American Enterprise Institute

Web event — Rescuing American history from revisionists and race hustlers

Welcome and introduction: Robert Doar, President, AEI

Panel discussion Panelists: Stephanie Deutsch, Author Wilfred Reilly, Assistant Professor, Kentucky State University Robert L. Woodson Sr., President, Woodson Center

Moderator: Ian Rowe, Resident Fellow, AEI

Thursday, May 20, 2021 7:00–8:00 p.m.

Event page: https://www.aei.org/events/rescuing-american-history-from- revisionists-and-race-hustlers/

Robert Doar: Good evening everyone. I’m Robert Doar, president of AEI, and I’m very pleased to welcome you to tonight’s event celebrating the release of a new book, “Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” This volume, produced by the Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites campaign and edited by , features essays that seek to offer a more complete picture of the African American experience by acknowledging struggles but also recognizing successes.

The current narrative on race and American history in the popular media and in many of our schools tells a narrow story focused increasingly on oppression and discrimination. “Red, White, and Black,” tells a more complete story of black American history. And in so doing, it demonstrates the rich variety of perspectives and achievements in the black American community.

These essays show that although there is a need to be honest about our nation’s shortcomings, progress has been built on courage, work, creativity, intelligence and on aspiration, faith, and hope. These are the same lessons that have underpinned 40 years of work at the Woodson Center in finding local solutions to poverty in low-income neighborhoods across the country.

Now here is where I want to pause a moment and offer a special welcome to Bob Woodson, one of tonight’s panelists and the editor of the volume. Bob’s determined work made this entire project possible. Now, many years ago, before he founded what would become the Woodson Center, Bob was an AEI scholar. But he left here to go on to greater things. And few have done more to help low-income Americans live successful and flourishing lives. He has continued to operate in the world of ideas, of course, but he has also operated in the world of action, making a real and positive impact on the lives of individuals all across America.

Bob knows that, as is true for all Americans who work to make better lives for themselves and their children, individual agency and self-determination have been and will continue to be a defining feature of the black experience in America. Now the essays in “Red, White and Black” reflect these values and the spirit of the Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites Initiative.

To begin this discussion, let me introduce tonight’s moderator, Ian Rowe. Ian is a resident fellow here at AEI where his work focuses on the importance of education and family formation in the fight for upward mobility. Before coming to us, he served as CEO of Public Prep, a nonprofit network of public charter schools based in the south Bronx in the lower east side of Manhattan.

And when he was in that capacity, he came here, and we did a wonderful event with two of really one of his most remarkable students. And it was really a great day for AEI. It’s not often that we have ninth graders and 12th graders on the stage, but it’s good to have it happen every once in a while.

Ian is now launching Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based international baccalaureate high schools opening in the Bronx in 2022. Ian’s writings can be found in major outlets like The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The New York Post. He is also a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center and a writer for the 1776 Unites Campaign. Like Bob Woodson, Ian operates in both the world of ideas and the world of action. So without further ado, Ian, take it away. Thank you.

Ian Rowe: Thank you, Robert, and I can’t wait to get into our panel. As Robert said, my name is Ian Rowe. I am a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And I’m also one of the founders of 1776 Unites and one of the essayists in “Red, White, and Black.” But tonight the hat that I’m wearing most prominently is that of someone who runs schools.

As Robert said, I’m launching a new network of character-based international baccalaureate high schools to open in the Bronx in 2022. And for the last 10 years, I ran a network of public elementary and middle schools in the heart of the South Bronx and the lower eastside of Manhattan. We had more than 2,000 students, primarily low-income students, primarily black and Hispanic. But all kids of parents who wanted their kids to live the American dream.

They knew that their kids would likely face some type of discrimination in their lives, but they chose our schools because they wanted their children to develop the skills and habits to become agents of their own uplift and build a better life, even in the face of structural barriers. This background is important because what young people believe about their possibilities in the present is very much influenced by what they understand was achieved in the past.

It’s important that our kids have a complete understanding of our nation’s history, warts and all. They need to know that they live in a good, if not great, country, one that is not hostile to their dreams. And they also need to know that millions of kids of all races have embraced the founding ideals around family, faith, hard work, entrepreneurship, education to move from persecution to prosperity. So that’s why it’s so exciting tonight that we’re discussing a new book “Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” Bob, I can’t wait to talk to you about why you chose that title.

And let me just read to you from the opening dedication.

“No nation is perfect but America more than any other is a place where people from every imaginable background have been able to pursue their dreams and realize their potential. Americans have never met a problem we were afraid to tackle or a challenge we can’t overcome together. In fact, those of us who have faced the most formidable challenges in life often become our strongest leaders and our greatest patriots.

This is as true of black Americans as it is anyone else. During the worst of Jim Crow, we built thriving communities full of families, churches, businesses, and countless civic institutions. On the very soil where we once toiled in forced labor, we found the seeds of our liberation. At a time when many are trying to pull us apart by stoking grievances and sowing discord, the overwhelming majority of Americans remain devoted to our founding principles and to one another. And this book is dedicated to those countless millions who love our country despite its flaws and long to live together in peace.”

And so we’ve got a great panel discussion. First, we’re joined by Robert Woodson. And as Robert Doar alluded to, for more than 40 years, Bob has been an influential leader on issues of poverty, alleviation, and empowering disadvantaged communities to become agents of their own uplift. Bob is the author of several books including “On the Road to Economic Freedom,” “The Triumphs of Joseph,” and now is the senior editor of “Red, White, and Black.”

We’re also joined by the amazing Stephanie Deutsch. Stephanie is an author who followed her interest in biography to study the life of her husband’s great-grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, which helped her develop a strong interest in the life of Booker T. Washington and African American history. Stephanie is the author of “You Need a Schoolhouse,” where she relates the remarkable story which she’ll tell us about of how Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, the then president of Sears Roebuck, met in 1911 at a Chicago luncheon and proceeded to build nearly 5,000 schools in the segregated south.

And finally, we’re joined by Dr. Wilfred Reilly, author, political scientist, and as I like to say, a truth-teller. Dr. Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University, a historically black college. He’s the author of two great books, “Taboo” and “Hate Crime Hoax.” If you’re looking for an interesting feed to follow, Dr. Reilly regularly publishes views that frequently contrast with the dominant narrative, but it’s always backed by solid data.

So let’s get into it. I’m very excited to have this discussion. And Bob, let me start with you. The book is entitled “Red, White, and Black” with the subtitle “Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” That’s a pretty provocative title. What was the impetus behind that name and tell us why this whole thing is so important?

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: OK. Before doing so, I’d like to again thank Robert Doar for inviting me. I spent five years at AEI. I came as a practitioner with little appreciation for policy that I realized that winners and losers in the marketplace are determined by the rules of the game. So therefore, policymakers set the rules of the game. And so by spending five years here, I was able to blend policy with practice and come up with new policies and better practice. So I want to thank AEI for that opportunity that I spent five years.

But as Robert indicated for 40 years, I have run the Woodson Center, and we have assisted 2,500 low-income grassroots leaders in 39 states to overcome the challenges of poverty in their communities. And a large percentage of them are black. But when 1619 Project, when issued its magazine charging that 1619 is the only legitimate and real birthday of the country and that America therefore should be defined as a “slavocracy.” And that all white people are villains to be shamed, blamed, and punished. And all blacks are to be pitied and patronized.

I think since the progressive left was using the black community and the birth defect of slavery as their bludgeon against the country, we felt that the count of messenger should also be led by blacks affirming the fact that 1776 is our legitimate birthday. But we did not want to engage in more tribal conflict by offering a debate. We wanted to offer an alternative narrative that is more inspirational and aspirational.

And so we assembled 28 scholars like yourself and Will and the rest to offer a more realistic and a more honest assessment of how were we. One of the basic propositions of the radical left is that the problems facing black America today with out-of-wedlock birth, crime, and disorganization in many low-income communities was the direct legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Well, our essays refute that. In our essays we proved that when whites were at their worst, blacks were at their best.

And we give evidence in our essays, examples of how with the Rosenwald Schools the education gap closed from three years to six months over a 20-year period between 1920 and 1940. That when we were denied access to hotels, we built our own. When we were denied access to schools and universities, we built 100 before the year 1920.

And so we felt that we wanted to challenge again with an alternative and inspirational narrative that affirms that no one — if everyone watching this show if I asked you what is your credit card debt, your mortgage payments? If I just assembled all of your liabilities and I say these people are in bad shape. The only way that I can really tell your net worth is to compare your assets to your liabilities and that determines your net worth.

Well, the same is true with black America. We must look at not just our liabilities but what net worth is determined by what we accomplished in the face of discrimination. And then finally our overall. And we do this not just by writing essays, but also we believe that people are motivated to change when they can see evidence of the value of the principles and virtues. People don’t want to hear another sermon; they want to see what it looks like. And so by assembling a group of activists to work alongside our scholars, we’re able to convince the American people that these principles, in fact, are valued.

Again, our overall goal of the project is to de-racialize race and desegregate poverty. That is our goal because we have many challenges facing us. The low-income black mother who lost their child to homicide, the Appalachian mother who lost their daughter and son to prescription drugs, and the mothers at Silicon Valley where the suicide rate is six times the national average. All of that, they’re different sides of the same coin.

As long as we have to look at each other through the prism of race, we won’t really have an opportunity to get to the deeper problem facing this nation. And that is the moral and spiritual freefall that is causing our young people to devalue themselves to the point where they want to take their own life or take someone else’s. We want to lead a multiracial effort to heal those wounds, but we can’t do it until we get race off the table. And so that is our goal.

Ian Rowe: Wow thank you, Bob, thank you, Bob. Well Stephanie, you know, as an educator, you know, we have lots of conferences, lots of events where we talk to each other. And I often cite the Rosenwald Schools as one of the most incredible examples of self- determination and resiliency in the most heinous days of Jim Crow. And even many educators aren’t familiar with that story. So tell us a little bit about how this came to be in your own life, and what you ultimately wrote about in “Red, White, and Black?”

Stephanie Deutsch: Well thank you, Ian. It is true that this story, which touched so many lives, is very under the radar. It is not known in a lot of places. There are even places in the south where the schools were where people don’t know this story. As you said, I was interested in writing a biography. One of my husband’s cousins suggested I look at the life of Julius Rosenwald. And my reaction was I don’t know. A businessman? That doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing I’d be interested in writing about. But when I started to explore his life, I found this remarkable connection with Booker T. Washington. And I can almost remember the exact moment when I was writing the chapter about their meeting. And I thought gosh, they liked each other. They met, and they had something in common.

So the story of the Rosenwald Schools is not just about the cooperation between an American businessman and the foremost — a wealthy American businessman and the foremost black leader of his day. But it’s actually the story about their cooperation and their connection to thousands and thousands of African American men and women across the south who came together and joined forces to create these remarkable schools. And this was during a time of extreme hardness and, as you say, extreme segregation.

So for those who don’t know the basics of the story, Julius Rosenwald was the son of German Jewish immigrants born in 1862 in Springfield, Illinois, never graduated from high school, but learned the clothing trade from his father, from his successful uncles. In 1895, he had the opportunity to buy into a small, unknown mail-order company called Sears Roebuck. And that astute decision combined with Rosenwald’s expert management because he really was a good manager, and Sears had been a promoter of genius. But Julius Rosenwald could actually get the packages delivered on time. That made him an extremely wealthy man.

So both his Jewish identity — from his Jewish identity he had a sense of social responsibility. As a newly wealthy man, he was looking around for how he might use his wealth in productive ways. But from events bubbling up around him in the first decade of the 20th century, he was getting a sense of the African American experience. In 1908, there was a major race riot in his hometown in Springfield, Illinois. And he began to think of racial animus in this country as a little akin to the antisemitism and the lack of opportunity that had driven his parents and so many others out of Europe.

So in 1911, when he had the opportunity to meet Booker T. Washington, he was anxious to do it. He had been given a copy of “Up from Slavery,” and he had read it and was very interested. So Washington was going to be in Chicago, Rosenwald gave a luncheon for him. They met. As I say they liked each other. I think they recognized they were both pragmatists. They were both — they weren’t let’s sit around and talk about ideas. They were let’s sit around and talk about things we can do.

And they were very pragmatic and they were also — they each had sort of a domain to show off. Rosenwald took Washington to tour the enormous Sears compound on the west side of Chicago. And so, Washington said, “OK, now I want you to come down and visit Tuskegee.” So in the fall of 1911, he filled a private railroad car with family members and friends from Chicago. He had Jane Addams and his rabbi, Emile Hirsch, and they all went down and spent three days at Tuskegee.

And what they saw there astonished and favorably impressed them. What they saw there was the beautiful campus that had been designed at Tuskegee. It had been built by the students of bricks they made there themselves. They saw the very committed faculty, the staff, hundreds of eager students. So Rosenwald was very impressed. He agreed to serve on the board of Tuskegee. He agreed to make financial contributions generous. But he also engaged in kind of an ongoing dialogue with Washington. And they visited in each other’s homes, and they exchanged letters. And the conversation expanded to sort of what more could I do? And it was then that Washington presented to Rosenwald the information about how few schools there were for black children to attend.

Now, public education was mandatory at that point throughout the country. But the southern states divided their money very unequally between their black systems and their white systems. And what Washington told Rosenwald was that there were many places in the South, where people, black people were getting together and talking about raising money to build their own schools. If the state won’t give us schools, we’re going to build schools. We want schools.

These were children and grandchildren of slaves, who had been systematically denied the opportunity for education for generations. What they wanted the most in the world was education for their children. And this new book of photographs that’s come out, photographs of Rosenwald schools, is called “A Better Future for Their Children.” And that’s really — that was what they wanted.

And Rosenwald was a big believer in I don’t give you something, I help you achieve what you want. So when he heard that they were already raising money, he was very interested and very hooked. So out of this connection came a program that, between 1912 and 1932, built over 5,000 schools, teachers, homes, and shop buildings in 15 states across the American South.

Overall, it was the local jurisdictions that gave the most money. These were public schools. And this program had actually attracted the participation of the public school systems. But after that, dollar for dollar, it was in the communities the schools were built to serve who donated more than Julius Rosenwald. Not a lot more, but it was more.

So the ongoing care and concern for the schools is an aspect of the story that is fascinating. The schools were built with participation from the communities. People donated land; people donated materials. In many cases, they had worked on building the schools, but they also helped to take care of the schools. Well, that same spirit is alive today in a very vibrant movement to preserve the schools that remain.

And in the last 10 years, I’ve had the opportunity to be with many, many alumni groups, and they’re working to preserve their schoolhouses. Or in some places, they’re just working to preserve the memory of the school. The school is gone, but they still get together to celebrate the school. And the schools had to close when segregation ended, but they are still celebrating them and there are places that they regard with affection and pride. Several generations of families often went to the same school.

I’ve heard former students recite the Gettysburg Address, which at some schools was something they did every year. I’ve heard about Soup Day at a school in Rappahannock County, where once a week a parent would bring lunch for the whole school. I’ve heard about the close bond between teachers and the families. There were lots of places where the teacher would live with the family during the week and then go home on the weekends. Heard about the cast-off textbooks from the white school and the long walk to and from school several miles that the kids did together. And I’ve seen the legacy of the schools in the men and women I’ve met, who many of them, the majority of them went on to high school, many of them went on to college. They went on to careers in education, in the military, in public service. And that sense of pride and affection and connection to their communities, in many places, sent people back to the communities where they grew up, where they’ve now become involved in these Rosenwald School efforts.

So this is an incredibly powerful story. It’s an incredibly positive story. And it’s one that has kind of slipped below the radar screen. So many people don’t know about it, even educators, even African Americans, even Southerners. And I’m happy to say that there’s now a campaign to create a Julius Rosenwald and Rosenwald Schools National Historic Site. The special resource study has been mandated by Congress and so that’ll — that will be ongoing. And so I expect we’ll hear more about the Rosenwald Schools in the years to come.

Ian Rowe: It is one of the most incredible stories. One thing I want to get back to in this conversation is ironically after building nearly 5,000 schools, incredible academic achievement, the assumption though that separate meant unequal and inferior, actually led to the demise of the Rosenwald Schools. We definitely need to come back to this.

Stephanie Deutsch: Yeah, interesting.

Ian Rowe: So Dr. Reilly, you know, one of the ideologies that’s very dominant right now is that America’s you know, starting in 1619, 400 years of oppression, and the history of slavery is a straight-line connection to many of the contemporary issues that face the black community. You’ve done a lot of writing around, you know, is slavery the entirety of the black experience. Tell us a little bit about what you wrote about in “Red, White, and Black?”

Wilfred Reilly: Well, I suspect you’d be a little irritated if this was my only answer, but no. Slavery and historic racial conflict oppression are obviously not the sole or the primary explanations for contemporary problems in black and, for that matter, white communities. The example that I use very often online is fatherlessness. I mean, in 1938 through 1945, the great economist Walter Williams pointed out that the quarter — he said legitimacy — the out-of-wedlock birth rate for African Americans was about 9 percent, might have gotten as high as 11. For Caucasians, it was actually even lower, it was around 4 percent if I recall correctly. But the 90-plus percent majority of men of all races were expected to simply take care of their families, and they did 90 to 99 percent of every group in the country.

So what we’ve seen with family collapse, it’s worth looking at the same rates today. I mean last I looked at them, we were talking about 72 percent for African Americans fatherless and out-of-wedlock birth. Sixty-two percent I believe for Hispanics as a class, this is the different Hispanic groups combined. A little higher than that for Native American Indians, for whites, for our Caucasian countrymen that just crossed 35 percent well over a third.

So it’s absolutely impossible to link that sort of issue which began in the modern era. You could say much the same for gang crime, opiates in Caucasian communities, which is often as destructive in poor white areas as in black ones. So on down the line, it’s impossible to link that to historical slavery. So obviously I’ve read through the book, I enjoyed both of your essays, greatly appreciate the collaboration we’re all working on. I’m a primarily quantitative academic by background. And what I wanted to do in the book is take a look at some of these claims made by what you could call critical theory, and see how true they were.

The 1619 project, for example, which although we are something very different, and I think superior, I mean, that obviously was sort of the rival risk impulse for at least part of the start of 1776. I mean, there are four or five specific claims that have been made by Nicole Hannah Jones, for example, by other people affiliated with the project.

One of these is that the Revolutionary War was fought, I believe, primarily was the language to preserve slavery. But that’s been attacked quite often. Another one was that virtually everything unique that we see in the came out of slavery. Again, that’s essentially a verbatim quote.

A third is that slavery was the thing that enriched the USA. Again, either the primary thing or all almost all of our wealth, the thing that “made New York rich.” This is a common critical claim, by the way, that all of America’s wealth and power comes from oppression. The enslavement of African Americans, the conquest of the great native tribes, perhaps the abuse of women. So that would be point three.

And point four, which I find the most disturbing of these is that racism is in America’s DNA. It can’t be shaken, every system is racist, the police evolved from slave catchers, so on down the line. So we need to set up a completely different system. And I am not — as I’m sure my priest would be the first to tell you, perhaps — the avatar of conventional morality. I’m not responding to these as a purely ethical student of philosophy. Empirically, these are — they’re false or almost nonsensical claims.

It is true that Britain was discussing to take the first and simplest abolition of slavery around the time of the Revolutionary War. However, that was something that was being tackled for the home islands. The slaves weren’t freed in the overseas British colonies until 1833, which is, if I have the math correct, 52 years after the American Revolutionary War. That’s simply an empirical fact, as many serious historians were quick to point out. From the world socialist website over to the right side of the political spectrum.

And moving on down the list. I mean, you see much the same level of reality to many of these other famous critical claims. The idea that everything that is unique about America came out of historical oppression is simply nonsense. I mean, that would seem to exclude Irish immigration, for example, Mexican American immigration more recently, the Space Program, so on down the line.

I mean, one of my friends at Kentucky State University, a black man, was looking through the draft of my speech with me and mentioned almost in passing, even basketball was invented by a white guy, James Naismith. And I don’t obviously think it’s “cultural appropriation,” for me to enjoy the game as well. But in reality, we’ve all contributed to what used to be positively called the melting pot over the decades over the century. So again, black Americans have a rich, potent note in that symphony, or have contributed many of the ingredients to the shared kettle, but to say that everything came from one group of our countrymen is not true. And moving on, the claim that slavery made the United States rich, I think has a one- sentence rebuttal. Slavery made slave masters very rich. Many of the great historical fortunes, for example, the founding pot of money behind Yale University, came out of the slave trade, the second oldest and the dirtiest of businesses. But the simple reality is that when serious economists, Tom Sowell comes to mind as a personal inspiration of mine, have looked at the actual impact of slavery on the wealth of nations, they find that it lowers it.

Feudal Peon agriculture based upon the labor of defeated enemies is not the most effective way to build a society. That’s the old and failed Ottoman model Russian model. So if you actually looked at the wealth of the American South prior to the Civil War, you did not find outside of the plantation houses scattered every county or so a richer land than the rest of the USA. I mean, you actually found the poorest part of the USA. And those scars linger even today in Mississippi, or in parts of Appalachia.

At the time of the Civil War, Sowell points out I mean, the American South had a population at least comparable to the north, but one-fifth as many factories for example. If I recall correctly, a bit more than a 10th as many trained craftsmen. The highest level of illiteracy in the United States. This is among whites and blacks.

And all of what I’m describing, of course, comes before the terrible cost of the Civil War, which caused the USA to take on debt as a country for the first time, which costs a price in dollar terms that would be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s dollars. And which most importantly killed 620,000 Americans. Some fought, in my opinion, obviously, for the wrong side. But nonetheless, all of those countrymen died and more than half of them wearing union blue to end the scar of slavery in the US. And it’s very difficult for me at least to look at that butcher’s bill and conclude that there was a positive measurable gain from this in our past. And I think that the — the fourth of these points to me is the most important: What’s in your DNA is permanent, it can’t be changed.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: That’s right.

Wilfred Reilly: It’s an irrevocable part of who you are. I am black, in addition to Irish and native because that is in my DNA. I’m a male because that is part of my DNA. The claim here is that the USA cannot be anything other than racist ever. And in reality, I think again, this is empirically false. We’ve mutated if you’d like.

With the Civil War amendments following that great conflict, we did things like ban slavery, ban involuntary servitude, except for certain felonies permanently. Give the vote to everyone with the notable exception of women, of course, quite a gap there. But to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, previous condition of servitude so on down the line. We dramatically changed who we were as a nation and that process has continued.

I mean, I will note, since the Philadelphia plan in 1967, most fields within our economy have engaged in pro-minority affirmative action. That’s now been something that in higher education, for example, has been in place for roughly 50 years. So it’s very, very difficult to look at a hiring process where I’m often rather likely to be preferred, and say that nothing has changed since the days of existential race war and the enslavement of African Americans. That makes very little if any sense. So I think that rather than going through every one of these points and saying, well, they’re wrong on this, they’re wrong on that, the question that I tried to answer in my second essay in the book called “A Positive Vision for Americans,” not notably for black Americans or white Americans. But the question is, well, so what is real? What are conditions on the ground in America today? And I mean, there are a couple of points. One of them which I think people on the right and center definitely do need to recognize is that racism obviously still exists. I doubt any human society will be able to ever truly get rid of it.

But there are what are known as audit studies in my field of the social sciences that find that, for example, as a black man, you’re likely to face about an 8 percent rate of discrimination if you go in and apply for an upscale apartment. I mean, I think we all know that if you are a young black male, you’re a little more likely whether or not because that’s true. That’s due to crime rates for the group of all, but you’re a bit more likely to encounter the police to be pulled over in your vehicle. So on down the line.

So bigotry has not ended. We don’t yet live in utopia, a world that means no place. That is something that we need to consider. But it’s also worth remembering. I mentioned sort of the age of affirmative action today. In 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, we as a nation ended at least de jure segregation throughout our educational systems and as the precedent came to be applied beyond. Since 1964, most racism, most discrimination say, has been criminally and civilly illegal. That’s the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And I’ve already given an outline of the policies that began in ‘67.

So what we see today is something very different from this old dualistic picture Andrew Hacker once called it “two nations of a country that’s entirely white and black with the black suppressed,” we just don’t see that. If you actually look at the list of the highest-earning American income groups, this is the most widely cited thing I’ve said in any academic public intellectual article, which surprised me. But if you look at the top 10 income earning groups in the USA, eight of them are groups of color. I actually brought the list with me because I wasn’t sure I’d remember it point by point.

But number one is Indian Americans $135,000 per year. Number two is Taiwanese Americans. Number three is Australians, so white group does come in. But number four is Filipino Americans. Number five is South African Americans, obviously a mixed white and black population there. Seven is Indonesian Americans, eight is Pakistani Americans, nine is Persian Americans. 10 is Lebanese Americans, one of the largest Arab groups, I could go on Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Nigerians are within the next small block.

Now there is one other point worth making as you read this list, actually, you have to scroll down to number 86 to get to my immediate neighbors, Appalachian Americans. Such a large lower-income, mostly white group, they’re broken out independently at 38,593, about a fourth of what Indian Americans make in the USA. So this today is a very complex, multicolored picture. And the real question is what predicts it, what predicts success? Is it that small amount of racism that you’ve been describing you admitted to? And the answer is emphatically not.

We find when serious economists, Sowell again comes to mind, June O’Neill more recently, look at even the gap between blacks and whites in terms of income, you find that vanishes. It reduces to virtually nothing if you adjust a few things. Age, the most common age for a black man is 27 for a white man 58. It’s not quite the median, but it’s very relevant. Region of residents, we’re more likely to live in the South, test scores, years, not quality of education. When those things are taken into play, the gap becomes nothing.

So I guess my point is here that it seems more logical to take those things into play, to focus very intensely on education for African American kids and indeed for all American kids, that something we’re trailing as a country. It makes more sense to focus on this than it does to hunt for ghosts that haven’t been here for perhaps decades. So that’s the conclusion of my piece.

Ian Rowe: OK. Dr. Reilly. Wow. So, Bob, when you hear these reflections, Dr. Reilly’s analysis that shows that there isn’t this straight line, when you hear Stephanie talk about the Rosenwald Schools, what does it do for a young black child or a child of any race when they don’t know this history? When there is a dominant narrative that you know, separate black schools are unequal, they’re inferior? Why is it so important that we broaden the history so that all of these stories are told, including the stories of atrocity?

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: Because people are motivated to change and improve their lives when they’re exposed to victories that are possible, not injuries to be avoided. I was opposed to forced busing for integration, and I left the civil rights movement on that because I think we should have argued that separate was strategically unequal, not inherently unequal. Because when you say it’s inherently unequal, anything is all black is all bad. And I think Jews were kept out of Harvard and Yale, and they went to Yeshiva and established Brandeis. But when they desegregated, they maintain Brandeis and Yeshiva and went to Harvard and Yale. We integrated ourselves out of our institutions and so that was a fundamental mistake.

But the real issue here is upward mobility of all people. And whenever you generalize about a group, all blacks, all this, and then you try to apply remedies, it always helps those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom. If Coca-Cola says well, I don’t want to be racist anymore, and I’m going to require 30 percent of all law firms to have black lawyers, or —

Ian Rowe: Which is what’s happening.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: And women have to be promoted to boards. But they’re not talking about low-income, black, white, or brown women, they’re talking about upper-income women and blacks who are going to make it anyway. So it’s a kind of a bait-and-switch game where we use the demographics of those at the bottom and then when the benefits arrive, they go to those at the top. And so it continues to a big class split.

So we really at the Woodson Center in 1776, we think we should really emphasize upward mobility for all people at the bottom. And use our energies for most strategies and policies that uplift people who are locked-in because of class and family circumstances as opposed to the color of their skin.

Ian Rowe: And so what’s interesting about that is why is it that when we have a narrative, particularly around the black community, it’s almost always from a deficit perspective. As opposed to studying all the groups that you just said which includes Nigerian Americans, which includes, by the way, black Americans who have adopted certain behaviors, why is it so alluring to continue to focus on the negative, as opposed to what we try to do in “Red, White, and Black,” which is tell the stories of success? How do we demystify success that we try to deconstruct behavior so that young people know that outside of their race, there are actions within their control that can help influence their outcomes?

Wilfred Reilly: I think that the short almost glib answer is that there’s not much money to be made in telling people to stand up and go get a job. That’s a cost of a self-help book. I mean, it’s a very easy self-fulfilling prescription. I mean —

Ian Rowe: But —

Wilfred Reilly: There’s more to say. But I mean, one of the things that I — talking to men’s groups and so on over the years — one of the things that I’ve heard coaches or faith leaders say probably 100 times is that if you do three or four things, you have virtually no chance of becoming poor in your life. And you have about an 80 percent chance of becoming middle class.

And if I recall them correctly, the four things are: take a job, any job, and keep working; go up through the shift supervisor and assistant manager, and so on roles at the local store; and obviously, educate yourself as you do this. Complete high school, don’t be convicted of a felony, and don’t have children until you are married, or at least 25. So there’s an opt-out even there.

But if you do those four basic things, you are never going to be a poor man or woman, empirically. And I think that obviously, this is a message that is conveyed by many people in the black community. I’ve just mentioned a couple of examples is conveyed by many Caucasian leaders as well as Hispanic individuals.

But I think that one of the issues in the black community is that the civil rights movement continued on long after civil rights had become a reality. So you had a group of people who are largely from the upper-middle and lower-upper classes, I would say if you look at, for example, the sons of who are very active in Chicago social life, not bad people. But who have to some extent a stake in continuing policies that benefit, for example, the black upper-middle class.

I think that this is an issue — in political science — this is an issue with revolutionary movements in general by the way. What happens in the revolutionary is won? Does the common turn go away, or does that become a secondary form of corrupt leadership? And the answer is unfortunately clear.

As a final line, a friend — in fact, my partner Jane Lingle — uses the term “stolen victimhood” for this in the context of feminism as it happens, but this would apply more broadly. Where if you can claim that group X, on average does say 8 percent worse than group Y, you can suggest remedies, i.e., all 10 percent of all positions have to go to group X members that will, as Bob said benefit the wealthiest, most elite, most competitive members of group X, which would probably include you.

The simplest solution to problems that disproportionately impact people of color but that impact a great number of Americans is to help the poor. So if black people are more likely to be poor, a program that assists all poor people will assist those black people who have the most at risk, the most to gain. But again, there are very few wealthy leaders that would personally benefit from that, unfortunately.

Ian Rowe: Well, that’s why I run schools and am such a big proponent of school choice. Stephanie just tell us a little bit extending the story of the Rosenwald Schools. Because I think it’s important for people to understand, Brown v. Board of Education, such a landmark victory which most people hail, even as Dr. Reilly just said was so important. But what was the impact of Brown v. Board of Education on the Rosenwald Schools and all of the educators, all the teachers, what was that impact?

Stephanie Deutsch: Well, it killed the Rosenwald Schools because they were black schools. So ultimately, over a period of 10 to 15, 20 years, in some places, they all closed. And just like I said I can remember the moment when I thought about Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, I can almost remember the moment when I realized, oh, my gosh, this was actually a loss in many ways for the African American community —

Ian Rowe: Huge.

Stephanie Deutsch: — because they had built up these incredibly strong institutions that were loved. And I was sitting in the reading room at the Library of Congress reading about a walkout that had been organized at a high school in North Carolina because they didn’t want their school to close. They didn’t want their black high school to close, they were proud of it, they loved it. And it’s something that isn’t immediately apparent. You don’t necessarily think about that when we think about school desegregation.

And obviously, for the child who wanted to go to the neighboring white school because it was a better school obviously, it’s a plus that that child can go to that school. But that these lovingly created schools disappear. And all those black teachers and black principals who had such agency are either out of a job or now their job is different. You know, they can still succeed at the white schools, and many did, but it’s different. And it was one of the things that really fascinated me and that hadn’t occurred to me until I did this work of the loss.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: In 1973, I was sent by the Urban League up to Boston to monitor the busing issue there. When Judge Garrity asked the black community in Boston, what do they want, strengthen neighborhood schools or busing? And they had town meetings for about three months. And the people in the community concluded that they wanted to strengthen existing schools and spend more money was called the land of compromise, spend more money.

While the civil rights leadership, the social activists that went to Yale and Harvard said to Judge Garrity, “To hell with what they want, bus them.” None of those advocates had their children on their buses, they were in private schools. And that is a pattern that has continued that the leadership is enforcing rules that did not adversely affect them. And one white parent said, “You are going to bus your children into our schools, and they’ll graduate as dumb as our children.” Because they were busing from a superior black school into an inferior white school in Boston. Wilfred Reilly: Just as a very quick comment. That was one of the remarkable things about this in Boston, in parts of New York. These kids weren’t being bused into rich suburban schools, they were being bused into, as it happened, Irish and Italian American slum schools. And the fighting between these kids was so extreme that most of the white parents, and in some cities close to half of the black parents, took their kids out of these public schools totally.

This is what shut down. as I understand, many of the urban public school systems or what reduced student population by more than a quarter, white student population by two-thirds. So again, there was no concern for these kids. The concern was that a statement be made even if what you have is an integrated poor school full of constant violence, that has no positive impact on the children that are in that institution.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: You take the list of people, Jesse Jackson Jr., Eleanor Holmes Norton, every one of those leaders in the cities all sent their children to Sidwell Friends School, and not to the public schools, but they were opposed to vouchers and opposed to choice in education. And that’s the hypocrisy of it when leaders don’t have to live with the consequences of their advocacy because it just adversely affects poor black kids. And that kind of I call it betrayal continues to this day.

Wilfred Reilly: To be fair, Sidwell was integrated in every way but class. I’m teasing, but it is a relative point.

Stephanie Deutsch: It was created to be an integrated school.

Wilfred Reilly: Really?

Stephanie Deutsch: Sidwell was absolutely, and it actually received some donations from the Rosenwalds.

Ian Rowe: What’s the takeaway? So imagine “Red, White, Black,” becomes a bestseller. I think it’s already in the top 100 of Amazon. And this history is known about these performative actions where the community is saying one thing, but the people who know better are imposing their solutions. What’s the takeaway in terms of how we should think about contemporary issues facing the black community?

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: Well, we need to invest in strength. There are examples of the same grit and determination, the same attitude of resilience being exhibited every day. You hear me — we write about the mom who had two daughters sleeping in a car for three years in a homeless shelter studying by the light of the cell phone. And the girls graduated salutatorian and valedictorian and entered college as sophomores because they took so many advanced-placement classes. We need to learn from those contemporary examples of resilience and self-determination to really help understand how we can encourage other families in similar situations to achieve. In other words, learn from strengths.

Ian Rowe: So I’ll try to have the presence of people who would disagree with that and say that sounds like everyone’s got to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, right? What are the structural barriers that we would concur that should be opened up or reduced that would then make it so that young mom isn’t in that situation in the first place? I mean, I think for me, school choice, ensuring that every kid regardless of race, class, gender, ZIP code, you do have an opportunity to go to an exceptional school. So what else is on that list? What else for the people who don’t somehow subscribe to this view of self- determination and building agency who are so focused on the structural barriers, where can we meet that group of people?

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: I really think there is no compromise with expectation. There is no substitute for saying to someone the victimizer might have knocked you down, but the victim has to get up. And I think what the most we can do is provide them with living examples of restoration and transformation, and redemption, and action. People are led when they can see examples of virtue in action. So I think our challenge is to try to encourage people to develop the proper attitude. That’s where we need to — you can’t compromise with expectation.

Wilfred Reilly: I agree with that.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: There’s no such thing as diminished expectation. No such thing.

Stephanie Deutsch: I’m interested in what you said about the schools that you’re going to be running that they are character-based. Is character perhaps kind of the bottom line that we’re wanting to develop?

Ian Rowe: Well, that’s certainly part of it. I mean, our schools are going to be grounded in the four cardinal virtues: courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And they’re going to be in the heart of the South Bronx, it’s going to be all black and brown kids. It’s not as if we’re waiting for white kids to suddenly attend the school to then make it better, right? So there’s no diminishing of expectations of what we have to achieve.

And I just think sometimes we’re so divided on this issue. People who study this they’re in one camp or the other. And hopefully a book like “Red, White and Black” can show that even under the most adverse conditions, there was individual agency and they were mediating institutions. Strong families, high rates of marriage, strong faith-based investments, strong education, like Rosenwald. So there are structural barriers, so it’s not an either-or situation, what I’m hoping “Red, White, and Black” can illustrate is individual agency and the strength of mediating institutions that shape the character of the next generation.

Wilfred Reilly: Yeah, just one comment on that. I think that the — the comment from the other two panelists that we absolutely can’t compromise on things like ideas of excellence, I think we all agree with. But one fairly obvious compromise with the say well-intentioned left would be admitting that some structural barriers exist and working to remove them. I would say that there are really two sets of these barriers that by far, the strongest set of these to me as someone who’s a higher educator in the Appalachian region is social class.

I mean, to me, the most significant impact of historical oppression for black or Native American Indians, for example, is that more people in those communities are poor, or attend failing low-income schools. But if you come to Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, Texas, you’ll see no shortage of failing lower-income schools that happen to be almost entirely Caucasian. The 50 percent majority of the poor in the USA are still white. And this is something that for obvious strategic reasons, neither the far right nor the left ever brings up. So I mean, I think we can certainly agree that sleeping in the back of a car makes you less likely to attend Harvard, or you certainly still can.

I think we can also focus on eliminating the residual racism that exists. There are very practical solutions. I mean, I’ve been a “boss,” as all of us have. I mean, you can do things like simply do name-blind hiring. Have your HR department replace each candidate’s race and sex and indeed name with a number. Works perfectly, you pick the best people. That’s something that I’ll do if I’m ever back in the corporate world. So I think we can all agree on that.

But a final sentence on this, I don’t think that’s the cause of most of the gaps we see today, it’s just not. When you look at those sort of work for or vote for kind of surveys that show 8 percent discrimination against blacks, the last I saw, I asked about voting for a qualified president in X group presidential candidate, and you got the usual 8 percent bias against blacks. But he also got 9 percent against Hispanics, 9 or 10 percent against Jews, 8 percent against women, which really surprised me, although perhaps not the female member of the panel. And then on from there, 19 percent against Mormons, 35 percent against gay Americans.

So I think that the reality is that virtually everyone, to some extent, a Jewish woman, for example, faces this sort of bigotry in day-to-day life. And to some extent, you can’t say it doesn’t exist, you can’t plant your head in the sand, but you also can’t let it stop you.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: That’s right.

Ian Rowe: So we’re coming to the end, I want to ask each of you one question. You know, there’s a lot of debate between 1619 versus 1776. And maybe one way to try to solve this problem is to project forward. So while it’s important to know our history, what’s going to exist in the future?

So let’s consider the year 2076, 300 years from the true founding, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence? What is America then? Are we still a nation trapped in this discussion of it’s just — we still have entrenched oppression, it’s still racism is in the DNA of the country? Or is it a nation that the mediating institutions of family, faith, education, schools, there’s more choice? Those institutions are strengthened in such a way that more young people do have agency? What’s your forecast? And what is it that we have to do now to ensure that we have a society where human flourishing is more the norm versus grievance? Each of you, go.

Wilfred Reilly: I can start as the junior guy in the group. Basically, I think that — unfortunately, the answer to that is that it depends who wins to some extent in a number of these ideological contests and conversations. And I do think that’s why some of these academic discussions, although our activists do great work on the ground, are worth having.

Obviously, the trend of the past 300 years, at least in the West has been that things are getting better. This is one of again, the great ignored stories in the mass media world certainly. But if you pick a variable, diet, IQ, women’s rights, virtually anything you could look at, at least for those who choose to access the tools we have, those things have been improving for centuries. So I think that’ll continue. I think we’ll have better cars and electronic books, and so on that we have today.

But the question of whether we’ll have families and so forth really depends on whether we — which narrative we choose for society, what we teach in our schools. We were talking about some of these things that seemed like science fiction beforehand, like buying a robotic friend, something that is now fairly common in Japan. Do we encourage that, or do we discourage it? I personally think we should strongly discourage it.

But I think that doing that sort of thing, focusing on tough things like physical exercise, or intense education, that are no longer absolutely necessary for survival is something that has to be taught, it has to be emphasized. And I have enough faith in America, and I think we will teach and emphasize it, but we’ll have to see.

Stephanie Deutsch: Well, Ian, I’m a grandmother. And so, when you say 2076, I think about Leon, and Arlo, and Aurora, my grandchildren, who will be coming. They’ll be where I am now, they’ll be coming to the culmination of their lives. And I do see them as living and navigating already the little ones a different world than their parents grew up in, a more varied world, a more integrated world, a more diverse world. So it’s my hope that the positive things that we’ve put out will happen. That’s my hope. And I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t have that hope.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: My vision is that we will replace with radical grace theory. Radical grace theory.

Stephanie Deutsch: Radical grace theory.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: Yeah, as opposed to critical race theory, radical grace theory.

Stephanie Deutsch: I like that.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: And also that everybody that puts forth an agenda, they should be required to explain how it is going to promote the improvement of the human condition. If their policies and programs are initiated, tell me how will life be improved? And then, that’s the standard that anyone should use of assessing an approach, a proposition, or a value.

Ian Rowe: Wow, well, with those words, Dr. Reilly, Stephanie, Bob, thank you so much for a rich discussion. Thank you so much for being the senior editor of “Red, White, and Black.” It’s important to understand our history, our full and complete history, in order to find the path forward for all Americans and kids of all races. Thank you very much, and thank you to our panel.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: Thank you.

Wilfred Reilly: Thank you.

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: Boy, this was good.