[quote]Barkley is an outspoken supporter of gay rights. In 2006, he told Fox Sports: "I'm a big advocate of gay marriage. If they want to get married, God bless them."[/quote] [quote]Commenting on the Ferguson unrest, Barkley called the Ferguson looters "scumbags"[/quote] [quote]Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we as black people, we're never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you're black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people. It's a dirty, dark secret; I'm glad it's coming out. One of the reasons we're never going to be successful as a whole, because of other black people. And for some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don't break the law, you're not a good black person. And it's a dirty, dark secret. There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don't have success. It's best to knock a successful black person down because they're intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they're successful... We're the only ethnic group who say, 'Hey, if you go to jail, it gives you street cred.' It's just typical BS that goes on when you're black, man.[/quote] [quote]In his response to the controversy generated by the removal of Confederate monuments as highlighted by the August, 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Barkley stated, "I’ve never thought about those statues a day in my life. I think if you asked most black people to be honest, they ain’t thought a day in their life about those stupid statues. What we as black people need to do: We need to worry about getting our education, we need to stop killing each other, we need to try to find a way to have more economic opportunity and things like that. Those things are important and significant. You know, I’m wasting time and energy [if I’m] screaming at a neo-Nazi, or [saying] ‘Man, you’ve got to take this statue down.'”[/quote] If people take that as a white supremacist stance they should kill themselves, that journal is forever fake news and shouldn't be considered valid for like, anything.