1 00:00:01,940 --> 00:00:05,280 You’ve heard about the black card, right? 2 00:00:05,280 --> 00:00:09,180 No—not the one from Visa or American Express. 3 00:00:09,180 --> 00:00:12,200 This one is much more valuable. 4 00:00:12,200 --> 00:00:15,880 There are entire organizations that have been built upon it. 5 00:00:15,880 --> 00:00:21,160 And individuals that have used it to acquire both wealth and influence. 6 00:00:21,160 --> 00:00:24,940 If this sounds like something you might wish to own, you should know that there is only 7 00:00:24,940 --> 00:00:31,280 one way you can get your hands on it: you have to be born with black skin. 8 00:00:31,280 --> 00:00:33,320 That’s the only requirement. 9 00:00:33,320 --> 00:00:34,920 Really. 10 00:00:34,920 --> 00:00:38,559 You can be poor, middle class, or rich—it doesn't matter. 11 00:00:38,560 --> 00:00:42,940 The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, 12 00:00:42,940 --> 00:00:46,700 even if you’ve never been oppressed. 13 00:00:46,700 --> 00:00:50,420 Flash the black card, and most white people will cower. 14 00:00:50,420 --> 00:00:55,100 Play the black card expertly, and you can win awards, make millions—all the while 15 00:00:55,100 --> 00:01:00,840 claiming that the people who got you there somehow hate you. 16 00:01:00,840 --> 00:01:05,320 With a black card, you can sell books full of indecipherable prose. 17 00:01:05,320 --> 00:01:11,040 Because with a card that powerful, who cares if your words make any sense? 18 00:01:11,040 --> 00:01:16,760 You can call yourself a “civil rights leader” and shake down multinational corporations, 19 00:01:16,760 --> 00:01:23,840 or you can torch your own neighborhood because you didn’t like the outcome of a grand jury verdict. 20 00:01:23,840 --> 00:01:29,030 Ironically, the people you might think have the most legitimate claim to the black card 21 00:01:29,030 --> 00:01:32,289 refuse to use it. 22 00:01:32,289 --> 00:01:35,580 Take my grandfather, for instance: 23 00:01:35,580 --> 00:01:38,820 He raised me from the time I was 9 years old. 24 00:01:38,820 --> 00:01:45,560 Born in 1941 in rural North Carolina, he started working at age five, laying out tobacco to dry 25 00:01:45,560 --> 00:01:48,080 on a sharecropping farm. 26 00:01:48,090 --> 00:01:53,789 Jim Crow, separate drinking fountains, and the KKK were ever-present realities. 27 00:01:53,789 --> 00:01:57,190 He was 17 when he married my grandmother. 28 00:01:57,190 --> 00:02:01,580 He made a living cleaning homes and office buildings until he saved up enough money to 29 00:02:01,580 --> 00:02:04,420 open his own cleaning business. 30 00:02:04,420 --> 00:02:07,660 The thing is, he never played any card. 31 00:02:07,660 --> 00:02:09,700 Nor did my grandmother. 32 00:02:09,700 --> 00:02:12,260 If they had problems, they didn’t blame anybody. 33 00:02:12,260 --> 00:02:14,460 They just fixed them. 34 00:02:14,460 --> 00:02:18,319 And they raised me to do the same. 35 00:02:18,320 --> 00:02:21,500 Chores were a requirement in their household. 36 00:02:21,500 --> 00:02:25,480 So was reading the Bible every morning before school. 37 00:02:25,489 --> 00:02:29,260 I didn’t like the Bible readings, and I hated the chores. 38 00:02:29,260 --> 00:02:34,700 But I realize now that these small acts of discipline, although sometimes stifling, 39 00:02:34,700 --> 00:02:39,420 had a strong, positive impact on my character. 40 00:02:39,420 --> 00:02:42,520 I was a first-generation college student. 41 00:02:42,520 --> 00:02:45,220 This was supposed to be the ticket to prosperity. 42 00:02:45,220 --> 00:02:47,150 But it wasn’t. 43 00:02:47,150 --> 00:02:51,800 I left college with a mountain of debt and no practical skills. 44 00:02:51,800 --> 00:02:56,500 I had just $80 dollars in my bank account and very few prospects. 45 00:02:56,510 --> 00:02:58,140 I could have given up. 46 00:02:58,140 --> 00:03:02,940 I could have dug deep into my history and declared myself a natural product 47 00:03:02,940 --> 00:03:05,160 of ancestral oppression. 48 00:03:05,160 --> 00:03:09,520 I could have played the black card and absolved myself of all responsibility 49 00:03:09,520 --> 00:03:12,400 for my own stupid decisions. 50 00:03:12,400 --> 00:03:14,620 Except, I didn’t. 51 00:03:14,620 --> 00:03:18,480 Because it would have destroyed my grandfather’s legacy. 52 00:03:18,490 --> 00:03:24,650 I am proud that he had the fortitude to turn nothing into something; and I have no intention 53 00:03:24,650 --> 00:03:28,340 of reversing that something back into a nothing. 54 00:03:28,340 --> 00:03:31,540 My attitude comes with a price, however. 55 00:03:31,540 --> 00:03:36,760 Because if you are born black and you don’t accept your natural status as a victim, 56 00:03:36,760 --> 00:03:42,640 then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question. 57 00:03:42,640 --> 00:03:45,120 Well, so be it. 58 00:03:45,120 --> 00:03:51,040 If believing in myself, if accepting the responsibility for my failures somehow disqualifies me from 59 00:03:51,040 --> 00:03:56,980 owning an imaginary card, then let me be the first to declare that I don’t want one. 60 00:03:56,980 --> 00:04:02,240 I also don’t want Cornel West, Al Sharpton or insert-anyone-else who uses their skin 61 00:04:02,250 --> 00:04:05,939 color to game the system as a role model. 62 00:04:05,939 --> 00:04:08,739 I already have my grandfather. 63 00:04:08,739 --> 00:04:12,469 If there is one thing that my family history has taught me, it’s that I do not need a 64 00:04:12,469 --> 00:04:17,840 black card—or an imaginary anything—to make something of myself. 65 00:04:17,840 --> 00:04:23,190 For the record, my grandfather, now retired, lives in a home that he and my grandmother 66 00:04:23,190 --> 00:04:28,790 built on a plot of land they purchased in North Carolina—the very same sharecropping 67 00:04:28,790 --> 00:04:32,009 farm that he worked on as a small child. 68 00:04:32,009 --> 00:04:33,410 His story is unique. 69 00:04:33,410 --> 00:04:36,040 His story is beautiful. 70 00:04:36,040 --> 00:04:38,340 Because it’s American. 71 00:04:38,340 --> 00:04:42,300 And that’s the only card I’ve ever been interested in playing. 72 00:04:42,300 --> 00:04:45,240 I’m Candace Owens for Prager University.