 To think tech Hawaii, rule of law in a new abnormal, systemic racism, violence, and other difficult conversations to make good trouble, we have the very great honor of having with us today. Professor Vananjia Randall from the University of Dayton School of Law, now in Florida, one of the leading experts both on health care law, disparities in health care law, and race, and the law. Sandra Gangl, one of the leading labor arbitrators and pioneer in many areas of labor and employment rights for employees and the marginalized for many years and vendors in Camus or Washington. And Professor Ben Davis, who retired from the University of Toledo School of Law, and a special, special honor for Ben today. Ben was awarded by the American Bar Association's Section of Dispute Resolution. It's highest honor for individual achievement in conflict resolution, the Dallenbert-Rabbert Award, Raven Award. This is not that award. This is something else, but it's to call everybody's attention to the fact that, like Bernalia and Sandra, Ben is truly an icon. He walks the walk. All right, thank you all. Now Ben's going to tell us about his shirt, because Ben has the most exemplary t-shirts. He had one yesterday, which basically said, confused the algorithm. Am I right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's today's. Today, this is actually one of my oldest shirts. You can see it there. It's a yin and yang, but it also has a sun and moon at the same time, which I think I bought in Woodstock in 1992 or something like that, or even. And it stood the test of time. And as today felt like the, I just put it on. I did put on a shirt and tie for the event, but I like to say that I've been zooming on the shoulders of many people. But yeah, this is just one of those shirts. There we go, folks. Well, yin and yang are the prime area of collaboration. Collaboration, on the other hand, is storily and painfully missing in what's going on in this country and Minneapolis Brooklyn Center right now. Well, you know, one of the things to talk about the topic is about systemic racism. And I just want to lay out because I always feel like one of the problems we get into is we get into arguments because people have different definitions of things. And so they get into an argument because they disagree. But what they're disagreeing over is the definition. And so it seems to me that I like to lay out my definitions just so that people, you know, you can say, well, I don't agree. And here's my definition. But if you don't have a different definition, then you have to evaluate me based on the definition I propose, not just because you don't want to out or whatever. And to me, the thing is, I don't know that many people understand what systemic racism is. It is, in my mind, a whole system like policing, education, housing, employment, banking, the whole system that has different parts of it has policies, practices, and procedures that causes some kind of disparate impact based on race. And the people in the system allow it to continue and don't correct it. It's not about individual racism, although that can be present too. It's more about having set up. It's like, I don't know if you watched that movie, Ice Train or whatever it was. They set a train to go around a track. They establish different levels of class. And the train is on automatic. No particular person, except to the extent that they keep reinforcing the policies and practices and procedures that has the problem. And the problem with the police is it is a system built initially on outright racism and has been transformed into a system maintained by systemic racism. Sandra, Ben? I have been really educating myself this year in racism. And I liked your definition, Professor Randall. What is your first name? Vanilia. Vanilia. Although we have an agreement to call me Professor Randall, just so people out there don't start calling me Vanilia. Oh, OK. OK, Professor Randall. And what I have found, I mean, obviously I'm white. And I never thought of myself as racist, because for many reasons. I mean, I was a foreign language teacher that taught Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees English. I have a granddaughter who is Black, who is adopted. And so I've considered myself kind of a very non-racist person. Then I read the book by Kendi, How to be a Non-Racist. And I realized, no, I am guilty of the whole system, because I have benefited over the years by simply being white. I have benefited from the system that allowed me to go to college and to become active in the legal profession before there were Black people that were welcomed, even though they had the same opportunity under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that I had. But there weren't any Black people getting into law school even when I was getting in as a woman. And the lending, the neighborhoods that I lived in over the years, the school districts that I went to, I benefited from the whole system, which is geared to the white community and has detrimental impacts on people of color. And so I really have been educating myself, learning a great deal, and realizing that we need to deal with systemic racism in so many ways. Brother Ram? I, too, agree with Brunelia, as Harry Professor Randall's definition. And the thing that I was going to comment on is there's been a lot of interesting shows recently on various networks that have been really deep for me to watch. There's a new series. You're going to sound like I'm plugging people, but I'm really not. But there is a new series on, I think it's on Netflix called The Them, which is about a Black family from North Carolina moves out to Compton, California, late 40s, early 50s, to an all-white neighborhood. And it captures just that moment when there are those covenants against Black people being able to buy neighborhoods. But they're unenforceable. So it's right at that moment then. And some of the issues that we just described about the primary banks, the major banks not lending to Black. And so then there were others that were charging higher rates and higher down payments and all kinds of ways of making money. And those secondary lenders were essentially having a Black family buying into a neighborhood. Then we would have white flight, which those whites would go to some other neighborhood where some other part of the real estate business would make money. And then they were selling the houses in the nice white neighborhood at inflated rates to the Black. And so you're making money on both sides in this kind of game. And the whites would be getting the loans at the primary banks. And the Blacks would be getting these land contract type setups and that. And it's really describing that period. And you see the intentional racism part of their short because of the neighborhood reaction. But you also see the systemic part of it, too. The second thing that I've seen, and this is kind of ties into what we saw in Minnesota, is there's a 30 minute movie, I believe it's on HBO called Two Distant Strangers that I just happened to come across this week, which is a basically sort of a groundhog day for a Black man who keeps getting killed by the same police officer. And he keeps trying to do things to stop that happening to himself. I mean, it's a very heavy meditation on all these police killings that we've seen. And then the third thing is, and I saw this, this was on HBO. It's called Exterminate All the Brutes. And this is a four part series for an hour each. And what that does is it goes really far back into the point in time when white supremacy arose as a concept. And they put a lot of emphasis on a 1478 papal bull called Exigit and Seriae Divosiones, which was the bull on which was based the Spanish Inquisition, where they were looking for converted Jews who were at home doing their Jewish services, but also the infidels of the Muslims who had converted to were also being questioned. And there was a whole effort by this to root out all this, so to speak. And it was really sort of the creation of this vision of Christendom that distinguished between the European and everyone else in the world. And there's other things going on there. But it was, so I've been trying to get this 1478 papal bull. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find it. You'd think you could just Google it or something. But I do have contact with someone at the Library of Congress who was actually surprised, too, that it was hard to find who's trying to find this. Because I wanted to see this document. I had seen earlier things like in 1455 there was a papal bull that basically called for the perpetual enslavement of Africans that is kind of the basis for the slave trade really exploding after that. But this other one, this 1478, is sort of the one that seems to be argued, at least in this particular show, as being the real genesis of the idea of white supremacy. And so, you know, when you read things like that, it's like these things are so, so far deep in terms of what's going on in systems, OK? And the particular view of the exterminate all the brutes is by European imperialists at the time. And things like learning how to kill at a distance, which was one of the modernization of guns, the cannon, all those things created this particular military superiority that was also morphed into sort of intellectual or superiority and all this stuff. Anyway, it's a lot to cover in a few minutes here. But, you know, that's another thing that I read that I really want to think about. So when we see ourselves today, it's like, well, then a lot of things don't look so surprising if you think of how deeply rooted they are and also how hard it is to unroot them and also the capacity to morph, if I would say it like that, from the end of the 15th century to today, there's been morphing and morphing and morphing and morphing with some other concepts underneath. And every once in a while, you'll have somebody who will come up with a rationalization for why everything is OK the way it is, right? I mean, we see that even today with the voting rights issues or with these police shootings, you see, or how the court system is approaching. And how the politicians. I took off my video because my internet's been acting up and it was lagging. What strikes me is there are no current politicians actually interested in fundamentally changing the police and system and that includes Biden. Look how he responded to the death of a child there. Yes, the young boy. He responded by, oh, yeah, this is so horrible. But we've got to give the system a chance to work. We've got to give the people a chance to do a, we've got to have an investigation. But he responded to and he did that in one kind of tone. But then when he got to talking about the potential for violence, he was almost in the anger in his voice. In just the very next sentence, he says in a very strong way, there is no excuse for violence. I'm like, oh, wait a minute. You just said there was an excuse for violence. You said we do an investigation and perhaps based on that investigation, the outcome will be that there's an excuse for violence. So that even the Democrat and the Republicans take it further, but the Democrats support systems of racism by not fundamentally undermining them when they have the opportunity. And right now, they have the opportunity. They have the opportunity because they control, to the extent they do control the Senate. The Democrats are conservative, are moderate Republicans, many of them. But at any rate, they're unwilling to make any fundamental change or use what leverage power like the power of funding, the power of money to get the police to fundamentally change how they operate. And they could. I don't know here what they say about this is a local matter. I guarantee you, if they said, we will stop giving you military equipment, or selling you military equipment cheap, we will stop funding training. We will stop giving you money if you don't adopt that best practices. And the best practices is, and they can make a whole list of them, one would be in my list is by definition, if you kill an unarmed man, you are not competent to be a police officer. I don't get what your problem issue is. That minimum competency should be don't kill an unarmed man. Like we want minimum competency for a surgeon to be don't take out the wrong organ. They take out the wrong organ, they can come up with all the reasons why that happened, but it doesn't matter. They have proven that they're not competent to be a surgeon. They're not competent to be a police officer. We're unwilling to do that. And what bothers me is we talk about it as if there's some discussion to be add on it, not we in this thing, but we the society as if we're confused about what can be done. Here's my take on a lot of the police issues. I think that, first of all, their training is very inadequate. When they are hired, first of all, the police departments today are having a hard time finding qualified people to apply because so many of them have some black mark on their own on their record that they can't even get a job. And so in order to fill the positions that are available, they hire people that really are probably not right for the role that they're going to play. And then they give them a very short training program and put them out into the workplace usually with an experienced person as their trainer. And I think that in Minneapolis, the two guys that were working with the person that ended up with his knee on George Floyd's neck were basically newbies, barely new, who were still being trained. And they felt kind of helpless watching what was happening. They did not have the courage to stand up against their trainer, their supervisor, who was supposed to be teaching them the right steps, the right way to do their job. And I do think that they need better, they need more training, and they need more familiarity with things like race relations and dealing with people with mental illness, dealing with people who are acting out and deal if they need to learn about bias. Do you think that explains why they shoot black mentally ill people more than they shoot white mentally ill people? Look at that guy who just jumped on a car and used a hammer and then had the police officer. Over and over again, we see white people shooting, using violence against police officers and walking away from it, even with the lack of training of the police officer. Well, I think that they need to, when there is a mentally ill person that has been, they know that the call is about someone who is mentally ill and who's acting out. And that's what happened recently with one of these cases that escalated. The family had called the police and said he is mentally ill and he's having an episode and we can't deal with him. Well, they need to be able to send someone who has expertise in calming down the person with the mental illness in dealing with them on a human level instead of treating them as a criminal. But I guess that does, I'm still, I'm going to go back to the question I asked. Is that the explanation for racial differences in how police officers deals with mental illness? I mean, do you understand? I knew what you were saying. No, I think that they draw conclusions, again, based upon their own bias, their own, whether it's conscious or subconscious, if they see something happening that they feel is dangerous, they and the person is a person of color, they're more likely to respond improperly with extreme behavior with that person. Whereas if it were a white person, they'd be more patient. I agree. I think that that's a real problem. Let's understand the distinction here, which is Professor Randall's question goes back to where we started, which is the root cause of the systemic element of this, which are both, as Professor Randall and all of you have pointed out, not only allowance, acquiescence, enabling stuff, but it's intentional stuff and sometimes mixed, sometimes both from the same sources. And then we also have the responsive situations where if you look at it logically, who in the world would ever stand a physical safety person, public physical safety person out to deal with an emotionally charged, a racially charged situation where communication to deal with that problem in its essence has to happen. Otherwise, you get a 26 year white woman officer, veteran out there training a trainee. Who panics with an unarmed black man and shoots him, alleging that she has mistaken her taser, which is a one finger old with a three finger gun. And that's not going to sell anybody in the middle of the time that we are watching a trial in which for over nine minutes, it is indisputable that the full weight of former officer Derek Chauvin's knee and body were on the neck of George Floyd to the point where it extinguished his oxygen flow and his breathing and his life. And we're trying that case. What the heck is going on in this? Why are we sanctioning violence systemically to allow this? And we got a couple of minutes left. Ben, jump in. I agree that it is insane. Let's just I mean, we talk about mental health. Let's talk about sort of societal mental health that it's insane. Now, it may be intentional and then, you know, in the sense of that's the way the system is supposed to work. But I'm just saying the system then for therefore is insane. I mean, to that we see this many things. When I when I saw that particular person say my bad, I thought I was going to use a taser. You know, I was like, excuse me. Why do you want to use a taser anyway? I mean, what was going on in that fact pattern that made you think a taser was necessary? Right, exactly. What was going on? I used to ride the subway. Let me just tell you, I used to ride the subway in the Boston. And I always thought the subway was great, you know, really when I was like 19 or so. And everyone was friendly and all that. And then one of my friends said that, you know, there were a lot of white guys were nervous about riding the subway. And I said, well, I think the subway is great. Yeah, because everybody's afraid of you. And I was like, this power I had to freak people out, you know. Yeah, this is like absurd. And in our last minute, and I think that touches directly on the perspective and the emotional reaction of the 26 year officer who shot Dante Wright. Hey, any last words? Well, I kind of think that one of the problems is that that until we acknowledge that police cannot operate in communities of color as a system because the system is racist and biased, and they will always there will always be members. Who are going to act on their bias in and and we need to stay on the police. We need to go to another system of safety. No one's talking about. But the system we built up from a slavery because this is basically a post slavery system. The system we have built up a slavery. Has built in problems that have gotten most of worse over the years. I stopped because I don't want to take up the whole minute. Well, and and we're out of time for today. Oh, I didn't know that we've we've we've got a system that has elevated property over human life for certain categories of people. Yeah, for the benefit of another category of people. Let's come back there in two weeks. Let's see what we can learn during these two weeks. And please rejoin us, folks. We'll be back April 29th, same time, same station. Have been Professor Randall Sandra, thank you so much for your thoughts and your passion about this really critical topic. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.