Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder recalled his late father’s warnings about the Democrat Party while making a statement before a House hearing on “slavery reparations” on Wednesday.
Elder shared some of his father’s teachings regarding perseverance, personal responsibility, self-reflection, and accountability. He also expressed a view of struggle and adversity as permanent features of the human condition.
Elder said:
Very few people could have had a life harder than my father. My father was 13 years — born in 1915 — when he was kicked out of his house by his mother, Athens, Georgia, Jim Crow, at the beginning of the Great Depression.
The man walked down the street, did whatever he could. Ultimately, he became a Pullman porter on the trains, which was the largest private employer of blacks in those days. [He] traveled all over the world, became a marine, was one of the first black marines, a Montford Point marine.
And my dad always told my brothers and me the following: Hard work wins, you get out of life what you put into it, you cannot control the outcome, but you are 100 percent in control of the effort, and before you complain about what other people did to you, go to the nearest mirror and say to yourself, “What could I have done to change the outcome?”
And my dad always told us this, “No matter how hard you work, no matter how good you are, sooner or later, bad things will happen to you. How you respond to those bad things will tell your mother and me if we raised a man.
And my father always said this about the Democrat Party, “They want to give you something for nothing, and when you’re trying to get something for nothing, you almost always end up getting nothing for something.”
Elder also described black Americans as “a race of overcomers.”
Hours before his testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties, Elder said in a video published on Twitter, “Think about it. Reparations is the extraction of money from people who were never slave owners to be given to people who were never slaves.”
“Only about five percent of white Americans have any sort of generational connection to slavery, which ended 156 years ago,” Elder continued. “When we paid reparations to people in the past, as when the Japanese received reparations for being put in relocation camps, the money was paid to them — victims themselves — or their legal heirs. Slavery ended 156 years ago; it is just too long ago.”
Elder produced and wrote the documentary Uncle Tom: An Oral History of the American Black Conservative.