The founder of Black Entertainment Television slammed the protesters across the country who have destroyed statues as “borderline anarchists.”
Robert Johnson told Fox News that the individuals tearing down the statues “have the mistaken assumption that black people are sitting around cheering for them, saying ‘Oh my God, look at these white people. They’re doing something so important to us. They’re taking down the statue of a Civil War general who fought for the South.”
“You know, black people, in my opinion, black people laugh at white people who do this the same way we laugh at white people who say we got to take off the TV shows,” he said.
Johnson, America’s first black billionaire, continued: “Look, the people who are basically tearing down statues, trying to make a statement are basically borderline anarchists, the way I look at it. They really have no agenda other than the idea we’re going to topple a statue. It’s not going to give a kid whose parents can’t afford college money to go to college. It’s not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it’s not going to take people off welfare or food stamps.”
Johnson also mocked Hollywood celebrities who have collaborated in social media videos to apologize for racism on behalf of white people.
“You know, that to me is the silliest expression of white privilege that exists in this country,” he said. “The notion that a celebrity could get on a Twitter feed and say, ‘Oh my God, I am so sorry that I am white.’ I don’t find any black people getting on Twitter and saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry I’m black.’ And we got the worst problems. My thing is: Embrace being white, and do the right thing.”
“White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a damn.”
Johnson joins several other prominent black voices in the United States who have criticized the Black Lives Matter movement and the push to tear down or deface statues which started as an effort targeted at Confederate figures but has moved on to mainstream figures such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and abolitionist Col. Hans Christian Heg, whose statue was beheaded this week in Wisconsin.
“It’s clear that this whole movement to tear down monuments, I believe it’s really focused on dividing the country even further because the monuments are part of our history,” former Princeton professor Carol Swain, a black woman and former Democrat, said about the effort to remove statues deemed offensive from the public square.
“If we can’t learn from my history, then we’re in trouble,” she said. “If we start tearing down the monuments, what happens tomorrow when the leaders that we are celebrating today, when those people fall out of favor? It’s the wrong path for our nation. It’s divisive. It’s opportunism. And it’s just meant to stir up people that are traditionalist, people that love America, people that are patriotic.”
Black political activist Niger Innis also echoed the positions of Johnson and Swain criticizing the movement.
“The BLM movement, Black Lives Matter movement, was founded by Alicia Garza and a number of other co-founders that were promoting a hard Marxist and LGBT agenda,” he said earlier this month. “Look, I don’t have a problem with people exercising their First Amendment rights. You have the right to organize. You have the right to protest. You have the right to come up with an agenda. But I’ll be goddamned if you use the suffer[ing] and misery of black Americans and our legacy to the United States of America as your shield and use us as cannon fodder when your agenda really has not a damn thing to do with saving black lives.”
