me back again.
I'm looking for you to come back. Thank you, Rock. That wraps us for this evening. For more information on this program or any other program produced by WHUT, go to WHUT.org. I'm Rock Newman.
God bless you. And I'll see you the next time around. You can't get out of me! This program was produced by WHUT, Howard University Television, and made possible by contributions from viewers like you.
Thank you.