“Every bad thing that’s happened to my race over the years, you can go right back to the Democratic Party,” said Burgess Owens, retired NFL safety and Super Bowl champion, in a Wednesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Earlier on Wednesday, Owens testified at a hearing on slavery reparations before a House Judiciary subcommittee. He proposed that the Democrat Party pay for “all the misery” brought upon blacks across America’s history.
Owens reflected on examples of black role models he saw while growing up. “I was blessed. I grew up during that era in the Deep South during the 1960s and I had a chance to witness, first-hand, the greatness of my community at a time when we literally led our country in terms of commitment from men to marriage to the entrepreneurial process. We were very Christian-based. We were all about winning, and for us to think about being victims was the biggest insult. It just wouldn’t happen.”
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“So I’m blessed that it’s not a hypothetical to me,” continued Owens. “I know how it felt. I looked around and saw the examples of great men and women. To be where we are today is an insult to them. My dad, my granddad, my great-grandfather worked too hard for their history to be forgotten. That’s actually what it takes for this socialist-Marxist shadow, and that’s all reparations is. It’s another socialist way of getting people dependent, angry, and divided. But for that to work, they have to first demean and delete our great history, and we can’t let that happen, because what we’ve done together has made our country the greatest in the history of mankind.”
Owens characterized the left’s historical interpretations of American history as sowing racial seeds of discord across the nation.
“If I had time [during my testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee], I could’ve talked about not just black history, but white history together with black history that allowed us to move forward, because we’ve always had a great heart,” said Owens. “That’s who we are. That’s our DNA, and we’ve let the left delete that type of history, then they get away with making a big hole, as if we went from slavery to 1960s when Democrats allowed us to vote, and we were a hapless [and] hopeless race in between waiting for the oppressive white people to break us free. That’s not the case, and we need to make sure our history is told the way it really was.”
Owens noted left-wing hostility towards American traditions and values. “We are talking about black and white issues, obviously. But understand, it’s deeper than that. We have a great country because of our Judeo-Christian values, because we have a nation that literally learns to serve, and we see ourselves inside-out, not outside-in. They’re the enemy against that, that’s the Marxists and socialists who hate God, who hate our way of life, and the way they do that is by stealing our history.”
“The first thing we need to understand is that any race that’s given freedom, opportunity, and hope becomes great,” remarked Owens. “They do great things. Right after the Civil War ended in 1882, the Tuskegee Institute was started by Booker T. Washington. Over the next forty years — and this is something that’s shocking for most people — because of their focus on entrepreneurship, on developing the value of meritocracy, they produced more self-made millionaires than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined.”
Owens reflected, “If we go through what happened to the black community in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, another key point of what happened is where we turned within ourselves. We didn’t think about the government. We didn’t think about white people helping us out. We built our businesses. We taught our kids. Those who became successful stayed there and reinvested into their communities. We were the fastest growing middle class in our country, and that middle class is the greatest gift of freedom, because they’re the ones that emphasized they’re the ones that just came from the tough times. They wanted that to continue. Once that middle class grows, great things happen.”
“Unfortunately, what’s happened over the last years is we’ve lost the middle class, and we now have a class of elitists,” said Owens of those within the cottage industry of racial agitation. “Elitists are the worst thing that could’ve happened to us, it’s the worst thing that’s happened to our country. It’s all about them and they will use anybody. They use, abuse, and discard. That’s what these black leaders have done the last 50 years as they’ve grown wealthy, and lived the American Dream, lived in gated homes, sent their kids to the best schools possible, and given us crumbs. That’s why we stay dependent on them. That’s what we’re fighting against.”
Owens warned, “What happened to the black community is a prototype of what our country will go through if we don’t wake up and understand what we’re up against. We don’t want to happen to the rest of America what’s happened to our black community over the last hundred years. … This is typical of what the black leaders are doing, [they] mention that this was all white people. No, it was the Democratic Party. The whole issue was President Roosevelt — FDR — He made a big deal about how to keep our race down during his administration because the southern Democrats owned him.”
Owens declared, “Every bad thing that’s happened to my race over the years, you can go right back to the Democratic Party. Whether it be Chicago, whether it be Mississippi.”
“Black Wall Street — for those that don’t know, go back 20 years — there was a community a little bit outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma,” shared Owens. “They had over 60 millionaires. They had theaters and law firms and a transit system. They were doing international business, and they didn’t have any interaction with white people, at all. But what happens when you get the KKK, who hate the progress of blacks, what they did was within 12 hours they destroyed that entire town. We need to make sure we realize who that is. It’s the Democratic Party. It’s the KKK [and] Jim Crow. It’s the segregationists. It’s the same ones right now targeting our babies and our mothers for abortion. These eugenicists — these folks — throughout the last hundred years, have done misery to our race. We need to point them out.
“[We need to] stop kind of putting this whole thing of white people into the big mix,” continued Owens. “We’ve had a lot of great things that we the people have done together from all races. We’ve had some very bad things from the Democratic Party. We separate those two, have them pay us back for the misery they’ve given us, then this conversation goes away.”
Owens quipped, “When I talk of this restitution, there are white people that feel guilty because they’re white. Well, they need to be part of paying us back. Let’s go ahead and have them go ahead and pay into this pot with the Democrats. They can do it to get the guilt off their chests, and we can all move forward. It’s a win-win for everyone involved. I say that in jest.”
Owens called for national pride while rejecting left-wing propagation of shame among Americans over the nation’s history. “But the bottom line is this: We’ve done too many things for us to be ashamed of who we are as Americans, period. We need to learn our history, and whites need to realize that what we’ve done, there’s no other country in the history of mankind has reached out and helped and supported and provided and protected and worked together with all the other denominations and all the other different races as we have done in this country. So let’s not let the leftists make us feel sorry for what we’ve done, what we’ve become, and our ancestors.”
Democrats and the broader left mask their self-service with political illusion, said Owens. “It’s not about the people they’re serving. This is all about power and prestige. … That’s why every Democratic town — every Democratic community — it’s a place of hopelessness. It’s where socialism thrives, where people don’t have hope, the people don’t like each other. They don’t like other people. Their vision of what America should be — just go to Chicago, Baltimore, and other urban communities — you’ll see exactly what Democrats think. They’re going to bring up whatever they can to keep dividing us.”
Millionaire professional athletes in the NFL and beyond who kneel during the national anthem have been raised on an anti-American ethos, said Owens. “They’re been trained since they were kids not to salute the flag, not to say a prayer. They listen to BET, where they’re told about how bad white people are, how bad police are, so of course they make it big and they still have this anger within.”
“We need to make sure that we the people understand that we’re being attacked,” added Owens. “[We need to] robustly go to work and serve these young kids so they learn through example that what they’ve been told is not true. The left has won by slowly working through the system to change the way our kids think about our country, and if we give them enough time they’ll end up voting for the worst type of people you can ever think of and turn our country into a real mess.”
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