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