be said because we all, we are each other s advocates. we are brothers and sisters in grief. we know what it feels like to have our children destroyed over things that we love and cherish about them. right. you referenced again what i referred to often as the appalling silence of good people that, as you recall, were dr. king s words from the birmingham jail. i ve seen that all the time, people who are i think in their core good people who don t know what to do who tend to send the paradigm that boys will be boys and girls will be girls and we re trying to shift that paradigm. and that s why in okahenapen we have an accountability document that calls for . (inaudible) with the idea, like i said, there is not a state going that we don t have a parent that has a dead child. we are dragging everybody to the party because at what point do we say, we can t even say, kids are dying. hundreds and hundreds of children have died when this should be the best times of their life an
great honor to host you here and i look forward to a very engaging conversation today. thank you. now i want to tell you my fae vifrt very favorite department of justice official. eric holder is my favorite department of justice official. tom perez is my second favorite department of justice official. we are very honored today that tom perez has come from washington, dc, to give welcoming remarks here at this summit. tom perez is the assistant attorney general of the civil rights division in washington, dc, he was nominated for that position by president obama and sworn in in october of 2009 and we are all the lucky we are all very lucky that that happened in october of 2009. tom has spent his entire career in public service and on protecting the civil rights of our most vulnerable people. tom actually joined the civil rights division as a young lawyer and while he was there he prosecuted some of the most significant cases in the country. lawyers in the civil rights divis
little more than two years ago to be united states attorney and it is my incredible honor to represent the president, the obama administration here in the northern district of california. welcome to the stop bullying summit. i m a federal prosecutor so it may seem odd that here we are talking about bullying and we asked all of you to be here and i want to explain the origin of that and why this happened. you people, everybody in this room, has been involved in this issue and is doing incredible work on this issue and we were so honored to be a part of it and to meet with all of you and to speak with you about it. the origin is that as the united states attorney, the administration wants me, wants all the united states attorneys, to go out into the community. it s actually a very different role for the united states attorney is envisioned by this administration. this administration, the president, attorney general holder, they want the u.s. attorneys to go out into the attorne
quite literally take their own lives as a result of cyber bullying and that is why i did a remarkable partnership in south florida with local law enforcement who had gone into schools talking about bullying, including cyber bullying and giving people concrete examples of things of situations they saw, it was remarkable. and that is why we will continue to do that work. so i hope today as we move forward you will understand that we are in this together with you at the department of justice. this is an all hands on deck enterprise. there is so much to do. i hope at the end of this day we will indeed all follow the lead of that student, walk out and say what are one or two things i m going to do differently and better? how are we going to improve this situation? i hope if you take one and only one thing from melinda and my and ruslyn s remarks today, if you have an idea, please bring them to us. we want to learn from you. we are in this together and i want to say thank you becau
another race or religion. and then i had another trial after this was done in another jurisdiction that shall go unnamed, and i would say there were maybe 5 percent of the jurors, potential jurors, who had had meaningful contact with a person of a different race or ethnicity and that s really what this is about. one of my least favorite words is the word tolerance because, you know, i tolerate brussel sprouts but if you simply tolerate the diversity that is america, you are going to, you are aspiring for mediocrity. when we have, and this gets back to your question, when we have leaders that embrace diversity and that build a culture that says, you know what, if you want to compete in the global economy tomorrow, pal, you ve got to embrace diversity. why does coca-cola write a brief to the united states supreme court and general motors and microsoft on issues of diversity and higher education? because they know if they want to get ahead, they ve got to embrace that diversity.