Peniel joseph. [applause] good afternoon, everyone. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our third panel of the day. Again the title was 50 years later blacks in the 21st century. The panel is framed around but kind of progress blacks have made since the Civil Rights Movement and the endorsement challenges and quality that these African Americans in the 21st century. The organizers have formulated two major questions for us to talk about. The first is of historical and contemporary factors continue to make racial equality a contested and elusive concept in the 21st century. And second, what kind of knowledge can we mobilize to face the specific challenges of racial inequity in our contemporary moment. I am absolutely thrilled to be able to be in conversation with two and possibly three speakers, dynamic speakers and thinkers today and i would like to introduce you to that before opening the conversation. Joining us is farah griffin, a professor of english, comparative literature and africanamerican studies at columbia, and she has also served as the director of the institute for research and africanamerican studies. Her most recent book is forthcoming in september, harlem nocturne Women Artists and politics during world war ii. Pardon me. Our second panelist is peniel joseph, founding director of the study for recent democracy and professor of history at but Tufts University and the author of wait until the midnight hour and dark days and the bright lights for to barack obama. The third is scheduled speaker is kendall thomas, who is traveling in from brazil. And unfortunately has not yet arrived but we are hoping he will take the stage as soon as he does come. I will introduce him and his absence. Hes a mass producer of falcon and co director and cofounder of the center for the study of law and culture at columbia and university and is one of the editors of the Critical Race Theory set for the movement. So we have three powerful sinkers and visionary speakers. [applause] welcome, kendall, it yourself comfortable and we are glad you made it. Barack obama set up our conversation about blacks in the 21st century through his comments yesterday. But i want to put into a larger context because we are trying to take a backward and forward look on this conversation. Where have we come to sense in the 50 years since the march on washington . At the same time, this particular moment is framed by the events. The first is in the three and a half weeks ago actually, the Supreme Court overturned the domestic marriage act and struck down the Voting Rights act. At the same time, seven days ago George Sinner minn was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin and yesterday the first black president barack obama wrote his Second Public statement on the state of Race Relations in the United States. So this is a key moment to reflect on 50 years later, and what kind of progress have we made in black america . Im going to ask you to comment on what you see as the impact of these three events in the political culture and what they say about what kind of progress is and what is not being made in the 21st century. Thats a very provocative question. Its difficult to come up with quick answers in the heat of this particular moment. We tried to address it. But those three legal interventions so to speak tell us what racial progress has meant historic way, progress in an area of race equality is always to recognized by the Movement Forward and the retrenchment so that there is never any street sense of progress. We certainly have made Great Strides in the 1963 march on washington. There was the Voting Rights act to years later and what 50 years later we have a retrenchment on the key piece of legislation. We have something that none of us know to be an act of racial violence where the person has been found not guilty to the they are calling it an act of racial violence and that shows you the way the retrenchment works and it is a more sophisticated and more difficult for us to name things that have to do with race. Those of that call it an act of racial violence could have been divisive i dont think that could have been the case years ago but there is a retrenchment, a backlash. They take maybe two or three or four steps backward. You have to be aware of that and that will show us. Striking down the Voting Rights act is a step backward. And Trayvon Martin i think is both because it is a step backward the demobilization, i am heartened by the mobilization are rounded and the refusal to give into the kind of dominant narratives that were spun as a result of it so progress and retrenchment. [applause] skill mix e3 for organizing this panel. I think that we owe him a great round of applause. In National Conversation of recent democracy should be happening. We should be having in our communities everywhere around the country that should be multicultural, multi generational. And weve been having these conversations and our communities historic please route, but we need to have these conversations among white americans, latinos, gays and lesbians and young people, and its really it should be an issue of national priority. First of all i would like to throw out a prosecution triet i would like to throw out a provocation that the difference between 1963 to 2013 is that in 1963, black people knew they were being oppressed. A 1963 with a new that they were being politically, socially, economically subjugated. I would like to for about a provocation that when we think about the heroic period between 1954 to 1965, what the people did then is transform fundamentally american democracy and they did so with allies and latino allies but they did so through the blood and blood shed. The the thing about Trayvon Martin is the 14yearold black belt that was assassinated in the middle of mississippi in 1985 for allegedly violating racial etiquette and speaking to a white woman. His body was placed in the tallahassee river with a 125 lb coffin jindal tied around his neck. It was shown in the jet magazine and that spurred the nation to look at the price of White Supremacy on our dhaka see. We think about 1963, 1963 is the year of birmingham and the year dr. King writes his famous letter from the jail. Dr. King says the activism that has gone on the end of the young women and men in that are being addressed it sometimes as eight, naim, 10yearsold are taking the nation back to the democracy that was dug deep by the founding fathers. He was being too kind because the country was founded on racial slavery and it is a conversation that we still have not had. About 50 years ago with the march on washington provided a litmus test for democracy. When he speaks of the march on washington she says americans of all cultures and races have to struggle together and go to jail together to try to fundamentally transform american democracy. 50 years later in Barack Obamas 2008 election we have celebrated an unearned victory. We celebrated the victory and talked about postglacial america. We are celebrating the mythology of the end of racism and thats why people were surprised about Trayvon Martin. I am heartened that the president spoke out yesterday, but he spoke out and started to speak truth to power only because the grassroots activism that has compelled him to speak. Barack obama is not Martin Luther king jr. Barack obama is not frederick douglass. When you get a picture of dr. King next to the Lyndon Baines johnson, hes got frederick douglass, hes Abraham Lincoln, and the sooner the black community has yet to maturity to understand that, they can level eight respective critique to the president of the United States for not discussing the black agenda, not discussing black poverty. He said hes not president of black america. I would say find, no matter what anybody says, we are american citizens and we should be advocating for an end of poverty, the end of racial inequality, and the end of mass incarceration. So when we think about president barack obama, we need to go back to what dr. King said in his last speech. He said the greatness of america lies in the right to protest. Whoever is in the white house should be someone who we is talking about an agenda that affects africanamericans even if that person happens to be the first black president of the United States. [applause] good afternoon. Its great to be here. I want to join in the congratulations of the book fair for organizing this event and allowing us an opportunity to talk about the contemporary state of black politics. Tina, you offered three images. One was the u. S. Supreme Court Decision in the Shelby County case. Not to forget the court this past term also decided an affirmative action case from the university of texas, in which affirmative action survived by a hair. I am persuaded that by that the decision the Supreme Court is setting up the law to strike down racial diversity as a compelling justification for race conscious affirmative Action Programs. But taken together i think we can say three things about each of those events or images, each of which offers us an approach on to the state of black politics in the United States today. About that Supreme Court decision in his opinion for the court, the chief justice, Justice Roberts says its something that i do not think could have been set 50 years ago and would not have been set 50 years ago by a member of the u. S. Supreme court. There is a moment in the opinion in which he frankly admits that Racial Discrimination in american life, particularly here in the voting excess and goes on to say no one denies that. Yet by the end of the opinion, what he has given us is a legal judgment, the reading of the constitution, which effectively says Racial Discrimination exists. No one denies it and we dont care. So we are living in a peculiar moment in which at one in the same time we can add net the existence of Racial Discrimination, indeed racial stratification and subordination and on the other declared without skipping a beat that is something about which we are justified as a nation and not caring about. So theres the political culture of indifference to the questions of racial inequality which i think distinguishes our moment from 1963. I may be getting into some hot water here because i read the speech quickly and i read some of the press coverage. What strikes me about the press coverage is the extent to which the speech has been universally lawyered for its profound insights into the nature of race and racism in the United States today. Dont get me wrong. I am very glad that the president chose albeit a week after the event she chose to address the verdict in the zimmerman case and he acknowledged the widespread pain that African Americans and all americans who are friends of racial equality who are committed to an antiracist politics in the wake of that verdict. But as in so many of his other pronouncements about race, the president s remarks pretty much remained within the framework of what i call in my own work racial moralism. As a was put of sound and sentimental stories this could be your son or daughter. Trayvon could have been my son, i could have then Trayvon Martin. The speech only gestured through the use of the world context which depending on how you use it can mean anything and nothing. To the Structural Forces that have produced Trayvon Martin. And it is the age of neoliberalism and that brings us to the moment of the zimmerman verdict itself and which a judge instructed the jury which reached the verdict that held and this is another provocation that when it comes to circumstances like this, a black man has no right which a white man is bound to respect. I am paraphrasing. [applause] im paraphrasing the decision of the Supreme Court in the dred scott case, the notorious case from the 19th century which predated the civil war. Unless for the celebration about the change weve seen in this country in many ways around questions of race and racial inequality since the early 60s. I think its important for us as we think about moving forward not to lose sight of the continuity to the am i saying that there is no meaningful difference between the structure of racism in 1963 and racism as we know it today . No, i am not claiming that. What i think i can say is we live now as we lived 50 years ago in a moment of racial contradiction, and we need to wrestle with the reality of those contradictions instead of wishing them away. That simple to do. [applause] i think everyone would agree those were very provocative statements and i want to follow up with a few of them. I would love to hear you talk more about the contradictions each one of you is pointing out. The contradictions that you were mentioning between a historical moment during which there was a recognition of oppression and the contemporary moment that kendall was describing of indifference. And i think that links directly to the cycle that you were talking about progress and retrenchment to get to me it seems like one of the things you are putting on the table was the question of how in this contemporary moment is race being erased in a way that takes away the possibility for action, legal action and protests. They are being put back on the table with the Grassroots Level but i am wondering if each one of you would like to comment more on the implicit criticism that you are making to the way in which for example barack obama is asking us to participate in a National Conversation on race but at the same time saying that he cannot lead that conversation, the the government isnt effective place to have that conversation but it should be had. I would love for you to tease out more of the contradiction at all of you are speaking to in terms of what is race in the contemporary movement and how can we mobilize against it in a different way than we mobilized against jim crow for example 50 years ago. I think the most important thing is to recognize and acknowledge that contradiction. And i think that peniel is right. There seem to be to responses to the zimmerman verdict. What did you expect . I didnt expect anything different. It wasnt made to treat us fairly. And other people were stunned that in this day and time this was the verdict we could get and there and is the contradiction and there is so much little ground that we need to be yet to discuss that yes, we are in a moment that the country made a tremendous stride and elected an africanamerican person, president as kind of an exceptional africanamerican person. The Civil Rights Movement was quite successful in that it didnt knock down certain barriers that gave a few of us access to read a few exceptional in the fungibles access. Yet there are so many black people who still suffer from all kind of any quality that wasnt addressed significantly enough that in there and lie is those contradictions. One of the things we have to do is acknowledge their existence, see how the absurdity, for instance, i will stop here, in the judges instructions to the jury or in the prosecution they could say profiling the they couldnt say racial profiling. So, there is a way that the cases what are the possibilities when we cant even call racial profiling racial profiling but in the prosecution the use race all the time and show women afraid of young africanamerican men because one was at her house. We can have pictures that evoke these racial narratives that would strike at the heart of the jury yet we cant say in defense of trayvon that he was racially profiled. And the final thing i would say with president obamas speech its the problem i have with personal anecdotes. We all have personal anecdotes. And i guess it is supposed to strike an empathy and the heart of the listener. I like obama. I thought he was like me to but i voted for him if he cant get a cab in manhattan. And that becomes there is a certain drama to the personal anecdote to that story. That becomes the end all and the be all of the story so what gets lost when people were doing the post speech discussions they say trayvon could have been me 35 years ago. But its exactly what he says but i cant do anything about it as president of the United States. I want to acknowledge your pain, black america. I understand it, but as a president and a brother ive experienced but as the president i cant do anything about it. And i watched and i looked at twitter and facebook and everyone quoted trayvon could have been me 35 years ago but few people paid attention to that and said its not the place politicians cant start these questions, the conversation that needs to be had. Personal anecdotes are good, but i think it is really not in our service lead overshadows and it trumps the work that really needs to be done. [applause] i would like to build one thing we have to do even before our audience here is to talk about a definition of racism. When we think about racism, its not about personal prejudice, its about institutional subjugation and oppressions of the new racism isnt about white and colored signs. The new racism is about outcomes. Whos in jail and why . Who has no health care, who is