Transcripts For CSPAN Race And The American Dream 20170408

Technology to detect concussions, and what it means for the nfl. [applause] discussion on a race in america and the postobama era. We will hear from wall street editorial writer jason hannahjones. Le good evening. Resound the nationally nationally renowned speaker that was previously introduced. I am proud to be your moderator for this conversation. Two important caveats to our conversation. One is that our speakers have come to talk about a wide variety of views. You can imagine they may not be the same views. Thats the whole point of the conversation. We are going to host a conversation between our two guests today, and then we would , andq a and the audience there we cards available for you to have time to write down your question. One of the best quotes that i love is the instruction to the audience in rooms like this. He makes a point to say please form your statement in the form of a question. Its brilliant. As using about the question, please be concise and brief to allow for more dialogue. Friends, so i of know the conversations will be soft and polite as we go through this very important conversation. Guests,two important both new yorkers who have come to visit us. Hannahjones is a awardwinning journalist for the new york times, or she has investigated racial segregation in housing and schools. She has won several national in wards National Awards and theg the peabody grand prize for testing was educational reporting, and a finalist for the National Magazine award. She has been named journalist of the year for the National Association of black journalists and named to the group 100. She is a 2017 new american fellow and the author of living apart, how a government betrayed a landmark civil rights law. Her reporting was also featured in the atlantic, and many others. She has been a guest on npr. She received a bachelors degree from the university of notre degree fromasters the university of North Carolina chapel hill in the goal of journalism and mass can medications. Welcome. Jason riley is a senior fellow at the manhattan institute. He is a member of the wall street Journal Editorial Board and a commentator for fox news. The journal, go was named senior educational writer and 2000 and a member of the Editorial Board in 2005. An, shed left in in, and his second book please stop helping us. Born in buffalo, new york, he earned his bachelors degree in english from the State University of new york in buffalo. Join me in welcoming our two speakers. [applause] i just want to start off our conversation trying to orient us us in of our suspense all of our suspense to the audience on how you came to this work, and how your work in , people who find issues and bring them to light in print, how did you come to this work . How did Race Relations become a core body of your work . Nikole hi everyone. I am also from the midwest, so i can be witnessed be midwest nice, but not all the time. [laughter] i loved news from a very young age. I read my newspaper, started subscribing to Time Magazine is a middle school student. I was always fascinated by history, always curious to understand the world. On the east side of town, which was where black people had to live when they came up. Segregationn notice compared to the way our white neighborhoods lived on the other side of town, and i wanted to know why that was. I was curious. I Read Everything that i could. I talked to my parents. Wasting in second grade, i in a Desegregation Program to white schools on the other side of town. I started taking my first black studies course, and it opened my eyes. I went in and complain to my black studies teacher one day that our School Newspaper never wrote about kids like me, the kids who come on the bus everyday from the other side of town, the black kids. He told me if i didnt like it, i needed to join the newspaper or shut up and not complain about it anymore. So thats what i did. I joined the paper and had a column called from the african perspective. Oh one of my earliest columns was whether jesus was black or not. I did not reach a conclusion on that one. [laughter] i felt early on the power of being held to tell stories about myself and my community. Ever since that moment, i was kind of hooked. Jason, how did you come to journalism . Foundations that formed the way you think about journalism . Jason well, thank you all for inviting me today. I appreciate the invitation. I am a journalist because i have no other marketable skills. [laughter] jason thats the bottom line. I wanted to study economics in , and perhaps become an academic of some kind. Got to second year calculus in college and realize this was not going to happen. I happened to go to a school that places a heavy emphasis on , so i did what a lot of kids still do and migrated to a discipline became much easier, which was writing. That ia similar story in read something in the College Paper and went down to complain, and was invited to join the paper. Between my sophomore and junior year in college, i got an onernship with usa today the sports page, which was a very big deal. That was the reason you read usa today. [laughter] jason i took that, and by the end the summer, i was convinced that i wanted to be a journalist , which may be senior year of college very long. I did not initially see myself writing about race primarily. , had things to say about race but i didnt imagine it would be the focus of my journalism. I developed more conservative views in college, discovered certain writers that had a huge impact on me, and what i had something to say about race i would write it in the paper. As a professional journalist, this was all covered already. Time, there were a number of black thinkers. They werent necessarily conservatives, but this was the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were challenging the old civil rights orthodox is at the time. There whodtimers out were economists, but you also steeleple like shelby andorlando patterson stephen carter, iconoclastic writers, all out there saying unorthodox things at the time. Randall kennedy was another one. Some of them moved left or became less prominent intellectuals. Kennedy comes to mind as someone who has moved that left from center. But my thinking at the time was, this ground is covered. It would be very hard for me to distinguish myself here. Im going to write about other things. And that was pretty much my attitude for the good first 15 years of my professional life as a journalist at the wall street journal. My first book was about immigration, which just happened to be a topic i covered for the wall street journal for many years and turned it into a book. I just found it interesting. I didnt really have a dog in the fight. I wasnt an immigrant or child of an immigrant, but i found it fascinating and decided to write a book about it. I thought thats what i would do throughout my career, find Something Interesting and write about it. A lot of these guys that i had admired in terms of onir thoughts and views racial issues were getting up there in age, and i didnt see a Younger Generation of people coming along to replace them. It disturbed me because i thought that a lot of what they were saying was still true. It still needed to be part of the debate. That a little dismayed there wasnt a crop of younger writers who were willing to take on some of these arguments. Thats when i decided to write the second book. The second book is what led me to devote myself almost fulltime to writing on these issues. Root inot as direct a terms direct a route in terms of writing about race. So we understand how you both come to this work more generally. The conversation that weve asked you to be a part of here is race and the American Dream, and how complicated issues have become increasingly more complicated. That there is a heightened sense of this issue right now in the postobama presidency and coming into the trump presidency. More intimately, we have a Community Interested in a conversation about race and the American Dream. How would you characterize race and the American Dream . How would you implore people to think about this, and house should we think about the dialogue we need to have . Have you thought about that . Nikole for most of our country, i think race and the American Dream have been oppositional forces. The black presence in this country has always been the president that there is a lie to this notion that american was that america was an exceptional place. If you look at my twitter handle, i write about race from 1619, because that is when the first africans were brought to this country to be enslaved, long before we become a country. We have artie decided we are going to designate certain people already decided we are going to designate certain people as a bottom caste. So that casts a shadow over this democracy. We have moments where we move forward and moments where we move backward. I think many people feel we are in one of those backward motions when it comes to race. I am not really sure how to answer the question. About whether the American Dream what is the American Dream and what that meant for black americans, for black americans in the being treated equally in the country of your birth. For white americans, it probably means something very different. I think the American Dream is alive and well for blacks in particular. I think tremendous progress has been made. It twice elected black president in office, thanks in part to the man whose birthday we honored yesterday, Martin Luther king jr. 1965oting rights act of was a hugely important piece of legislation in franchising millions of americans, making us more perfect union. There areas that remain in place, racial and otherwise . Certainly, but i think a tremendous amount of progress has been made. Forward, the going real focus should be, in terms of black americans, on readying themselves to take advantage of the opportunities that are now help their because of the work of civil rights pioneers like Martin Luther king. I think that is the real challenge Going Forward. Most, ofany, if not the important battles in terms of civil rights were fought and won on the right side. Nikole could i interject . I assumed thats why you have us here. [laughter] its a dialogue. Nikole its interesting you would bring up the Voting Rights act, because we know that a key provision was struck down by the supreme court. There has been a flurry of Voter Suppression laws that have been challenged in the courts. We know that, in terms of housing segregation in many northern cities, it has not budged since the 1970s. Black americans are still the most segregated group in the country, both by race and class, regardless of income. Black children are in majority black schools. Of course there has been progress. But i think to say that progress for black folks is enough when we are nowhere near quality or parity, then look at the Unemployment Rate. Black Americans Still have twice the unemployment of white americans, black americans who are working who are looking for work and cannot. Black americans are still at the bottom of every single measure. I would never argue we dont have progress. My father was born on a sharecropping far sharecropping farm in mississippi during apartheid, and i am standing here right now. Poor blackok at americans, it looks very similar to what we saw when i was a child. So jason, we live in the same country and have had two descriptions, yours and niko les. Are both pictures true . Do we have great optimism, great opportunity, and great challenges . I said in my remarks the challenges remain. But the question are what problems remain. With respect to the American Dream, whether or not is a lot and well not it is alive and well, i maintain that it is. I think the real challenge for blacks Going Forward in terms of Racial Disparity that we would all like to see closed to take advantage of these opportunities that exist. But these are different challenges from what dr. King was facing, i believe. A fundamentally unjust society, crow, andegation, jim very linked and virulent racist attitudes among americans. That has changed, too. In addition to striking down the ,egal barriers that existed thanks to efforts of Thurgood Marshall and others, the characterization of whether Voter Suppression laws or voter id laws, is that what you are referring to . Nikole yes. 2012, a higher percentage of blacks in america voted than whites. States with the strictest voter id laws in the country. Laws if voter id laws are a form of suppression, wheres the evidence . Polls have shown a majority of blacks favor voter id laws in this country, along with a majority of whites and liberals and conservatives and democrats and republicans. But if you want to characterize it as Voter Suppression, i think some people might disagree with that characterization. Again, there are barriers that remain in place. Im not sure i would identify the same barriers as my colleague. I think you mentioned, segregation in schools, which often comes up. Segregation in schools. There is this abiding belief that my children need to be sitting next to white kids in order to learn in school. I reject that. They have long been there have long been majority black schools in this country, since reconstruction. They did an excellent job of teaching black kids, and they remain today some of the best Public Schools in this country. Some of them exist in the city where we both live in harlem or the south bronx or brooklyn. Majority black schools outperforming the lowliest white suburbs in new york city the suburbs in new york city. The idea that it should be on the racial makeup of the school and whether or not instead of whether or not anyone is learning i reject. Obsessed with the racial makeup of the school. Im obsessed with the performance of the school. I think our policymakers would do better to focus on that. You written on education and opportunity you have written on education and opportunity. Toe us the frameworks, given access on education in america, how it overlays this conversation. Yes, there are exceptional schools, just like there are exceptional people. But exceptions and pointing out of handful in any community majority black schools that can sustainably compete with affluent white schools jason there are dozens in new york city alone. The harlem network consists of dozens of schools that regularly outperform neighborhood schools. Is, is but my question that the exception or the rule in new york . Jason i just named dozens in new york city. Nikole is that the exception or the rule . The rule in new york city. They regularly outperform neighborhood schools. Ive been covering School Segregation for 10 years. I support through data compiled ive pored through data compiled by the department of education. More heavily segregated a school is, the more likely they are to there are exceptional schools, but that is not the rule. Whenwe also know is that you are separating kids not only by race and class, that creates a toxic learning environment. It does not mean that any black child has to sit next to a white child to be smart. My own child is in an allblack school. I live in an allblack neighborhood. Clearly i would never say that a black child can be smart or cannot achieve if they are not in a class with white children. What we do know, from the founding of Public Education in this country, resources follow white children. We have not ever provided the same education to black children in segregated schools we have provided to white children. That is just the fact. There are 60 years of Educational Data that shows that, and this goes back to the 1700s when we found a Public School in this country. It simply is not true. Report ave you a report. On the resources following my children, that hasnt been a serious issue since the 1960s. Nikole how has an up in a serious issue since the 1960s . Jason because of title i funding and out and how it has balanced out funding. Today, if you go to majority black communities like newark, washington, d. C. , and many people you will see spending way above the national average. Cities are our inner not suffering because money is not being spent on their education. They are suffering because they tend to be in poor quality schools. They are in poor quality schools not because we dont have had to educate and educate them. We do know how to educate them. The schools have problems scaling up because of political pressure from teachers unions dont want schools to open or they cannot organize teachers. In new york city, you have 40,000 kids on waitlist for charter schools, and the mayor wont budge because the mayor of new york city takes a lot of money from teachers unions. He is doing their bidding, not the parents of those black kids on the waiting list. This is not about not knowing how to educate the kids, is not a funding issue, and it is political will. That is what is going on in Public Education. Nikole let me say, when i talk when i have about resources, i am not simply talking about dollars. When we look at teacher quality, of the largest resources in the classroom, black children are the least likely to have an experienced, credentialed teacher in the classroom that is credentialed in the subject here she is teaching. Teachers are not going into black schools. This is data any of you can look up if you look at civil rights in the department of education. Why arent they going into those schools . Nikole you have to ask the teachers about that. What we know is whether a community is a small one and the south or any major city, you cant have it uniformly happening across the country not for systemic reasons. We understand that brown v. Board of education, black children in an educational to have to beng in the same vicinity as what children. As always in the case. It is not about what makes a child smarter not. What i find interesting is, we know that it has longterm effects on health, on prosperity. The same thing happens in a classroom. You can talk to any teacher in a classroom. If you have five kids living in property, it is much easier to measures that then if you have every single child in that classroom poor and behind. That is common sense. We also know from Research Social sciences all over this country, that that concentrated poverty in the classroom is very difficult for the teacher to thoseand for those to children to learn. I dont know why we pretend that that doesnt matter. It absolutely does. Another thing about resources, my Daughters School is 90 free or reduced lunch. Parents and thats cool live in Public Housing except for about 8 of the parents who dont. One mile away is the most affluent school in brooklyn. That pta can raise 1 million. They can fund all of things my Daughters School can never fund. But a child in that school wanting to apply to harvard, there are parents there who can write a recommendation, help that child get a job. There are no parents and my Daughters School who can do that. It is all of these things outside whether or not you can have the same dollar amount that matter, and i think that when we discount those things, we are not being realistic. I dont believe your children are in an allblack poor school, but i think all of us understand that if we have a choice, we dont enroll our children in schools like that. Jason more black people dont have school choice. Nikole to prevent that is ok and not a problem for those parents i think is dishonest. Lets dig into i think we have clear lines of demarcation on the argument. [laughter] what i am interested in now nikole i will bring my midwest nice back. [laughter] i think one of the important part is to feel very comfortable with differences of opinion and hard conversation. I think that is really what it is all about. I dont want to let all try to nice and of the conversation nicen of the conversation. Nobody is saying these kids shouldnt have a great opportunity for a great education. So what are the places where there are ways to think about this particular example of education and race and , and ways of thinking that this audience and others ought to be thinking about Going Forward given the data points you have provided, but. 2 very different parts of the problem . Jason i think there is wide agreement that lowincome black children are stuck in the worstperforming schools in america. The question is what we should be doing about it. I am not obsessed over the racial makeup of these schools. Im obsessed with the quality of these schools. I want to scale up highquality schools. The reason we dont scale up highquality schools is because there is resistance from entities that control Public Schools in the country namely, teachers unions. And the politicians they support. Reform isr to school not racism. It is politics. Sure that illy would point to the problems of asooling for innercity kids primarily a racial issue. It is primarily an issue of political will. You have various entities in place, special interests, protecting their own special interests. I think that is what has led to the situation that we have today. Yes we need to do something about it. I do not think a focus on the segregating schools will help. In other words, if white people dont want to send their children to black schools, i am fine with that come as long as my kid is attending a high quality school. That is my priority. And goney have a come a different issue on how to attack the problem. Nikole it is political will. Know from data going to about 1970 is that there is one School Reform that has closed the achievement gap. One, on scale. That is integration. That is when the blackwhite achievement gap was narrowing. We have seen schools going away from integration and we have never gone back to that narrow point to the peak of integration. There are a host of School Reforms. As an education reporter right after no child left kind was passed. It segregated majority black districts. These two were 98 poverty. Schools, small high schools. Early college high schools. Nternational baccalaureate fired principles, fire teachers. For aight get progress year or two and then go back. We have not been able to produce School Reforms that work on scale for black children. We just havent. Except integration. Brown the board does not talk about test scores. The data shows School Integration for black children does not just help with test scores come it changes the entire trajectory of their lines. We are in a majority white country. To pretend think isolated in schools away from other people is not going to harm kids. Majorityave worked in white institutions and gone to majority white institutions and we understand that means you have access to power. What longitudinal the data shows is that black children who have gone to and graded schools are less likely to be poor. Theyre more likely to go to college and graduate from college. They live longer. They are healthier. They pass was that if its on to their children. That holds through within the same families. Two siblings are measured. They were able to follow families and to find out that even within the same household, if one black child went to a segregated school and one went to an integrated school, that changed the trajectories of both their lives. The child who want to an integrated school had a better life outcome. Were talking about getting black children access to full citizenship. That is what works. The lack of political will to actually do that one reform that you have to ask thatelf is there one tool data that social Logical Research has shown works . That is not because of teachers unions. Lets move off education for a minute. I want to get us back to the larger conversation about race and the American Dream. This has allowed us to drill down deep into subjects to find out what the demarcations are. I am wondering, how should we all be thinking about some of the challenges the other challenges of race in america that creates both barriers and hopefully opportunities to address the achievement of the American Dream. What other areas of race should we be thinking about, especially now as we are coming into a sort of post first africanamerican president. Reflecting on his legacy, reflecting on this idea of a Postracial America how should we be thinking about other opportunities where we can deal with race and deal with it on Common Ground . I would go back to something i talked about briefly closing which is that Racial Disparities that we see today i think will involve blacks taking it upon themselves to take advantage of the opportunities that are out there today. I think that a lot of the barriers to that group advancement are cultural. Dont spendthing we a lot of time talking about. I mentioned a couple , two of the earlier nations foremost sociologists, both at harvard now, i believe. They were at university of chicago many years previously. They had written about how their field academics and their field are so reluctant to talk about how certain black cultural traits, particularly in the united states, have led to negative outcomes. Sociologists dont even want to talk about it. They want to talk about bad schools or housing, but they dont want to talk about culture. It is taboo. Both agree this is absolutely ridiculous. We have to have these conversations. This is a major failure. Even as aat commentator, that gets you into a lot of trouble when you talk about that. You are blaming the victims. You are letting whites off the hook. You are ignoring racism. I think not talking about that, not dealing with it is not going to help the problem go away anytime soon. It is something we need to discuss and that is a major, major barrier to people taking advantage of the opportunities. I will give you a statistic to illustrate what im talking about. Look at the poverty gap in america between blacks and has widened over the past decade. It has started to narrow somewhat now. It is a huge gap. Among black married couples, however, the black poverty rate is in the single digits. And has been for more than 20 years. The blackwhite gap a function of racism rich large writ large . Or is it a function of the makeup of a family, regardless of your race . That is just one example of what i am talking about in terms of wanting to drag race into a lot of sections to claim Racial Disparity. I dont think it is a sufficient explanation of this disparity. Let me turn this to you to sort of certainly respond, if you like. Also i want you to kind of help us think about how race defines some of the challenges we are dealing with as a nation, not africanamericans. How does race characterize our achievement or area for the American Dream . Is it similar to what jason was talking about . I dont think it is similar to what jason is talking about. The notionejects there is something inherently flawed in poor black culture that has led to disparity. I dont understand how one can the historyderstand of this country. I dont understand how one can think that, i dont understand the sociology that shows that every step of the way, like americans are facing discrimination and they are somehow unable to overcome discrimination in job market, housing, and schools, that that is simply a problem with culture. I would be interested in what is a problem with white culture we need to be writing about worrying about . If yous president s want to talk about culture, talk about the problems of that culture. Like people did not create ghettos. Black people did not bring themselves over here. Like people did not create jim crow laws. They did not create housing segregation in the north. Of course i reject that. What i can tell you is my family is very workingclass. Some of them would be considered the working poor. They go to work everyday. They dont blame white people for their problems. They dont even think that large. They are not thinking about any of those things. They dont know that i have read studies about how if you apply for a job with a black name, you are less likely to get called back. They dont know that. They dont know that if you call your congressperson and sound black, you are less likely to get a call back. Are 4ont know there million instances of housing discrimination that occur in this country every year. They just know they are working and cant get ahead even though they are working hard every day. I fairly reject that notion. Out ofone generation legal apartheid in this country. I was born six years after this country pass a law that you simply could not discriminate against black people if they wanted to buy a house. Six years after that was passed. That was only passed because dr. King was assassinated and 100 urban ghettos in the north breakout in riots. Six years after that. To somehow pretend that one generation out of that, we are responsible for the circumstances that we live in, i. Hink it is intentionally naive i dont understand how one can believe that black culture is to blame for that. I take deep personal offense to that because again, i see it in my own family, my Daughters School. Even when your children dont receive an education, they value it and understand how important that is. When we think about what is the American Dream mean for black people, it has always meant to simply be treated like a citizen of your own country. Onull citizen of your country. I dont think that is true yet. I dont think you can look at black people who face discrimination in every facet of life and then say that you should work harder and overcome that. Know that that is what you say. Jason that is not what i say. That is a total distortion of what i say. Nikole that is what i heard when you say the problem is black culture. ,ason i said sociologists these are black sociologists, when they look at their profession, they say it consciously steers clear of discussing how black culture plays a role in Racial Disparity. Insaneink that is because it is so obvious it does play a role. Nikole what role does white culture play . Jason it is a factor. I will give you an anecdote. A few years ago, i wrote a. Olumn quoting dr. King he was speaking to a black congregation in st. Louis in the late 50s. Congregationo the you know, we are 10 of the population of st. Louis, but responsible for 58 of the crimes. He said we have to face that, we have to do something about our morals. We cant keep blaming the white man. There are a lot of problems in the white world. There are a lot of problems in the black world to thank, and we have to face that. Some readers wrote in accusing me of making that up. Awed, because was in this age of the internet, you can google anything and find the source. Fromparticular quote came harpers magazine in 1961. What really struck me about the reaction was that seemingly, these readers could not conceive of a time when black leaders used to speak this frankly about personal behavior in the black community. It is just a foreign concept to them that that is how black leadership in america used to regularly do, which might tell you a lot about black leadership today, frankly. This readership could not conceive of that. King was operating in a world it is so different in terms of his expectations. His message was to black people we need to succeed, not withstanding this racist society we live in. Todays leadership seems to have flipped this on its head , and blame us for anything racism will be vanquished from america. Used as an allpurpose explanation for bad black outcomes in this country. I dont think data backs that up. Avoid the tense moment you to just presented us with. Let us move this to speaking about how then do we find a way to proceed . We can both have this picture of race. I think the story of dr. King, the one you brought up, it wasnt the fact that not only could he talk about an aspiration for america that included as he pointed out the opportunity for his children to be standing next to a white child with the same opportunities. It was that he put together a Diverse Coalition of people who before whatever together. Very wenever together have this opportunity, what would you say to progressives, conservatives, moderates, about how to deal with some of the challenges we are seeing . That however you want to come to the condition of race, that people should think about working together to deal with this. I dont know that we are at a point where we found this is the theme of the talk about Common Ground. This wide,e speak to diverse Political Landscape that we have . Either one of you. Gentleman first. Im im very dispirited right now about coming together. The developments in the past few. Ears make me very pessimistic i am normally optimistic, but again, getting back to king king was all about color blindness. Dont look at the color of my skin. Dont Pay Attention to that. Pay attention to my character. E flipped that over we now have movements that focus on race consciousness. People who go around the country matter black lives are not interested in colorblindness. People who go around promoting racebased College Admissions or racebased congressional districts are not promoting race blindness. They are promoting grace consciousness. We have been down this road before. Some people in this room are old enough to remember when the black Power Movement broke off from king and went their own way identity politics. It did not end well. Not for the revolutionaries, and i would argue not for the rest of black america. I think king had it right. When we have diverged from that vision, i dont think we have progressed. As much as progressing when we adhere to that vision or it you mentioned the coalitions king brought together. Namely other minority groups. Jewish groups in particular were strong allies of the Civil Rights Movement. Colorblindness turned into color consciousness, a lot of the jewish leaders parted ways. They did not want to go down that route. I think that has been to the detriment of the Civil Rights Movement that that happened. I am very pessimistic right now about where things are headed. Movement,is altright the flipside of the black lives matter movement, you have black identity politics, white identity politics. Two can play this game, but it gets very ugly very quickly. Stop. It would obviously both sides of the political aisle have their reasons for going this route, playing to this crowd or that crowd. I think the rest of us as a ourtry, our dialogue, conversations are all the worse off when we go down this path. Bring broad and diverse political views together to deal with race in america . Nikole i dont know that we do. I was saying in the green room, one of the things you want to think about is how we find Common Ground on this issue. I think as having a rd time that that out version of king you presented is the homogenized version of king. It is not the post 1965 king. King built with white progressives started to fall apart when he took his movement to the north. Challenging School Segregation in the north was when king saw that coalition among progressive whites begin to fracture. The is when you saw coalition for civil rights outside of king among progressive rights begin to fracture. That is why the Fair Housing Act does not get past until 1968 after king died because northern white congressman blocked that because it would bring integration to northern cities. Know about king is that he talked about redistribution of wealth. He basically made the case for blacktions based on americans being deprived of their rights to earn the same as white people and to have the same opportunities both in jobs and schools. We know he was not asking for a Colorblind Society until we could make up for the past. He was hoping we would eventually get there. This was not a naive man. Yet understood the entire history of our country had been based on race consciousness. He was not simply fighting legal apartheid in the south. He was also fighting segregation that occurred in the north. He understood that you are going to have to do something to catch black people up. You could not simply pass a law and save from here on fourth we are not going to discriminate anymore and pretend that was somehow even the playing field. African americans being deprived of their own labor or the right to earn or homeved of the right to ownership is not going to be made up because we passed a law that says you cant discriminate. Dr. King understood that. If you read his later writings, when he started to lose his white support and when he died, the majority of white americans did not support him. We would all like to get the point where no one in this country sees race. It you cant pretend that will go away. You cannot look at every indicator of wellbeing that people who look at black or are perceived as black are at the ottoman of every indicator of wellbeing and then pretend we cant talk about race anymore, it will not be a problem. You talk about racebased admissions. A segregated k12 system that provides an inferior education to latino and black students. When we get to College Admissions, we believe in the merit system. What is the merit system for a student going to a school that has 14 to 18 classes with national and boardcertified teachers . That all the sudden we want to believe race does not matter. If anyone would like to see that race does not exist, it is black people. We are not there yet. We have a couple questions from the audience. I want everyone to feel free to continue to write questions. Let me sort of channel these and either of you can face those questions. On votersour thoughts who supported obama in 08 and 12 and then supported trump in 16 . You knew youre going to get to the trump question. What does that tell you about the vote . Jason as was mentioned in the most analystss, got the election wrong. I was not a supporter of trump. I did not think he was going to win. Along with not only a lot of my colleagues but a lot of the country that he did win. I think one of the reasons he won the main reason he won, i people wanteduse to upset the apple cart in washington. I think a lot of us in the media in particular and in the Mainstream Media in particular were overly focused on trumps tone and temperament threat the campaign as being disqualified disqualifying. His twitter, his attacks on other politicians, and so forth, we just kept saying this was behavior unbecoming a president and disqualifying, america will not go for it. But they did. I think what those voters who voted for trump were saying was jason, ike me havent had a vacation in five years, my Health Care Costs have gone up even though i was told they would go down, i am underemployed, i have not had a raise. You worry about trumps tone and temperament. You have that luxury. I dont. This guy sounds that he can mix things up. I know what im getting with clinton the status quo. The status quo is just not doing it for me. I think that is why he won. He won one person, a demographer said he won the areas of the country that keep our lights on and keep our motors running. Which i thought was a very fitting description, and not a description of where i live. Or where a lot of colleagues in the media live, frankly. The other narrative out there is that he won because racist voters put them over the top, but i think to your point, that does not explain it. Obama because he clipped voters. I will went for obama. Obama won it easily in 2012. Trump wanted easily in november. Did i was suddenly turn racist over the past four years . He did it in wisconsin, he did it in michigan, he did it over and over again. He flipped obama voters. That is why i think he won, ultimately. What is your picture on this . Actually wrote a story about iowa, my home state, because it did go for obama in andit went for obama in 12 i would say that obama got elected because it was a world white state that a rural white state that showed it could vote for a black man. Things, the problem about the economic argument is that it does not work for workingclass people who are not white. If youre only going to say it was economic anxieties that led people to vote for trump, then he should have gotten black voters and he should have gotten latino voters. Again,ack voters Unemployment Rate is twice that of whites, economic anxieties for all of these midwestern cities, i did not see a lot of reporters going to gary to talk about those workingclass voters. We have a distinct narrative about who the workingclass are, particularly the workingclass you need to be concerned about. It cant just be economic anxieties or he would have also gotten the workingclass black vote, and he didnt. Won white voters across all income levels. These are not poor and workingclass white voters. Thing that i reported and what i talked about is that because someone once voted for a black man does not mean that person doesnt have any racial animosity or anxiety. We tend to talk about race and racism in this country in an complex and an nuanced ways. Clan orou are in the you are a rainbow of everyone. They can be tipped. You have to understand when people were voting in 2008, youre coming off eight years of the bush presidency. You have the big Auto Companies on the brink of collapsing. Banks that are getting ready to go wonder. You have double digits unappointed rates for white folks. Unappointed rates black people have had consistently. There was so much anxiety that people were willing to take a chance. Obama ran a good ground game. He wanted to a lot of those neighborhoods that democrats dont tend to go to. He got rural white voters to vote for him because theyre able to vote over their anxiety when they believe it is in their best interest. In 2012 he loses some of those counties that voted for him before. I talked to people, and i can tell you voters are saying white voters in iowa are saying we like trumps message, we did not feel like we were living is good, but that black lives matter thing really kissed us off pissed us off. When president obama mentioned trayvon martin, that made us mad. They started to feel president obama was not representing them when he spoke specifically to black people. They did not want to put their lot in with black people in the first place. If you think about, obama never won the majority of white voters. Even though he would like to pretend he won a majority so we could be called postracial. With aa Large Coalition majority of the white vote that was enough to put him over the top. Voted out of ao sense of economic anxiety, it trumped their racial anxiety. This time it did not. I think that is the difference. That we can somehow say because someone once voted for a black man or has a black friend or once went to a movie for black people that they dont have racial anxiety. That is not true. Im not trying to be funny, but it just does not work that way. I talk to women who work with latinos and they are fine, but they want him to build the wall. They believe in freedom of religion, but they dont want the muslims led in. People can hold these same views. It is what is called the american dilemma, that we can believe on the one hand in a quality act in very different ways. That is as american as apple pie. That is what we saw with trump voters. Folks have economic anxiety. When the other party is trying to take away or at least you have the sense the other party is trying to take away your very basic citizenship rights, you cant vote on economics. Black people did not have that choice. People in gary and all these factory towns in the rust belts that are heavily black that have lost jobs did not vote for trump. Let me move to a less controversial subject. This is for both of you. You may choose which one to go first. Can you comment on the effects of constantly policing black neighborhoods in ways that affects children and where they live . Another light hearted topic. [laughter] jason i guess this boils down to why police spent so much time in these communities. Is it because they are picking on these residents . Or is that because that is where the 9 11 policy originates . The data argues for the latter. Responding to complaints coming from the residents of these neighborhoods. That is why they spend so much time in it. There is an over policing argument that has been made, and the empirical data, i think largely dispels it. And here is how. People who attack down thepolice right race of the assailant. They keep those records. On,ver policing was going you would see police arresting blacks at a higher rate than they are named as the assailants for crimes. You dont find that. You find parity in those two figures, which i think speaks to refute the argument that these neighborhoods are being over policed. Are in that the police these communities for legitimate reasons, and that most of the lawabiding residents in these communities and most of the residents in these communities policeabiding want there to protect them. They are the primary victims of the criminals in these communities. That, i would agree with believe it or not. Of course people in communities want police. Black,in communities, white or whatever, wants to be safe. They do not want to be the victims of crimes. The problem we have is both over policing and under policing in black communities. You look at the homicide solve rates in black communities, they are extremely low. Chicago is one of the worst in the country. It is not by accident it also has a serious problem with violence. It spins out of control when homicides dont get solved. I can tell you living in a bad poor blacks a community, we see citizens were minding their business who are constantly stopped by police. My neighbor wrote their bike to a bodega. The Police Caught them, theyd eat him and they are they beat him. He goes to jail and loses his job because he cant report to work. People dont like that have jobs when he can just miss a job. We know there is constant contact. Unconstitutional because black and brown people are simply walking down the street and being stopped for no reason. Theyre finding no reason to charge them. What black people want in their communities is the same type of policing that most White Communities experience. They want to be treated with dignity, to be about to walk around the neighborhood like free citizens. They dont want to be stopped without reasonable cause. If that is the relationship black people had with police, you would not see a friction. But that is the difference. When you look at Police Response times in black communities, its takes police longer to get into those communities for real crimes. The sense is that if someone is hurting me, i cannot get the police to investigate, i cannot get police to solve this crime. If im just Walking Around biting my business, and you have black police who work within these organizations that saves that set that say that is what they have to do. That they needed to make a lot of stops. Who are you going to make a lot of stops with . White powerful people who are going to call the mayor and complain or a poor black person who is probably doing something wrong in the first place . I think that this narrative that somehow black people enjoy being victimized and im not saying that is what you are saying, but that is commonly out there that black people dont want police in neighborhoods, they want the same policing that White Communities expect. They dont want to be treated as suspects in the neighborhoods they live. Does colorblind help to maintain power structures in the ways that they once existed . To doesnt colorblind maintain racialized power structures. Is it doing the reverse of what you explained . Is it somehow actually creating the structures . Jason i guess i would need some of those terms further defined. Whatever racialized power structures exist, and it did not stop obama for being elected and reelected. He is just the culmination of the civil rights vision that started with king, which is that what blacks need in this country to advance socioeconomically is political power. The Civil Rights Movement focused on achieving political power. To a large extent, they succeeded. The number of black elected officials in this country rose from Something Like 1500 to more than 10,000 between 1970 and 2010. Officials running cities, big urban cities from mayors to Police Commissioners to school superintendent, it has happened. The Socioeconomic Progress that we had thought would follow that, or that civil rights leaders have thought would follow that has not panned out. But i dont think it is due to a lack of political power or being politicaltegrate institutions. That has happened. And it speaks to a larger point these crazyame with expectations and he was never going to be able to meet them. It is unfair that that much pressure was put on him. One reason he was not ever going to meet them, at least in terms of lifting blacks as a group socioeconomically, is because i dont think that the current barriers to black Socioeconomic Progress, our political barriers. Barriers. Itical black people dont need an obama in place to get done what they need to get done socioeconomically. It helps if you have a black mayor, black commissioner, but i dont think it is an essential element for a group to rise socioeconomically in this country. I think that is borne out by the patterns and other groups in this country, racial and ethnic groups, not only in the u. S. But other countries around the world. Ikole, youre going to get the last word. You have two choices. You can respond to jasons point in ther there is an alum audience who is a product of fair get Housing Project who once you to reflect on your yourle in choosing Daughters School in a segregated city. It is totally up to you. Nikole i actually agree with jason on this, that political empowerment has not led to economic empowerment. Think the battle is still to be one. Still to be won. When you say you want me to reflect, what do you want . Warehouse living in a housing i learned how to play the french word French Foreign french horn. [indiscernible] to the point you made earlier, within the classes and groups that were in that Housing Project that graduated from that tomentary school, we went on integrated schools, went on to college, and graduated. Ive been living in grand rapids for 30 years. [indiscernible] he has unfortunately be in tier time. Quickly if you could. Eaten into your response time. That rare is resource, majority black poor school my daughter learned mandarin, she takes art, she takes music. Her grades are great. It is a stem school, a magnet. Those white parents will not send their children to the school and they live right across from that. You think about the argument, people say they want neighborhood schools and love their, then they want choice. Then they want to go wherever they want. If they brought his white, they dont wants choice, they want to go to their neighborhood schools. People want to avoid going to schools with kids who are in ad schools. Feel so passionate about it is i was that kid. I was the poor black kid that he wouldnt want in their school. Say this out of any hubris, i was smarter than most of the white schools white students at the school i was blessed with. They did not want me there. Nobody wants their little kids around, what could they become if we actually invested in them likely invested in white children . Kids i know how hard it was to have to ride a bus two hours a day to go into an allwhite school where the kids never thought i fit in, where everyone thought i was dumber than them. I would love to be in a country were black kids could just go to black schools and they would get the same thing that white kids could get. Was. W how hard it we dont have that country yet. While we keep trying to figure out if were going to be that country or not, the kids in our classroom right now are being deprived of the thing every person in this room would fight to and nail to guarantee their own child. I see that is my role. I have a voice. Projects working at a pop eyes, no one listens to her. Im not thinking about some cool by all vision of america that doesnt exist. Vision ofmbaya america. They dont have the opportunity. [applause] what i have heard is there is andon ground on policing political power. I think this is a Good Opportunity to hear both sides of very important issues. On behalf of the Common Ground and the community of grand rapids, we would like to say thank you for being here. [applause] for those assembled here, there is a reception outside and we ask that all of you join us. Again, please join me in thanking our presenters. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] afterwords,ght on blue an insider story on good cops catching bad cops. Book with at the former nypd officer and author of once a cop. I spent 41 years in the nypd. I saw acts of courage, bravery, integrity. There is always a small number of cops who keep you up at night. I was a precinct commander. Everyone knew the person, maybe two, that he did not trust. Any other offices did not trust him or her either. I went to internal affairs. I brought the Commanding Officers on board and we would meet with them on a regular basis. I would ask them questions like who in your command are you little concerned about . Who in your command keeps you up at night . On cspanfterwords, twos book tv. This week on q and a, heather mcghee, president of the mouse demos. She received a call from a white man from North Carolina. He said that he is prejudiced what she can mcgee do to become a better person. What he could do to become a better person