the weird coincidence of the jack johnson pardon being given at the same time that this happens. jack johnson is really the exemplar of the things that these young men who are kneeling believe in. that starts with him. we start talking about the po t politization of sports. heather, if you want to work on criminal justice reform that affects african-americans, what about living african-americans? that s exactly right. i mean that is why this decision to pardon jack johnson was safe. it had become a cause celeb for people like john mccain, for harry reid, for sylvester stallone. it had in some ways become like so much of the civil rights movement, something that conservatives could embrace as well without dealing with the issues here and now. but i just want to be really clear about what the political
treated and how the league, you know, protect them in the long run is something that s very, very important. the fact they did not consult with the union before releasing this new rule i think is going to come back to bite them. i mentioned sterling brown and we do have that video, so i want to play some of that. this is the context for all of this. overwhelmingly african-american players, though not only, raising these issues because of videos like this. take a look. i told you to back up. i ll do what i want, all right? i own this right here. you don t own me, though. taser, taser, taser. oh, oh! you know, the nfl apparently wants to have black people without everything that comes with blackness. these are african-americans. even when we talk about owners
hesitation about this, but nobody tells me directly. we mutually co-sponsor each other s bills. but we have a lot of work to do because this is not a blame piece of legislation. we re not trying to blame white leaders in this country before us. what we re trying to do is examine the lingering effects of the incidents of slavery in american history and what and how it impacts upon african-americans and other minorities today. and to do that, we get away from the question of how much money should the check be and so forth. congressman, thank you for joining us from detroit this morning. are you back on the ballot, sir? oh, yes.
we re talking about something that has to do with racism and that injures african-americans of all economic classes. so i want you to, professor katznelson, frame this historically for us. you make the case of reparations in the same week mtv releases a poll saying millennials think basically race is kind of over so you have a majority of millennials saying people should just get past race and having a black president means that things are okay. what do they need to know about history to help improve this? first, to note that the millennials who say that have a particular, very special set of experiences and contacts which are, alas, not representative of the united states today where the continuum has stretched. president obama on the one hand but heightened segregation, deepened poverty. the legacies of past policies continue to play out.
and it s why for many of the descentants of enslaved people, 40 acres and a mule has become a symbolic reminder of the long legacy of slavery and america s promises of redress that have never been kept. reparations that are due but still unpaid. still unpaid in part because of few policy issues divide us more than the issue of reparations. in 2005 in the aftermath of hurricane katrina, two fellow researchers and i surveyed more than 1200 americans asking a series of questions about support for federal reparations for african-americans as compensation for historic injustices. people in our study were asked do you think the federal government should or should not pay money to african-americans whose ancestors were slaves as compensation for that slavery. we also asked do you think the federal government should or should not pay money to african-americans as compensation for the system of anti-black violence and legal segregation known as jim crow. we also asked do you think that reparati