The national tragedy of more drug overdose deaths, suicides, and homicides won’t be solved “if we have to look at each other through the prism of race,” activist Bob Woodson says.
“There are people who are profiting from the grievance of our society, and we must challenge these racial profiteers,” says Woodson, an author and founder of the Washington-based Woodson Center.
Some “try to promote” the racial challenges in America, Woodson says, citing two examples.
“Black Lives Matter … comes along and collects $100 million in white guilt money,” he says. “Ibram X. Kendi at Boston University collects $48 million to do anti-racist research.”
In Woodson’s view, “race has been a distraction” to addressing the real problems confronting poor communities.
If a fraction of the money given to “anti-racism” initiatives instead was put into organizations such as The Piney Woods School, which serves children from challenging backgrounds and neighborhoods, Woodson contends that more lives could be changed in tangible ways.
Since the 1980s, Woodson, who is black, has worked to address issues plaguing poor communities across the country. As a young man, he was part of the civil rights movement. But, finding himself in disagreement with some aspects of the movement, Woodson says he “began to work on behalf of low-income people of all races.”
Now, at 86, Woodson says, The Woodson Center gives a voice “to the voiceless grassroots leaders who are laboring in these communities confronting drugs and violence and out-of-wedlock births.”
“I’ve sought an alternative to the traditional approach to these problems, which is to pour more government money into it, $22 trillion in the last 50 years on programs to aid the poor,” Woodson says. However, he adds, “70% of every dollar didn’t go to the poor, but those who serve the poor, who ask which problems are fundable, not which ones are solvable.”
Woodson joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to expose the harmful effects of a focus on race on black communities and to explain how the strategy of The Woodson Center transforms lives and entire neighborhoods.
Listen to the podcast below:
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