 Greetings students make sure you have something to write with or pretend you have something to write with. My name is C. Jama Adams. I'm a chairperson of Africana Studies at John Jay. We're on the ninth floor of that sauna bath called a new building and it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Muhammad who is virtually a faculty member at John Jay. He's always here. He's always presenting. You don't have to go up to the Schomburg. For those of you don't know the Schomburg is a branch of the New York City Public Library. It specializes in Africana matters so if you're doing anything related to Africa or its sons and daughters in the diaspora that's the place to go. The stuff up there is priceless. Progress is possible. Struggle is important and that the role you have to play is a crucial one so you want to also listen to him on the people who fought black white men women to sort of change things so that you can be in this room today and that you have the possibility of bring about further change. Okay. Dr. Muhammad. Thank you Professor Adams. That was the best introduction I have ever had and I don't say that casually because I've never had such elegant framing of the work. So thank you. Thank you very much. I also want to thank Dan Stagemann for orchestrating this evening's program and of course all of the faculty who coerced or corraled their students to be here this evening and of course to my colleague who has been a mentor and an inspiration Professor Brown and finally to all of the students and graduate students who were not forced to be here but are here to engage in an important topic. I think that covers everyone and if not no no not you okay well thank everyone else for being here. I'm gonna talk for about 45 minutes and I'll warn you at the start that I'm gonna cover a lot of ground. I am wired that way. I can't help myself and I'll go into a little bit of a trance and kind of lose track of time just so that you know I have a timer in front of me so I am gonna know that I'm five minutes over or ten minutes over at the point at which that happens but I will promise you that I'll save time for Q&A. I'd also like to say that if you've heard me talk before some of this will be familiar but I do work hard to try to think about how this history can be in conversation with our president in ways that may not have been the case two years ago. One of the ironies of being a historian is both the blessing of writing scholarship that isn't dated very quickly and one of the curses of being a historian is that people don't always think the work is very interesting or relevant. It just so happens and this is a little anecdote when I was putting the final touches on the condemnation of blackness which began in its conception in 1999 or so and it took a long time to write first as a dissertation then as a revised book. I worried in the run up to President Obama's election that a book titled The Condemnation of Blackness might not sell many copies and I was always interested in reaching broader audiences. In fact among those broad audiences was John Jay and Professor Brown brought me here weeks after the book had been published. Nevertheless I struggled with whether that title made sense in a moment when as we've all witnessed and seen the rise in the fall of the post-racial era in the wake of Obama's election that maybe I should title the book The Condemnation of Blackness before the election of Barack Obama. As it turns out little did I know that so much of the world would turn on the very historical factors and forces that the book engages which brings me to tonight's talk. The unbearable likeness of Ferguson an origin story of now. Here lies an image of Michael Brown the deceased 18 year old killed not yet a year ago in the summer of 2014. In its graphic display demonstrates in a nutshell the prolonged and enduring trauma of being black in the Western world and particularly here in these United States. So many commentators spoke about this death this murder this killing as a reflection of a long history of lynching in this country of both the ways in which the state acted as an arbiter of black life in America as well as and a better of vigilante violence in the nation standing on the sidelines co-signing by inaction or by complicity in the premature death of black people. Thinking about Ferguson in relationship to that history of lynching and knowing that the Department of Justice pronounced the killing of Mark Michael Brown as a justified killing because of his behavior that day the struggle over the gun the turning back towards officer Darren Wilson. In some ways is uncomfortable as it may seem for those on the left to accept their judgment. We stand as an audience as consumers of the Department of Justice's responses to the shooting of Michael Brown as well as the Ferguson report itself on the systemic policing and brutalization of that community in some ways we can't have it both ways if in fact the Department of Justice allows us to see the everyday repression of a black community then we must assume then that that same Department of Justice under Eric Holder got this right. And so we're stuck in this uncomfortable space talking about respectability talking about what he might have done that day differently that would not have resulted in his death. And that to me really is a much more powerful connector to the history of lynching because in our historical memory in our historical mind's eye in the myths that we say about each other. Pressor Adams talked about American exceptionalism which is always about what this generation our current generation has done better than the ones before. It turns out that those who bore witness to the premature death of black people in the midst of the lynching era running roughly from the 1880s to the 1950s in this country those Americans those mostly white Americans but sometimes black Americans bore witness to lynchings like this and they themselves had a conversation about respectability. They themselves had a conversation about what Jesse Washington might have done differently that would not have resulted in 10,000 people gathering to first view his burning and then his body hung from a tree. He was lynched for an alleged rape and murder in 1916. And although he was convicted on slim evidence circumstantial evidence it was not enough that his due process rights resulted in conviction and therefore to stand and face a sentence of imprisonment. He was lynched. If Michael Brown was guilty of the things that he was accused of that day and an agent of the state essentially acted as judge jury and executioner in the same way that those 10,000 gathered stood as executioners in the wake of Jesse Washington's conviction are we so different in this 21st century than they were then. And it depends on how we respond to those events because so much of the conversation still even in the silences what we don't talk about is that respectability will save them if they pull their pants up if they speak better English. If they just work harder in the school. If their parents turn off the television you've heard this before repeatedly again and again then these terrible incidents these terrible tragedies will not happen. Ida B. Wells historically the most significant anti-lynching activist known to the historical record who cut her teeth as a journalist in Memphis in 1884 and I have to remind myself I am talking to an audience of students and so I'm going to give you a little bit of background in case you don't know. Ida B. Wells was a journalist in Memphis. She was committed to reporting on the news and affairs of a black community. She was run out of town after she defended her slain friends whose respectability whose success they owned a grocery store in that then bustling New South town and because of their economic success white business owners saw them as a threat and when they did not take heed to the warnings they those white business owners shot and killed them. And Ida B. Wells wrote about this in her newspaper when the white community saw what she had done when she defended their black humanity when she reminded readers that they were in fact respectable people whose success was the reason for their killing she was run out of town her printing press destroyed. She landed in Philadelphia first and moved on to Chicago and became an international activist bringing the news of lynching in America to a world audience to embarrass this then younger nation that was not yet the world superpower for its savagery for its inversion of its own civilizationist discourses she also published extensively bringing attention to lynching so by the time she was in Chicago in 1907 at the famous Palmer Hotel not unlike the Waldorf Astoria here in New York she was there to participate in a ceremonial event to honor some local leaders you kind of know what that looks like we still do this sort of thing today and someone stood up and talked about remarked about how it was a terrible tragedy it was so unfortunate that young black men in Chicago were committing crimes in the city and Ida B. Wells was listening carefully to this speech it carried over into a private conversation with a woman named Mary Plummer who was a local suffragist and Mary Plummer connected what was happening in Chicago to what had happened not too long ago in Atlanta Atlanta had a race riot in 1906 nearly destroyed what was then one of the most successful black communities not unlike what you've heard about Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921 this was literally ground zero for the Atlanta University colleges Spelman Clark Morehouse and Clark University nearly amounted to a pogrom against the black community and so in that news of what happened the respectability of that black community was on trial even a place like Chicago and so Mary Plummer suggested to Ida B. Wells this anti-lynching activists that the solution to the race riot in Atlanta and the disadvantages of black folks in Chicago was to drive the criminals out from the community saying to her have you forgotten the 10% of all crimes committed in Chicago last year were by colored men then just for your notes less than sorry this should say 3% of the population less than 3% of the population a student of the lynching era a man named Arthur Raper who wrote a book the tragedy of lynching one of the most significant at the time following on the hills of Walter White's rope and faggot which had been published in 1920s he was soon to be the head of the NAACP he was a sociologist and I'm connecting these dots because the very people who were on the right side of history people who had liberal credentials like a suffragist fighting for the expansion of women's rights who was willing to have a conversation with a black lynching activists in the first place or sociologists at the leading liberal campus in the south the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill talked about the lynching problem and said that black people could do much to stamp it out to to end the lynching era by demonstrating the ability character and good citizenship of the race by cooperating with officials and influential white friends so what I'm emphasizing to you the headline in this moment is that in the midst of lynching which none of you none of you if I if I gave you a survey question and said on a scale of one to ten was lynching racist ten or a legitimate response to the criminality of black people in the Jim Crow era as a one none of you would venture anywhere near one you'd all be tens because it would seem so obvious to you that in that distant past those people did terrible things and yet here we are in this present here we are thinking still about that relationship this is just illustrative of the work that Brian Steven is doing Stevenson is doing at the Equal Justice Institute in Alabama one of the leading indigent defense organizations to save those facing a death penalty sentence and in his effort to memorialize the lynching area to remind Americans how expansive was this were these acts of terror on these shores both amongst individuals the George Zimmerman's of that time and amongst state officials the Darren Wilson's of our day this is what so many black people were actually lynched for for referring to a white police officer in the case of Jesse Thornton in the top left box as late as 1940 by his name without the title of mister or Thomas Miles allegedly lynched for writing letters to a white woman invited her to have a cold drink with him or General Lee a black man lynched in the middle box on the bottom by a white mob for merely knocking on the door of a white woman's house and the story goes on and on that really in this country the story of lynching and the story perhaps in the age of Ferguson is the story of the respect that black people owe to white authority and shall we dare say to black authority in blue uniforms or brown authority behind a badge that that policing of the right to speak back to challenge oppression to use one's voice is still criminalized dissent in a black and brown body is still criminalized after all we're not even talking about dissent when we're talking about the various expressions of humanity that people engaged in like not calling one mister or having a relationship across the color line. This is the context that produces the outrage in the wake of a comment like former Mayor Giuliani when he spoke extensively in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting that black people really have no reason to be upset about this that at the end of the day it is what black people do to each other that ought to be the focus of their attention and that ladies and gentlemen young people was precisely the argument of respectability it was precisely the argument that these lynchings were really not about what white people did in any in many ways they were about public safety against people who had already proven themselves incapable of treating each other with kindness kindness and respect never minding the fact that you all know now and perhaps knew before Giuliani's remark that all groups are most likely to kill each other and that victims are homicide are also most likely to know each other. So what does this really mean what is this performance here to say that I find it very disappointing that you're not discussing the fact that 93% of blacks in America are killed by other blacks I would like the attention paid to that paid to this those lynch moms were often using the justification of premature death within the black community say these people are a danger not only to us but even to themselves we are not as different as we'd like to think from this distant past. I'm citing here this notion that reasonable suspicion or racial profiling in our current moment in this post civil rights era has this kind of statistical discourse and performance that we are all committed to to one degree or another whether we are liberal or left or conservative or centrist the language and discourse of how we communicate our beliefs and opinions about what happened or about what the problem is turns on various articulations of a profile of black people and so you're familiar with these cases I'm citing these here to bring you into your own common text and language for what we are here to talk about so you know in the Floyd case that an officer a former officer who was a witness to the systemic abuse of NYPD said that he'd been given regular orders to find black males 14 to 21 for stopping and questioning. And so if it's if it's not racial profiling what is it then even in this moment is still frustrating to sort of think about the performance that this is not about racial profile but that is exactly what Ray Kelly said in the final throws of his tenure as police commissioner of the NYPD when asked by David Gregory in a Meet the Press interview in August of 2013 to the question is stopping the first racial profiling and this is just an excerpt of what he says actually have a clip built into the YouTube here but I don't want to spend our time I think in this place you know the story so I'll just remind you he says that it doesn't mean that people are not doing anything wrong so to the question of racial profiling and being stopped here we it doesn't mean that people are not doing anything wrong like knocking on the door if you look at the statute it says reasonable sufficient that individuals may be about to commit a crime. So the articulation here is predicated on the notion that our police officers have precognitive gifts they can intuit what people are about to do now in the extended example here he talks about young men gathering outside of bodegas appearing to about to commit robbery or suspicious people running down the street but we all know from from the data from the counter narrative data that in fact overwhelmingly none of the people none of the million stopped fit that description that this was an elastic measure to control the movement of black people as a political response both to the anxieties of all of those who lived outside of these quote unquote high crime areas that is the language of Darren Wilson and at the same time to respond politically to I would argue a silent black plurality of people within the black community who see law and order as a useful instrument of dealing with impoverished people yes that strain comes also from within the community and in fact 30% of black people consistently polled in support of stop and frisk year after year in Quinnipiac polls. So David Gregory in this extended conversation pulled out of Ray Kelly his logic and that's what I want to call your attention to for the students what is the logic undergirding the defense of the idea because if I'm making a larger claim that the age of Ferguson is an old story then I am really interested in the logic that makes it possible that we can still be living in what Michelle Alexander would call a Jim Crow era now I'm not committed one way or another to what we label the moment but I am committed to the sets of ideas that have survived over a hundred years that make possible in a post civil rights era in an age of Obama legitimate discrimination. And so he said there's a preventive aspect to this people say any of that innocent that is not the right word so ladies and gentlemen headline black people particularly males between the ages of 14 to 21 are not innocent out of the horse's mouth are not innocent these are useful things to note you got to sit with that for a minute former mayor biggest city in America along with former commissioner Ray Kelly all defending and then the previous mayor defending black and brown people are not innocent not innocent and then much to any of our dismay and if you want to think about the connection to this past which is present and all that is happening around the country this is the standard law enforcement practice around America. So Charles Epps and co-authors have written a book about investigatory stops published last year and I encourage you to read it I'm still making my way through it but if you want to look for the smoking gun evidence for why Cleveland and Ohio in general and Oakland and Charleston and New York so on and so forth connect then you look for the police training models the best practices that were distributed across the nation to say this is exactly how you police black and brown communities because they are not innocent and we stand in judgment as post civil rights arbiters of our present we are not like those in the past and then finally he says here in an extended quote and I this is sort of a segue to this past we think the reasonable criteria that is for what racial profiling I'm sorry for what this innocence profiling is is presented to us by the Rand Corporation an institution that has been in existence for a hundred years says to take a look at racial profiling to determine if it happens you should first look at the universe of people who are the perpetrators identified by the victims of violent crime and in New York that universe comports to the racial makeup of the people being stopped. So translation because black people kill each other at greater numbers than other communities kill each other that's where we put our police resources never minding the fact that stop and frisk does not produce either guns or murder suspects so there's a mismatch between the rationale and the actual deployment of the policy but what may not be so obvious why genuflect to this organization the Rand Corporation institution that has been in existence a hundred years I mean one thing if he had said the Rand Corporation says blah blah blah but then to tell a national audience or meet the press and institution that has been in existence for a hundred years if we had more time I'd ask you to throw out some possible answers but since we don't I'm going to give you the answer it is because we are supposed to respect social science as an objective race neutral authoritative source of decision-making for us and because that's what ran the Rand Corporation does and because it's been doing it for a long time it has a good housekeeping seal on it we can trust it and if those researchers who the hell they are I have not looked up you're free to do so maybe it can turn out a dissertation because of what those researchers tell us then we're not engaging in commercial profiling and we can pack our bags and we can put our our ACLU and New York civil liberty use in cases away and walk away knowing and holding our heads up high that we're not like those Lynch mobs or that or like those congress people beginning of the 1920s who refused to listen to the entreaties and the evidence of the NAACP which made lynching its number one civil rights issue was the reason for the NAACP's founding in 1909 and congressional session after congressional session after congressional session refused to pass an anti-lynching bill we never got one the closest we came in the 1990s was a hate crimes bill driven in part by this history by evidence exculpatory evidence of civil rights murders as well as a movement to protect gays and lesbians who had been killed in acts of bigotry so the ran corporation connects us to a history a hundred years old history that looks at the relationship of how we are to understand and police the black community now here professor Adams gave me a nice segue and so I can move through this a little quicker than I might otherwise until the 1890 census which was the first census to authoritatively measure black people's health and welfare in the United States why because one the most of the black population had been enslaved until 1865 to in the midst of the civil war to census reports the 1870 and 1880 census reports were unreliable because of survey techniques in the midst of the war the new south was still building up as capacity and three the 1890 census was particularly helpful because it represented a milestone in measuring a generational cohort of black people who'd never been touched by slavery now you would think okay what are the stakes of that what the stakes were because black people's humanity had always been subject to debate and so when your humanity is subject to debate there are people on different sides of the debate and essentially the pro-slavery debate the conservative debate was that black people were inferior they were a threat not only to civil society but a threat to themselves and they could only be put to productive uses at the agricultural mostly labor in the context of plantation slavery under the context of chattel slavery as enslaved people with masters and kind white people making sure that they were fed and clothed and got a few Bible lessons to boot on the other side of the debate was an abolitionist claim beginning in earnest in the 1830s although those abolitionist claims go back as long as chattel slavery existed in this country to those who always saw it as an abomination to God's plan nevertheless by the 1830s the defense of black people's humanity as God's children put those who had defended slavery on their heels led to an explosion of scientific investigations about the true nature of black people measuring their brain sizes the shape of their face the width of their nose the texture of their hair the color of their skin the size of their buttocks all of these things were legitimately scientific investigations we still do this today although we call it genomic research and we think that we are above the same ethical questions about what we are to do with this information why we are in pursuit of it in the same ways that many of those scientists stood above the ideological phrase saw themselves as simply finding useful answers to important questions the questions we ask as researchers do not live outside of the world that we come from if you haven't learned that yet this is an invitation to learn it all of us are products and creatures of the frames of mind the shape our everyday cultural habits and ways of thinking and understanding the world so the questions you ask do not live outside of that no matter how objective you may want to be how objective you may strive to be and so therefore that was the state of play in terms of racial science prior to 1890 what happened in 1890 was the very first time that a demographer looked at the census data and made meaning of how many black people were in prison overwhelmingly male just over twenty two thousand thirty percent of the imprisoned population whereas African Americans in general were only twelve percent of the general population and as a result of that well what are we to make of that what would that mean to you now we live in the shadow of this history therefore our frames have already been set for us we might think we can come up with new ways of thinking about it or we might say that is nonsensical why does it matter to us how many black people are in prison I'll show you how illogical the question is by asking you how many Italian Americans are in prison today you have no idea because the question is not important enough for us to ask or to track or to measure but it's still important for us to know how many black people are in prison and they're not the only one therefore the question itself is a product of a moment that increasingly turned to crime statistics as the smoking gun that the biological scientist could never find because for all the ways in which they search for the size of the brain as an indication of one's intellectual capacity it turned out that some people had some black people had bigger brains than genius white men the very scientists who donated as part of their contribution to science when they got to their brains after they were long dead they said oh my god this brain is smaller than the black male convict whose brain we just measured in that other jar there was no correlation between brain size and intellectual capacity because the assumption of course was that the convict was an idiot or moron or feeble minded which was the language of intelligence back in that day as compared to the esteemed scientist whose body had been donated to medical research so it turns out that our the very questions that we asked the data that we produced the Bureau of Justice Statistics to the NIJ are a product of a history that the Rand Corporation's own capacity to answer such a question that the NYPD poses to a please tell us whether this is racial profiling or not are tied to a history and I can't give you the full breakdown the blow by bill you have to read the book for that turns out that this first generation this generational cohort these 25 year olds who were born after slavery were the key to reconciling the nation's debate that as it turns out black people who were not enslaved who were not if you were abolitionist degraded by slavery or if you were a pro slavery person who were benefited by slavery it turns out that when we are not in control of them they revert to criminality they become criminals and that frame and that discourse and the research questions that were driven by it the political discourse and the policymaking that went in place as a result of that are still with us are hardwired into this conversation as a result of that the allegations of black crime and rape in the south existed alongside this statistical discourse and there's an important difference here that I want to note because it helps to explain why this history is so enduring many of you would might even ask the question okay Professor Muhammad why were the nations a third of the nation's prisoners black in the 1890s now I've asked this question rhetorically to some audiences and some audiences will say well you know like people have been slaves surely they didn't quite know the rules of the road and they were accustomed to stealing from their plantation owners you know stealing a couple potatoes here stuff in their pockets ears of corn and so because that had been formative to their experiences as enslaved people surely in the transfer into freedom some of that continued the young people themselves were struggling with disadvantage in an age that was becoming an age of segregation in Jim Crow and so surely they did what they had to do to get by and so we could have a debate even now to this day about how much of that that prison population was actually reflective of criminality in that moment and I would say to you you'd be having the same debate we have today about how many people incarcerated in Irish and prisons are really innocent innocent by what measure innocent because they actually participated in drug economies or innocent because drug economies are a rational instrument of upward mobility for impoverished people to have that debate is to take us back to the Jim Crow era and to talk about the political economy of the South that on one hand did compel people within a limited set of opportunities to engage in what the law would have considered criminality while on the other hand we know that by whatever measure the war on drugs has been prosecuted with great discrimination and mistreatment of black and brown people surely we assume the same was true and perhaps worse back then guess what we'll never know don't even bother because it misses a bigger point and that bigger point is that the context in which criminalization is being defined and arbitrated is already stacked against the humanity of black people they are already not innocent in the way that so elegantly Ray Kelly has defined it now we also see that and this is very important because we could casually if we were in an activist mode if we were in a media mode we would not care about such details but we are at a college and at a graduate center we are a place where we do care about the details and because we care about the details it turns out that even for those who are articulating a white supremacist belief that black people are criminals because they were over-represented in the nation's prison never mind convict leasing or chain gangs or new laws to actually ensnare and target black people never mind all of that it turned out that the best evidence of black people's fundamental criminality was that they were more criminal in places outside of Jackson, Mississippi or Sanford, Florida or Birmingham, Alabama that it turned out in because of their criminality in New York or Chicago or Philadelphia where the disproportionate rates of arrest were even higher than they were in the South this was the evidence of their fundamental criminality this is the story of New York City of Cleveland of Oakland because these are places that are not backwater southern these are places where people get to rise and fail by their own individual merit and therefore if black people have a crime problem there it is on them and guess what that enterprising demographer who drew our attention to those statistics in the very first iteration of them in 1890 when the very first generation of black people stepped into the fullness of their humanity and freedom were already marked as not innocent there is no point in US history where black people weren't marked as not innocent as criminals and that the best tools the brightest minds were set to the purpose of proving it even so much as to look to the place where union soldiers came from in the defense of slavery to say aha your neighbors your black and brown neighbors are more likely to commit crime and therefore this contributed to what is called the myth of southern exceptionalism and the colorblind urban north which amounts to American exceptionalism because only in the south do we remember that racism actually lived only in the south can we contain a collective agreement a consensus that yes racist things happened back then this is our historical memory of this moment playing out over and over again but I've already suggested to you that if we listen to the people who lived in that moment they sound a lot more like us and therefore this myth of the colorblind urban north is very much part of our contemporary moment what did it sound like well this comes from a quote from a man named Frederick Hoffman who I write about in the book I call this the personal responsibility in the first post-civil rights era what is the first post-civil rights era well you know from US history that after slavery passed a series of civil rights acts including constitutional amendments first abolishing slavery with that messy little slavery loophole for for a commission of a crime then the 14th amendment which was equal protection and due process and the 15th amendment gave black men the right to vote and there were additional federal civil rights laws that were passed in the 1870s and 1880s so to those walking in the footsteps and in the shadow of slavery in that day this was a post-civil rights era by the time we got to 1890 the deck had been wiped clean the legislative infrastructure of the nation had already done the work so what does that mean to someone looking at crime statistics making meaning of them translating them to a national audience so that we could as a nation discriminate lawfully against black people define them as potential criminals and then create public policies that made sense to us in the name of public safety by and large prison and arrest statistics from Chicago Philadelphia Louisville and Charleston South Carolina I didn't make this up and from states including New Jersey and Pennsylvania according to Frederick Hoffman quote confirm the census data and show without exception that the criminality of the Negro exceeds that of any other race of any numerical importance in this country okay heart stop boom stop there that could be a fact as a statistical artifact could be true without being a racist that black people overrepresented the nation's crime system now why they're overrepresented and that's the rub so guess what you don't get to produce statistical knowledge as if just putting the fact out makes you free and clear of any implications of it because that's not how the world works and Hoffman to his credit told us what to make of this he then goes on to say when the Negro learns to respect life property and chastity until he learns to believe in the value of a personal morality operating in his daily life the criminal tendencies will continue that's the translation personal responsibility right can't make it up now just so you know that the idea that black people will save themselves as has already been established we as black folks even our best and brightest in this case W.E.B. Du Bois the first sociologist the black sociologists of any national importance Harvard trained blah blah blah look them up if you don't know who he is says in his 1899 classic study actually this is not from I have to change that this comes from an essay he wrote called the conservation of races published in 1897 we believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races commonly called the Negro problem okay fine there's nothing wrong with there he's giving us an explanation for this lies in the correction of the immorality crime and laziness among Negroes themselves it still remains as a heritage from slavery the first and greatest step unequivocal first and greatest step black people's immorality their crime and laziness so why am I telling you this is not to throw Du Bois under the bus because he was a very complicated thinker and this quote taken out of context would miss the whole point of what he's trying to say he's actually trying to meet he's trying to meet those who have put us on trial halfway he's offering up it's an offering like indigenous people bringing maize to the party not knowing that they're about to be gunned down so he offers this in that context which ultimately in the in the way in which he offers it up should tell you that anybody including the president or any other elected official or any preacher or teacher or any motivational speaker that you run into who starts a conversation like this we don't often talk about what we do to ourselves and we need to have a conversation with that raise your hand if you've heard that before come on be honest because usually what passes is we all know we've all heard the race card being played white supremacy racism but what we don't talk about is black people in their bad choices well if you knew the history better you'd actually know that this was the starting point for how black people responded to the challenge my people have always offered themselves up as willing victims of a discourse that there was something wrong with them turns out those who are offering a structural anti-racist critique were the ones who consistently were marginalized it's why Booker T. Washington was the head negro in charge until he died in 1915 as opposed to Du Bois the structuralist it is why Booker T. Washington was the first black person to appear on the U.S. postage stamp in 1940 but you didn't know that because that is what he offered he offered something's wrong with us and we're going to work with you so that you can help us be better which is exactly what Arthur Raper said the sociologist talking about lynching is what Mary Plummer said to Ida B. Wells when she says you guys need to work on this crime thing and just so that again to drive home the point this is a fairly unknown local activist a community activist in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century who's read Du Bois' work who takes him at his word and what does he do? He starts an organization you all know how this works and he says we're going to root the criminals out of our community so his mission it starts a dual mission organization the Association for Equalizing Industrial Opportunities in the League of Civic and Political Reform to his credit on one hand and he said listen we know that the economic deck is stacked against us and we're going to address that and on the other side we're going to deal with the criminals in our midst we're going to suppress corner lounging public indecency vicious resorts and political crookedness among colored citizens so we have strived to save ourselves been doing it a long time from the very beginning now the last point really rooted in this history but there's two more this is the next to last point that the person who engineered the framework that I have argued has been the enduring way in which we talk and think about this problem I've already mentioned his name Frederick Hoffman offered an alternative vision of how to interpret crime statistics so if we had stopped the conversation with Frederick Hoffman was a white supremacist social scientist and demographer of his day at the beginning of the Jim Crow era and came up with a set of racist ideas that stigmatized black people and set in motion a set of policies that legitimized discrimination you might think to yourselves okay I didn't know about that guy and I can see the importance and assailance to that point in relation to the lynching era but I'm still not convinced that this has anything to do with the present day and what it has to do with the present day which I've not mentioned is that Hoffman articulated what would become the reigning structuralist critique amongst the nation's leading sociologists articulating various versions of strain theory largely engineered by Durkheim picked up by the Chicago school and advanced at mid-century by people like Robert Merton and Daniel Bell which articulated that crime statistics on any significant scale were a fraction of a pathogen of pathology in society after all that's what sociologists do they're not psychologists they study society and therefore we argue that when looking at crime statistics on the white side of the color line it turned out that you could see evidence of systemic inequality how could that be? how could the same person who's helping to articulate a white supremacist reading a black overrepresentation of the system as evidence of black pathology simultaneously argue that overrepresentation of crime among whites was evidence of system failure so he says the study of statistics of suicide madness and crime is one of the up most importance to any society we agree when such an increase has been proved to exist it is the duty of society to leave nothing undone until the evil has been checked or been brought under control we also agree the health of the people must come before the wealth of the people I agree we must be far from truly civilized as long as we permit to exist or accept as inevitable conditions which year after year drive an increasing army of unfortunates to madness, crime or suicide it is the struggle of the masses against the classes okay let's go back to this guy is this a statement about the struggle of the masses against the classes? is this a commentary about the health of society? is this a call to action for the nation to care about premature death among those people? is Rudolph Giuliani a modern day white supremacist? now we could ask the question and answer it in the affirmative and not many people would take us seriously but it's a question worth asking in a historical context because this guy is articulating a very robust progressive critique of inequality in society and is helping to actualize that reality for people who had previously been defined by eugenicists and social Darwinists as unworthy of support in our society as degenerates as people who should be sterilized or restricted from our borders who should be subject to nativist and xenophobic violence these European immigrants should not be welcome here Hoffman wanted to create a pathway for incorporation for them like so many others so this is one example of what that looks like in Chicago in 1907 this is the same Chicago that Mary Plummer is turning to Ida B. Wells and scolding her to remind her that have you not forgotten that a third of this city's criminals are black men and they are themselves their own worst enemies telling the anti-lynching activists so what did it look like in Chicago if you were a white progressive focused on the criminality of impoverished working class overwhelmingly new immigrant groups will it look like this this was the progressive response this was the underground reaction how criminals are made well let's look at the image I hope you can all see it clearly this is one of the better setups I've ever lectured in so I think you can actually see and read for yourself the first thing that is really striking is it's an all white scene this is what the white's urban ghetto of early 20th century America looks like Chicago only had 2% of its black population in 1890 and 4% in 1907 percent in 1910 so throughout much of the progressive era before the great migration we're really talking about an overwhelmingly white population of various nationalities with a significant underclass an impoverished group so if we were to think that it is evident that crime statistics tell us to be punitive and to quarantine and to focus our attention on public safety other than the quality of life then we would not expect this history that says that there was a completely different set of values imposed and practiced in an earlier period because as social scientists we like to categorize things and we like to study systems and we like to think that they're elegant that those models actually once we define them because every generation has figured out a better model that then teaches us something that makes everything else bad that because we just assumed that everything we do today is better than it was yesterday well it turns out that the model of engagement for a prisoner reentry organization which is what the Central Howard Association was in 1907 was to humanize poverty was to see the criminality of poor white people in inner cities as evidence of a call to respond so let's read together how criminals are made so long as there are bad tenements sweatshops brutal policemen bad jails child labor dishonest and grinding employers saloons and gambling dens so long as boys are taught to fight and allowed to carry firearms so long as fathers are in different deserts I mean can we just stop for a second right so long as boys are taught to fight and allow to carry firearms have we heard such thing like somehow we should worry about the young black and brown men who are fighting with guns that we should have some responsibility for that that's not really what I hear I mean I hear it in progressive grassroots organizations but I don't hear it's part of the national conversation doesn't shape and define and frame the problem and fathers are in different deserts white men used to not care about their kids like could this be true? could this be true that the crisis of white male abandonment of children was so epidemic that it was common fair in a typical prisoner reentry organization focused on trifling white men asking to raise money so that their partners with their five kids to fighting in the street she's holding one in our arms this crisis of single motherhood in white face poor doing washer woman's work in a bad neighborhood where her poverty is evidenced by the quality of her housing and an abusive police officer on the corner the structure of this is so analogous it's so beautifully elegant for the ways in which we color the whole scene black and brown and we come up with a whole different set of responses so to finish the quote so long as fathers are in different deserts and mothers must maintain the family by the washboard so long crime will continue what will you do to help this association to prevent it? a call for us to respond if someone could close that door that'd be great thank you I think you get the point so here we are with Ferguson report DLJ report I told you I would be long-winded I'm gonna do a time check I've gone 52 minutes I'll try to do five more although it'll be very hard but if you guys are willing to hang with me I'll keep going so the Ferguson report there's a lot in it if you've not read it as students of John Jay school of criminal justice I suggest you not graduate without reading it for yourself no matter what your future aspirations are and this is just one quote to emphasize a point about how this past is so with us today city officials have frequently asserted the city officials the same ones many of whom been fired now have frequently asserted that the harsh and disparate results of Ferguson's law enforcement system do not indicate problems with police or core practices but instead reflect a pervasive lack of personal responsibility among certain segments of the community so let me be clear about this I'm not arguing that there is not a space for personal responsibility what I am arguing is that personal responsibility has been the longest running excuse for premature death by the hands of white citizens and state actors from the very beginning and that there is an unknown unquantifiable relationship between the legitimacy of that state violence and the very cycles of crime within the community to which when it was happening to European immigrants when they were being imposed upon by vigilantes and xenophobic and native of state actors the response was what will you do to help this situation Giuliani speaks for us in this moment like so many others what are we supposed to do for ourselves many black nationalists and many well-meaning African-Americans within the community have taken that challenge to heart and I don't diminish in any way possible but when you do not run the levers of power when you do not control the instrument and machinery of justice you are fighting with at least one hand behind your back the Ferguson report also illustrates a number of other points I'm not going to focus on these today but there is one the second point I want to emphasize so this is really a way of summarizing the major findings and I think many of you have heard them in the news but the second one really resonates with me and the second one resonates with me because it is it is a grand corporation like it is part of the technocracy that drives so much of how we ask questions about data what we think are important these metrics that we hear so much about recidivism that seem is is our best standard I think there's more criticism around recidivism today than the 15 years that I've been in this field than has ever been the case but this need to somehow do evidence based programmatic work what does that mean when the deck is already stacked when the data is already toxic I would argue so it turns out that the efficiency model affected the Ferguson policing that even the let's just take the hypothetical officer who wanted to do right by the citizens of Ferguson faced the prospect of demotion or firing if they were not stopping the good citizens of Ferguson and proving that they were doing their job you could not just be a sentinel you could not just be a peace officer you had to rough up people in order to prove that you were doing your job and so efficiency and productivity standards the ways in which we increasingly demand of each other proof that we are worth something even when one as a police officer is precisely the context when that officer in the Floyd case admitted that he'd been told you're not producing numbers but what should I be doing you should be go out and stopping black males 14 to 21 we are all Ferguson more our investigation has revealed that these disparities occur at least in part because of unlawful bias against in stereotypes about African Americans we have found substantial evidence of racial bias amongst police officers and court staff for example we discovered emails circulated by police supervisors and court staff the stereotype racial minorities and criminals including one email that joked about an abortion by an African American woman being a means of crime control this is fascinating for a number of reasons but the one that I want to emphasize in this moment is you may all recall that Stephen Leavitt wrote an article that became part of the popular Freakonomics book the first version of it that basically took an iconic this view of Roe v. Wade ran it through a model and said aha crime drop explained by legalization of abortion a whole cohort of future black males 14 to 21 were never born never stepped foot on the earth therefore less fewer criminals you can't make it up and to think that one might be a joke what we might dismiss as the lunatic ravings of an economist turn out to be in the mind of people in Ferguson think about that so this is only what we know because we have Ferguson on trial but is it in NYPD? I think that could be true I think there's some officers in the room here maybe who maybe have some of those same jokes because according to an investigation a few years ago there are elements on the NYPD who share some of these thoughts I'm not just picking on the NYPD I'm using the evidence that's in front of us so you remember of course they're close to 20 NYPD officers have been implicated or disciplined for racist speech because of things that they said on Facebook in relation to the West Indian Day Parade about 150 comments posted referring to parade revelers as savages and animals a couple here quoted I say have the parade one more year when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them out killed them all not innocent no innocence here killed them all nobody's denying rude boisterous inappropriate behavior by parade revelers although as we've heard and I don't want to be tried about this but of course you know in the midst of the Baltimore riot or a lot of comparisons to the Ohio State University riot or the Boston Red Sox riot and best I could tell no calls for genocidal attack on those communities when elements of those communities decide to take their whatever frustration or exuberance too far it's exhausting so I'm going to signal it and invite you to read up on this yourself we don't need any more blue ribbon commissions Ferguson to report stands in a long tradition of producing thoughtful systemic evidence of the bad behavior that exists amongst state actors and the first and most comprehensive of these was a Chicago report published out of in the midst of the Chicago race riot of 1919 that summer 22 cities experience racial violence now when we use the term race riot this is for my students up until about 1935 because of a Harlem riot and certainly by 1943 into the 50s and 60s race riots used to mean white people attacking black communities and in most instances black people defending themselves but often losing in that comp in that conflict since about 1935 race riots have meant black people attacking business owners and police officers in their community or property these have been considered commodity riots or property rebellions so before that day this is a investigation of a white on black riot and produced lots of evidence that essentially there was tremendous bias within the criminal justice system and why does that even matter because it seems so obvious because it was back in the day and of course all people were racist but it matters because in the north in the middle of the Jim Crow era white people walked around thinking they were not racist that this was a post civil rights era and that evidence of black people being overpoliced was evidence of a crime problem not of a policing problem in the same way that the lynching era as I've already described they had that same mentality and so this is what the report was responding to this is the stoning to death of a black man not innocent can't be innocent had to be deserving and in the midst of that the police officers were interested in disarming black people to make sure that they would not bring harm to others and so here is here are law enforcement officials searching black men for weapons in the midst of a race ride directed against the black community so all this conversation about second amendment rights and self defense and all that stuff does not apply when you are not innocent so they make recommendations and what is fascinating here is this is one of the first instances I'll offer to you of black agency because we haven't heard a lot about it and Professor Adams promised it so in addition to all these reports which again are not the magic solution we need no we need no more research on the problem we just don't need it that is not going to save us so one of the things that black people offered up in this seminal moment in this origin story almost a hundred years ago was that the statistics were flawed what came out of the Chicago race report recommendation I have zeroed in as scholars do on a particular aspect of the report and in this case I read to you these situations presented to us such obvious dangers the use and abuse of statistics that the commission considered it best to avoid giving currency to figures which carried such clear evidence of their own inaccuracy and misrepresentation did Giuliani get the memo didn't get the memo the memo's been circulated since 1922 so much so that the father of American criminology Edwin Sutherland who published something like seven additions of principles of criminology bought the story read the memo and adopted it for a time so if you read the first two additions of principles of criminology first published in 24 the second published in 1934 this is what you find that racial crimes this is were completely unreliable can you imagine can you imagine someone having the audacity today to say higher infrastructure or racial disparity data is unreliable that all of the currency that we impute to the evidence that we have that we're churning out month after month quarter after quarter sending graduate students back to their databases to revise the evidence so they can produce a new article so they can keep at it and never look up and the world just passes them by the bodies pile up on the streets we had a chance 75 years ago to say enough is enough if you don't take my word for it here is Anna Thompson National Urban League Sociologist a black woman studying the problem looking at racial disparity producing evidence of racial disparity in 1924 pointing out that 7.4% of Philadelphia's black population consisted of 25% of arrests this is exactly what the New York Civil Liberties Union was doing year after year would stop and frisk this is what New York's investigation was doing we've been doing this ladies and gentlemen for a long time she talked about suspicious characters furtive movement she talked about needless arrests she gave examples of people being arrested at the footsteps and on the porches of their own home like Henry Lewis Gates over and over again vagrancy low-level crime enforcement producing statistical artifacts of black people's criminality which then feed into a system and an argument that those people are criminals and we have to put more police officers in them and we have to contain them and so these people in this moment in the 1920s and 30s looked at the situation with clear eyes and said no no no no this is not what this is evidence of this is evidence of a policing problem and so Ira D.A. Reed who was the director of research for the National Urban League studied all up and down the east coast even beach towns Mammoth County anybody from the shore? Exactly went to the shore of New Jersey of all places really couldn't have been that bad only to find the same pattern repeating itself Thomas Woofter part of an interracial liberal southern organization commissioned on interracial cooperation this high-handed arrest of colored people is extremely galling to the law-abiding citizens it cannot be excused on any ground other than ignorance and inefficiency of police officers who engage in these practices and indifference of the citizens who permit such officers to remain on the job so do not think that anyone who says the same thing in 2015 is a genius or saying something new now I'm not saying it doesn't need to be said it absolutely needs to be said but saying it is insufficient police killing so Illinois crime survey 1926 and 27 30% of people killed by police were black people except they were only 5% of Chicago black population Alfred Lingle not unlike Amadou Diallo killed in a hell of 35 bullets because he was accused of breaking into a store we don't even know if he broke into the store never got never stood trial police went looking for him 16 year olds they found him unloaded Ida B. Wells wrote about that too then we had critiques of state violence and police legitimacy say police legitimacy you sound like you have something important to say except people been talking about police legitimacy for a long time Kelly Miller sociologist African-American Howard University 1935 too often the policemen's club is the only instrument of the law with which the Negro comes into contact this engenders in him a distrust and a resentful attitude toward all public authorities and law officers none can doubt that such a kindly attitude would go far to convince the Negro of the value to himself and advantage of law abidance and good citizenship if the state is your oppressor it's hard to believe in the state Harlem 1931 this is an eyewitness testimony has been going on for some time not only in the stationhouse but on the street I can recall several instances which I have been an eyewitness writing to the NAACP this is not published anywhere this is in the NAACP's archives of the Library of Congress in a very fat folder of a lot of people saying the same thing over and over again what did it get us? it got us I'm fast-forwarding a Harlem riot report in 1935 black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier systematically studies the community in the wake of the rumor that an Afro-Porto-Rican youth Lino Rivera had been killed by a police officer for shoplifting in a local store turns out the rumor was not true but people the powder keg was only that it happens the simple fact Freddie Gray actually was killed but at any moment the rumor of a death like that any city in America today town or suburbs could go up just like Harlem did in 1935 and it did and after days of writing with Fiorrella Ligordia and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. touring the neighborhood with bull horns please ladies and gentlemen go back to your homes this report was produced which essentially in these five recommendations and in the interest of time I'm going to fast-forward where the identical recommendations produced 33 years later in the Kurner Commission report better treatment of citizens to ensure proper individual conduct more police protection of residents independent citizen review boards citizen input on new guidelines for aggressive patrol to minimize the harm of stopped and first practices develop community policing I'll just give you one just in case you don't believe me the police of Harlem show too little regard for human rights and constantly violate their blacks their fundamental rights as citizens it's all there report after report after report so the next time an elective official stands in front of you and and you ask a question about police violence or someone asks a question about mass incarceration it said I am calling for a task force to study this problem and then somebody in the audience claps as if this is some kind of response that is going to produce a helpful outcome you say uh-uh we don't need another task force what are you going to do to change it as an elected official as a person who helps to make and enforce laws in this nation what are you going to do to change it and I should get an applause on that one folks all right I'll close with this beta federal racial disparity data will save them so we started with black people will save themselves personal responsibility will save them so as my caution to an audience of scholars and would-be scholars this one is also something to take note and you might think to yourself well damn what will save them then we can have that conversation but in some ways that is the unresolved challenge and we ought to be asking the question and working to answer it rather than to looking to one person me I am the historian so you know I get to play with the past nevertheless FBI Director James Comey gave a pretty remarkable speech in February where if you recall if you heard February 12th at Georgetown opens with this wonderful story about how he keeps the order of J. Edgar Hoover to do wire surveillance on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after his I have a dream speech as a reminder of the history of the Bureau and the ways in which the Bureau itself have been complicit in civil rights civil rights abuses of black people and so this is an evolved man this is a man who also talked about his Irish American ancestry and the fact that he is something like third generation law enforcement that his Irish American grandfather had won the badge and had been subject to anti Irish bigotry and yet through that experience was able to participate in the American dream and pass on to his son and his grandson a belief that that the justice and fairness were always just around the corner you kind of get the point right? So and then he talked a lot about implicit bias and he talked about the ways in which police officers did not always treat black people and brown people with respect and dignity and humility and did not treat them as if they were innocent and yet in all of that he came down to thinking to articulating this point of view that the greatest challenge hear me folks it's in the speech the greatest challenge just like the boy started in 1899 offering up as a sacrifice black people the greatest challenge is to grow drug resistant and violent resistant kids trapped in all of that lies this fundamental understanding of the damage of these people not the society right? not like those immigrants it was the society that was wrong we're going to fix society the greatest challenge is to fix the kids then adds for you special message to you and the first step to understanding what is really going on so it's one thing what we must do the other thing is what we must know and what we must know is to gather more and better data related to those we arrest those we confront the black and brown people for breaking the law and jeopardizing public safety because that's what they do and those who confront us data seems a dry and boring word but without it we cannot understand our world and make it better which puts us right back with the Rand Corporation as we genuflect to them and say please help us understand this problem please help us find positive and productive solutions and so here we are at the end of this history Ferguson exceptionalism because that's what we want to believe Ferguson is not us it's the history of southern exceptionalism just like those lynch mobs are not us is indeed America's history and the story of now thank you very much for being very patient just be part and partial of institutionalized racism that all this stuff is being plagued on the African American community so when I refer to structural racism that is synonymous with institutionalized racism okay and the second comment would be if in order to stop this one would think one would like take a class action lawsuit as opposed to a group a class of people that this is being perpetrated on well class action lawsuits are very helpful although class action lawsuits tend to be about monetary damages and not about legislative or legal change so part of it is it definitely is in the realm of law we have you know I'll give you one example we need federal laws that hold police agencies which are locally or state managed accountable for the criminality of their officers and in the same way that we needed a federal lynching bill to hold local and state agencies responsible for the criminality and violence that their actors engaged in we are stuck with needing that same thing now of course that's a political project and in a majoritarian nation that is built on white supremacy it still is a hard fight but it's a fight worth having because for a long time we've been pushing the personal responsibility argument I think our president is very much representative of that and we've not been hearing the need for laws that the federal government because we can't leave it to the states because it's Chicago it's Newark it's New Orleans it's Seattle it's Cleveland and so the only bureaucracy that can be an instrument and Professor Adams talked about this contradiction that very same state is also can at times be our worst enemy but you know this is what we're left with we can always expatriate too that's a possibility but yeah anyway yeah you're welcome Khalid Ram Mohamed absolutely wonderful presentation one of the only ones I've since I've been in school for like I'm on my graduate level since like seven years now that she made me go hmm there might be something here but on a really serious note one of the things you said fervently was go to city council go to your like officials and say what are you going to do to change a systemic thing but isn't that pro part of the problem itself going to city council expecting the president of the United States regardless of color regardless of where they came from I am under the impression that it is built into the system because that's how the United States was created therefore the system itself needs to be destroyed yeah comments please so there's an interesting time I'm going to make this a simpler response and I think it deserves and your professors here can pick up pick up the ball and either agree, disagree or offer alternative revolution is the possibility that would create an entirely new system from scratch it's how we were born so there's that and there are organizations thinking about it and I think we need utopian visions in terms of building from scratch in the meantime because we also have to figure out how to get through next month next year, 10 years from now is the system that we have is a system of laws right we've been reminded of that a lot this is a nation of laws and so if you don't even hold the elected officials accountable if you don't even hold the people who are ostensibly quote-unquote representative which I would argue might feel like we have been in a very narrow moment since Trayvon Martin but if from my position as a historian for the last 40 years people on the short end of this history have not been asking these questions of the elected officials and if you think about the difficulty of black people in general to hold President Obama accountable for abuses in the criminal justice system as a president I think you get a little bit of a sense of how difficult it is for black people to hold the city council members of this city accountable for these issues so I actually think you know in terms of I used to be an economist I think there's a lot of market opportunity like there's a lot of market penetration just in the simple ways in which politics is transactional it's about compromise but if we don't even put these issues at every level of politics on the table if we continue to let people like Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter who basically traffics in the currency of black people are their own worst enemies in a city with a tremendous problem of premature black death if black voters are not no we want to talk about the quality of life and we want to redefine the issues in these communities as health issues rather than public safety issues then I'm not sure we can expect any out any different outcomes even in terms of our laws in the ways in which elected officials articulate them so while I appreciate your cynicism about what politics and law can do we are stuck with that system in this country until somebody invents a new one and signs us all up to fight for it any other questions? you guys are either tired or hungry it's not tgit so I know I'm not competing with Olivia Pope Hi first of all thank you so much for the analysis it's really good information especially as us who are studying criminology as something as if it's almost new and you know it is kind of a lot of reinventing the wheel as you say you know like all this information has been recycled in such a way where like at the same time it's erased right so but I wanted to come back to the idea of what the the person that just came up asked have you heard of the theory of dual power and the theorists that spoke on this and especially the experiences of other societies that have you know broken down the problem of what is the process of a possible revolution I mean does that necessarily mean that you go ahead and do something similar as your presser and like kind of like reinvent the wheel in so many ways right so instead of doing that I know there's a Russian philosopher spoke about it Chinese philosopher spoke about it so I want to know and I I think also more modern and recent black American theoreticians spoke about it I think possibly Heywood Harry Heywood I'm not sure or Kevin Rishi Johnson more recently has so just wanted to know your thoughts on that so it's it's not my strong suit and I think this is exactly the kind of question that invites all of us to follow up so I mean I'm not going to offer any theories of starting new societies because one I'm not first in them they're not in my hip pocket as we say so I can't answer that question but you can I mean if you want to take a moment longer to give us a praisey of what you think we should all be talking about I think it is an invitation for us to to be more conversant and fluent in these ideas okay so the concept of dual power is that as the state you know tries to expand and distance you know and take away power from the community by oppressing them and funneling them into a certain economic formation right the so the role of black people black and brown people who are unemployed and they're funneled into slave work in the prisons for example and that takes away power and economic power and a knowledge a collective knowledge of how a society works collective knowledge of how to run a society how to run a political system how to use the networks that you spoke about right so how does somebody who is in complete contradiction with the state and its own agencies how does that person even begin to think that they can use the city council that they can use a government right when it's not meant for them right so instead of actually asking for that power is a it's a way of understanding first of all first and foremost we are funneled out of not having any control over our lives and we're funneled into these menial jobs and McDonald's and Starbucks which are it is slave work you know and it's also taking away intelligence and you know any kind of collective understanding of how how to run a society how to be in power so the idea of dual power is you build revolution as you take up more power right you take up you know control of these institutions little by little and strategically because a revolution is not something that is messy or I mean it is messy right because it's not another quote by a Chinese philosopher right is that it's not revolution it's not a dinner party right so it's it's a it's an intense antagonism between two classes with competing interest but so there has to be strategy and dual power is one of them so it's kind of like what's your name Fernanda Pardo excellent so John J. I'll be very proud of its students I'll I'll say just as a response to wonderful comment and philosophy lesson that my caution about how you are essentially channeled into a praxis of data reproduction is I think an expression of dual power right so you describe the McDonald's workers I'm arguing that even higher education is a site for this that you are already self-contained and unless you reinvent what you do and how you do it into what end then whether you're at McDonald's or at John J. Jeremy is not about you then you may also find yourself invested in that so thank you just a quick question I'm going to John J. I'm trying to be in the NYPD so you brought up a good point about police are often judged on their statistics how many people have you arrested how many tickets I get out so let's say someone who wanted to be served those to use that term the dual role of being an activist but also a police officer how do you kind of bridge that gap where you're judged on who you bring into the department and you're pushed into these high crime communities but you don't actually actually want to you know just enfranchise the entire population so how do you balance that the thing I love about and that we all face this as faculty right so we have to you know teach and solve the world's problems simultaneously be warned when all of you might end up in this position one day have to write a book over 10 years and inspire people to listen to you for an hour and 15 minutes and then solve the world's problems all at one time trust me you will appreciate how hard it is to be faculty member all right so let me take a stab at that I have a difficult time I'll do it by way of analogy so I run a research library my library is designed to assist researchers of all kinds from lay people who are just there and interested in reading something new to professional researchers who are interested in producing new knowledge my job is not to speak to the world's race problems not really my job but I made it my job and I'm going to do me and whatever job I'm in and if that job won't allow me to do me then that's not a job I want so if you're interested in seeing a different kind of policing in the world if you're interested in being held to a different standard of what it means to be a good peace officer then I would be a police officer so long as you can live up to those values and do it and otherwise find another way that's my advice to you and I have no idea what that looks like because I have no idea what which precinct you're going to be in and what the command structure is going to be and where we're going to be at the time I mean you might already be an officer but bending institutions to new ways is not easy but if we don't try and we don't are willing to make personal sacrifices that are necessary in order to have some principles in this we could all be complicit through our hands up and say what am I supposed to do and that's exactly where we are I first want to say that I really enjoyed your lecture I've come from LaGuardia Community College over here because I'm writing a research paper on the similarities between the incidents in Ferguson and Baltimore and how they illustrate the problem of racial profiling throughout America and my question to you is is that based on this flawed system is it inevitable that there is going to be a Ferguson there is going to be a Baltimore everywhere okay so that that's that's a good question but I think it misses the point so none of this is inevitable you know if you were standing on the shores of the Atlantic in 1754 it wasn't inevitable that the colonies would be combination if you were standing on a plantation looking at Magnolia trees in Mississippi in 1854 wouldn't be inevitable to you that the storm clouds of war would be on the horizon in just a few years nothing is inevitable so the danger of history and storytelling is to contain the possibility that we can do anything if that's what we want to do and some of it ain't easy I mean if you're an abolitionist by way of example if you're Frederick Douglass or Ida B. Wells or David Walker and you are essentially willing to lose your life for the idea that black people could be free you are a crazy person and I say that in the purest sense of the word you are a lunatic because it was lunacy for abolitionist white or black to believe that they could change the fate of enslaved Africans absolute lunacy so when they showed up at dinner parties and they're in their polite finaries and they sat down and they start talking about the slavery problem most people tuned out and left the dinner party went home and said to the host do not invite me back the next time that crazy person shows up so the world is what you make it and it's hard to do it alone so you need to find some allies but if you have a vision that is different than the world that we live in it's up to you and this history the story that I have told you which is a story it's not entirely accurate I've done the best that I could with what I have in front of me is a way to inspire you to at least know that there's a problem and to at least know that your time might be better spent doing some things differently than people have tried to do over and over and over and over again because it's easy to feel like you're making a contribution and you may be but if you knew you know if Copernicus knew that the world was not flat then he might have picked up another habit if Columbus knew that there was not much gold certainly not on the east coast then he might not have chosen to sail west in other words these stories at least offer you something that might help you make a better decision about how to spend your brief time on this earth so the question is not is it inevitable because where do you go with that if I tell you it's inevitable now what go out and get paid I mean that's an option but if you're here and you're interested and the point is not that it's inevitable the point is that you have to figure out how to make the best go at changing it in whatever way is a product of your strengths and talents and your knowledge so if there are no further one more okay last question listen I just have to catch a train that leaves at 805 right first thing I want to say thank you for coming and speaking to us I like how you weaved the Frederick Doug listen to WB the voice in that because I'm reading a lot of that now in my current literature and I'm kind of seeing how the past is like showing this snapshot of the future before it even happens and we're still talking about it now and the discourse I know of it because I'm a child of immigrant parents came here worked hard that was a story I heard all my life work hard don't be a criminal like those kids outside in the street they're just outside doing whatever stick to your books all that so that was my creed for a long time and you know even though I dilly dally I ended up here academia and I'm doing it President Bush dilly dally too the White House so with a C average and he he made it right but the thing I want to ask you because you just said an interesting line you said what is there left to do but to get paid that's kind of now that was a tongue-in-cheek and response you're okay all right just so that everyone I'm not holding sometimes people hear things they're like that's what he said I'm not going to hold you to the fires and I'm not going to take it out of context but that is the theme in our culture right now as a lot of urban young African American teens women and male but we're more speaking to the male because that's who I represent so the question is now that we see these things and it's happened over and over in history and it seems like there's nothing we could do to possibly overcome even though we're taking these little baby steps it seems like it's like you said inevitable and these things and I didn't say that either well that's okay you're saying you said basically these things will inevitably happen as far you didn't say that what did you say no I said that we have we have asked the same questions and come up with the same answer for a long time right if we need to ask different questions and expect different outcomes so apologize the whole language of inevitability is nowhere in the discussion it was the young he asked if it was inevitable and you said if he was to tell him that then what get paid so that's right but I am on the track so I'm with you so now no offense so the culture for my African-American males nowadays they feel it's inevitable so let me place that on them as we see the climate and environment around America and it seems that there's a sort of awareness coming about where people really are having enough and they're fed up but they're not using that energy maybe to infiltrate as she said or to get into the institutions and maybe change they're saying let's just get paid we can't do nothing else let's get that money and I think that's a mindset that kind of plays into the systemic racism as well because if you're not as you said this before if you're not bettering yourself and using your talents to get better you're just wasting your time here and that kind of plays into them saying well we have these people in check let's just keep them there and we'll continue to aspire and being the best that we can how can I give this message on a bare bones layman's term that can be hip enough for urban and maybe this is too much for you but maybe I'm posing this question to everybody exactly now you're on track yeah so how do we get them to kind of understand in the layman's terms because now when you say statistics it's true the statistics are interpreted and they're shoveled back and fed to us in these bare bones black and white interpretations so can I can I got it really great question okay all right so only because I think you know you've laid out the case right unless you have out out of respect if you had a point I didn't hear I almost pinned you to the fire so no you could come now all right so first of all I made the made the lip remark to the previous question and precisely because I know exactly what you're talking about it's in the ethos of America it is both an expression of parts of hip hop as well as Wall Street and by way of example Ellis Coase who's a very respected award-winning journalist published a book a couple years ago and some of you have heard me give other talks have heard me quote this but I'll keep talking about it because it's very relevant to this moment about getting paid so he writes a book called End of Anger it's an analysis of the Obama era in the beginning published in 2009 and he's basically looking at changing attitudes about America in relationship to Obama's success so he studies two high achieving groups I'm trying to get this button done one is alumni of a better chance it's a program designed to offer talented underprivileged children a chance to go to prep school, boarding school and also alumni of Harvard's business school black MBAs and he looks at them generationally older middle group and a younger group and you'll have to read the book to find out what he finds out but in a book at the end is an appendix and the title of the appendix is Top 10 Rules or 10 Rules for Success so we might have a conversation might be a follow-up to this like what is success in the 21st century in the age of Ferguson that'd be good right you could get a lot of different responses on so what did they think in the age of Obama before Ferguson success was well number one was something like work hard study hard you know pull up your pants that kind of number two and I'm paraphrasing here but the spirit is accurate and you can judge for yourself cultivate people more powerful than you sales which is fancy language for networking so on and so forth and I usually in my speech I have some crib notes so I can tell you more but anyway the spirit of it was exactly what every child hears over and over again even from poor parents surprise there are a lot of white folks and media pundits who think that poor parents don't teach their children about values and hard work and delayed gratification and ambition and all that so all right so it's all of that but rule number ten is so these are Harvard MBAs very successful educated they've been paid well number ten is never talk about race or gender except to say that it does not matter think about that they got paid and the challenge so for them success is material it's individualistic you're already educated you have an opportunity so what do you do in that space you don't have conversations in the workplace about Jeremiah Wright you don't talk about Trayvon Martin in the workplace you focus on the job and therefore they are not terribly different than those young men young men and young women that you're talking about in some ways to use an old-tired cliche that Calvin Coolidge used in the 1920s in a period not unlike our own the business of America is business and so it's been that way now see again here we go with the inevitability the depression like but people like Calvin Coolidge places like business schools don't have to be that way there are a lot of people in those spaces in elected officials and in business spaces that need to know that people like you and the young men in the community with which you are representing and the students here want different outcomes they want to know that people don't aspire to make 300 times what the average worker wants we all said we only want to make 30 times with the average worker makes then we'd have different shareholders and different expectations Wall Street would recalibrate one of my fantasies and I'll leave you with this one of my fantasies if I was able to advise any president and all this talk about our failing infrastructure and the privatization of the public good which is better known as neoliberalism and this low tax culture and this limited government and the Tea Party and all of that you know my fantasy would be something akin to being president or telling the president listen tell all the multinationals who are here in the United States pick up all your stuff and head to whatever part of the world you want to do business in we don't need you now some of them would go no question about it unemployment would shoot up you know there'd be a period so I used to be an you know it was an econ major market there would be disruption in the market but what it would force the question to the nation the force the question to the table is what does citizenship mean to you so if you're a corporation is it in your stakeholders is it only about how much money that corporation can make for you and yours or is it about the obligations of those businesses to a greater good and that is a question that we have not been asking of corporations for at least the last 40 years since the Reagan era so you know there you have it maybe it's idealistic but it's something to shoot for so thank you