In an explosive 18-minute video posted on YouTube Thursday, conservative commentator Candace Owens explains why she does “not support George Floyd and the media depiction of him as a martyr for black America.”
During her at-times impassioned video post (below), Owens, who is African-American, criticizes what she describes as the African-American community “cater[ing] to the bottom denominator of our society” by “demand[ing] support and justice for the people in our community that are up to no good.” The holding up of Floyd as a “martyr for black America,” she suggests, is an example of this trend that she forcefully rejects.
In the video, Owens highlights Floyd’s criminal record, particularly a 2007 armed robbery of a woman’s home in Houston, for which Floyd was convicted in 2009 and served five years in prison. While the media has generally portrayed Floyd as having “started a new life” since his five-year stint in prison, Owens points to his alleged attempt to use a counterfeit bill, which prompted the ultimately fatal arrest, and two autopsies indicating he had drugs in his system as evidence suggesting he had not fully reformed.
Owens repeatedly stresses that by highlighting Floyd’s criminal record she is not attempting to justify former Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions, which she thoroughly condemns; rather, she is arguing that Floyd should not be held up as some form of “martyr” or role model for the black community.
The desire to post the message, Owens begins, “has been weighing very heavily on my heart and on my mind,” but she held back because there are “so many emotions and so much pressure for me to go with the popular opinion about who George Floyd was, and sometimes it can be difficult when there were just so many external pressures to say what you believe. And this was an instance where I felt like my silence would have been better in the beginning.”
“But the more that I would think about it, I realized that we are being sold a lot of lies, at the detriment to the black community, at the detriment to the white community and at the detriment to America as a whole,” she continued. “So I want to come out and say that I do not support George Floyd and the media depiction of him as a martyr for black America.”
Citing conservative African-American author and columnist Shelby Steele, Owens says the black community is “unique in that we are the only people that fight and scream and demand support and justice for the people in our community that are up to no good.” While she strongly condemns Chauvin’s actions and says the family of George Floyd “deserves justice for the way that he died,” Owens states, “I also am not going to accept the narrative that this is the best the black community has to offer.”
“For whatever reason it has become fashionable over the last five or six years for us to turn criminals into heroes overnight, and it is something that I find to be despicable and there’s something that I refuse to stand by any longer and I am not going to play a part in it — no matter how much pressure comes from black liberals and black conservatives as some token of people wanting you to believe that this is the only way you can be black,” she says.
Watch her full statement below:
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