Host Don Lemon: “I want to get your take on what we heard from Senator Tim Scott last night about this country not being racist.”
CNN’s United Shades of America host W. Kamau Bell: “No, don’t do it to me, Don! No!”
Lemon: “Why not? Listen. Let me tell you what he said….He said the original sin isn’t the end of the story, it is a story of redemption. What are your thoughts on what he said? I gather from your reaction there. Go on.”
Bell: “I mean, it sounds like a low-rent ee cummings poem. I don’t know what that was. This country was built on racism. It was built on the genocide on the native Americans and it was built on the transatlantic slave trade for slaving African people….The country we all live in right now, we all, in some way, are benefiting from that. Now, obviously, black folks are not benefiting as much as white folks are but we are all sitting on indigenous land stolen that was from them and it was built by enslaved Africans. That’s the truth. And the fact that we were enslaved and when we got our freedom, our quote/unquote ‘freedom,’ we were never restored whole.”
— CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, April 29, 2021.