Blackout

by Candace Owens

  Concern for the less fortunate is entirely different from imagining that we can do what we cannot do. Nor is the humbling admission of our inherent limitations as human beings a reason for failing to do the considerable number of things which can still be done within those limitations. In America, at least, history has demonstrated dramatically that it can be done because it has already been done.

  Of course, the easiest way to determine that affirmative action is ineffective is to measure against the success that blacks have found in areas where it was not implemented. As an example, we tend to dominate sports. It’s worth noting that LeBron James was never told that scoring one basket would equal four points for him because of his skin color. He was never told he was inferior or was brainwashed into athletic inferiority.

  Black America also excels in music. On the top-ten list for the most Grammy awards ever won sit vocalists Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé, and rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West. None of them were given more votes because of the color of their skin. They were not graded on any curve. They simply created better music than their competitors and were rewarded for it.

  It really is a shame that our education system refuses to apply the same method of hard work—the only method that has ever produced black greatness.

  PUBLIC SCHOOL TRAP

  Before my family moved in with my grandparents, the only escape from my dysfunctional home life was school. From the first day of kindergarten, I looked forward to attending school each day not just to learn but to be in an environment that felt promising.

  One of the first friends I made in kindergarten was a girl with blonde hair and blue eyes named Laura. We became fast friends, and she eventually invited me to her house for an after-school playdate. I had never been on a playdate before—at least not with someone outside of my extended family—and so I was unsure as to what to expect. What I encountered far exceeded anything within my imagination.

  I still vividly recall the car journey to her house that day. I stared out the car window of her mother’s oversized Suburban, startled, as the houses we drove past grew bigger and bigger. I remember being most impressed by the trees, regarding which there were just so many. There was so much forest, so much life outside of the existence of my family’s small three-bedroom apartment on the other side of town. I was young then, and yet I remember feeling overwhelmed by the sense of it all; I had assumed that everyone lived like me.

  Laura’s home was a mansion in north Stamford, affixed with an expansive playroom. A room just for playing? The concept defied my short-lived existence. I was an alien visiting another planet. Her bedroom was immaculate, and it was all hers—she didn’t have to share it with two sisters like I did. She had a white Victorian bedroom set with porcelain dolls that neatly lined the shelves. Everything seemed so delicate. I was conscious of not wanting to break anything.

  I often share this story when I give speeches today, because its lesson is important. The minds of children are but blank canvases, working in overdrive to process the world around them. How they process those experiences will steer their lives in one direction or another, toward their futures. Most important then is how adults answer their ever-blazing questions of “why.” Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Why is Laura’s house bigger than mine? The immediate responses they receive, whether true or false, will begin to shape their relationship with society. In many cases, it can spell the difference between their ultimate success or failure in life. Like most children who spend the vast majority of their day in classrooms, I looked to my teachers and textbooks to provide a further understanding of the world, and because I attended a public school, those answers fit a clearly defined pattern: one that favored black victim propaganda over truth.

  Parents would like to think that schools are safe environments for their children to grow up. Having come a long way since the days of Ruby Bridges, few can imagine that inferiority is learned in the classroom. But it is. Kids in schools all across this country are being taught the flawed concepts of white privilege and inherent black oppression, that their skin color makes them different. In public schools, children are taught that the difference between families like mine—those who live in low-income-housing buildings—and families like Laura’s, is a matter of systemic injustice.

  Over the slow years of our educational brainwashing, we are made to believe that slavery, Klan rallies, water hoses, and attack dogs during the civil rights movement are the prime explanation for every current ill that befalls black America today. This packaged theory is applied across the board: the poor are pitted against the wealthy, women are pitted against men, and so forth. This victim vs. oppressor method of teaching is particularly detrimental to the spirits of black youth. As it turns out, being told why we will not be held responsible for any of our shortcomings does little in the way of inspiring hard work.

  Of course, the schools I went to never bothered to teach me anything that would lead to my concluding that perhaps Laura’s family was well-off due to her father’s entrepreneurship. Perhaps it was his good life decisions that played a role in his business success. Nor would any of my lessons have explored the inverse culpability of my own parents’ decisions; perhaps my mother’s lack of a high school diploma and her decision to become pregnant as a teenager may have stifled her early potential. Perhaps my father’s financial irresponsibility contributed to our economic instability. No, the school would not have dared teach a black person about the consequences of personal decision-making—not when the narrative of systemic oppression is so preferred.

  And so, because instead of learning about free markets, capitalism, and entrepreneurship, today’s curriculum overemphasizes the role that others play in our success. Students are being systematically disempowered, trained to resent the success of others.

  And that creates a self-fulling prophecy of sorts. We can never attain what we resent, just as we will never achieve what we loathe. If money and success become the objects of our loathing and resentment, then we can be certain they will never be within our grasp. Our subconscious mind will reject its opportunity seeking to prevent us from becoming that which we have been conditioned to hate.

  And beyond the tragedy of the education system’s collective brainwashing of children against their potential is its outright failure to educate.

  REFUSING TO CHOOSE

  In chapter 4, I highlighted how elementary-to-middle-school-aged black children are lagging behind their white counterparts in nearly every important statistical category. Unfortunately, the problem is only exacerbated at the high school level.

  According to a 2019 report published by the standardized test company ACT Inc., only 32 percent of black 2019 high school graduates who took the ACT exam between their sophomore and senior years of high school showed college-readiness in the subject of English. And the data was much worse across other subjects of learning. Just 20 percent of black students met college readiness benchmarks in reading, and in the area of math and science, the percentages were 12 and 11, respectively.

  This is troubling for the black community across the board, but black students who are considered “underserved”—that is, black children who like me come from low-income families and have parents who did not attend college—fare even more poorly:

  Just 9 percent of underserved learners who met all three underserved criteria met three or more ACT college readiness benchmarks.

  21 percent of underserved ACT-tested 2019 high school graduates reported taking three years or fewer of math—more than double the percentage of non-underserved graduates (less than 10 percent) who reported this.

  Underserved students lag behind their peers in readiness for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) coursework. Consistent with the previous two years, in 2019 only 2 percent of students who met all three underserved criteria achieved the ACT STEM benchmark.

  I needn’t spell out what this data indicates for their futures. Without basic educational skill sets, their career prospects are
lower, making them more susceptible to perpetuating the cycle of poverty that currently engulfs their communities.

  It almost goes without saying that the public education system is largely at fault for these dismal statistics. Every day parents are handing their children over to dismal institutions that are clearly not best suited to prepare them for their futures.

  But while black families have evidentiary proof that the public school system is failing their children, they remain convinced by the Left that it is their best, if only, option.

  And though choosing the best school for our child should not be a politicized issue, it has certainly become one, as Democrats have convinced blacks that opting out of these institutions would spell catastrophe. Although numerous polls show that black Americans favor school choice (via vouchers that would allow parents to transfer the government funding already allocated for their children’s education from a public school to a private school, charter school, or other institution of their choosing), left-wing politicians have nonsensically waged this option as an infringement on civil liberty. They make the extraordinary claim that the voucher system favors white families and is thus responsible for segregation in public schools. These are classic leftist misinformation campaigns, which control and constrain black progress.

  It is unfathomable that black parents would continue to put their children’s future at risk by pledging allegiance to abysmal public schools when the option to drastically improve their educational circumstances sits before them. It is even more unfathomable that liberals would ask them to. Is it not ironic that the same people who claim the American workforce is racist and that black Americans have a harder time securing jobs and moving up the corporate ladder would at the same time do all they can to prevent workplace preparedness by advocating against the best available paths for education? It is too often the case that those with the loudest voices against school choice are the very same Democrats who send their own kids to private schools. Their astounding hypocrisy is evidence of a more sinister intention, I believe. Perhaps Democrats simply understand that uneducated black children transform into uneducated adults, and uneducated adults are far more easily controlled by mass propaganda than those who think critically for themselves.

  ACADEMIA

  There can hardly be a meaningful discussion about black people and education without discussing how black culture is one of the biggest contributors to black failure—because education is not deemed “cool” by many black students.

  It is a sad fact that black students perform better academically when they are in a classroom of predominantly white students, as opposed to within predominantly black classrooms. The reason for this is never discussed, because it points to an internal problem which runs against the current code of black blamelessness.

  The truth is that black Americans celebrate ignorance and accuse those among them who do not capitulate to Ebonics as “acting white.” Nobody knows this better than me.

  When I was in elementary school, students were not made to take standardized tests until we reached eight years of age, and even after the testing, we were not divided into classrooms based on the results. This meant that my classrooms were racially diverse. Accordingly, I was best friends with a young Hispanic girl and a young black girl simply because they were in my class.

  When standardized testing began, I scored high enough that my third-grade teacher recommended I skip up to the fourth grade. As I had just switched schools and had just started making friends, I cried hysterically to my mother and begged her to let me stay in the grade I was in. She acquiesced, under the condition that I join an Extraordinary Learner’s Program, which was a separate class that took place during the regular school day, for students who were considered high achievers. All of the students in this program, except for me, happened to be white.

  Upon entering middle school, students were now placed in all classes according to their standardized test scores. I was placed in a class group that had predominantly white students. I had two other black students in my class. Like all students, I made friendships with the people who were in my class. This meant the majority of my friends became white, a shift from elementary school days.

  And that’s when the bullying started.

  The black girls who were in lower academic groups would block me in the hallway when I was trying to get to class and shout rude insults at me. One girl in particular would bump my shoulder every time I walked by her in a hallway. I chose to ignore them. In one particular instance, a black girl called me over to her table in the cafeteria to ask me a question. As I walked over, I knew it was a setup but felt I had no choice but to engage her. When I arrived at the table, she asked me plainly, “Candace, if I were to say to you ‘Holla,’ what would you say back?”

  I answered her honestly. “I would say hello.”

  The entire table filled with black girls began wildly hollering with laughter, as I walked back to my table. Later, I would learn that the correct answer was “Holla back,” a colloquial term popularized by the biggest hip-hop song of that time. Quite frankly, I wasn’t much interested in keeping up with popular hip-hop songs, because J. K. Rowling had released another installment of Harry Potter—and I was racing home to read it every day, before any of my friends could spoil the ending.

  All of this chalked up to their regular assessment that I was “acting white.” And that was reason enough for black girls to try to humiliate me. Years later, I wound up sharing an art class with the girl who used to bump my shoulder. We became instant friends. I asked her why she used to bump my shoulder, and I will never forget the answer she gave me.

  “I just thought you were stuck-up. I didn’t realize you were cool.”

  She had convicted someone whom she had never even spoken to on the basis of little more than an assumption—an assumption based on the fact that I was in a higher academic group.

  In high school, the girl who used to block me in the hallway and insult my outfits wound up in my geometry class. We too became fast friends. When I asked her why she used to pick on me, her answer was equally as absurd.

  “I don’t know. We just all thought you were a bitch,” she quipped.

  Of course, though convicted of the charge, I was never “acting white.” My true crime lay in the fact that I was speaking proper English, correctly answering questions on tests, and reading books rather than keeping up hip-hop terminology. To my race, this represented some sort of a betrayal. I was not considered to be acting black. I was not conforming to an unwritten code of blackness.

  Of course, the idea that black children who perform well in school are somehow “acting white” is in and of itself a racist assessment. It insinuates that intelligence is an attribute that belongs to white people. It signals to black youth that academic success is not for them. It fosters a culture where brighter black students must decide between wanting to be accepted by their race, or performing well in their studies.

  The truth is that those who accuse others of acting white are themselves acting quite foolish.

  THE BURDEN OF FREEDOM

  The fundamental issue is that after sixty years of Democrat allegiance, black America has been led to believe that we are exceptions to every rule. But we cannot be excused from hard work, studying, and good decision-making and then feign appalling surprise when we fail next to our peers. We cannot except ourselves from diligence and claim injustice over our varied results.

  Holding us hostage in insufficient elementary, middle, and high schools is not enough. The education system, in tandem with the Left, grants us entitlements that do nothing but paint an illusion of accomplishment—an illusion that collapses at the first tremor of competition. And today’s black culture—the residue of earlier racist misgivings about our capabilities, further alienates and limits our progress.

  We so often hear the expression “freedom is not free,” but what exactly does that mean? It means that freedom isn’t a young woman in an open field with her head tilt
ed toward the sun. It’s more likely a young woman sitting at home, studying, even though she’d much rather be out with her friends. It’s a young man, getting accepted into a highly ranked university on the basis of his outstanding academic performance. Freedom is personal responsibility. It’s the sacrifices we make personally so that we may afford our lives certain privileges. Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

  Though fought for, true black freedom was never achieved and protected. It’s time for a new generation of blacks to take up the fight for it once again.

  7 ON MEDIA

  Amy Robach’s face was twisted in disgust, her voice thick with frustration. The words tumbled out of the ABC News anchor’s mouth—one damning revelation after another, all caught on a hot mic. “I’ve had the story for three years,” she said. “I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts. We would not put it on the air.”

  Robach was, of course, speaking about the damning evidence she had gathered about billionaire financier and suspected pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. And without knowing she was being recorded, Robach spoke candidly about the ways that she believed her employer, ABC, had stonewalled her story and opted to protect a potential criminal and his allies—instead of the young girls he had already harmed and those who could become victims in the future. Years later, after Epstein’s arrest and the awakening of the general public to his monstrous behavior, Robach remarked that she was “freaking pissed” that she had been forced to keep quiet.