Transcripts For KCSM Overheard With Evan Smith 20170429 : co

Transcripts For KCSM Overheard With Evan Smith 20170429

This is overheard. audience applauding deray mckesson, welcome. Its good to be here. Thank you very much for being here. So, we sit here today on january the 13th, one week from the Trump Presidency beginning officially. How are you feeling . You know, it is sad in so many ways, and so much of the energy of the next four years will be spent withstanding an administration and trying to maintain the progress that we have made so far. Im hopeful that over the next four years that we dont lose our sense of promise and hope whene think about what resistance looks like. In my profession, the journalism business, the saying that has become commonplace is, give him a chance, but hold him accountable. Are you prepared to give him a chance . I dont know what a chance looks like when he is so openly racist and bigoted and islamophobic. I dont know what giving him a chance looks like. I do know that there are people who are ready to hold him accountable and ready to withstand the administration and hold Congress People accountable, and i think people are gearing up for that. But its sad, if hillary was president we would be pushing for reform to just happen at a different pace, but this is withstanding somebody whos willing to just dismantle so many things that benefit people of color and marginalize people across the country. So youve enumerated a bunch of things about hi and peace. It is said though about him that the problem with how everybody regarded him during the campaign was he was taken literally but not seriously, when he shouldve been taken seriously but not literally. You take him literally and everything you heard during the campaign, so that when you move from the smack talk phase, im trying to win an election, to the governing phase, that that stuff will not be forgotten and should not be forgotten. Yeah, i was hopeful that he wouldnt govern in the way that he campaigned. That wed see some pendulum shift, but we have not seen that. Well, he isnt governing yet, technically. Yeah, but i push and say that the people that hes nominated to be in the cabinet, and actually the first step of governing. And making the ambassadors all end before his presidency, is a governing act and i think that were seeing the same sort of intensity in the negative way that we saw during the campaign. Again, im hopeful the activists and organizers across the country will be ready to withstand this administration. But it is sad that this will take so much of Peoples Energy that could have been directed towards really positive work over the next four years. But rather than the general notion, hes racist or hes islamophobic or whatever else. Are there specific things that worry you . Theres so many specific things. Okay, but this is pbs, all we have is time. Yeah. audience laughing enumerate for me things that concern you, specific things. So, we think about what does it meant to have a National Stop and frisk strategy, that we know disproportionately impacts people of color. He is being heralded by the police, and you think about the doj report that just came out in chicago, that noted that theres a deep pattern of practice of discrimination. And we would say that that is endemic of Police Departments all across the country. Of course, thats a city run by a democratic mayor, one rahm emanuel. You put that on him, or on the federal administration, whoever administration it is . Yeah, well weve seen with the police that the uprising in ferguson started under president obama being president , indeed. Which doesnt well, in fact so much of what black lives matter has come into existence to respond to what happened during the obama years. Yeah, but we know that obama didnt make the 18,000 Police Departments, that the legacy of racism that is in the Police Departments was long before president obama and long before rahm emanuel, which is not an excuse for either of them but it is real. He said he wants to build a wall, there are so many things. We think about even undoing the Affordable Care act as the first step of it happened at the 11th hour not too long ago. That would disproportionately impact people of color, women, and marginalize people in ways just that are unheard of. I think hes pressing forward really aggressively, so im worried about that. Again, im hopeful that people have the energy to withstand it, and that is a good thing i guess. I take you at your word, and i take it seriously, what is withstanding it mean . As a practical matter. What do we anticipate withstanding it means, or resistance means . Some of it is just know what the what is. So when people look at the Affordable Care act and they say, what does it mean that preexisting conditions wont be covered, or what does it mean that contraceptives wont be covered, or defunding planned parenthood, is that actually a real thing or not . Empowering people in communities so that they dont think that policy is this abstract thing that they actually cant impact. Put a human face on it. Yeah, and just make it accessible for people. That one of the things that i think is really damaging about the organizing community in the past is that policy becomes this thing that is mythical and magical. And there are these people who know policy and then theres everybody else. And i think what people are trying to do, especially over the last two years is demystify it, and say, you can actually have a voice in how you hold your Congress People accountable for, preexisting conditions being apart of the aca, or covering contraceptives or any of those things. So, i think thats one part. The second though is Building Community and i think about what we did so powerfully in ferguson and cities across the country was bring a different type of coalition together to say, were going to build power and harness power. So we think about in the last couple days thousands of people have called their Congress People to push them to vote a certain way, or to not vote for jeff sessions, whos an avowed racist. Ben carson barely knows what hud is, so pushing people to not support ben carson as the hud secretary, which is wild. And i think that were seeing people understand their role in this democracy differently. And i think about president obama, i was in chicago for the last speech and i take him seriously when he says that the most Important Role in this country is citizen. And i think that is about how do we build power differently. How do we help people harness the power they have because trauma does two things to people, whether the trauma is racism, police violence, any other systemic thing. Trauma either actually takes your power away, or makes you feel powerless when you have power. And part of our work as organizers is either to help people reclaim their power, or for systems to restore power to people, and that is so much of the work that comes next. The consequences you alluded to and the reference to what president obama said about citizenship makes me want to ask you about the vote. So, one very practical civics book form of consequences is that somebodys in power, they do something you dont like you vote them out. We have a system in which its actually pretty hard to get incumbents out. And a lot of people around the country, not just communities of color, but everybody has come to believe to some degree that the system is rigged. That change is made impossible by the structural or endemic barriers in the electoral system. So, how do you get around that . Yeah, so the system is rigged in many ways, what we call gerrymandering, when we think about the voter id laws that that is legitimate rigging that is disenfranchising millions of people all across the country. What happens when you have voter id laws and then you close all the places that give people ids. That is a way to disenfranchise people. That not withstanding, i do think one of the things the democrats did poorly this go around was that they didnt take seriously that an opposition strategy wasnt enough. Theyre saying, dont vote for trump because hes crazy wasnt actually an affirmative, that people needed something to vote for. And i think that hillary, and i was at the Javits Center on election day and it was quite sad. And i met with hillary for the second time about two weeks before election day and i think that she actually got it much more than people gave her credit for, im not convinced that that actually made the mainstream. So you think about the surrogates is that killer mike, was out there paving the pound, pounding the pavement. Pounding the pavement, that was rough, woo. audience laughing i wasnt gonna let you go too long with it, thats okay. Pounding the pavement . Pounding the pavement for bernie and that was really powerful. Katrina pierson, whether we like her or not, she was delivering the talking points for trump. Its like, who was actually doing that for hillary . Hillary had some Amazing Things in her platform, and i think that that was a real loss. I think the messaging in the Campaign Just wasnt really refined. So, that begs a larger, more existential question that could take up all the time we have. It wont, but did he win or did she lose in your mind . I think its a combination. I think that we cant downplay the impact of comey and the fbi and the emails and all that stuff. I think that that had a huge impact, but i do think there was a little bit of taking for granted the fact that people are deeply disillusioned with the system in this moment. And i think that there are people, and it was one of my frustrations. I came out and publicly supported her, like the Washington Post editorial. The Washington Post editorial. And one of the things that i was trying to push within the activist community is that there are many ways to build power. That we sit in streets, that we disrupted Peoples Commission hearings and all these other things is a way to push power, but voting is another way to build power. And we have to have every tool in the toolkit. And i think that one of the things that president obama and so many other Democratic Leaders did, i think that was unproductive, especially with younger people was to say, voting is the way. If you dont vote you dont care about the country. And there are a lot of people like me who are like, i voted my entire life and i got tear gassed in cities all across the country. Its both and, not either or. Right, that voting was not the end all, but we understand voting to be one important tool in the toolkit. But you keep setting up whats interesting about that, i want to come trump all these other topics i want to talk about. Is the question of whether as black lives matter as a movement has evolved if working more within the system, in quotes, has made it less of the movement that you imagined it to be. Theres been a discussion, i know internal to the movement about protests and marches on the one hand, like when Campaign Zero was launched, there was a lot of question about whether, you guys have gotten so professional and formal and you have a 10point plan and everything else. Where is the movement that i knew, its become this thing. You dont want to become the thing you despise. I would say a couple of things. One is that i think the first part of the movement was about awareness, right . Two years ago people though there was a problem in ferguson, they didnt think there was a problem in america. It took two years of seeing this is actually close to you, this is your neighborhood too. The Police Killed three people a day in this country, this is very close to you. If you get killed in america and the newspaper doesnt write about it, youre not in the data set, that is wild. So, we pushed people for two years. I think we successfully got them on the other side of the awareness battle. People generally, whether you like us or not, whether you like the Movement Everybody knows you, theres no question about that. People get it. And i think thats huge and i think this is the moment though where movements die, is that they change the language and then youre like, what happens next . Theres this false idea of what it means to work inside and outside the system. I think that what is real is that systems break in pieces. And part of our work is to think about what are the pieces that we take down and how do we rebuild them. That theres this idea, you know king said it, baldwin said it, this notion of, why would you integrate into a burning house. As in the system is broke, why dont you start over. I think what is real is that you never start from nothing. So, you burn the house down, its not like you start from the garden of eden. You start from the ashes. And what were saying is that the house is ours too, that this is not the abdication of the system. That marginalized people help build this, that the wealth that we know in this world comes off of the unpaid labor of the enslaved. And that means that this is ours and we have a responsibility to make this the best system. This is not about abdicating our role in this moment. Right, so back to clinton for a second. So i was very interested to go back and reread, i read it when you published it, the endorsement that you made of secretary clinton during the campaign. You took trump out, you made very predictably, youre a supporter of clinton, youre not for him. But you were for her, youd come around. More recently, this week as we see here again, Tanehisi Coates of the atlantic did an exchange with his readers and he was actually quite critical of secretary clinton. He said, look you know, she may not have been the messenger that we wanted, that we cant simply put the responsibility for this on, oh these people who turned out to vote for trump, they ultimately won this election. Really, she sort of failed us as the candidate. And i remember the days of the superpredator, you know. I remember the long history of the clintons and im just really not buying this idea that somehow she was a great candidate and he just won. That somehow she has to own, and the campaign has to own the outcome here. Are you there with that . I think democracy is about choice and compromise in that when we think about this campaign that there was one candidate that was far superior to the other candidate. I think that this will also be a lesson of false equivalencies, that people who did the, well, shes just as bad as him. I think that they are living the consequences of that now and are seeing that thats going to all the bad things that happened with him, but then people went, yes but the emails. Yeah, youre like, are you kidding . This is wild, right. So i think the spirit that Tanehisi Coates is saying is right in the sense that the campaign made some errors. I think that it is a real fault of the campaign that when people think about hillary they think about, she didnt support a 15 minimum wage at the national level, she doesnt support ending the death penalty. That people only think about these negative things, they dont talk about the hundred billion dollar economic stimulus for poor communities. They dont talk about her plan to peel back the 98 crime bill, that those were not the talking points. And i think that they thought that the threat of trump was so wild, whos gonna vote for this guy . I think what they didnt take into account, and we said this to her when we first met with her a year ago. We said we dont think people are gonna vote. Forget the people that voted him, we dont think people are gonna vote for him. We think people are not gonna vote in this one because they are so disillusioned in the system and i think that we were right in many ways. Look back on the eight years, speaking of Tanehisi Coates, the president obama question. What kind of an eight years did we just have . Do you feel like the eight years produced the results that you thought they would, that you hoped for . Do you leave the eight years with any regret or remorse . Ive met with president obama twice and our last meeting was four hours and the first one was very long. At the end youre like, im ready to go. laughing very good meeting. Yeah, you start yawning. I was like, its so long. Are there snacks, whats going on . He does like to talk. And he likes to listen. Oh, hes great at that. To his credit. I think that the reality is that the context, the landscape of hope is so different than it was in 2008. Obama not only sort of introduced us to the beauty of hope but i think he became a vessel of peoples hope, and i think that that will always be a set up. Is that a burden for him . Yeah, i think that he could never have been as great as people wanted him to be, so that is the context in which i think about him. I do think that more could have in the beginning years, when the democrats had congress, and i think that some of that is what happens when, his whole team, it was a new team. It wasnt the clinton apparatus, they were a new, the obama world was forming. At the end i think that he got much more aggressive about criminal justice and these issues, it was just the end and when i think about all the meetings i was in at the white house and with white house staffers, i think that they were setting up for the hillary years. That they were going to put all this stuff in place, hand the baton off. Hand the baton, right. So you think about the president s 21st Century Task Force on policing, great recommendations. All the commutations. Yeah, incredible stuff. He was commuting people at an unbelievable clip there by the end. He has commuted more people i think than how many president s combined . Yeah, its incredible. But i do think they were like, let us set it up and shell just implement it. And then that all fell apart which is why we see the doj actually being aggressive in the final days. The baltimore Consent Decree the other day. Were gonna get it in under the last day. We see chicago trying to go out with the intensity that i think he believes in. Yeah well, definitely that last speech reminded everybody of the last eight years and the way that maybe over the last couple years, weve just taken for granted. And the last speech was such a reminder of obama the organizer, right. It was not the soaring rhetoric, there werent these deep metaphors. I

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