Strategy. Host bing west has been our guest this month on in depth. He is the author of seven nonfiction books and one novel, and this book right here, the wrong war grit, strategy and the way out of afghanistan, is booktvs Book Club Selection for the month. Booktv. Org, thanks for being with us. Guest thank you for having me. Live coverage on cspan and cspan2, here on cspan3, we are the home to American History tv with programs and events until our nations story. Lectures include delving into americas past and our new series real america features archival films produced in the 1930s to the 1970s. We travel to museums and Historic Sites to learn what this reveals about history. This focus is on the nations commanders in chief and we will go to the battlefield for key events and figures during the 150th anniversary of the civil war. Cspan3, created by cable tv and funded by your local cable and satellite provider. Follow us on twitter. Next on booktv, the National Black writers conference. This is an annual event in its 12th year. It is held at the meaghan Evers College in brooklyn, new york. For the next four hours we were bringing panels on ways, politics, literature and identity. It all begins now n booktv. [inaudible conversations] once again, good afternoon and we welcome you to the National Black writers conference. Thank you so much for being a part of this great conference. Lets give everyone a big hand. They always do such a great job and this is part of the great job they are doing today. Race, power, politics is the title of our panel. Our moderator for the day is wallace ford. We have several authors and lets welcome our moderator for today, wallace ford. [applause] thank you and good afternoon. Okay, all right. First of all we would like to thank you for coming to the 14th annual black writers conference. I am the chairman of the Public Administration department here at the college and the school of business and im the author of the contemporary commentary blocks and to be in a book form called love and hate in the time of obama and also the host of the inclusion show which can be seen in various parts of the country. The introduction today has a deal with race and power and politics and race and racism has been described as americas original sin beginning with the particularly odious operational slavery which began in the 1600s which is carried forward in its many iterations. There is knowledge, there is economics and the political records. Because it is a very important part of the concept of power, it was forbidden for black slaves to learn how to read and write. And it is also the reason the black slaves were forbidden to own property and of course we see iterations of that Going Forward even into the 21st century. But after emancipation the red line, if you will, was drawn on a different point in the battle with respect to access of political power has been going on really sends emancipation and we have had the laws and restrictions and the terrorism to keep black people from voting over many years and here we are in the 21st century emirs will talk about her suppression strategies and let the nation being advocated by one major party here in the United States. And so we do have this notion on the political side and there has been a progression of politics going from the emancipation politics of dealing with issues that we have seen articulated for so many years and civil rights and i would suggest you again that the Civil Rights Era and the struggle has certainly not ended but its entered into a new phase. So we have had an era of political activity where there was the first black governor, first black senator and so on in the modern era and we have had urged africanamerican president as well. One of the things that panels will be discussing his were are we in terms of politics and black people and certainly the election has brought about such terms as racial politics and we have to examine that and see what it really means in terms of political activity and political discourse and direction that we see for the black community here in this first part of the 20th century. So im going to do my job which is very pleasant and one that im honored to do, which is to introduce our guest, as is indicated, we have Michelle Wallace and our speakers will speak in this order. We will then open the discussion up to all of you because this is meant to be an interactive event and im sure that her colleagues have much to say of interest and value and of course, so to you. We want to make sure that we have been losing our process here today. So with that, and im just going to read from the biography, professor cobb is the author of substance of hope, barack obama and the paradox of progress and other essays and a freestyle on the hiphop aesthetic, which was a finalist for the awards for writing. And we have the struggle for civil rights. He has been a featured commentator on msnbc, National Public radio, cbs news and a number of other broadcast outlets and you have his speed line in the program in your encouraged to follow that. It is my pleasure to introduce them now. [applause] first of all, i would like to say thank you for inviting me. It is an honor to be here, especially with someone who has been attending this conference for a very long time and from the point that i was a fledgling writer just trying to learn the ropes and find out how this undertaking really worked. So this conference has been key to me in so many ways over a long period of time and im very happy to be here to talk with you today. So we have the subject of this panel and i was somewhat apprehensive because i think it is impossible to have this conversation without talking about the Obama Presidency but its also a very important subject that we have these dissonant and policies that determine the way that we respond to obama and criticism that is most evident to me when we had an oblique criticism and we will come back to that in a minute. My brothers keeper program. Other obvious shortcomings and failings and the difficulties are implicit within trying to address this all we have a black presidency. So as i was saying, i think that the fundamental point here, and we are in a point of aggression while we appear to be in a point of progress. And this is not a typical. But to see that there are things that are implicit within something that appears to be progress is not uncommon. In 2000 and we saw the election of the first africanamerican president , someone that none of us thought would happen and then in 2000 while we saw the reelection of an africanamerican president and people have seen this to be somewhat significantly successful. The ongoing move to make it more difficult for people to have access is the ongoing unchecked excesses in the ongoing issues of income inequality in the black community is still reeling from the earlier to address the racial impact of the housing crisis and so on. So in talking about those dynamics it is often taken as a criticism or referendum on the barack Obama Presidency. So very briefly about my brothers keeper, the concern about that program, 300 million that was raised by the Obama Administration through private philanthropic efforts to support the initiatives relating to young men of color and their needs, 300 million sounds like a lot of money and is actually less than the new york city budget for the Parks Department for one year. 300 million spread over five years over young men of color across the United States. And this is less than what the Parks Department spends for new york city and is the first thing. The second thing that is of particular concern is that in 1996 when booker washington ideogram economize address in which he said that politics really could not care black people where they want it to be, that we had mistakenly placed our faith and politics they galvanize what became the Niagara Movement and what became the naacp, and the sentry law to culminate this in the Civil Rights Movement and the attempts to gain political rights. To see how that we could move the political system to better condition. So looking at the africanamerican president who sees unemployment and the circumstances of jordan davis and Trayvon Martin and the best response that we can anticipate from private philanthropic money, what it says is that we have perhaps reached the ceiling of what was talked about nearly 120 years ago. But this is the farthest we can go in the pinnacle of political expression and power in the place that someone is in the white house and that person is incapable of addressing those needs on a specific we Public Policy and federal policy level and this perhaps we need to revisit. I dont think politics is useful but i do think as we look toward the barack obama and ration, we have to have Difficult Conversations about the limitations of politics and one of the new Strategic Directions we had come up with, if this is incapable of producing more than the anemic racial returns of the Obama Administration this far. And i will stop there. Thank you, professor. Next up we have professor lamont hill. He is one of the leading hiphop generation intellectuals in the country. His work covers topics such as culture, and has appeared in magazines and books and anthologies spooling hiphop, expanding hiphop based education across the curriculum in the classroom conversations on black life in america. And a collection of conversations, he lectures widely and provides your commentary for media outlet like npr, the Washington Post and the New York Times and is a contributor for cnn newsroom former host of our world with black enterprise. He holds the and africanamerican studies at the institute for research at columbia university. Please join me in welcoming Marc Lamont Hill. [applause] thank you, everyone. I would like to echo the sentiment is conferencing so much and im grateful to be invited with everyone. And the doctor has done so much work to make this conference possible. So much work everyday. I had a sense that he was going to cover a lot of interesting up but i agree with wholeheartedly and i am equally as curious about what this political moment means and im struggling to make sense of it in a way that is productive for us. Because i could just spend an hour critiquing the Obama Administrations policy as such, but im not sure if that would get us as far as we would like. This moment is so bizarre to me. For so many reasons. Theyre just a few things that i find frustrating. First welcome i wonder if over g. E last six years we have first welcome i wonder if over the last six years we have yielded a level of moral authority and Political Authority with these symbolic triumphs. And are we so excited to have a black president that we are willing to no longer engage and critique . May overstate this level that we had before, but i remember being in washington dc and being in an antiwar march and there were black people there, brown people there, so much activism though much of the invasion in iraq and their work critiques of empire and all sorts of things happening. I remember black people defending potential strikes in libya and preemptive strikes in libya. But the idea that we can engage in preemptive war as a means of advancing a Foreign Policy and so the idea that baby for the first time we know that some are war hawks in support of this administration. That was puzzling to me. It made me wonder where our sensor was going. I was curious to me. We know that their art predator drones being struck and yemen and afghanistan. We know what happened in libya. It is a hawkish Foreign Policy and the bush and reagan Foreign Policy, yet we have not had a critique of it. We just talked about my brothers Keeper Initiative and i cant imagine any other moment that we would be celebrating and intervention through Corporate Philanthropy as opposed to this. And there are all of these moments were bizarre stuff is happening and i just dont see a critique. I dont know of any administration that has talked about this in a public way. But i think our expectation is that he would have we would have this and etc. So i think that that might be the limitations of this form of politics. But what i am curious about, because i just dont want to talk only about obama, if this power and politics and how it part of late capitalism. Im wondering if we as a community can have a different kind of conversation about this state of late capitalism and the role that the marketplace right now in our everyday life. From the way in which education continues to be privatized. And this is part of this privatization would have normalized monetization and we have a general appetite for this because we imagine the private to be good in the public to be bad and the public is bad because it is often marked in Public Education, Public Schooling, public options. Public anything marked as lack of bremen airport disposal. As a consequence we buy into it ourselves so we think of this are people too have this and what have you. So i think that economic agenda is to advance to racial politics and that is what concerns me the most. But we are obsessed with this and im not sure that we have the language to do that. And there is a marketbased response to education and it might be better than no child left behind and governed by the same logic area when we see this going from 250,000 to 2. 5 million, people incarcerated over the last 50 years, weve had as a crisis of time and its not just a crisis of globalization although thats very important. And not only normalizes it, but supports lost but expands this. So i think that we have a conversation about the market and economy across all of the sectors of our lives. And i will stop there. [inaudible conversations] thank you, professor. Lets now have ob hendricks, who has been hailed as of the last prophetic scholar and we were speaking before the program that we hope youre not the last. [laughter] that he is a former wall Street Investment executor. The oldest africanamerican institution in the United States. Professor hendricks is currently a visiting scholar and africanamerican studies at columbia university. In the professor of this at the center for American Progress and a trustee of the Public Religion Research institute in washington dc and a member of the u. S. State Department Religion and form policy working group. He is the author of living water, it a novel. In his most recent book, radical reflections on the bible. Please join me in welcoming the professor. [applause] enqueue. Im glad to be here and im a longtime participant supporter and beneficiary even before i thought about publishing any books. Im really glad to be here. Id like to shift just a little to talk a little bit more about the subject of my college mark introduced. And that has to do with the intersection of power and first we just have to remember that race has always been a strategic tool used by the forces to divide the workers and to weaken workers and keep them from collectivize in so they can continue on with their uninterrupted flow so they demonize black folks and say that we are the problem but it is really a strategic tool that is used. And how have they done this . Well, they use coded racial terms like innercity and lazy and undeserving and welfare queens and all of that in the racial rhetoric. And they use this to cast blame for the plight of Everyday Americans on what we might call post government and equality. Its really caused by marketbased and equality. The concept of post government and equality, a cause of severe wealth disparity is not of the capitalists excesses and often illegal practices occur in the markets, but it ignores these factors as having anything to do with economic suffering and dislocation of workers. But it says that the daytoday economic struggles of americans are the result of Government Policies that sees peoples income and wealth by way of federal taxation, which is then transferred or redistributed to be used for the benefit of the undeserving. Were distributing it to caricatures of shiftless undeserving poor people, which ultimately conjures up the image of supposedly lazy black folks and welfare kings and queens. And so as a result we see poor and struggling toothless whites sometimes really against redistributed policies that would give them a much fairer economic shape because they are a fared the black folks might benefit as well. Maybe to pray that there is some redistribution. So they might be able to live a little bit that her. And here is what we call aristocratic racism. A species of social darwinism. But some wealthy elites, especially those of inherited wealth, is an attitude that the return title not only to be more from the tree of life than those beneath them on the economic ladder but also to run the entire nation. They think it is their right and that is to say that aristocratic racism says that the rich are not just different from the nonrich but that they are a superior human subspecies. It says that the nonrich deserve your life chances, then of course africanamericans seem all the more undeserving of economic equality. So here again we get the last and least beneficial end of the policy stick under aristocratic racism. What can be the goals of the corporate capitalism and strategic use of racism . Of the first is to distract American People from focusing on capitalist policies against the good of society. For example we have the American Legislative Exchange council funded the by the koh brothers that formulate this stand your ground law and they wrote the whole bill and they sent it out to legislatures around the country and many proposed the bill without changing a word to become law. Look what happened with Trayvon Martin, just to take one case. And the whole nation became distracted with what happened at the stand your ground law. Weve seen the young black woman who is looking at life in prison because of this. And what we have been as energy and focus is on these kinds of things on the ground. So why is this something that would be of concern . The koh brothers either and they are never threaten anything or anyone. They have armies of bodyguards. And they do it because it distracts us from looking at their practices are looking at them is one of the 10 greatest polluters in america. They support the Keystone Pipeline and they are saying it is because of jobs in America Needs jobs. You can see that they own 1. 1 billion acres and their estimated to make between 50 and 100 million if this pipeline is brought to fruition. And thats one reason that they use race to distract us from looking at what is being done in another reason corporate capitalism is uses race as a strategy, it is disempower working people. So they cant effectively struggle for true economic democracy in the workplace. Keeping us divided, keeping us angry and looking at each other, fighting for nickels and dimes in making billions of dollars. Another reason to create a poorer and less educated scapegoated labor pool that can easily be exploited less than these wages. How do they do it . There is a long list. For one, they are trying to dismantle Public Education by sponsoring local politicians as professor hill pointed to. Also by reciprocating this and resegregating it. And again, the koh brothers through americans for prosperity organizations have found it is successfully elected support and local School Board Members in North Carolina with buzzwords like neighborhood schools and neighborhood education to get them to dismantle the program they had and it allows a real interaction between black and white folks. Its very important because when we have mostly black schools we know that we get the short end of the stick again. Rather than those in state legislatures who can be easily bought out. They actually want to dismantle the voting franchise. Were concerned about stand your ground and those kinds of things, and theyre getting away with murder. And also we see these conservative, you know, corporate libertarian types doing their best to withdraw funds from black communities by seeking to cut programs necessary to black Community Health and well being on down the line. Paul ryans just a poster boy right now with the foolishness that hes talking about. Theres much more. But i just want to end by echoing Martin Luther king in the last years of his life when he said that the next phase of the black struggle is economic, is for economic democracy in the workplace. That is to say that we must see racism as a strategic tool of capitalism, so we must be involved, as Martin Luther king said, in class warfare his terms class warfare. We must fight for economic democracy in the workplace. There is no democracy in the workplace. Think about it. Try to go in and say, well, i disagree, and youll get your walking papers. So i think that is the fight. We need to look at the tool to dismantle unions so they can even have more of a hegemonic sway and control over our lives and the direction of our lives and our life chances. Thank you. Thank you very much. [applause] okay. Im going to ask our colleagues except for ms. Wallace, i guess you want to be there . You going to stay there . Were all going to come up. If you bring your chair over, you can leave your belongings. Move your chair over here. Theyre going to be broadcasting, projecting images on the screen. If youd just move your chair over to the right. Before the lights go out, i have no memorize this. Micheli wallace is our next speaker, and she is a selfdescribed feminist scholar, intellectual who has been furthering the difficult work of decolonization since her first brave book, black macho, published in 1979. [applause] some people are telling their age in the process. [laughter] her books include, her other books include black Popular Culture dark designs and visual culture, and invisibility blues from pop to theory. Her attention to the invisibility and or fetishization of black women in the gallery and Museum Worlds has made possible new, Critical Thinking around the intersection of race and gender in africanamerican visual and Popular Culture, particularly in what has been called the gap around the psychoanalytic and contemporary africanamerican critical discourse. Presently, ms. Wallace teaches professor wallace teaches in the English Department at the Graduate Center at the City University of new york, and please join me in welcoming professor Michele Wallace. [applause] hi. Im here today to talk about my mother, Faith Ringgold. [applause] she is a world renowned artist, and were trying to do a powerpoint here, but we cant get it to project as we wish. All we can to is get this, which is the slidesorting page. So were going to work with that. If we can get less light in the room like that light right there. [inaudible] yeah. Its probably two things. One, there, i think, is a problem between the mac theyre not used to pc, number one. And number two, it is a large powerpoint. And so i think maybe theres some part of the system thats not able to feed it. Its like 160 images. And, anyway, i gotta do the right thing, was my mother is here. [applause] shes in the front row, and i will introduce her in a moment. [applause] and i have been given many, many instructions about public speaking. You dont spend all the time apologizing for things that are not going to happen. [laughter] you get on with it. Anyway, Faith Ringgold, today i have chosen to focus on her work of the 70s, because theres such a large array of work. Much of it which would be very relevant to the discussions of my other panelists who were excellent. But lately weve seen the revitalization of the 60s work with some of the writings that identify done. There was a show at the newberger museum, theres a catalog in which i wrote a crucial essay and, actually, theres a show right now at the Brooklyn Museum called witness which includes three works or, rather, two works by the Brooklyn Museum which they are, they have purchased or i dont know which tense to use. But any waw, theyre anyway, theyre in their collection. And these two works, youre never going to find this out, see, because they dont want to print the title. Because the title of the most important work that they have is called die nigger flag for the moon. It was done the year that the United States landed on the moon. And its name is die, nigger. So who would ever thought all these years later that the white press so afraid to use that word at least in writing that youll see it alternately referred to as a very attractive flag painting or an American Flag or anything but die, nigger, which is the name of it. Actually, the Chase Manhattan Bank almost bought that painting because you cant you have to look at it for a while before you can see it says die, nigger. Anyway that work and another work called study now which comes out of the Civil Rights Movement t and particularly the episode this which Charlene Hunter gold was integrating the university. So the 60s work i dont know whether you know it or not or whether youve gone over the Brooklyn Museum which now has a show on the Civil Rights Movement, the art of the Civil Rights Movement finally here in brooklyn from the 60s [applause] you know . 2015, ill point out. And its curated by kelly jones who with some of you may know. And so thats going on. And so now hi mission is to my mission is to bring to the public the 70s work. Faith is much better known for tar beach and her story [inaudible] whos afraid of aunt jemima. Shes also known for her childrens books, tar beach being the most famous of them. [applause] and her work is in the collections of all the major museums. But right now since i was growing up while she was doing the 70s work, in 1970 i was 18, in 1979 i was 19 or 1980 i was 20 no, thats not right. 28, right. 1979 i did black macho. When i wrote black macho, after having spent my life living in the house with an artist who produced the work that you see behind you, producing the work that you see the behind you and who was a black feminist and who i was actively engaged with all the time, i didnt mention that. And we have often talked about why. But, number one, in excuse for myself, number one, i didnt know how to mention it. And number two, i i was not encouraged to do so by my editors or my publishers. I was encouraged to marginalize my mother in her work. And her only presence is its dedicated to my mother, and she did the picture of me on the back of the book. And, actually, today misspelled they misspelled her picture credit. I cant remember what it was. It wasnt Faith Ringgold, it was some kind of way they did that. So we had some issues. Anyway, were still addressing that, and i am belatedly trying to introduce you to the work of the 70s which is always which has always fascinated me. And want to do, you know, an exhibition project, a book. Im doing a book called Faith Ringgold my mother, my muse, my mentor. Im going to retire next year and devote my life to doing this. Because my mother so wonderful. I love you, mom. [applause] so im going to ask the people in control to turn the light off so that the camera can see the screen rather than me, as i know theyre able to do on cspan because ive seen it done. And the guy in the booth is going to just roll slowly through a selection of her works. I pooled this down from 300 works that she produced in the 70s, and this is 160 of them. It includes, it begins with it includes some pictures of some of the political activity. I also chose the 70s because this is a political panel, and her work in the be 70s was all in the 70s was all political. So i guess were not going to get the light off or any of the lights off. How about the house lights . House lights . Oh, me . Okay. [laughter] yeah, okay, you can sort of see it. Actually, it really does look better. [laughter] so you see the work of Faith Ringgold in the 1970s. I start, im starting my process by i started by constructing a master chronology of all the work in order by medium. And this was the period in which in the 60s faith only produced paintings. This is the period in which she started using other media. And this is the reason. The reason is because she had all these big paintings and no place to keep them, and nobody wanted to look at them, and nobody wanted to buy em. And we were living around them. She couldnt dare produce more. Okay . And she kept those paintings all these years. She kept them safe for 50 years. And now people are receiving them. So she began to work with different materials and to get very engaged in political protests. Thats her in 1970, a picture of her with her work in the background. Thats her protesting in front of the museum of modern art, because we were very actively protesting the museums then. And you cant see that picture, but i look really cute in that picture. [laughter] i was 19 or 18 or something. And then theres another picture of her with the judson three. She got arrested for desecrating the flag. Partly the arrest was because of the painting that niece thats now on the walls at the Brooklyn Museum. Those are political posters. Roll it up a little bit. Those are details of the, for the womens house which she did this 1971 as an installation for the womens prison. She wanted to give it to a school, but nobody wanted it. And so she said im going to go somewhere where i have a captive audience. [laughter] so she, which was the womens house on likers island. Rikers island. So she went there and asked them what they wanted to see, and this was her first maybe her only painting entirely devoted to women. Because she had become a feminist. So everybody in the painting is a woman, and it shows women doing things we didnt ordinarily get to do in the 1970s like play drums. The little, the white woman who has the babe by in her lap baby in her lap, shes reading to her from a book on rosa parks x. Theres a bus driver, we didnt have that. Doctor whos teaching at a university, theres a lady running for president , a woman what marrying somebody, theres a woman cop. Anyway, thats all [inaudible] now. Be keep rolling. And then weve got the selections of political landscapes that she did. This is a series he did for shirley chism. You remember when she ran for president , and we didnt show her much love. But my mother did, and she did a series devoted to her. Then, roll. These are the political posters which are now worth monumental amounts of money which she used to give away. One for angela, one for the United States of attica commemorating thank you. Oh, great. I didnt even expect that much time. Okay. So i can point out the United States of attica is up there. That was commemorating the awful thing that happened at attica. If 1931 in 1931. We were all so grieved about that. And then, of course, some of the panelists are talking about the legacy of what happened there. Which is really stunning. The criminalization of black people and brooklyn being the primary location of that. Roll on. These are the feminist series. She began to do [inaudible] that she could roll up that she didnt have to stretch and that she could travel around with. She quit her job teaching, as a teach or, and began to teacher, and began to go around to colleges and campuses because she couldnt show in new york. Going all over the country showing her work. And these are feminist landscapes. She got the idea from seeing tibetan tacas in amsterdam. She had the idea of doing landscapes, which she loves to paint landscapes. And putting the worlds, quotations from important black women and black feminists historically. And so the way you do on a city bet tan taca tibetan taca, you have words. Roll on. Then she got into the slave rage series which is dedicated to plaque women and slavery black women and slavery in tacas in which she wanted to its called the slave rage series. She wanted to really connect with the experience of black women. But not having been to africa yet. Roll on. During this period she goes to africa. See, whats happening is because its so big, its taking a while for the images to load even on the slide sorter. I dont know what kind of projector this is, but usually when people do powerpoints, you know, they have two or three images. I dont know what thats about. Anyway, these are the [inaudible] that she did, family of women. Keep rolling. Roll on. And then she started doing dolls. Family of women were her, the women shed grown up with. Roll on, keep rolling. This is windows of the wedding. She wanted me and barber to get married, so she started doing wedding art. [laughter] and these were, like, stained glass windows. Roll on. This is Wilt Chamberlain who wrote a notorious book at the time about black women. She started doing sculptures of him and also his wife and children, and then she started doing wedding pictures. Id go to the house, and everything was a wedding. And she was trying to work on us to get us married. [laughter] in her own special way. Keep going. [laughter] okay. The wakened resurrection of the bicentennial negro. Roll on. Just roll. All of this is work she started to do once shed been to africa. Just roll on to the end. Im done. Thank you so very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] okay. Thank you again, professor wallace. Thank you. A round of applause, please. [applause] and thank you for the gift of your ipad here. [laughter] thank you very much. Thank you for your patience. Okay. We are going to get right to our discussion part as i mentioned at the beginning. This is meant to be an interactive experience here, weve certainly enjoyed our initial comments from our guest speakers. What id ask is that if you would, i think we have a microphone well, we have a microphone over here. If you feel that you can speak without a microphone, thats fine, but i would just oh, no, you need to speak to the microphone. Ive just gotten a very subtle message fromsome in the from somebody in the back. If you have a question for one of the panelists, id ask you to come forward. In the interest of time, theres an expression that sometimes everything has been said but not everybodys said it, so we dont want to get into that. [laughter] wed ask is that if you have a question for one of our commentators, please address it to either the entire panel or one individual. And id say to my colleagues, if youd like to just chime in at that point with any additional comments, and well just move on and see how we go from there. So with that, and if youd introduce yourself, please. Thank you. Thank you. My name is yvette moore, United Methodist women. First, thank you for ms. Ringgold for all the books that you gave my children coming up. We really enjoyed your books. [applause] my question has to do with something Marc Lamont Hill said about privatization, and it has to do with Public Schools. We all see the commercials for the Charter School, you know . And they have a little thing on the bottom that says paid for by Charter School parents, but we know if the Charter School parents had that kind of money, their children would be in private school, and we wouldnt be having that. And i see theyre making, theres a battle theyre trying to make the brown folks fight, you know . How do you organize against that kind of money that when i was wondering, if i saw that paid for by Charter Schools, you know, id turn the channel. I turned the channel, literally another one was on. But this brown v. Board of education type inequalitys going on inside the same building when the Charter Schools come in. They get renovated, the other children cant get book withs, cant get cant get books, dont have libraries. And i know that happened to the Excellent School that my children went to. How do you organize against that . Yeah. I mean, to me, organizing work is always connected to political education. So part of what needs to happen is people need to understand the nature of Charter Schools and why they could be problematic. And im not, like, the enemy of Charter Schools per se. Im frustrated with how theyre being used. Charter schools were designed to be sort of laboratories of experimentation and innovation. So wed have a Charter School, and we would try a new teaching technique or curriculum or some approach that we would then distribute to the larger Public School system. Charter schools are publicly funded, theyre often privately run sometimes by corporations, sometimes by people, sometimes by different strands of people. And so for me the problem isnt Charter Schools in that way, its the way in which Charter Schools are being used to dismantle the broader Public Education project. School choice as a broader repertory of political possibilities is dismantling Public Education because the language is itself unproblematic. Who doesnt want choice, right . Choice is seen as something fundamentally american. So the language of choice gets used to smuggle in a particular type of political vision and strategy. Charter schools are problematic because, one, they strip away large layers of funding from the broader Public School system, and they go to these pockets where not everyone has equal access to them. Charter schools have the opportunity to not take students who are, who have emotional datings, intellectual disabilities, they have the opportunity to send kids back when they dont like how theyre performing, so often times their performance on state exams are different because they can throw back the ones they dont want, you know . But not with the funding, which becomes really tricky. Theres also what we call a creaming effect. Typically the parents who do come to school, those are ones that often access the Charter Schools first. So you crime off the most engaged parents, and Public Schools are left with even less engagement than even before. So what we called mainstreaming where youd have a balance of students connected to each other, strong orer students, weaker students in terms of performance, now all of that, theyre all in one room, and everybody else is left in this other room. Forgive me, i dont want to go too long. But it creates lots of problems. And then the other problem is there have been new tax credits developed for Charter School building, right . So a lot of the money that was going into Public Schools is going into private corporation coffers for the ostensible purpose of building Charter Schools. So what we see if the strengthening of a private wealth under the guise of Public Education, a lot of people dont understand that. And thats how they persuade parent, dont you want the choice . Rich people get to go to private school, glow get to now you get to go to one. Most of these dont work. Thats like me going to bronx science and saying all Public Education works. Its not an apples to apples comparison. So first of all what we have to do is organize parents by giving them the information. We also cant be dismissive or condescending and say these parents got the world wrong because if your kids does go to a is it the same building. Sometimes it is on the state, right. Sometimes its on the same building, sometimes its upstairs. They literally annex it out. I dont get mad at parents for making decisions that are best for their children, we have to create a universe where there are good options that dont come at the expense of other people. We have to organize, we have to b on these school boards. We have to advocate for Public Education so that the traditional schools have teachers and administrators and School Board Members that matter. We have to organize and do the work. We have to devote people who have an agenda of Public Education, not just a de blasio vision of what Public Education should look like which often is leaning on corporate interests. Again, it comes down to political education and organizing. Okay, thanks. Next, please. [applause] good afternoon. My name is jason harris. Im from baltimore, new futurism. Com. The question that i have is, you know, i was really excited that from the start everyone talked about the economics, because it seems to me that for the Civil Rights Movement the most effective event was the montgomery bus boycott. Like that was the thing that had an outcome that really forced an entrenched policy to be changed. So in this day and age now were saying weve reached a ceiling with political power and the type of outcomes that we can have operating within this political arena. What are the strategies, the basic strategies that we can start using, or are there any strategies that youve identified in your research that work as far as creating something that communities can agree on and pursue and have success with in regards to economics . Okay. Anyone in particular want to take that . Thats a good question. I appreciate that. Just did a trilogy of articles on Martin Luther king in the huffington post. First two are in the archives, you can look them up under my name. Is the last one is on why Martin Luther king had to die. And it focuses on the poor peoples campaign. What Martin Luther king understood, what we have to understand is that we need a real countervailing force against the forces of capitalism and wealth. And we dont really have that. Unions are the closest that we have. So we have to really start organizing, for one thing, supporting unions again, fighting against the demonization of unions. He found several broad principles and goals that would encompass most of the people in america, this poor peoples campaign, and so to bring people together with common interests to fight against those who are in power and those who have and positions of exploitation. That is to say that you cant come together around narrow interests but you have to use broad interest and realize that it really is us against them in almost a class warfare cents. Those who are empowering are doing everything they can to push back and dismantle and disempower and they almost its almost like they cohere into a corporate class against us. That we are fighting with these different groups sometimes one can the other. So the first step is to identify real commonalities and try to bring people around economic commonalities and one commonality is the concept of economic democracy. We have this the least formally accept the workplace where we spend our working hours. And most people dont see it that way. You have to raise consciousness and say that we are in a state of neo feudalism. Those who are in control tellis how long we were, if we can go home, whether we can go home and see our childrens programs at school and that kind of thing. And i think that that is overly broad interest that affects all people and i think that that is something that we really need is your talking about and try to get together a common interest and push aside this as much as we can come of those things that divide us. Yes, please . Good afternoon. Could you introduce yourself . My name is deborah struthers. I am from the area, Crown Heights. I have been a single mother boys that i raised by myself in the School System and in this area. Charter schools are nothing new. Its good for us because the money from our community has always went another group in Crown Heights and they all had the private schools. I had to fight is a single mother not only against the system to educate my voice and send them to private school, but there was also a whole challenge between the church and class privilege amongst us and ourselves, those who totally have a feeling this high that if you were a single parent, your kid or your parent wasnt good enough. So we held each other and ourselves back. For example, when i came along i raise my children in the church and i they today, where is the church . My children do not want to go to church. We have made a ministers with mega dollars. The own planes and jets and i dont see any money being prevented and they are not building schools so that we can have our own Charter Schools. We talk about what everybody does to us, and then we quietly we dont say what we do to ourselves. We have to lift up our young men and i cant ask another culture to lift up our boys and make them be the man that they are one our churches have held them. So my question is how do we deal with that . And i like mr. Hendricks to answer that. And i would like for you to answer about economics. When i open up the paper and i look at beyonce spending thousands of dollars to get her hair done, jc spending another 70,000 to have his hair done and then they build a stadium, are they putting any money back into our society remap we have money and we need to stop acting as if we are begging and so needy. We need to build. We need hospitals. We are not making them accountable. That is a good point. How can we make people within our own society stop doing the class thing and the church has money, plenty of it. Hip hoppers have money. Thank you. So Going Forward we are going to just ask brett one question. But you got in before the wire. So please, professor Obrey Hendricks . Theres not a lot to be said its not obvious. There are real problems in the church can be so inward looking. Its more about institutional maintenance than that is what its supposed to be about. We have a problem with too many ministers that do not know what they are talking about. They do not understand that what jesus talked about more than anything was poor people in poverty. The jesus said the spirit of the lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor. What is good news other than you are going to change the systems and structures and relationships and make people poor and keep them poor. So what we have to do is Start Holding this to the fire. The problem is that these churches are so performance oriented and people dont go to them and they often go not to be a congregation but an audience, to be entertained. Part of it is, i think, we need to lean on the church but dont ask fact so much from them unless they are already going in that direction. Because today prosperity and foolishness and all of that, and everyone has to be a bishop or an archbishop or something. If they were really about changing the world like their faith is supposed to tell them to do, then our society would be very different and our communities would be very different. I dont think that they are really the ones we should be going after, unfortunately, even though we have a lot of people that are there. I think we will have to come up with forces despite them because many go to off and have fun instead of go to church. [applause] i believe the question is also dressier. I want to be assisting this possible. [laughter] i want to be as succinct as possible. About jayz and beyonce, we all remember when belafonte talked about this eight to 10 months ago. He didnt think that jayz and beyonce were doing enough with the resources that they have. People thought that they could criticize mr. Belafonte is just another one of the civil rights generation criticizing younger black folks. I was in the middle of twitter fight and mark was probably in it too and its like, you dont understand, you dont have the mandate to talk to a harry belafonte. [laughter] you refer to him as a boy at one point . Yes, in a rap song and so on and its like, you know, that is someone who is from a different generation. But i know im an academic and intellectual, but theres a different other side of me that comes out if you want to disrespect him like that. Because you cant talk to him like that. Moreover, you dont have the ending for the man was his life. When they needed to bring money in 1964 and he and 1548foot down there, thinking because they were the most famous black people and the world at that point, nothing could happen to them but that the government would be forced to investigate this. So that is who that man is. But that being said, i think that we should be hesitant to rely upon what to expect from this, that we live in a different point and i think we need to recognize that because of capitalism and the capitalism culture, jc and beyond they are just symptomatic of a much bigger set of concerns. And its not related to the pastors and preachers and so on. What we have to do is go about the hard work of building a culture that can sustain itself and this goes for us across all sorts of different wines. To not be afraid to say things that will get you into trouble. The last thing i will they in terms of our institutions and what we learn to fight over, yesterday ebony magazine did something that i thought was unconscionable and we should all talk about this. On ebony magazine, the writer had a dispute with a person who is a press person for the Republican Committee and she said i dont want a white person to tell me about being black. As it turned out this person was black and the defense to it, she apologized for assuming that he was white but then the conversation continued with like i basically dont care what you have day, which is within her rights. She did apologize for assuming the person was white. And it was also a son of juan williams. So if you know anything about juan williams, and this is in that reaction im not surprised that his son works on behalf of the Republican National committee. However, ebony magazine saw fit when the republicans demanded an apology, the magazine, the Publishing Company that published the picture of a desecrated body, republic apologize for the Republican National committee. What i said is you apologize to the republicans when they apologize for cutting the Voting Rights act. [applause] until we have institutions, then it was our own fault and we dont hold them accountable. Three thank you. Next question . Thank you. My name is sylvia. I am the chief diversity officer for this institution and i thank you very much for your comments today. Last year we actually gave a Lifetime Achievement award and it is a delight and honor to be the recipient here. My question to the panel is this. You talk about the tentacles of capitalism that cuts across a number of areas in our culture and society and i specifically wanted to hone in on the conversation of the industrial complex, particularly as it relates to black labor behind bars. And im wondering if there is a way for us to think about flipping, how do we put this conversation to expand entrepreneurialism, particularly around a trend among our young men and people because we are in a Global Economy or you can do business from brooklyn to beijing on the internet. So how do we begin to raise this conversation and how do we recapture our labor and the efforts of our labor that are now being exploited behind bars for so many young people who could not get jobs outside on the street but are somehow being trained to do computer consults and software designs behind prison walls. So if you can address that, please do. Because particularly we have so many opportunities to do business and not just the caribbean and africa and china has basically taken over africa. How do we recapture that which is ours on the global stage . Thank you. A Quick Response to this. Im a historian, so i think about these things in one term. So we talk about it three fifths compromise and we know that is. That the slave population would be counted as three fifths of a person for purposes of taxation representation in the house of representatives. The compromise was undone by the 14th amendment so that every individual who is on in this country is a full citizen. It was also on doing with the dred scott decision of 1857. So what happened out of this, this is an attempt by republicans in the 14th and 15th amendments to create a new political last in the south out of the newly emancipated black people that would be an electoral check on the political power of democrats that had torn the country in half to defend their right to hold black people as slaves. So we can hold a population that will vote as republicans, we can actually diminish their ability to have the same sort of influence in National Affairs as that they once had. It did not play out like that. Because the amendment serve to give more power to these individuals than they had before the war. Because now theyre counting the entire population. Those opposed to the 60 , they are counting 100 of the population that means youre entitled to more representation and revenue from taxes and so on. But if we could reduce our population to a group of people that cannot vote through physically brutalizing people out of political contention, you now have even more political power than you had been. So historians say what is past is prologue. So when we look at where people are being incarcerated and the communities and people come from communities like this one and let the community that i live in but i grew up in southeast queens. And they are in largely white areas and they are not counted in the census as residents of these areas. Soaring 2014 you have the same net effect that you had in 1872 in 10 of me and in 1874 in georgia were mississippians on. And that is blackout is being used to give disproportionate power and influence to white people left early and politically. So this is not simply about we need to get rid of stop and brisk. But we need to deal with the infrastructure that is designed to put a hard limits on the political the capacity of black people. The last thing i will say about this is a reporter called me and wanted to know if i thought it would be possible that another black president occurs in a lifetime. And i said that i compared barack obama to jack johnson in 19 away. He became a heavyweight champion and 2008 he became president and there were black people doing the electric slide in the street. So if we go on from that, because he existed as a heavyweight champion, the athletic infrastructure make sure that no other black person had a chance to contend for the heavyweight championship until joe louis nearly 30 years later. So it was like the biggest obstacle, the forces who are adversarial to us now know that it is possible for a black person to become president. So these are the dynamics that we are talking about. This is postreconstruction again and the same tactics and motivations trying to create the same outcomes which is disempowerment and explication and black people being reduced nonentities in american society. Thank you. Yes, please . First, i want to thank Michele Wallace for bring this incredible artwork to this room. Thank you. My name is Connie Julian and i worked of the staff of revolution books and im part of a movement to build revolution in a time when everything that has been said in this room today advocates for that and nothing less. It would be one thing if there was no way to make a revolution in everything that the people in the 60s tried to do is now proving to be impossible. But no, its not. People should come talk to me. We need a strategy that will actually work in this society. But the question i have for you is, could you disagree with me when i say that barack obama is one of the best arguments for why capitalism cannot do anything for the people and black people in this country. And can you really argue that all the things youre talking about, the mass incarceration, the incredible quality within the education, the burning up of the planet, which barack obama is on the forefront of, the endless war and all of these things that this country is actually doing to people across the planet, is there anything short of revolution that could actually address the . The question is no, youre fine. You can say. The question is what we mean by revolution. And are we talking about something that is organic and builds from the ground up, raising peoples consciousness or do we have some romanticized version like we have in this movement and i was part of that what we learned to just tear things down and all of that. I think that this last one is not realistic. So i think its important as the slogan was changed. He did not come in to be a revolutionary, a horse. And if he had, he could have been president. So we have to be working on all fronts. So to vociferously criticize barack obama, i dont do that in public for this reason. I dont want to give aid and sufferings to his enemies. His enemies are my enemies. This is not directed towards you. But i do have critiques of criticism of him, but i try to offer them in a constructive way. Barack obama is ultimately not a problem now. The problem is capitalism and we are not assuming the economic structures that are destroying us and treating us like we are things and so that is what we have to do from the bottom up. Raise consciousness, try to get the preachers to do some reading and thinking about changing the world. And i think that that is really how we can do little by little. I dont think theres any one leader that we need to hollow and i think that we just need to organically come together the best that we can and question and push back and look to change things as we can little by little. I would like to say one thing about obama. I felt that way about him and before i say things that irritate people here, i will let people know that i was in South Carolina in 100degree heat Walking Around organizing voters for him in North Carolina that some are doing the same thing. And i gave large sums of money to make sure that he was elected president and i served as delegate in 2008 as a committed delegate in 2008 to make sure that nothing crazy at the convention happened when the nomination was it to hillary clinton. That being said, i get this idea of not criticizing obama and public so you dont give aid and succor to his enemies. But i just wish that barack obama felt the same way about us. And so the definitive point was we understand very clearly that the limitations in any black person who has never gotten this other job but i understand the position that he is in. So we have a particular kind of empathetic perspective on him. For him to then say that we understand limitations of what you can do if you cant get a budget passed for background checks after those 20 firstgraders were machine gunned in connecticut, because these people are so committed to making sure that there could be nothing to point to in this country. I understand that. But then you turn around and criticize black people for writing after Martin Luther king was shot at the anniversary of the march on washington. And this is what you have to say. Then when you turn around and go to morehouse, which we built and attended as slaves and anchor ourselves in that tradition of learning and you have to talk about the people that are not taking care of their kids, and then you turn around and go to their Congressional Black Caucus and tell them to stop complaining and put your marching shoes on, kick off their bedroom slippers and so on, i wonder, whose side are you on . What exactly are you planning to . And so i find that unconscionable. When you cant do anything to help poor people we understand. And they are making this lot no worse than what it already is. We have another question here in a. This has to be quick. Im introducing myself and im going to try to talk is allegedly as possible. Im a professor here and i understand what youre saying. My question actually speaks to this idea of the limitations of barack obama and obviously that gives a right to criticize. At that point being is that we recognize the limitations of Representative Democracy and maybe they are inserting their own agenda at times. Where should we go . Is that power not to academics when there was a time when you mention that whole idea of yes, i was there and i was in that and i did that. But we all speak about this changing of the culture and i dont believe it can happen within our Current System of political power. And all these things happen when you keep fighting for the things. But we are continuing to be pushed back by these laws were these voter repression things and where should we go . Wants to take a swing at that first . And i think that we all sort of agree that its all dispensable and its a tactic. Its part of the repertoire. And we didnt vote our way and 64 and 65. Its part of the equation, but so is marching and all the other work that we do. So i think that has to continue to be important for us. For what we need to do is have a real conversation about values. And we have to reassess what matters to us to make it concrete. And we have all talked about this as a problem. This is the most incarcerated nation in the world. Boss come i just want to say something. Okay. I was going to say the last thing. And thats okay. I like to do the grand finale. So the question is we need to stop mass incarceration and we need to change laws and how many of you equate justice with confinement. When someone has a drug addition, we construct those people and if someone is on crack, they might be making a bad decision. But that doesnt make them a bad person. But if you are on crack and youre a black woman on this, you end up in 20 years in prison and we dont have the level of sympathy on cocaine or marijuana or what have you. And for 50 years it is exorbitant. And my point is that just as an example we can vote away into new laws to some extent. But if we have a value them the political system is informed by particular values that we brought into play permanent war and violence and that is like going back to political education and that were needs to happen. I was so proud of Stevie Wonder for saying im not going to floridas longest underground is on the book. What kind of this could reengaged beyond just putting on for these on our twitter advertised which is a symbolic form of politics. We have the last words. Revolution today has got to be a culture. And i have a suggestion for how you can start be revolution on this very day. It would begin if every person attending this conference and all of your friends and family when we asked to see witness the art of the Civil Rights Movement. Go to the desk, go in, go look at the art. Be in tha