 How are you enjoying the conference so far? 1,500 people. Atlanta showed up. So when we were together in Washington, D.C., or just outside Washington, D.C., if we tell the truth, we determined that we wanted to have a larger town hall meeting about the intersection of Black Lives Matter and drug policy. Because although we talked about it in separate silos, we often didn't talk about it together. And if you're going to be a movement, you've got to be willing to have what Patrice Conn colors taught me to have, which is courageous conversations. You've got to be willing to do them. You've got to be willing to say the truth. You've got to be willing to be authentic. And that doesn't mean being disrespectful, but it does mean standing in your truth and owning that space. Michelle Alexander set the bar high on that yesterday, and she asked us to go big. And that's what we're going to try to do tonight. Because what we know for sure is that it's not enough just to talk about changing policy when there are still people who will never recover from the policies that were created before to begin with. That's the conversation we want to have. What's the nexus? And what do we do as a movement? What's our position? We've never really had that talk. What are our values? What do we stand for? When we started this movement in 1994, not me. I was too young, and that's real. Don't laugh at that one, because I really was. I really was. I'd only been married twice at that point. Real, you know, the values were driven by what we knew then, which was a lot about personal sovereignty, which is something everyone in this room can and should appreciate. The right, as Dorsey Nunn would say, to own me. The right for the government to not impinge upon my body. But also, at that time, Bill Clinton, the Democrat, ushered forward in omnibus crime bill. I love Tony Nunn. He stayed with the boo in the right moment. And that was the bill that challenged us to not just consider our liberties as individuals, but who we were as a society. Many of us who lived the real world consequences of the effective death penalty act is what it was called, right, Ira? My family was harmed underneath it. Couldn't speak in 1994. We were struggling. We were drowning. We were happy to have a bone thrown to us. But this is 2017. And many of the people who were harmed are now in the leadership of this movement. And it means we've got to begin to ask different questions, deeper questions, sometimes harder questions, but maybe not as hard as we think we are. And maybe we can do, as Malcolm X used to instruct, be reasonable people who walk in reason together. And so tonight, co-hosted by AfroPunk, this conversation is being live streamed to literally hundreds of thousands of people about the case for reparations in our movement. We've lived with more than 50 years of the drug war, more than 50 years of mass incarceration and criminalization. And what does America owe us? What does it owe the world? I was in a gathering earlier today talking with people from all around the world. And the one thing that was consistent in that group was that even in places where race was not a factor, right, in Kenya or in the Philippines, what was consistent was the targeting of marginalized people by police. And it brought me back to a book that Ethan wrote, Cops Across Borders. And part of what the United States has done has not only exported a drug war in a blanket sense of policies, right, but a way of policing people, a way of surveilling people, a way of deciding who matters and who doesn't matter. And so we want to have this conversation considering that, too. What does America owe the world? What does it owe the world? We know America ships out all of this stuff. And usually, we only talk about hip-hop when we talk about what America ships out, our culture. But we ship out also the worst ways to treat human beings. And there's something that has to be held to account for that. And that's the conversation we want to have with you tonight. Are you ready? I'm going to tell you like I told you, at the point of reception must not be no Brooklynites in this house, because Brooklyn ready for this conversation. So if you're ready, let me hear you say you're ready. Come on, Ira, show them how Brooklyn does. The original, come on, Ira, let them know. So to have this conversation of some of the most brilliant people I know that I have met from long time and people I've met from short time, but sometimes even that short time is a lifetime in terms of the quality of the relationship. And so I'm going to ask you to join me in welcoming this extraordinarily distinguished panel to have this discussion. And I'll say to you that, as you know with me, I think that we want to have the conversation up here, but to the maximum extent possible, we also want to have it with all of you. And so at a certain point, time allowing, I'm going to also try to come in the audience and get as many of your questions and hear from official responders. Dr. Ron Daniels is in the house and has been pushing the question on reparations and from the first state of the world before that. My mentor from 1990, when we were at BMCC College together during the Malcolm X conference and pushing it then. This is a question that's been around for a long time. And so he's here. So we want to hear from you as well. How do we do this? This is our way of being a movement. We call this the International Drug Policy Reform Movement. We have many partners who put together this movement. But DPA is still the largest organization. What that means is not just to say that to funders. What that means is that we are accountable to more than just our board. Accountable to more than just our staff. We're accountable to all people who are here, all people who are harmed by the drug war. And so we invite you into this conversation as we figure out how to do this work right. So please join me in welcoming to this stage. Yeah, these people I've just known for so long. Who I meet on many paths in my life because you know we're gonna take any paths to get free. And this is a woman I have just loved, adored, learned from, and so will you. Please welcome the co-founder of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference and its general secretary, Dr. Ivory Carruthers. A newer friend, but no less meaningful to me, meaningful to me is a brilliant woman from Panama who I met at a panel who talked about what it felt like to live in exile. Well, not actually being exiled, but because of what the United States had done and the decisions that it made. And Panama forced her family to leave the country. And so much of that was tied to the drug war. How many people remember Noriega and how we treated Panama? And we don't talk about it anymore. And because it's not in the news, it doesn't be in our consciousness, but it is in the consciousness of the Panamanians who are there and here. One of them is with us tonight. She's a United Nations and Human Rights Strategist. She is the leader of four Americas Consulting. Please welcome Jean-Vierve Williams-Cormier. Jean-Vierve asked me where you want me to sit like she ever listens to me. That's some fake shit right there. The next two women I'm going to introduce, I sort of want to introduce them together because there's a descriptor that I use for both of them and it's true for both of them. So the thing that I love about these two young women in my life is that they made me braver. There is something true about getting a little bit older and a little tired and having private school bills to pay and all this sort of thing that just says, I'm going to do good. I'm not going to really harm, but I'm also not going to push it too much because, you know, I've learned sometimes by pushing it, I get punched in the face. And then you meet some obnoxious ass young people who never, who never let you dial it in, who always push you to be the best version of yourself, which is to say, push you to tell you the truth. The first person who fits that description is the State Director of the New York Drug Policy Alliance Office. That's the one to Cassandra Friedrich. And the second person I met in 2011 in Denver just before marijuana was legalized in Denver. Art, are you here? You know a black man led that campaign to legalize marijuana. Let me just recognize our way. We were doing this partner meeting and it just, we weren't doing it right. We weren't doing it right. We were asking the wrong questions. We were making the wrong demands. And everyone knew it. The attitudes were off in the room. I knew it. And there was one young woman, I will tell this story to the dad. I know she's sick of it, I don't care. That's a mama privilege. But she said, you have to stop. This isn't how it goes. I just put my father in the ground because of this damn drug war. And we're gonna talk about this differently. She was the newest partner in our room and she was probably the youngest partner in that room. But she was so, not just convicted, but she was right. So we changed the meeting in that moment. And we began to build a friendship. And on July 13th, which is also my birthday, in 2013 when I came home from my dinner with my daughter. And we heard that George Zimmerman had been acquitted. She said, y'all could get mad on Facebook. I'm gonna do something. And along with two other women, Opalayo Tometi and Alicia Garza, say their names, they started a movement called Black Lives Matter. And so the founder of a movement that's now become a global network that continues to call people together. And now the author of a book called When They Call You a Terrorist, a Black Lives Matter memoir that will be out on January 16th, 2018. And some sucker trying to sell it on eBay already. I can't even believe it. Welcome, Patrice Concolors. And I pick on him because it's my right to. I'm gonna do what I want. Look at Ira and Kenny trying to figure out which one of them get on my nerves more. You see them over there conferring? Well, Kenny, you said you was gonna be the best at everything, so I'm gonna give you that award. The thing about Kenny and, you know, I may repeat some of this tomorrow, you know, in all seriousness, that like other folks who were here and without going into his personal bio, you know, he wasn't meant to be here. You weren't meant to know his name. Wasn't meant to sit on a panel. Wasn't meant to be called a pastor. There was an entire society that had decided his Black life didn't matter. I'm trying to think of the courage it takes to stand up anyway and push through that. But he did, and from prison, created an organization called the Ordinary People Society that every single day feeds 300 people in three different states that politically educates them, that has changed the laws across the state of Alabama, the only state in the United States where people can actually vote from prison and from jail. That's what he did. This year took that law even harder and another 200,000 people can vote from in prison. Join me in welcoming my friend and personal, what is that called? Agitator, I was gonna say nuisance, but we'll take agitator, that's Pastor Kenny Glasgow. You know, when I was a girl growing up in the 1970s and after the Black Power Movement, people used to say, well, white people used to say, they were proud because they had a cocktail party and every cocktail party had a black person. This is my cocktail party. My cocktail party got a white person. From the moment, really, I think a week into my tenure at DPA in 2005, somebody who's like actually as loud as I am talks as much as I do walked in and he's like, who's this? Started talking to me about Frederick Douglass, started talking to me about mostly hope. And I was like, I wanna be on that rainbow, right? When you're facing some of the most horrible things and every day you're still going to get up, you're gonna have conviction and you're going to do it with love and with hope. And over the course of 13 years at DPA, when I've struggled, when I've been angry, when I've wanted to walk away, it was often the president of our board, which is rare, who I called to talk me off a ledge at midnight and at noon, and so it was at midnight and at noon. And Connecticut or in New York to have those conversations to go deeper, he led us through a transition period that we wondered how we would get through seamlessly. We just kept dragging him out. He was like, I'm retired, 21 years. I left the ACLU, I really meant I was retired. We were like, not today homie, not today. And so I am honored and moved to introduce to you my first mentor at the Drug Policy Alliance, Ira Glasser. So we're about to do this. And everybody have water, I get cotton mouth up in these ways. So cold, you wouldn't think you would, but I do. So, you know, let me just begin straight away with you, Ira. Why not? And you know, when we talk about reparations, it's often a conversation that's had only among black people and white people won't have to talk. Can you talk a little bit about the fear that exists among white people around, even just the word reparations, just the very word, when it relates to this country, because we do embrace it elsewhere. And then Dr. Ivi, I want to bring you into the conversation to talk a little bit about the history of this movement and what it means and where it might fit within a drug policy context. But I want us to work through that fear before we do anything else. Well, you know, I spend most of my time that I talk about this issue, talking to white liberal friends who regard themselves as part of the civil rights movement and as supportive of it, and as the very opposite of the kind of wave of white nationalist racism that we're seeing in the country now. And those people are very unsympathetic, well, more than unsympathetic. You start talking about repairing the damages, and I use that phrase because I found more success with it than in the word reparations for some reason. And they get defensive, they get angry, they feel as if they're being accused of being responsible for a problem that they don't feel responsible for. And it's one of the hardest... I mean, I went through this in talking about affirmative action with white liberal audiences for decades, but this is much, much harder. I'm not exactly sure why, but I do know that they don't know any history. I do know that they don't, in fact, have any problem with the concept of repairing damage, whether or not you're responsible for it, whether or not you intended it. If they hit somebody in the street with a car by accident without any intention to do so, they would not feel that it was inappropriate for that person to get compensatory damages. They would not leave that person with a broken leg on the street and say, oh, well, just because I didn't run over you again, you can get up and walk away, and I'll drive on. They know that. Many of them grew up as the children of a generation that benefited from something in this country that almost nobody thinks about anymore, called the GI Bill of Rights. The GI Bill of Rights was the biggest program this country has ever passed for reparations. They didn't call it reparations, they called it rights. And what the GI Bill of Rights was, was a program that decided that, well, you know, we took this whole group of people off the track of opportunity. We took them out of the mainstream and had them fight a war for us for three or four years, and so now we have an obligation to make them whole, because they come back and they're at a disadvantage. They're behind. They're at a disadvantage with jobs, they're at a disadvantage with education, they're at a disadvantage with money, they're at a disadvantage in every way. And I think a country which thought it was morally obligated to make amends for people who were taken out of the race for a few years, has trouble thinking about making amends for what we did with the war on drugs. And remember that the war on drugs is just the latest instrument of subjugation. We're talking really about a history of 300 years, and there's no way to talk about repairing the damage without talking about all of that. And most people don't know. Certainly I know my children don't know. I talk to them all the time. My grandchildren don't know. You get to be this age, you get to be a historian, because you find out when you start talking about things nobody knows anything. They're not coming from the same place you're coming from and they don't share the same premises because they don't share the same facts. People don't know that what the GI Bill of Rights did is it provided tuition for college, high school, vocational training schools. It provided living expenses while people were going to school. It provided low-cost loans without a down payment, low-cost mortgages without a down payment for people to buy homes when they came back from the war. It provided low-cost loans to start businesses, credit to start business to people who had no assets. And it didn't do that with a means test, though they debated that at the time in the legislation. They did it for everybody because everybody suffered the disadvantage. Everybody was going to get the repair. And they didn't do it just for people who were in combat. They did it for people who were on active duty for 90 days or more. 90 days. And you compare what that repair was targeting with what we're talking about. And you have to conclude if there was a moral obligation to pass the GI Bill of Rights, that moral obligation is multiplied by a factor of a thousand for the people that we're talking about. And that case has never been made to the white liberal audience who thinks they're with us. They don't know about it. You have to get past their sense of defensiveness. They feel like you're accusing them of racism when you tell them they have a moral obligation. And they wouldn't feel that way if they were debating the GI Bill of Rights. And they wouldn't feel that way if they had an accident and hit somebody by accident with their car. The idea of repairing damage that the state and official policy and law has done is not an alien concept. It's established in our country. It's established in our culture. It's established in our law. So you have to ask yourself why is it so received so radically and crazy in this context? And the answer has to be rooted in the same way that every answer is rooted in this country. It's different when you're talking about people of darker skin color. So one more thing I want to say. The GI Bill of Rights because this is a very important part of the GI Bill of Rights. In order to get it passed, they needed the votes of Southern Democrats. This is 1945-46. And in order to get it passed, part of the way it was passed is that the law required that the federal government would fund this, but it was going to be administered locally. So local white folks got to decide who got these benefits. So there were 67,000 mortgages enabled by the GI Bill of Rights in the first year after it was passed and fewer than 100 went to people who were not white. There were 100,000 people in the first year, black people who applied for the education benefits. Fewer than 20% of them got it. So looking at the GI Bill of Rights, you get a rationale for what we're trying to move toward and think about that is very powerful and compelling, but at the same time, the way in which the GI Bill of Rights was administered and played out describes the problem that we have, even with the audience of white liberal people who we think should be with us. And we need to find a way to transfer that sense of moral obligation to them, even if they were not racists. Thank you, Ira. Thank you so much. Patrice, you and I talked about the GI Bill relative to your father. I didn't know those numbers. That was incredible. And Dr. Ivory, I do want to bring you into this conversation to think about, as we are doing this work, about repairing the harm and there is all kinds of fear from primarily white people, although some black people too won't have the conversation to be completely honest, I wonder how we do it rooted in the history and the original history and the telling the truth of the history of reparations, where that movement comes from, because here we're going to be talking primarily about black and brown people. And I want us to know how to do this work right within that context. I want us to think about the lessons you've learned about the pitfalls we can avoid in engaging this work and does it make sense to pull it apart and think about the drug war and mass criminalization and incarceration as one piece of it. It's sort of what was done in your city in Chicago. So thank you. I am very pleased to be here and honored to be here. And Ira, I listen to you intently. I stop counting the number of times you use the word people. And I think that's the operative word. That in fact, people of African descent were not considered people. And so it becomes very easy and the psychic and in the privilege of white people to not think of people of color and particularly black people as deserving because we are still not considered human. And so the whole notion of what it means to be human comes center stage in the context of us having to confront the reality of the consequences of racism and white supremacy and what it has done in the world, in a global context in which indeed there is a belief in a hierarchy of human value and black people, people of African descent have been at the bottom. I want to go back and just start with my personal narrative because you brought up some feelings in me that happens when you start telling your different narratives. My father was a Tuskegee Airman and I was born while he was overseas and when he came back he was one of those veterans who was denied. And so it begins very personal for me and this happens over and over and over again of people of African descent where the reality that we have to confront as we walk in our daily lives forces us to deal with the consequences of what it means to live in a society in which there are a few who think they are more entitled by the color of their skin. I want to honor the memory and the work of Callie House who is considered to be the mother, mother of the movement and Queen Mother Moore who is another mother of the movement. I want to honor the work of Reverend Dickerson who worked with Callie House and I want to honor my uncle, my great uncle who expatriated to Brazil in quest for a different world in 1913. And so the point I'm really making is that from the first snatch I think the people of African descent snatched from their communities in which there was a different world view about what it meant to be human when they were snatched the movement for reparations began, the call and the claim for reparations began. And so when we think about how we begin this conversation I think there's some assumptions that it is going to be a very difficult conversation you've spoken to that. But what it's going to require is some truth telling and the courage and the capacity for people to sit and tell the truth and share one another's truth in a way that will allow us to come on the other side with a dismantling of a basic belief in this hierarchy of human value that some people have more value than others. Two weeks ago I was in Geneva and I was there because the World Council of Churches actually has reparations on the agenda. And so I wanted to be known that there are pockets of people who are trying to begin this hard conversation. But not only was the conversation of reparations on that agenda but the overarching call was the call of Afrophobia. And so the conversation was on Afrophobia and Xenophobia as it related to where we are at the decade of people of African descent and what it means for the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights to at least engage a conversation on what is happening in the United States relative to African people. And when I think about Afrophobia I think about the demand for us in this context to first of all claim as you have claimed that we've got to move from a paradigm of mass incarceration to one of mass criminalization. And once we do that we are clearly then in a state where we have to interrogate what it means to be at this point in time in which black people the state of being black is criminalized. And so it doesn't matter who you are where you are if you're the president of the United States your acts are criminalized and de-gutted. If you are black lives matter your movement is criminalized. If you are an eight-year-old child your white peers can lynch you and fail but they did attempt to lynch you. In Rhode Island. So this history is a history of contestation it's a history of claim it's a history that said ain't I your brother, ain't I your sister it's a history that said I am a man and black is beautiful and it's a history that said black lives matter. And so I think that there are the historical roots that we're standing on some of which I've named but there's real opportunity to and we'll come to that conversation I'm sure when we start talking about the role that John Conyers in particular has played say his name say it one more time John Conyers representing if I don't represent Brooklyn there's only one other city that I'm going to represent and that is the great John Conyers from Detroit Motor City Detroit and the role he has played in carrying in his belly our claim a claim that began on the shores of Africa. Thank you so much Dr. Ivor thank you. I want to appreciate Dr. Ivor and Ivor Glasser for giving us some history and context for this and we're going to continue to pull that apart when we have to but you know for the moment right now I want to bring Kenny and Patrice into the conversation and really begin to ask each of you what reparations might look like let me begin with you Patrice we just had the most sort of intense process co-authoring your book, your memoir which we realized at a certain point was the less the memoir of Black Lives Matter than the story of what it meant to grow up with the target on your back from the day you were born living at the epicenter of the drug war and the war on gangs in Van Nuys, California and I wonder what the reparations could possibly be to you who watched the world move purposely against your father your brother your mother and that's all before you became an activist a world who decided everybody you loved didn't matter what could possibly reparations look like for you it's weird so that means I'm going to be super emotional I'm tearing up already me too well I want to just I think that's an important question and I want to back up a little bit because I feel like I always want to remind people what it having this conversation under this current context and what it means right now I think it's easy when you come in a conference setting and you've been to the habit energy of like we're going to workshops we're going to listen to a plenary but this to me is always the conversation about reparations is a historical moment and I just want to like let that sink in a little bit when peoples who have been systematically targeted for their own demise call for reparations which is super simple right a call for repair because of harm that has been caused for centuries and yet the response to those people are guns more law enforcement militarization laws that purposefully rip our families apart it's just this there's these moments where I get to sit in these places and Asha you're often the one curating these spaces to have a much more deep and profound conversation about what's going to get us there and I just I want folks to just sit in that because I think it's important but I think a lot about growing up during that time I had the gift of writing a memoir with Asha and writing my memoir with Asha and for those of us who grew up in these places and still live in those places that are really places that have challenged black peoples humanity we're just surviving we're living if we were to actually sit and feel all the pain that we've experienced we probably wouldn't survive it so we have to keep living and so for me I don't believe this country can ever repair what it's done to us I don't but what I do think it can do is reckon is reckon and that's what it refuses to do all of the time instead of reckoning it's harm it causes more harm when people decide they're going to grieve when people decide they're going to host vigil instead of honoring that we are met with rubber bullets and tear gas and so there's something for me in this country's dare I say spiritual energy there's something that's bigger than laws that's that's policy can't fix there's a sickness here and we must reckon with the sickness and I think if we can reckon with the sickness we can call for reparations but if we don't reckon with the sickness and we have something like reparations it's going to fail and so part of the writing and processing what I witnessed as a child and what I continue to witness is literally I remember writing an email after my brother had been released from state prison he was released in the middle of a manic episode nobody told us nobody told us and as he spent the next several days literally deteriorating in front of us and we had no idea what to do I had this moment and I was like oh they literally don't give a fuck about us and so I think it's important in these conversations that we become honest part of learning our history part of writing a memoir is about being honest and the honesty isn't necessarily from black people we know what's up the honesty is from other communities white folks too but I'm talking about non-black communities about what we live inside of and how you benefit from that sickness the only people that don't benefit are black people and so part of the reckoning is it has to be the fight for reparations can't be just black people fighting for it it literally has to be a fight for all of us and a recognition that if we actually win black people that is everybody else wins mm like point blank period and if we don't embody that if we don't embody that we're going to fall short time and time again and so to me the piece about reparations is it's a cultural shift and it's a shift that has to happen not just inside the states it's a shift that has to happen globally thank you patrice let me share with you because I know you're emotional so let me just tell you how much you just called forward one of our greatest ancestors Audre Lorde who wrote the line if we lose black women's blood will congeal upon a dead planet but if we win there is no telling that's the energy you just called forward thank you Kenny I want you to hold space for and think about you know all of the people who we have sent to prison since 1970 71 and what has been taken the lives that have been changed lost disjointed dismembered you know one of the hardest things when you know people who are in prison and when you love people who are in prison is to be with them when they lose one of their parents or one of their children you know and I've been through enough with a number of people and walked with prisoners to their parents deathbed and you know that when you have 2.2 million people in prison you're never talking about anything that's a active personal failure that's a policy decision and how do we repair the harm for that I really wish I could sit up here and give y'all a real palatable acceptable answer to that question but in being honest how people that have suffered in prison and how we have allowed the society that has caused us and took so much from us that we didn't even support our own to where Adolfi Gaines is there who I have to draw strength off I have to draw strength off of Aisha Bondelli and the whole Patrice Hanes so I don't start cussing everybody out and um I'm trying to figure out this reparations thing in the way and the context that y'all put it Iroca Rothers and Deborah Smalls but I'm also looking at the damage that was done to our family so much that we allowed them to lock us up and even we let them do it and didn't keep up with the visits and didn't keep up with the phone calls and didn't keep up with the letters that would keep them for violate us knowing that somebody can't so I'm trying to figure out Aisha how in the hell I be politically correct up here and answering your question when there's no way in the hell that our family has been taken away from me where I have to depend on you and everybody else because it wasn't politically correct all acceptable for them to even have anything to do with me because of me being in prison so when we talk about reparations how do they pay for that Iroca how do they pay for the part that kept even people who I should have been depending upon not even able to be there for me because they would have fell into the same white supremacist society as not being acceptable themselves Jean Vievre see you Cassandra I really do remember the moment that we were on a panel and you talked about feeling as though you had been exiled based on American policies that were exported around the world and Deborah and I have often talked about the Philippines being the natural vulgar outgrowth right 10,000 people killed in two years of American drug policies but it's almost like Panama was one of the testing grounds and I wonder if you can talk about a bit what one might imagine you do when you decided to disrupt the entire country and I want to say this in a certain context it was interesting last year I took my daughter to Guyana where her father had been deported to and Guyana is what we call a past through country so there's very little drug use on the grounds in Guyana but when they arrested like the one guy literally who was a kingpin it disrupted the entire economy because he bought businesses yet all of this stuff he employed people we saw that in Jamaica when they arrested Dutas he built hospitals and he kept the police from coming in in civilly gardens and so it's a different thing that you experience in another country and while we even here talk about how horrible kingpins are which in many cases they are there's also this other piece when people are manipulating the economy of your country and I wonder if you would pull that apart and what it means to live in a land not your choice although you do get to live in the same city as me now but not from Brooklyn no that's not they got again to all the details so this is I don't usually talk about this the invasion a lot but I'm more and more I'm speaking more about it because it's very traumatic right to live through a process of invasion because invasion doesn't start the day that US invades I come from a family a lineage of activists very proud people in Panama my dad was anti-military bases from he was a teenager we're descendants from Jamaica that were forced to migrate to Panama so I'm a third generation Panamanian doesn't mean that much when you're black though just keeping that real because people have this illusion that we all belong and there's no racism in Latin America which is not true so the same way that we're criminalized here we've been criminalized there non-black people got citizenship before black people did I still have my grandmothers non-citizenship card that she could use to open a bank account but that didn't ensure that she could vote and children couldn't speak Spanish sorry children couldn't speak English outside of their households even though they were born there if you came from Barbados Grenada, Jamaica you were punished for speaking English outside of your household so that's the context early 1900s up to 1940s 1950s I'm a mother beautiful children that will never know Panama the way that I grew up in and that's very hard for me because they I was uprooted against my will when I was a teenager to move to Canada under certain conditions and then I had to go back to Panama and then I finally I got here and I had children here but they will never know what it is growing up in Panama and I resent living in the United States and it's a daily existence that I have to challenge myself against but here I am 1989 the U.S. invaded Panama after as you spoke earlier on it was a long history but let's go back to Reagan and Bush and what they did was that they were forcing Noriega to take his stance against left insurgency throughout the region specifically El Salvador and Caragua and they were funding they were channeling arms into the region and when Noriega said well slow your horses here because I'm not down with this then they started claiming that Panama was like the center of this massive drug trade and trafficking and then Noriega passed from being a peace builder with them into being an enemy and they had to invade Panama under national security to make sure that drug trafficking was halted and delayed into the United States and because Panama was then going to threaten the Panama Canal which was their biggest investment in the region which is ridiculous we're a small little country but what happens and this is where folks don't always know the history the first bombs from the US were specifically targeted to a black community which is El Torrillo that community has never been able to rebuild and that's a community today that has the highest incarceration rates the highest drug addiction rates less access to healthcare less access to education is still a forgotten community and this is where black people live so this is the unspoken and a lot of us know this history this is not for black activists here I understand now as an adult that there is black resistance to this military invasion into Panama but we didn't get that information when I was a teenager I was 14-15 at the time so this is how the stabilizing US foreign policy is in the region and this is Panama's one example there's also Nicaragua they have 40% of Nicaragua most people don't know this it's autonomous land and that's a threat to the US interests because they control the natural resources for the whole country so that's coming that's in the plan there but then we have Colombia which is the second largest and strongly displaced community in the world because there's war and drugs that the US is funding and funneling over and over again and it's not even only on the ground now it's aerial warfare where the US is fumigating people's land and Colombia is a country that has it recognizes black afro-descendant communities and it allocates land to them and that's a threat to the United States so in order to control this and for this population to be destabilized they fumigate under the threat of illicit crops again which is a minority in this land but it kills all the ability to grow crops to sustain their families independently sustainably like they have throughout the decades and decades that they've been there the hundreds of years that they've existed as communities and then that suddenly opens up spaces for you know, Monsanto to come in and all these transnational corporations from Europe, Canada and United States to destabilize the whole community and economy and then they end up living in the streets in Bogota so how do we how can we not you know, and when I talk to this especially a lot of to black folks in the context of the United States most people don't even know that this is happening and that we are contributing to this and I have to say we unfortunately because I live and exist right here in this country and if we can if we if we talk about land and reparations in the United States then we also have to talk about land and reparations throughout the world and region come on let me bring Cassandra into this because some of the ways that we may be able to think about it internationally may also start with how we think about it right here and I want to be completely authentic right in this conversation Cassandra is working very hard to move a marijuana legalization campaign here in I'm sorry in New York there are though and it's going to win we're going to get it we're going to get it and last year when Lynn Lyman led Proposition 64 along with all of our partners from a new way of life and from all of us they're not just across the region in California she said because it included $50 million in reparations and Glenn back I don't know if he's here but we're in there and fought for that I see you cat I see you cat our new LA our new LA marijuana czar came out of that campaign but what Lynn said then and she said continually through the discussion was that we've set a new floor not a new ceiling and so Cassandra began to get us up off of that floor she began to think about the campaign here in New York there are those who agree with us that we should legalize marijuana where we part is how we do it because there's so many things that there are those in this movement who would leave off the table in order to advance marijuana legalization perhaps before funders to say we gotta win I don't know maybe and I feel like as a movement we need to say something about that does marijuana legalization mean anything if it excludes the very people that it's mostly supposed to help and so I want you to talk about Cassandra and make your damn case here for the people who are taking what I believe to be of vulgar position make your case why reparations must be pivotal pokey must be central if we are talking about marijuana legalization legalization in our work and if anybody is not doing that why they are not doing the work they say that they're committed to thank you Asha how a voice that old gentle you know that's not real that's some fake shit right there come on thank you ain't nobody believe that ain't nobody believe that just call me a perpetrator so I really struggle with this question and I struggle with it because Michelle Alexander yesterday called our movement out right she called our movement out because it has become more fundable to say that the work we do around drug policy is racial justice work but as she eloquently stated yesterday when you scratch the surface you realize how shallow that is that what people think is racial justice work is acknowledging and highlighting racial disparities in enforcement and that is to me what I fear about the conversation is that there are there are people that build campaigns criminal justice campaigns economic justice campaigns drug policy campaigns that are quick to cite racial disparities and yet nothing in their policies do anything to disrupt the way that state violence and their actors affect women trans people communities of color black folk but are very quick to say they do racial justice work we even see that in the way that people are building their marijuana legalization campaigns everyone can quote the way that racial disparities and disproportionate enforcement affects communities of color as a talking point for their marijuana legalization campaign this is now just standard and I want to acknowledge that that is because of the work of folks in this room that's because of folks like Debra Peterson small that's because of work like Harry Levine we've taken advantage of that and we thought that that's where we needed to stop because people are building whole campaigns around racial justice without doing a damn thing for black people without having black people in the leadership with not being accountable to black communities you have people having full on conversations about racial justice but see here's the thing about reparations and the conversation about reparations is not new Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay is not the first time we had a conversation about reparations but that's the first time that a lot of white liberals thought that it was acceptable to have a conversation about reparations I know people at drug policy alliance that were not down with the conversation about reparations but because Michelle Alexander made the point about it they were like oh this makes sense and that was confusing to me because I thought when I described to you what it meant to be snatched from West Africa to be plopped down in the Caribbean to be invaded by the United States that that was enough for you to realize that my life that my humanity needed repair but it was not it wasn't until someone said well you arrested all these people for marijuana and now only the white people are making money off of it this might be a problem but if you never understood why reparations in general around black people was important then the conversation about reparations and marijuana is fake it is an insult you cannot have a conversation about reparations and the drug war if we don't talk about the armed conflict which was the snatching of black bodies on the continent of Africa you can't have a conversation about reparations if you haven't been paying attention to the work that the institute of the black world has been doing that has created a ten point plan you can't have a conversation about reparations if you are connecting it only to a god damn plant because a plant will not legalize black people $50 million in California is great but it is not going to recognize what the decimation of patrice's life was looked like it does not recognize the decimation of my fricking culture when we talk about why white liberals are scared it's not because they don't understand it's because they realize they have to give something up give anything up you got to give something up you have to give up your arrogance you got to lay down the sacrifice you have to give up your leadership they don't want to do that the conversation stops because people say I didn't do that but you sure do benefit from it so the conversation about reparations and marijuana legalization to me is shallow because you cannot repair the harms based on marijuana prohibition if you don't want to repair the harms associated with why I'm on this fucking continent in the first place I think I was right in my description and she still got the face on but there it is and I want to ask could be included realistically in legislative proposals and I do want to put it in that because we do policy and so what is the deal breaker right what is the deal breaker what are our common threads and so either one of these questions in the speed round let's answer is that those fair and then we'll go to the audience and once you bring in questions Ira let's start with you well you know the problem with answering what kind of things that we want to have in legislation is that if Cassandra is right that we can't really address those problems without addressing much larger problems then the question about legislation that might be able to pass and make some difference gets to be a much smaller and predicate question and I actually don't think we're ready yet there I mean there are things that could be done because one of the consequences of everything we've been talking about and not just the drug war but our whole history is that when you look at the statistics about relative incomes you see a lot of progress between white family income and black family income over the last 30 years but you don't see much progress with respect to wealth and assets right now there's a reason for that and it is not accidental it was policy driven there were reasons why if you supply people with a little bit of subsistence income they can never accumulate assets there were policy reasons like the tax code in which you get a deduction for real estate taxes if you own a house and mortgage interest if you're paying a mortgage but you don't get any deductions if you're paying rent even though the rent includes money that goes to the landlord that's used to pay interest on mortgage and real estate taxes in order to really unpack the layered and complex ways in which racial stratification and subjugation have been institutionalized structurally in this country you have to unpack all of those details you have to talk about creating new wealth you have to talk about creating asset accounts not welfare payments you have to talk about more than just making it look like the current generation is operating more equally thank you Ira the two questions before you go to the audience are these what examples are there of a successful reparation campaign that we've seen in this nation that we could learn from and that we want to draw from or what do you say has to be included in any legislative proposals going forward and by that let me be clear we made certain decisions we started addressing in a very deep way racial inequities and racial discrimination in the drug laws we called them racial impact statements so there are ways to begin to look at this I don't think they were a cure all but there are ways but are there deal breakers are there things that our movement is just too damn good to do like we said in Ohio like we said in Ohio with the marijuana legislative in Ohio looking at that from a legislative perspective one of the first things that we got to do I'm gaining my energy off you Ron so that's why I'm looking at you so hard and I'm quite sure you know if don't nobody else know I'll pull off Ron Daniels the first thing we got to look at if you really want to attach something that's pertaining to reparations to marijuana and the drug law and all this you got to look at the 13th amendment in that exception clause that's first and foremost because that would be the closest thing to looking at starting to repair all the free labor that they have taken from us when you look at the black codes the slave codes that come into the exception clause and then let's look at the fact that each and every one of these prisons are actually the plantations that existed before there was emancipation of proclamation on the bullshit they call it thereof and that's when prisons came into effect so that would be the first piece of legislation that we even have to look at repeal the 13th amendment or amend the 13th amendment thank you Patrice to ask you are there any reparations campaigns that you want to lift up that have happened in our current history in this nation that we can learn from or is there anything that you would say is a deal breaker in any legislative proposal that we put forward yeah I mean the one campaign that I've been looking at and talking to folks about for a minute is the Chicago reparations campaign yes and folks can it's so searchable you can look at the ordinance but it's a couple things one of them is an actual fund for torture survivors of John Burge I think is huge and I think black people across the globe have have claimed to being tortured by local governments and I think we should actually really think about what it could look like to launch local reparations campaigns and the other thing that I really appreciate about this reparations campaign as they built a Chicago torture justice center specifically for victims who tortured by the police the first ever of its kind to specifically talk about state violence and its impact on black communities I think it's really important because they also talk about not just the people who are tortured but the impact that torture had on the family members and the community those people came from and so for folks that don't know the campaign study it for people who are thinking about what kinds of conversations they can have locally I would say study it and for people who are thinking about campaigns I would say that this could be a really interesting campaign to do locally Thank you Patrice Jean-Vierre I mine is pretty simple because I'm looking also I'm looking also at the global piece specifically in Latin America is get the hell out of there number one US get the fuck out get out so and that means us over here knowing what free trades are and what free trades are being passed that we don't even know about that is only benefiting United States but not really benefiting all of the United States because it really doesn't benefit black folk right here and you know and I say this because in most of the countries where there has been military bases and military invasions and you know you don't have anything to do in there so get out let the organizers over there have their process to then hold you accountable because that's also part of the process those that invaded us and destabilized us will be held accountable but we have our own processes so the first thing for me would be you know get out the second piece is for the folks over here to really know what policies you are supporting and by your silence you are supporting them great, great and how modern day slavery from Latin America is impacting us here and how we're benefiting from it the diabetes crisis that is happening here in the United States most of the workers in Columbia all the workers in Columbia that process sugar not only for sugarcane but also for the green energy that's not really green is all black labor so our silence is costing people here diabetes so those little sugar packs that you see out there most of them don't come from the United States they come from black sweat over there and those people are not paid for that, they're held captive pretty much you know it's interesting in South Africa where we love our wines to come from they have the highest incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome because they used to pay the women who worked the vineyards in bottles of wine and not in one dime to live and find out where your gold is coming from right, because a lot of it is also coming from Columbia and from Latin America Dr. Ivor the same two questions to you and then to you Cassandra and then I want to bring it out here so I would just add to the conversation by suggesting that we have to pay very very serious attention to Reparatory Justice as it relates to education and to create the capacity to build centers of education that will allow for us to do the kind of truth telling so that our people are part of a process of restoring their mind and by way of extension when we hear the pain that's been expressed here we understand the extent to which we have been traumatized and there is a need for us to do the internal healing that we have to do in order for us to move forward and so I think it's very very critical that we pay attention to how we create and make non-negotiable the capacity building to do the education that we have to do Thank you Dr. Ivor and Cassandra So quickly I would say I think to your point Ivor I do think that there are legislative things that we can do I just think it needs to be situated in a larger context and to that I would say any policy that has to do with marijuana legalization that bars people with criminal justice histories from being a part of the business or anything associated with the regulated market is not a marijuana policy that we should ever support I think any policy that does not strategically and intentionally make sure that communities that have been most harmed by marijuana prohibition are part of the licensing and the ownership I think it's really crazy that people out here in the marijuana industry are trying to give pooky internships in a business that he's already been a part of I think we need to have conversations about making sure that any policy that we are doing anything around marijuana legalization also takes into account the way that child welfare systems treat marijuana it's not just legislatively it's also administratively there are a lot of social workers doing a lot of damages in hospitals in treatment facilities all over the place and I think it's super important that it's not only necessary that the impact of marijuana prohibition around women is centered and about people that have been harmed by the justice system by people that are incarcerated currently formerly incarcerated any bill that does not get people out of jail or prison within six months of that bill being passed is problematic anything that does not do what my colleagues in California did as soon as that law was passed that people can get their records sealed at that very moment is unacceptable thank you so I know there are questions in the audience we've been given 15 minutes grace please be gentle ask a question or make a... hi my name is Tiffany Johnson from Los Angeles I'm an associate director of a new way of life for entry and I wanted to bring into the conversation since we're talking about reparations when we talk about reparations are we looking all the way back to history when slavery was in when we were enslaved and our women was raped and tortured and we had these children who was raped and tortured that is still happening today as a formerly incarcerated woman I went into incarceration due to being raped from a white man for a period of years where's the reparation in that and I am not alone when we bring into this conversation I must ask you to really think about what is happening to our babies that is systematically taking them to a traumatic state that is leading them into incarceration and into the streets what are we going to do about that thank you Dr. Ivy you want to take that oh yes I didn't know if you were going to do other questions so absolutely we cannot look at this in a silo in terms of a narrow view of drug policy and when we're talking about reparations first of all I think this panel has represented that it's a global issue and that there are global assumptions that drive and have driven the claim that we have and so you know HR 40 which John Conyers sponsored and has sponsored subsequently every year began with a question of studying the lingering effects of the transatlantic slave slave trade but that new bill that he has proposed through a collaborative process from the ground up of all of us sharing in the documentation that essentially said we've already studied it it is now time for us to assume reparations and then begin to make that claim in a way that we can develop proposals for such and that has to go back to the point of the snatch it has to go back to the point of the rape and we are obligated based on the blood and the soil to speak to that and so the answer to your question is yes there are very specific 10 point programs coming out of CARACOM representing the heads of states of the Caribbean as well as the National African American Reparations Commission which has a 10 point program all which has identified the various sectors from the taking of our art and culture to health to education to issues of law etc and so we only have to do the work of making sure that we create the infrastructure by which we can do this hold one another accountable and move this agenda generation by generation and I want to say thank you young people for having the audacious courage to stay here and be a part of this movement Thank you Dr. Ivor Hello my name is Frederica and I don't have a question I actually have a statement and I too like Dr. Harper want to thank everyone here because I woke up this morning literally and I didn't know anything about international drug policy I woke up and I prayed and I started doing research because I said something's not right me and my husband have been fighting for years against public corruption due to discrimination due to race due to a history of drug and addiction my husband was discriminated against because of his history and people went in and changed his medical records literally so what I want to say is I do need help we have been fighting we've called hundreds of attorneys so I went online this morning and I was invited down so if anyone knows anything that can help us we are reaching out to you and I want to thank everybody in this room for what you're doing and what you stand for Thank you There were two very powerful points made tonight one is that truth telling is needed and the other point is that you can't repair this but you have to reckon with it so I'd like to ask the panel what is to be learned from the truth of South Africa and what's to be learned from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with regards to residential schools in Canada and what are we doing with regards to Truth and Reconciliation and reparations for Indigenous people Thank you so much Somebody want to take that? Well, I think one of the things that has been learned from the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa is the need for people who benefited from the subjugation to understand it and cop to it I think we are still a long way from that I spent the better part of my whole life fighting against racial subjugation and discrimination in this country and it was not until about two-thirds of the way through that that I actually learned how I benefited from all the subjugation I was fighting against how I was what I came to see as I called even to find a word for it and the phrase I finally found was that I was the unjust beneficiary of racial subjugation How? My father was a construction worker with a fifth grade education he grew up during the depression he had trouble getting a job during the years that I was an infant he had a job in New York City not full time all the time we employed we made it why did he have a job he had a job because in order to get a construction job in New York City in those years you had to be a member of a labor union a carpenter, electrician a glacier, bricklayer, plasterer labor unions did not admit black folks when I grew up that was normal I grew up in a liberal I went with my father from time to time to the labor union hiring hall I never saw anybody black but I never noticed it because it was normal and then what happened is because my father had a job he accumulated enough money to put it down payment in 1950 on a house in the suburbs and he was able to get an FHA mortgage it wasn't until years later that I came to understand that black folks in exactly his situation couldn't get an FHA mortgage so everything that I had I owed to the fact that he and therefore I was an unjust beneficiary of the discrimination that I thought I hated I think that part of the truth of the reconciliation process is that you have to begin to engage people in that kind of understanding and concession and copying to the ways in which they have benefited which I know from enough arguments with white folks we are a long way from there yet and we have to get there Thank you, Ira Our creatives for the great movement for human integrity in Los Angeles I want to direct my question to Dr. Carruthers Namibia country of 2.2 million people is in the process of filing a 300 billion dollar reparations lawsuit against Germany for a century of genocidal activities there One, how do you quantify a price for the kind of reparations we are talking about tonight that covers not only centuries but regions of the world and how do you prosecute toward a resolve outside the United States because you don't go to the person who has created the harm and then work out a deal so where would you take this case and how would you quantify to come up with an amount and what is the region what is the time span Dr. Iver? Okay, that's about 10 questions but let me first suggest very simply what my grandmother said whatever they pay you they owe you some more so you cannot really quantify the damage that has been done but what we can do is we can rely on the economists such as Sir Hillary Beckles who can go in a room and figure out based on the various notions of what we know to be the value of our labor the things that we're stolen and put some numbers to that right and then we can make our case but remember now that part of making the case and you know better than I in terms of the international courts has to meet a certain standard and part of the reason the United States did not want to participate in Durban and they did not want for us to claim that this had been a crime against humanity once again not acknowledging our humanity is because that allows us to make a claim in the international courts but let's be reminded that the very reason Burge spent time in jail I'm from Chicago is because we argue that at the United Nations and it was only through dogged tenacity and capacity to figure out where the spaces were that allowed us to step into the necessity to quantify to understand there will never be enough to figure out how to create the institutions that can help us to repair but let's be real clear Bishop Tutu even said that the failure of the truth and reconciliation process was that it was treated like a fly over those are my words fly over you cannot get to reconciliation until you get to transformation and South African society has not been transformed and until we move towards really adjusting and dealing with what you have said we will never get there and so the question is not whether we're going to stop making the demand and the question is not our humanity the question is will people find their humanity by acquiescing to our demands thank you Dr. Ivor we have literally one minute left and I want to say these rooms are meant to open up discussions that you continue to have I wish every question could be answered here and we walked away and the world was right and set back on its axis we don't and I'm sorry I can't get to every question though deeply grateful to all of you who have allowed us to stay longer and those of you who did I know that it's late but this is the last question I want to say good night and this remaining one minute from India and I don't fully understand but like Asha said this is about courage so I will have the courage to ask in India we have what you describe racial discrimination we have caste based discrimination where people who are born into a certain family are yes treated with so in our constitution we have a framework of affirmative action which really focuses on the areas of education and employment and there's a lot of literatures political, legal, economic about that so maybe that's something you can look at and the other comment that I have is that there's another community now which is subjected to mistrust and animosity and insecurity and that is our Muslim brothers and sisters and I understand that a lot of Africans are also practicing Muslims how do you this sense of what you describe today how do we make sure that that doesn't now wheel up another community which is and it's happening all over it's not just happening in the US it's happening back home in India, Europe lots of other places Thank you so much and maybe Cassandra it's good to talk about the work that we do here and what it is that we can take on to do within in this space is consider the policies that we are accountable for we take money every day in these jobs that's the people's money people will be paying this in taxes they don't pay taxes so they do philanthropy that'd be going into the public you know what I mean and so we're accountable to a particular mission and work that we're going to do in the good and so my own sense tell me if you agree is that what we might like to do for those of us who work in drug policy is do like what happened in Chicago and begin to create a model that others can take on and replicate in other areas of replication I'm sorry just some of that ten seconds so I would say I think to your point I think part of the structure of the way to have a conversation about reparations is breaking up into three acknowledge and that is taking an account of what is happening in various ways like what are the different systems that are impacting someone's life atoning creating a space for conversation for reckoning for atonement for recognition accountability and action how can we make sure that this doesn't happen again and I think that you can take that model throughout any community and figure out what's happening and that's essentially what we're trying to do in New York and trying to figure out how can we actually use this the drug war an issue of armed conflict in communities to create a process in which we can acknowledge what is happening how we can atone for it in some action thank you so much can you cut up my other mic? I want this mic