Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy picked apart woke America’s idea of “systematic racial inequity” in a video uploaded to Instagram, claiming the government’s policies and practices “badly” failed black Americans.
Ramaswamy said that the “central premise” of the woke movement in America is the claim that there is a “systematic racial inequity” between Americans, giving the example of white and black Americans. However, he claimed that the results show different outcomes when you look at how the data was taken.
The Republican presidential candidate claimed that the government’s policies and practices “badly” failed black Americans when looking at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society policies and affirmative action.
Ramaswamy alluded to such policies and practices being the actual drivers behind the claim that “70 percent or so of black children were born into two parent households” in the 1960s, but that the percentage has nearly reversed today.
Ramaswamy explained:
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society policies, failed black Americans badly. What they said is… ‘We’re going to create incentives to get a parent out of the household, because you can get more money as a single mother from the government than you would say, from your husband.’ Where you create economic incentives, what happens, you get what you pay for. That’s a big part of what happened in black communities across America.
Then they implement these policies of affirmative action in America, which teach black kids, black people of every age, that you know what you don’t have what it takes to be able to succeed on your own. So we the government are going to force these quota systems to supposedly help black Americans. What does that do? It destroys self confidence itself. It’s a new form of psychological slavery in America. Where what do you have? The old form of slavery? You have a government that actually… you have government actors that say, ‘You have to work here, we’re going to provide for you. And that’s how we keep you in shackles.’
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It was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society that actually kept a lot of black Americans still effectively shackled by the modern form of slavery by saying the government has to be here for you, creates incentives that stop you from being self reliant, and then apply the psychological shackles of slavery to teach the next generation of Americans that you’re not good enough to hack it on your own in schools or in the workforce. That’s the real form of slavery that we need to fight today.
Ramaswamy said that Americans “need to open our eyes and wake up to that fact” because these ideas have been “perpetrated” among people who claimed they want to help black Americans.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.