White people are always stealing stuff from black people. And black people, like Oprah, don’t like it.

Neither do third-grade teachers in lily white schools.

Just a few months ago, my friend’s third-grade son informed him that white music record labels steal black music and never pay for it.

He learned that from a teacher who spent an hour breaking it down how the Beach Boys stole "Surfin’ USA" from Chuck Berry’s "Sweet Little 16". But the teacher left out the punchline: Chuck sued and won and today he is listed -- and paid -- as co-author of the song.

Ditto Robin Thicke and Pharell: last year, a judge ruled they owed the estate of Marvin Gaye $5 million for a similar offense.

The list of black creation and white theft is a long one, we are told -- stretching back to the pyramids right up to the space program.

And every scholar of Critical Race Theory will tell you it is one of the reasons for the historic poverty of black people: White people just keep stealing from them.

The latest story of this kind to reach popular culture is the legend of Henrietta Lacks: how in the 1950s, Johns Hopkins University extracted rare cervical cancer cells from her body during treatment and used them as the basis for hundreds of medical treatments and discoveries for diseases including AIDS.

But unlike Chuck Berry and Marvin Gaye, Henrietta Lacks never got paid. And that is why Oprah got mad enough to produce and star in an HBO movie about it.  What the white people did “not understand is: we didn’t know nothing about nothing,” Oprah cum Lacks charges in the movie to the cowering white reporter.

In scene after scene we learn more and more about how white medical authorities ignored, denied, condoned, excused, and even lied to Henrietta about her cells -- and what they were worth.

Oprah’s movie is being well received in all the right places, with all the right people heaping plaudits upon her for exposing this legacy of historical mendacity and racial larceny. NPR said it was “brilliant.”

Variety liked it so much that this bible of the entertainment business said it should have been a mini-series.

The New York Times called it “intriguing and thought-provoking,” agreeing with every other major critic that role was the best of Oprah’s career.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Emmys: Henrietta’s son showed up and said Oprah never paid him a dime for the story of his mom. And now, like Chuck Berry and Marvin Gaye, he wants to get paid from the person who stole his mom’s story.

“The late Lacks’ son, Lawrence, has claimed Winfrey and HBO should cough up some cash for using his mother’s story,” said the New York Post.

But Oprah does not want to hear it, any more than the Beach Boys or Robin Thicke or all the bio-med companies that made billions from cells of Henrietta Lacks, says the Post:

“Do I think the Lacks family should have been paid for all of those cells by all the millions of drug companies in the world who have used those cells… of course they should have,” she told us at the premiere hosted by HBO CEO Richard Plepler.

“Do I think that its now my responsibility or HBO to compensate for that, no. 

“It was our job to bring the story to light and it is a shame that they were never compensated. But I will tell you this, Deborah [Henrietta’s youngest daughter] to her dying day never cared about the money she just cared about her mother and her story being told.”

And all that talk in the movie about how Henrietta did not know nothing about nothing and that is how they took advantage of her? 

To Oprah, that doesn’t mean nothing either.

Colin Flaherty is the author on Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, a #1 Amazon Best Seller.  You can subscribe to his YouTube channel and check out a few clips Oprah complaining about people stealing stuff from black people here.