CHICAGO – On the 84th day of his 100-day rooftop vigil to build a community center designed to provide opportunities to his community, Pastor Corey Brooks wished to share his thoughts on systemic racism.
What follows has been lightly edited. We strongly encourage you to watch the accompanying video so you may hear the pastor in his own words.
I've been reading about the rising crime all over America. Here, we just had 30 ladies shot and seven were killed, and two of them had babies who were also killed. I've been reading about Baltimore a lot lately, where there were 36 homicides in January.
2022 is not looking very good at all.
What bothers me — aside from the shooting and murdering — is the talk around it. I understand how people are trying to figure things out. And I've talked earlier about how Defund the Police led to more carnage in the poor communities. Now that Defund the Police is no longer politically cool to talk about the conversation has returned to systemic racism.
I don't know, but I'm starting to wonder if systemic racism was the original Defund the Police.
The left has used race so much in advancing their causes. If there's a roadblock, they call it systemic racism until it withers away. It's a very effective strategy because nobody wants to be associated with racism, and so they get out of the way.
But we've had all of this talk of systemic racism and it's gotten us where? The reason why I bring up systemic racism was because in one of the articles I was reading about Baltimore some city officials were blaming all of the crime on systemic racism. They've been saying that for years and years and years.
What they mean by systemic racism is white supremacy. They believe that it's the root cause of all our ills, the white supremacist and the system these white supremacists created.
But that is a lie. That is an excuse.
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We do have systemic racism and it's called liberalism. Post-60s liberalism to be exact. Look around my community. The government practically has had a hand in every aspect of creating this impoverished and violent neighborhood. And, to our great shame, we the people who live here allowed the government to take over our lives in their efforts to help us. They created this massively oppressive culture of dependency.
That's why I spent so much of my time trying to get people in this community to understand the basic American principles of free will accountability and merit. And to show you how crazy this Democrat charge of systemic racism is: those values I just described are systemically racist and need to be destroyed.
We need to stop with this systemic racist excuse. My community suffers because of liberal, Democratic policies. And we continue to suffer. So we must reject the post-60s liberalism with every fiber of our being. We must stop letting the charge of systemic racism destroy everything in its path. We are better than that. And we are.
Follow along as Fox News checks in Pastor Corey Brooks each day with a new Rooftop Revelation.
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Eli Steele is a documentary filmmaker and writer. His latest film is "What Killed Michael Brown?" Twitter: @Hebro_Steele.
Camera by Terrell Allen.
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