Stories of Us: Roxanne Beckford Hoge | Stories of Us

To prove you're not racist becomes this game of Twister. Parents need to know that their children are being absolutely damaged. I'm Roxanne Beckford-Hogue, and this is my story. I'm a mom of four, an actress, a small business owner. I'm from Jamaica, island of, not New York, and I had a pretty idyllic, amazing childhood until things got really hairy politically on my island, to the point that my mother announced that we were moving to a new country the night before. Jamaica went through a lot of turmoil in the 70s, and politics became everything, and when that happens, mob rule happens. And so we moved to America when I was 11. Being an American citizen, it is a beacon of freedom. It means you can say, and be, and do anything. Any avenue you want is open to you, and that doesn't mean great success, I'm gonna be hugely rich. You can just live a life that's quiet with your family. The most incredible thing about America, I think, is that you can choose to be anything regardless of what your parents were. That's not true in almost any other country in the world. Who your parents are determines what doors are open to you, and here, it's literally all doors are open to everyone. So as a kid, I did work as an actor, and I was Tatiana in Midsummer Night's Dream at school. I came to L.A. in 1989, and I gave myself a year. I said, in a year, if you don't have a SAG card, hang it up and go back to corporate America. After a year, I got tapped Hartley into a movie. I had one line, but it was with Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie, and it was like going to film school because I was on set for two weeks and had one line, so I got to watch and learn. I loved playing Whitley's cousin on A Different World, which a lot of people know me from, and I did Something's Gotta Give and Bewitched and Father of the Bride II as movies, and I did a lot of just sitcoms through the 90s. When I came to L.A., I was still a classic liberal, so much so that when I discovered Dennis Prager on the radio I called to argue with him about the death penalty. I would drive around trying to get babies to sleep, and so I started listening to talk radio a lot, and I remember thinking, this Dennis guy, he's completely off the deep end. He doesn't get what I know about our side, and so I called him to tell him how wrong he was, and slowly over time I realized that he was making sense. So he's sort of been my teacher and my mentor. I even wrote an article about being a radical feminist for Salon and name-checked Dennis as this right-wing radio host. I just remembered that. What was it about? I don't even know what it was about, but I remember thinking, that Dennis Prager, right-winger. I became a conservative because I wanted to join the team that fought for civil rights, that didn't inter-Japanese Americans, and that freed the slaves, for heaven's sakes. I am a conservative because I believe in tolerance and the ability and the right of everyone to speak their mind. That used to be classic liberalism. There used to be things that we all agreed on. Look at JFK's speeches. Everything he says would be total, would get him booed out of a Democratic Party convention. I just, I realized one day that the other side wasn't bad people. I also realized that I was on the side of people who were bullies. I was on a set and the director stopped action, which never happens. I mean, the days are long and people are trying to make their pages so they can get to the next set of pages the next day, and we stopped everything to watch a Democratic debate. I think they were all cheering for John Kerry. It was very evident that if you spoke up and said, oh, that doesn't make sense, that you'd be fired or shunned or something bad would happen. That didn't seem American to me. What's happened at schools is sort of mirroring what happened in Hollywood. At first, a super tolerant place where everyone was welcome and the golden rule was practiced. That's what we taught. Treat others as you'd like to be treated. Slowly, over the past few years, it's become balkanized. They've introduced in so many schools, out of, I'm sure good intentions, but we know what the road to hell is paved with, affinity groups, which basically separate parents based on the color of their skin. These groups get budgets from the school because the school wants to say, look, we're funding our black families to be together. They'll have events separate from the school. When they did that, they took them out of the parent associations, which every school has like a dirty dozen, usually moms, who get stuff done. They're the ones who run the ball or the gala or the fundraiser or the auction or whatever it's called. When you take black people out of the group of moms who do things, when you take Hispanic people out of the group, when you take, now you end up with basically a group of white people running things. That's, I don't think that's what they intended. To prove you're not racist becomes this ever crazy game of twister. So they've had to create affinity groups so they can box us up and put us on display and say, look, we have black families. Look, we have Latin families. Look, we have gay families. And now they've trickled down to doing it to kids. They are now having affinity groups where they pull the kids out of instructional time based on their race. And they put the black kids in one room and then the white allies in another room. And they say, this is what's happening. Black men are being murdered by police at an amazing rate. Well, actually, no. Why don't you look up the statistics for a particular year? What sort of mother would I be if I told my kids, yeah, you're getting a D because of the color of your skin. I've got to tell them you're getting a D because you're not working hard enough or you're not getting it. What can we do to make you understand this? What can I do to give you the tools to be successful? We're gonna fight back because this is the greatest country on God's green earth. You can be and do anything and it doesn't matter what your 23andMe says. It doesn't. Be nice, be kind. Everyone you meet has a struggle. Everyone you meet has a cross to bear. Parents need to know and understand that their children are being absolutely damaged. You need to be an advocate for the mental wellbeing of your kid, no matter what race they are. If your kid is black and being told that they're being hunted and killed and that they can't succeed without white people, if your kid is white and being told that they're the reason for all that is bad in the world, if you're Asian and being told that working hard will get you nowhere because what we're working on is taking away all the merit-based opportunities that you created for yourself, if you're Latin and being told that your gendered language is a lie and you have to refer to yourself as Latinx, all these things are lies. People think that you have to do something big or even come out to fight back. But sometimes bravery comes in really small increments. And by being the person who speaks up, by being the person who smiles in the face of adversity, who says, I think that's wrong, you don't know how much courage you're giving to someone else. And it's not necessarily another adult who has a life and is able to get on. It may be a kid. It may be your kid. Small steps become bigger steps. Next thing you know, you're running a marathon. Thank you for watching this video. To keep PragerU videos free, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. We'd appreciate it.