 Good afternoon and welcome to New America. I'm Mark Schmidt. I'm the director of the political reform program here and director of studies for New America. I want to welcome you all to this conversation, which is a joint production of the fellows program here and the political reform program on the topic of the complexity of black political attitudes and voting behavior in the United States, which is to me a fascinating topic. I know lots of people who delve into the minutia of white voting behavior and the difference by class and age and background and so forth, but very often treat black voting behavior as kind of an undifferentiated block, largely because African-Americans vote largely along party lines at the presidential level, but underneath that there's an enormous complexity by generation, by the forms of political connectedness and so forth. And we have a panel here today that is superbly qualified to address many aspects of this question. I'm just going to introduce the organizer of this event, Ted Johnson, who is a fellow at New America. He's an Eric and Wendy Schmidt fellow, writing a book about this topic, Black Voting Behavior in the Post-Obama Era. He is currently a research manager and adjunct professor at Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. And previously he was a commander in the United States Navy where he was a White House fellow and speechwriter for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He has a PhD in law and policy from Northeastern and has written about race and politics for the Atlantic, the Washington Post and a bunch of other publications. And we've been really excited to have him part of our community at New America and we've all learned a lot from him and we'll continue to learn a lot from the panel. So Ted, let Ted introduce the rest of the panel and get this going. Thank you. So I'm going to keep it brief because the folks on the stage are the folks that we really want to hear from which is why I invited them out. One of the benefits of being a fellow here is that you get to invite smart people to New America to help you think through the things that you can't quite figure out yourself. And so as was stated, I'm a fellow here this year. I left the Navy wanting to do more in race relations and public policy. The racial disparities that the country is facing and has faced since its inception that continue to persist even after the great society legislation of the 60s is sort of what compelled me to turn my attention away from national security in the Navy and want to focus more on race relations. As I often say when I speak before groups, my interest in black folks and politics really comes from my name, my full name is Theodore Roosevelt Johnson III. So baked into my existence as a Republican president and some Southern sharecropper, great grandparents in South Carolina who really appreciated President Roosevelt for inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner in 1901. And so I grew up pretty privileged existence, middle class and I was blinded I would say to a lot of what much of black America experiences until I had gone off to college and become more of a world citizen and not so insulated in my middle class suburb. And I wondered why is it that I've had so many opportunities that have not been extended to others and it's really a function of geography and zip code in many instances. But even though we have these disparate experiences that I would argue the black American experience is more disparate, more varied than it's ever been because of the amount of progress that each country has realized there are black haves and have nots. A lot of black America has been left behind. And so I wanted to explore what does this varied experience that black America now has? What does that mean for our politics going forward? And that's what I'm spending my year here at New America looking into. And so to help me think through these things we've got a great panel here today. First we've got Dr. Kinesha Grant from Howard University. She's an assistant professor of political science there. She's a graduate of Florida A&M University, FAMU. HBCU in the house. We'll talk about historically black colleges. And she earned her PhD from Syracuse University in American Politics and Public Administration where she really explored the effects of the great migration on the politics of America and the Democratic Party. And next to her we have Dr. Megan Francis who's a Princeton-trained political scientist and now a professor at the University of Washington. And she specializes in the study of American politics, race, and constitutional law. She's the author of the award-winning book, Silver Rights and the Making of the Modern American State which you all should run out and buy as soon as this panel is over. And in the book she tells the story of the NAACP's campaign for anti-lynching legislation and against state-sanctioned violence and how successful the activism was that the NAACP employed. And then we've got Jamel Bowie who is a chief political correspondent for Slate Magazine, a political analyst for CBS News and one of the foremost leading writers on race and politics, I'd argue, in the country. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post, the nation among numerous other publications and he holds degrees from the University of Virginia in political and social thought and government. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll have Dr. Grant come in and share some thoughts. After her will be Dr. Francis and then Jamel will talk to us and then we'll have a facilitated discussion here on stage and then we'll open it up to the audience for some Q&A. I think the goal here is to, we've sort of, the election is over. We have a new president and we've gotten a glimpse of what his administration hopes to accomplish over the next several years. And so I think the goal is to think about how Black America will respond to the election, how they will use their voting power, the power of activism, how they will frame particular issues so that their interests are continued or begin to be met by parts of the government and also where there are areas that we can, that Black Americans can work with this president, the Republican Congress and use the Supreme Court as a vehicle to ensure that our civil rights protection remain intact and that the disparities that much of Black America experiences begin to be addressed. So, Dr. Grant. Thank you. Yeah, or wherever you're coming. We'll just see. Yeah, okay, excellent. So as we were thinking about or as I got the call from Dr. Johnson about what we would be talking about here today, I wondered like how do you start this conversation? First of all, is it even possible to start preparing for this conversation a month in advance with the rate at which things were happening in the Trump administration? And then second, what's the most important thing to think about? So I, like he said, was more interested in thinking or talking about what we could do moving forward or what's important as we chart a path about how we're gonna operate and exist in this administration and two things came to mind. The first was whether or not Black folks will continue to participate in the political process. There is one, I guess, way to think about this which is that this process, the political process has not worked for us in many instances and therefore it doesn't make sense to participate. But I'm a political science professor so I can spend some time with you in that space but I can't stay there because I fundamentally believe that it's our responsibility as citizens and as people who have a claim to this government to get involved in the government. And as I'm thinking about how we get involved in the government, I'm thinking about or watching people participate in politics in ways they might not have participated in it during the Obama administration under the assumption that things were okay. Things are fine. I trust President Obama, I don't have to participate. And folks are waking up now to understand maybe they weren't actually fine under the Obama administration. I should have been participating a little bit more and they are certainly not what I want them to be today. So I absolutely have to participate in ways that I haven't participated before. So I'm looking forward to see how Black people interact in that way. I'm looking forward to see what is going to be happening in the generation of people younger than me. So I'm like an old millennial. I think millennials ended at 35 or something. But I distinctly remember the 2000 election living and growing up in South Florida where I had to watch the news every day as they talked about counting dangling chads in West Palm Beach. And I knew at that moment that I would study political science. So I'm wondering who is watching and deciding that they too will study political science or who is watching and thinking, oh, I could be this elected official or that elected official and how they will be participating in politics. I think it's something interesting to watch and I think it's our responsibility kind of circle around these folks to figure out how we can continue to make demands of our government. I think the other thing to think about is kind of coming to some clarity or consensus about what Black people want, which I know is difficult because Black folks come from all different kinds of places. And they have all these different kinds of ideas about the way the world works. But I think if we are gonna continue to work within this two-party system and to the extent that Black people are gonna continue to be Democrats and work within the Democratic Party, we have to figure out how we come to some consensus about what is absolutely most important for us in that kind of space. And I think we can look to our institutions like churches, like the NAACP, maybe sororities and fraternities, other groups, the smaller groups of community organizations to try to figure out or come to some consensus about what's important and be clear in our message and clear in our demands about what we want from the party, and hopefully have people in the party who are Black and who are allied to make these demands and get the government and the politics to change in ways that work for us. Good, Dr. Francis. Okay, if I go too long, just poke me. That's fine. All right, hey everybody, how's everybody doing? Everybody's doing good? Okay, good. All right, so I'm gonna talk about the state of protest in the Trump administration. I'm a political historian. I went to school for political science, but really what I've been interested in for a long time is Black political activism in the early part of the 20th century and at the end of the 19th century. I'm also a believer that kind of our past history can light a way out of the present darkness. So for me in looking at kind of this present moment, one of the, I think, the big questions that is on everybody's mind is can citizens on the ground, can they shift the operation of political institutions? All the protests, whether it's Black Lives Matter, whether it's around kind of the environment or the woman's march, there is a central question. All right, all these people are in the streets, they're raising kind of these legitimate demands on our government, but at the end of the day, does it really matter or is it just kind of a fun and sometimes a very dangerous type of protest? For me, the way I found kind of hope in the present moment is through history. So I'm gonna share a little bit about my research, actually kind of why I think it's useful for the current moment and then two very quick lessons that I wanna raise as well from it. So my first book focuses on the NAACP's campaign against racial violence in the first quarter of the 20th century and so how we mostly kind of understand the NAACP is around education segregation, right? We know Brown v. Board and we know them to be really big around voting rights as well. But in the early years of the NAACP, when it was founded in 1909 through 1925, the organization's main concern was all about racial violence, mob violence and lynching, state-striction violence and private violence against Black bodies. And one of the fascinating things when you read through the minutes of the NAACP early on is that they're really actually not concerned about education. They're not too concerned about voting or housing segregation and the reason why, and there's this kind of this quote that I think is useful, it's one of the board meanings and there's a discussion, one of the white board members of the NAACP doesn't understand why they're not focused on education and voting rights and one of the Black members of the NAACP says, first all the American Negro wants is a chance to live without a rope around his neck. End quote. And this is the idea, right, that before African Americans can have other rights in this country before they can have education and voting, their lives have to actually be protected by the state. And so what the NAACP did very quickly is between this period, 1909 to 1925, they launched this massive campaign, public opinion first, the boys is all about, if we can reach the hearts and minds of Americans, they'll change, clearly white folks didn't change that quickly, right? So then what they did is they kind of, they tried to press up against Congress to pass anti-lynching legislation and then this is what I find kind of in particularly useful, in particular useful right now is they tried to advocate in Woodrow Wilson's administration and also in Warren G. Harding's administration and if you guys know anything and I know y'all do, I'm looking out here and y'all know anything about the segregation because Woodrow Wilson, you're like, what Megan, that's crazy, right? No, but they really believed that they could change Wilson's mind to address this issue of mob violence and lynching in a very direct way. They believed that if Woodrow Wilson made a statement against lynching, then a lot of things would change, right, as the leader of the country. And they never stopped in this belief for Wilson, eventually after a big racial violence, this massacre in East St. Louis, they were marching down Fifth Ave in New York City and afterwards Wilson actually felt his hand basically kind of being pressed. So he decides to meet with the delegation of the NAACP and other black citizens and he meets with them, James Walden Johnson says in his memoir for three hours. And then what we do know is a few months later he actually makes a statement against lynching. Now this is no way to redeem him. Okay, let's be very clear about that. But part of the reason why I like to tell that story is that under at some level kind of a white supremacist, very oppressive presidential regime that the NAACP was still organizing in the executive and public opinion and Congress, the book kind of ends very quickly on how they have a breakthrough in the Supreme Court and basically the first case in modern criminal procedure doctor in this case, Morvey Dempsey, is basically happens because of the NAACP and they basically write this federal guarantee. But one of the big lessons that comes out, especially for the current moment, is that protest on the ground is so important to the movement of political institutions, but like protest on the ground must be connected to electoral and political institutions to create change. That's one of the big lessons that comes out of the book. Two very quick things because I feel like I'm running close on time that I just, I also wanna highlight kind of the obvious question at the end is, wait a minute, Megan, what happened to racial violence and criminal justice concerns? We know NAACP in education. And the argument that I make in another piece of research that I'm working on is one of the things that we often don't pay attention to, especially in movements, is the role of money. And I think much more attention, especially in the current moment, needs to be placed on the role of money. The argument that I make is the NAACP moves away from this issue of racial violence and mob lynching because of this big radical philanthropy comes on board and it's like, you know what, the way forward is education. Let's forget about racial violence. Black lives will be protected if we fight for education. A very last thing is one of the things, I mean, I'm a big believer in protest, but I do, especially around kind of the Black Lives Matter, one of the concerns that I think is worth talking about and thinking about much more is who we ask to do the repair for the problems of our democracy, right? Are the ones at some level who've been wrong the most by political institutions, how much, I mean, is this a proper burden that we ask of them to repair problems in our democracy? And I'll end there. So I think I'm going to talk about some of those problems in our democracy and how they relate to Black Americans. So, you know, one election happened, but I think it's worth looking back at the mechanics of the election and two things stick out about the 2016 election. The first is that it's the first election in 50 years to not have the full protection of the Voting Rights Act, first presidential election. The second is that against a longer-term trend stretching back to the 2000 election, Black turnout actually dipped a little bit and it dipped in critical Midwestern states and you can make a pretty strong argument that had turnout among African Americans not dipped in those Midwestern states that Hillary Clinton might actually be president right now. Now, I think that gets to two issues. The first is the voter suppression regime which shows every indication of getting stronger over the next four years, not just in the states in which it's already covered, Wisconsin, for example, but I think in the states that are growing, the center of American politics in terms of the geographic center, I think it's moving south. As far as much as we talk about the Midwest, the population is growing fastest in the states of the former Confederacy and those are the states that are transforming politically quite rapidly. Virginia is a blue state, straight up. North Carolina is a purple state, depending on the level of organization on the ground, a blue state. South Carolina is closer than people realize. Florida, Georgia, those are states that are on the precipice of either becoming blue or becoming highly contested. And I don't think it's an accident that these are also the states where voter ID laws and barriers from the voter suppression have been getting stronger. So in Virginia right now, for example, there is a proposal to strengthen the states fell in disenfranchisement law to make it more difficult to restore voting rights to former convicts and this would probably have the effect of disenfranchising around a quarter of Virginia's black population and making the state much more contestable for Republican candidates. Looking forward and thinking about sort of where, the political power and influence of black Americans as a group nationwide, I think that one of the challenges is going to be, you can call it sort of electoral friction, reducing this electoral friction by way of voter suppression to allow the full voting strength of black Americans to take effect. And the fact is that precisely because black voting is so kind of, one way to think about it is favorably geographically positioned, right? Like there are a lot of black people in swing states across the country. So because that is just the geography of American politics right now, we're likely to see greater and more explicit attempts to push back on black voting rights, to push back on the organization of black Americans. So to offer another example, in Georgia a couple of years ago, there were lawsuits against a group called the New Georgia Project, which was running mass voter registration drives when the state had racked up about 60 or 70,000 registrations that were all struck down by the Republican Secretary of State, who said that these were all illegitimate and these were not done to the proper procedures. And in states that have new voter suppression and voter laws, there are often limits or new restrictions on how you do registration, how you actually get people signed up. And I do not think you can disconnect this from kind of the changing geography of American politics. So there's that. Related to this is I think this also provides a great opportunity for the black Americans engaged in politics and for kind of, liberal left politics in general, which is that I think voting rights is returning to kind of the center of a political agenda, looking forward to the future, precisely because the ability of liberal and left movements to actually affect policy depends so heavily on African American participation. In a real sense, there is no national democratic party that is not winning upwards of 90% of black Americans. Because of that, I think there's real opportunity to kind of return to voting and voting rights and expanded voting participation as a locus for organizing. It's something that can transcend the very real class divides and very real geographic divides within the black community. And I wouldn't say funny way, but in a kind of ironic way, the fact that the Trump administration poses this sort of like omnithoretic against the interest of many Americans and black Americans in particular creates or helps create a sense of solidarity for goals to move forward on. So I think my watch is ringing, so my time is up. And I think that's sort of where my head is, where I'm looking. Voting rights as both, something that will be contested over the next few years. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an opponent of expanded voting rights. And also a place for which black Americans and other Americans can organize to push back against this. Well, yeah, so I'll tell you, so I think what I'll do is sort of follow up with each of you with a specific question. And as I do that, we can sort of have a discussion as we go down the line about each of the topics. For Kenesha, I wanted to ask again, because you're an HBCU graduate, and I keep saying this because I am too. But 85 plus presidents, HBCU presidents are showing up to meet with Trump administration officials next week at the Library of Congress with Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina and a representative from North Carolina and Amarosa I suspect will be there as well. So she's a Howard grad and a Central State grad as well. So what's your view of one, the role of HBCUs going forward? Their Republican administrations tend to be sort of favorable, whether they're symbolic or otherwise is up for discussion. So the role of the HBCUs and other institutions, fraternity, sororities, and then to what extent should they cooperate with this administration and sort of put aside their moral differences on their worldview in order to help their institutions? So I think that they, I talked earlier about needing to have these institutions help us organize our thoughts and decide what we think is important, what we should do first and those kinds of things. I think HBCUs are a critical part of that, especially because of their location. I think they have the ability to reach lots of people who might not be reached in other kinds of formal ways. I think that they have the brain power obviously of folks who are sitting around thinking about these things, thinking about how to make the world a better place. So for that reason, I think that HBCUs are essential to help us organize and think about what do we actually want and what is the best way to get this thing and how do we engage our politics? In terms of the HBCU president's meeting with the Trump administration, I am stressed about it honestly. So I was at Howard a couple weeks ago when the new secretary of education came to campus and I'm thinking about it and I think that HBCU presidents are doing the best they can under the circumstances. I don't think that any of the historically black colleges in the United States live in this kind of like comfortable Ivy League space or even comfortable state-sponsored space. So we end up in a situation where we have our presidents who have to, in the case of Howard, Howard has a federal appropriation, right? So if I don't play with the president at all or I don't allow the secretary of education to show up on my campus, this is me, you take my whole appropriation and if you do take the whole appropriation, does it close? Or can I expect that the American public will step in and give us $600 million, like how does this work? So I think that HBCU presidents are doing the best they can. I would hope that since, in my opinion, they are kind of forced to go and participate in these actions that they kind of get some of their, for lack of a better description, soul back or participate in kind of a moral resistance by speaking truth to power in that space, right? So I can't not come to this meeting because I need the federal dollars that come into my school, but if you are going to force me to sit here and talk to you, let me tell you the truth about what's happening in my community. I think that a part of this could be like some of, to some extent I think class becomes important in black America at this moment, especially in ways that we don't really talk about. So this attempt to say, okay, I'm gonna give some money to the HBCUs is nice. Like I appreciate that I work at HBCU, but I have family, I'm a first generation college student. So I have family who have not been to college. Some of them might not go to college, so you can't give me money for my HBCU and expect that that solves all the problems of black people because there are lots of black people who are not there. There are some black people who are not in college at HBCUs who are still at college, right? So I think it's nice to be having these kinds of meetings and things like that, but I think it's important for them to tell the truth in those meetings and for them to make the conversation a broader conversation. Right, and also to ensure that the wealth is spread. So if you fund HBCUs, but then you cut Pell grants or you've got student loan interest rates or increase the credit viability for, necessary to qualify for a student loan, then you hurt black students no matter where they are, even if you help the institution. Right, and then to completely blow it up, if you give us some kind of extra money in this appropriation or the next four appropriations that you never gave us, but you repeal Obamacare, right? Like the extra dollar or two that I got from my researcher and my paycheck doesn't matter if I have to pay for my cousin's surgery, right? Like, so let's not try to give these symbolic things to black people and distract us from the things that are fundamental to our economic security. Right, right, and I mean, expanded even to like roles of churches and other sort of black institutions, traditional ones. Yeah, can I? Oh, absolutely, yeah. No, so I think this is, I mean, one of the things that rubbed me on this is that Republican presidents in the past, it would have given to HBCUs, right? It would have been in terms of historic if there would be like no kind of HBCU mandate from the Trump administration, but kind of this notion of kind of symbolic kind of like pork to the black community here and like be happy because I have this HBCU initiative. So did Bush, right? So did Reagan, I mean, but like part of it is kind of to create this whole show of the Library of Congress, there's gonna be obviously a huge picture. He can finally appear with black people more than one, right? And so part of my worry here is kind of exactly what you've laid out is this idea of kind of like this show and kind of to distract from the very, very real issues that impact middle and lower class black people. Yeah, and so, but we can't begrudge them for taking the medium, right? I mean, because it kind of has to happen. Right. Yeah. So I think we got a glimpse of this. Day one of Trump's administration when Talladega College sent their band to be part of the inauguration and there was controversy within the black community about whether or not they should participate. And I think this gets at sort of the tension that these presidents have to face and that black Americans will have to face whether it's when Donald Trump went to churches, there was, you know, whether or not he should be allowed to go or not. And then when he would go and make political statements, there was one I think in Detroit where the pastor said this is not a space for politics. And so, to what extent do you allow yourself to engage with the president when you don't agree with his politics but still sort of hold your moral ground? And that's an issue I think black America is gonna have to wrestle with in its institutions beyond just colleges. So Megan, you mentioned this, that really powerful quote about like, I just don't wanna get hung, you know? And so I worry about education. I'll worry about education later. And so I think we are sort of in that time now like Jamal brought up where we don't talk about what do black people think about energy and what do black people think about immigration because we're sort of worried about just basic civil rights. So what is the role of, you know, we talk about black lives matter, but the role of protest in to consolidate the black sort of, the power of black America to preserve civil rights, but also almost so that we have space to show how unverified we are or how varied we are and how monolithic we are not. Oh no, that's good. In terms of, you know, the kind of black history in organizing goes back and, I mean, well, let me say, I mean, one of the things that I find fascinating about kind of the contemporary organizing, especially around black lives matter, is in some ways you have people who are in kind of these different economic classes who are all together to protect what is, for so long has always been kind of the very first civil right, which is kind of the protection of one's life, that has always been. Then, you know, I mean, obviously the history of American politics has also been that as that right is at some level seemingly secured, then kind of the fight gets kind of brought into look for other rights. For me though, I think one of the lessons in moving forwards here is that, especially for black political organizing, that it must encompass a number of different issues, right, that it can't just be kind of just focused on voting, it can't just be focused on education, housing segregation, and that hope that everything else will follow. I mean, this is kind of one of the issues around not focusing kind of directly on economic concerns and not focusing specifically on issues of criminal injustice in the 60s and the 70s. Kind of the idea here was that once the workplace was opened, then of course African Americans, right, would kind of fall into that. But that necessarily didn't happen. And so you had kind of a huge class stratification in the black community. And so one of the things, I mean, moving forward has to be some kind of movement in which we focus on issues of immigration, right, where you focus on issues of religion, right. There's a, I mean, in terms of, especially if we think of religion, there is, right, a segment that our black movements that have been organized historically over time and that are organized right now. Especially if we think about the kind of the Northeast, New York, New Jersey area, and kind of the West Coast, California LA, and the Bay Area as well. And so it must encompass these different things. I think four successful protests that actually happen in the current moment means that we have to form more coalitions, I think, than we've done before. And so some of that, I think, means coalitions within black politics, right, because it isn't just kind of this monolith that votes. But there are all these different interests. But so I think it means inside of the black community as well as outside of the black community, right. There's all these different and very important protests, whether that's around LGBTQ issues, women's issues, issues around economics. So that to me kind of seems really important in terms of moving forwards. And in terms of organization, I mean, Black Lives Matter is proud of the fact that they're flat, no real leaders. And so how does that work? I mean, looking at the NAACP, like if the president wanted to call the NAACP to negotiate, he had someone to call. So how does the activism where they could get an audience with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, how do they now get an audience? And then if that were to happen, like where's the policy people? Like how does it go from action, from activism to true action? Oh man. I mean, so one of the things that I find super exciting about the current movement is how decentralized it is. And also in terms of the leadership, how it's more women than ever before, how it's not centered in churches, how at some level, right? I mean, clearly kind of over time, but especially over the last five years, there was, I think there was a very strong belief that if you did your work, you went to some of these good schools and you got a job that you would escape racism, but it wouldn't kill you at least, right? And then kind of the realities that have set in for many people over the last decade, two decades is that it didn't matter. One could wear a tie, but one could still be on a dark corner and get shot by police officers, right? And so, I mean, one of the things for me that's been interesting is not necessarily to watch the fall of respectability politics, but once tie and ballot is not gonna save one, right? There has been this very real belief in that. And so kind of like pushing off of, just because our protest doesn't look like your protest, just because our protest isn't as respectable as you want us to be, it doesn't, I mean, we're fighting for something else, right? And like, at the end of the day, you should respect our lives because we're human and like, it's not necessarily even just a civil right, also a human, right? So I mean, but to this kind of very real question, because I, students and then also some of my friends are like, ah, like, what's gonna happen? Like, what happens, right? When Obama and or Trump wants to meet with leaders because we have at some level kind of a very traditional model of what rights activism looks like. And for many people, because the current movement doesn't look like this model, they're like, ah, I don't know what to do. But I think that, I think one of the huge benefits is that more people actually have kind of come to the movement that it's representative of more interest. I think there's a lot of problems that haven't really been talked about until like two, three decades later after the traditional civil rights movement, which was the marginalizing of issues around sexuality, the marginalizing of issues around gender and also economics, and very real issues about, I mean, the NAACP, sorry, for those who might be in the audience, today it's seen as a bourgeois organization. They come in the 50s and the 60s, right? As an organization that is focused on respectable plaintiffs. The search is for respectable plaintiffs. The search at the beginning two decades of the organization, they were just like, no, we have to fight this. And so there is a belief kind of later on about what rights should look like. And now it's like, you know what, like, it could look like this or it could look like that. In terms of leaders, I think that will happen over time. And I think in terms of it, you know, not, you know, but I'm excited about kind of the organic nature for leaders to rise and the opportunities that exist for new energy and new ideas to come into the movement. Kind of one of my students was like, she was like, it's not your mother's movement. It's not. But I really love the energy. And I think that a new type of model that took some of the lessons from before and that builds on it is what is necessary for this time. And just because my parents' older generation doesn't necessarily know how to directly communicate with it, doesn't mean that it's not useful. It just means perhaps that we need to adjust and reframe the way in which we communicate with movement activists. I'll add to that. And one interesting thing is that under the Obama administration, for example, well before Obama was regularly meeting with representatives of Black Lives Matter, the administration was feeling pressure from the presence of this protest movement, right? That you don't necessarily have to have discrete leaders for politicians to pick up on the fact that these are salient issues on which they should do something. So Hillary Clinton met with like, you know, Doree a couple times. But well before that had sensed that within the coalition she was trying to lead, these were salient issues and she should perhaps get ahead of them somehow. So I think that dynamic shouldn't be ignored. And I mean, sometimes I'm tempted to even argue that you don't actually need leaders at all. That given how democratic politics can work, the mere fact of pressure of sort of organized statements of saying this is what we want, having a well-defined agenda rather than a particular leader can at least be signals to politicians that they should want to sort of like align themselves or get behind or begin to respond to those concerns. So one of the, I love this because one of the issues that I kind of the worry about in this, the kind of the 50s, 60s movement is this idea of there's this kind of memorializing of the leaders. And that's what we remember. That's what at some level we remember. And kind of the hope I think right now is that we'll remember the ideas and what they fought for and this kind of idea that the idea should be at the forefront of the movement, not necessarily specific people and leaders. And if we give them enough time, they will. So we start out with the Black Lives Matter movement and we're kind of like, we don't know who the leader is. We don't know who's in charge. But eventually they present a clear agenda. So the question becomes, I think, well, politician, what do you want? Are you looking for an opportunity to take a picture with six people or are you trying to make some kinds of changes? And if you're trying to make changes, you have the tools that you need. If you give us the time to do the organizing and write down our demands, you can make moves based on what we've asked you to do without having this meeting with six people. Right. Yeah, and I mean, I guess at its foundation, if you're arguing that Black Lives are important, like what policy is going to make that real? You know, if the Constitution doesn't, if the amendments to the Constitution haven't already enshrined that in the nation, then arguing for another bill to be passed doesn't suddenly make it real. And so I mean, I do see the argument for when we talk about Black Lives matter, just the very objective that Black Lives should be respected, there is no policy answer to, like, you know, this requires a fundamental change in America's heart for that proposition to be realized, but there are policy things that can be done to sort of usher the thing along. And so when they talk about body cameras for police or independent reviews or community policing, these are small incremental steps to try to push America in the direction where life, Black life in particular, is appreciated. And so sort of on this line of these lines of politics and policy, Jamal, I mean, you talked about how really solidifying the Black base in the Democratic Party is where power can be realized electorally going forward. And I wonder if there are other strategies. Paul Freimer at Princeton talks about the, you know, electoral capture, where essentially the Republican Party is unwelcoming to Black folks by policy and in perception. And so there is no competition for the Black vote, which allows the Democratic vote, the Democratic Party to take the vote for granted. So Black voters are captured in the Democratic Party, which means that there is no real pressure for Black demands to be met by either party because Black voters have no other option. A famous quote from, I think it's Julian Bond, civil rights activists who recently passed said, when you say Black folks don't have anywhere else to go, you're wrong, they can go fishing, which is kind of what happened in this last election. They decided not to show up at the rates. So if electoral capture is real, if our real power is in the Democratic Party, what are the strategies to either marshal that power to affect change in the party or use that to, you know, create a more welcoming Republican Party or an interest group like maybe the CBC that can sort of serve as sort of a third party interest group within a party? I think, so I think to pull back a little bit, I think sort of almost the model for successful intra-party negotiation is the conservative movement in the Republican Party. That like over the course of several decades, it managed to make itself a genuine power center and then almost sort of a group that one cannot cross within the Republican Party. And within the conservative movement, particularly the evangelical movement and its ability to muster grassroots energy to at least make its demands be felt. They were captured to the Republican Party because of their commitment to anti-abortion politics, the evangelical movement was not going to vote for Democrats, but they could make life very difficult for Republicans who did not hold on to their priorities. And I think something similar can work for black voters, for black voters not just to vote for Democrats, but to actively punish Democrats who do not seem to be acting in their best interest, whether through use of primaries, local, statewide, and national primaries, whether through use of the very real leveraged black voters have in the Democratic, in the national Democratic primary for the president. One thing I think certainly Bernie Sanders learned in the 2016 primary was that you should need to hit a critical mass with black voters to be able to have any chance at winning. African Americans are, I want to say, a quarter of the Democratic primary electorate. So if you are not winning upwards of 40%, you have essentially wiped out your chance of capturing the nomination. And that by itself, I think, is a lot of leverage. It provides a lot of opportunity for bargaining. And I will say, I don't think, I don't think the Democratic party is the only mechanism or method through which black Americans influence politics. I think we're thinking electoral politics. That's where the opportunity is. That's where the leverage is. As long as a Republican party is committed not just to a very sort of narrow agenda that does not have room for sort of positive economic rights and so on and so forth. Not just committed to that, but to seemingly a white identity politics. Black Americans kind of really, they really have no place to go but the Democratic party in terms of electoral politics. But despite that, there are a lot of ways in which you can utilize your position within electoral politics, not simply because black Americans, that's kind of the only place they can go. But as I said earlier, the Democratic party cannot win national elections if it does not win a huge number of black American votes and get sufficient turnout. I mean, it's just, especially if the white electorate to be blunt about it continues to become more Republican and that just raises the amount of votes among African Americans and Latinos and Asian Americans that Democrats have to win. So this is a two way relationship here. No blacks have to go electorally but Democrats are kind of stuck in a position too. And in that dynamic, I do think there's a lot of opportunity for leverage and a lot of opportunity to make games and to make your priorities felt. Yeah, and I wonder, I think in the last, and I'll have to check the numbers on this, but certainly in the last five to eight years or so, the new blood in Congress went on and the new black members are the Republican members, Mia Love, Will Hurd, Tim Scott. And it seems like the old guard in the Democratic party have been there forever. Is this a harbinger of things to come that new black blood entering politics may not subscribe to the Democratic party may seek their opportunities elsewhere or to Megan's point, maybe the activism becomes their political expression instead of electorally. It's really interesting, because the thing about Love and Hurd and Scott is that they don't really represent black constituencies, right, that Scott as a house member represented, I don't want to say represented Trump Thurman's old district. That is a hilarious irony. And so in terms of sort of, black communities, black districts and so on and so forth, I do think there will still be, there's still gonna be like new political blood that come up and now that I'm thinking about it, I think one of the things I have in mind when thinking about intraparty pressure is exactly, I mean, I tend to think that there does need to be a concerted attack on black machine politics. I think that, I think that the, I'm not one for term limits, but it's certainly the case that the longevity of black leadership in the house in particular may be an impediment to really fully utilizing the amount of leverage black Americans as voters have. And so there I think there's a lot of space for action and activity. I tend to think that the Republican Party is going to continue to look for African Americans to run where they can, recognizing correctly that there's value, not necessarily among reaching out to black voters, but among reaching out to white voters in having that symbolic representation. But I don't think in terms of mainstream black politics that like the Republican Party is gonna be much of a factor. I do think this turn towards what I, this sharp turn towards white identity politics is gonna close off that for a while. Yeah, and Kenesha, I mean, what about at the state and local level? We've seen some folks out in Compton, they've got a young black female mayor, Tishara Jones in St. Louis is running for mayor. Yeah, exactly, we wrote an amazing letter to the local newspaper there in St. Louis sort of calling out essentially systemic racism and the disparities that the city doesn't talk about. So what's the role at the state and local level to sort of get away from national politics where black politicians and leadership will play? I think that they're connected, the state and local politics and the national politics are connected. And I think the Republicans did a fabulous job of planning very slowly how they were going to take over local and state politics and have that trickle up to the national level in a way that allows them to take over the presidency. So state and local politics are important on a couple levels. One, they're important because like the things that you deal with on the day-to-day basis of your life are probably state and local issues. So you wanna have somebody there who can speak to the concerns that when you're dealing with a police department, as an example, you're dealing with a local police department. Maybe if you live in DC, you're dealing with the city police department or you're dealing with the county sheriff's office, right? So it matters who gets elected sheriff. It matters who gets elected mayor and how they direct the police department at the state and local level. So we can't lose sight of that. But in terms of like organizing the larger party, the people, this morning I'm reading about what I think what should be an interesting fight in the Democratic Party about who gets to lead the party. And when we are making decisions about who gets to lead the party and what the Democratic Party is going to be, who makes those decisions, governors, mayors, people who have been formally elected to office, right? So they are important, not just for the work that they do in your day-to-day life, but they are also important because those are the people who get together in a room and shape how the Democratic Party is or is not going to move forward. Right, right. So we'll get ready to open it up to the audience for questions and to sort of roll into that. I wonder from each of the panelists, where do you think there's opportunity in the Trump administration for Black America? He's talked a lot about inner cities and about his big infrastructure program. Are there any lights in the Trump tunnel for Black America? I mean, certainly the inner city thing, right? He talks a lot about inner cities, he talks so much about inner cities that one gets the impression that he does not realize that Black people don't only live in inner cities. But I think his focused inner cities reveals maybe some opportunity, right? That like maybe there are ways you can leverage housing and urban development, which appears to have taken the role as like the Black department in the Trump administration, leverage housing and urban development to get more community funds and sort of like really basic. Similar to under the Nixon administration, there is like sustained lobbying of these departments for funds for development and so on and so forth. But this reveals the limits of it, which is that Trump's conception of Black America seems to be actually pretty racist and shaped by that racism. And so when he talks about Black communities, he doesn't just talk about inner cities, he says, well, we need to bring in the feds to cities like Chicago to deal with crime. I mean, his image of Black communities seems to be stuck basically in 1982. And as a result, that does, I think, sharply limit the kinds of avenues for engagement you can have. Because at a certain point, you are dealing with an administration that views you in a fundamentally racist frame. Yeah. Fundamentally racist into your earlier point, old frame, right? So I study the great migration, Black folks start moving back out of the cities and out of the South as early as 1970, right? So if we're thinking about what we should do and how we wanna organize and help Black communities, we need to be thinking about suburbs, right? Outside the cities as much as we're thinking about the cities and as long as he's focused on what's happening in the inner city of whatever place he wants to focus on, there are a bunch of Black people who are gonna get left out of that, right? And that's not gonna work. I mean, to that exact point, like the new frontier of urban poverty are these inner ring suburbs. Are places like Ferguson, Missouri, which is not a city, it's a small suburb of St. Louis, but it's a suburb that's largely been abandoned by Whites leaving outwards. That is, those are the dynamics now, transportation, job access, and there's no indication that anyone in the Trump administration has any inkling of this fact. Yeah, and I think American politics, I mean, it is littered with good intentions. I mean, if you look at the GI Bill or a lot of the housing legislation that came in the New Deal, those were good policies to help America get out of the Great Depression. The problem is they left the Black people behind or completely out. And so the policy may be a very good thing, but the implementation turns out to be implemented in a very disparate and discriminatory way. And then those things compound themselves, which sort of gets us to where we are today. So it's not even just about good ideas and wanting to help, but then it's about following through. And then using policy that targets those that have been left behind instead of even the rising tide of this all boat mantra is does not address racial disparity at all. Okay, so questions from the audience. Please remember to keep your question to a question with as much, with as little lead time as possible till you get to the question mark. Yes, here in the pink on this side and then we'll go over here. Hello, okay. Hi, so my name's Crystal. Howard University person as well. And I had a question about running for office, in particular with being an organizer activist person but also interested in civic engagement. I think one of the holdups for a lot of us is that perception of being a sell out but also can you be radically black and also be involved in politics and policy and also be successful with that? Like getting your things done, like talking out early about systematic racism and things like that and not just having to be confined to running a place like Detroit where I'm from. Yeah, so what if you issue respectability? Do you have a chance at being elected? I think that the short answer is yes. Like in my hopes, it's yes, right? So I think it depends on where you're running from. You make a point about Detroit, like absolutely you can be as black as you wanna be and run and represent Detroit and get things done or you can do that in Atlanta, right? Or at some many other places around the nation. But I think you can do that in places like Ferguson or I'm from a city called Lotter Hill, Florida where it's like predominantly black. It's a suburb before Lotterdale. Like there are many places around the nation where you can be as black as you want and get things done as long as you're like a serious person, as long as you're serious about policy. Now, are you going to face people who don't wanna work with you because you have this notion that you are black and you are working for black people? Absolutely, but the way politics works in order to get things done, usually need more than one person. So they might not wanna work with your super black self today, but they might need to work with your super black self tomorrow to get what they need, right? And you wanna try to understand the way that people operate in a way that allows you to be who you are, allows you to use what you know you have in a way that can work with them in instances where you can find some synergies. It's also true that I think that in the current moment, not just that Democrats and other people are looking for new talent to actually run, whether it's local, state and federal office, but I think people, voters, constituents, notions about kind of what candidates might look like and the types of candidates they need. It's actually changing for a lot of people and I actually think that there is right now a lot of opportunity for people who don't follow a particular mode of the past. People want something fresh and new. I mean that's in terms of kind of like, I just don't want establishment candidates. That's not something that kind of the right has. Democrats, people on the left who don't necessarily identify as Democrats want that too and so I think there actually is a lot of space in the current moment for individuals who are not necessarily kind of wedded to a particular party and or kind of an owed type of politics that used to work when one actually ran campaign. To add to all of that, I'd say that politicians are elected by coalitions, right? And that the shape of your coalition has a lot to do with how, what the kind of mode of politics you want to perform. And so for example, in the last election cycle, there were several district attorneys across the country that lost races to reformist candidates backed by black activists, organized by black activists. And we'll see how this works out, but it's really not hard to imagine those DAs acting in sort of very reformist, aggressive ways knowing that they have a strong coalition behind them that will back them and maintaining an electoral base that doesn't just tolerate whatever mode of politics you want, but it celebrates and I think it's very vital to being able to be as unapologetically black as you want in office, wherever you are. I'm from Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is about like a 22% black city. And while there has not, I don't think there's been a black, there hasn't been a black mayor in the city. One can imagine the situation in which a black mayor is elected on a largely or plurality black base and that gives them a lot of space to act just because of the way local elections are because of the way turnout is. You don't have to have that many people behind you to have a firm hold on elected office as we see right now. Right. Right. Yes, here on the aisle. Hi, this is political discussion. I guess I'll introduce myself politically. My name's Dave Price, former journalist and educator and I'd say I'd be a real strong Bernie Sanders supporter for you. We're a little bit more to the left. So that'll kind of preface where I'm coming. But my question is this, I wanna focus with an observation and then two quick questions. The last two words in the program today was Trump's America, which I find interesting because Donald Trump is president but I don't know if it's not my America, it's not a lot of our Americas. And my question is this, as you deal with someone like Donald Trump who really does, I mean this is not a put down, it's just true, he lives in an alternate reality that he creates himself. How hard is it to talk to someone or deal with that when there's not even a basis of truth? I'd like to compliment the panel. More facts and information today than if you watched maybe 14 hours coming out of the White House or for the rest of, you know, who knows? That's one question. And the second thing is, I guess if you had to say something good about Donald Trump, he seems to be kind of a, I don't wanna say the word hater, but a misunderstanding of so many groups, okay? So how important is it for each of those groups, whether it's immigrant, black, women, gay, I guess white, Jewish, you know, we could go around the room. How, and again, you know, it's not just some rhetorical question because all those groups have their own vested interests and they're very important interests. Someone who taught in the inner city for almost 30 years, of course we know that. But never I don't think have they been, has the call been so great ever maybe in America for those groups to unite and make a change. So the two questions, how do you deal with somebody who lives in an alternate reality when they have the ultimate address in America 1600? Pennsylvania Avenue. And then secondly, what do you advise people as good thinkers, as leaders, to how do these groups get together to work with large numbers? The point about how you talk to people or influence people, I don't expect that I would be able to have a conversation with Donald Trump and influence him to do anything. But I do think that it might be possible for me to talk to, I think we have to exercise our networks is where I'm trying to go with this. And as an example, I wrote a piece after the election about like some stress I felt about white women and how they turned out for Donald Trump, didn't turn out for Hillary Clinton in ways that I thought would help us, right? And if I wanna have this conversation as a black woman who grew up in a predominantly black situation, went to a black college and had like all this blackness in my life and I wanna reach white women, I need to talk to white women who spend time with white women. So that's what I did. I said, this is this thing I wrote, this is what I feel about it, what does this make you feel? And then my friend tells me this is what I feel about it. And if there are points that are missing or things that don't work, then I have to rework what I'm saying, right? I have to reshape my message in a way that gets to what she understands. So I said all this to say that I think it's important for us to think about how we interact with people and how we craft messages in ways that can move them, right? Like I don't wanna have a conversation with you. I do wanna have a conversation with you from the basis of fact, but if I know that you can't deal with fact, I have to figure out how else to have this conversation with you or with a person to whom you might be sympathetic if I actually wanna get some work done in terms of moving your hearts and minds. And I think if it is possible at all to move the electorate in a way that could be helpful in moving Donald Trump, then that's the way we do it through conversations with our network and hoping that our network can reach people and get them to move in ways they might otherwise move. Now, why supremacy is a beast, right? So I don't know how much talking is gonna help that kind of stuff, but I think on some of the policy issues, it might be possible to get to some kind of common ground that way. Your question is partially why I didn't answer the one that you raised last one before we went to the Q&A about opportunities in the Trump administration, in part because there is, I think it's kind of this notion of where he doesn't, there's not kind of a form in which I can actually engage him or people with reason, right? Kind of the opportunities that I see is that with him in so many ways, there has been kind of this concentrated resistance. And so one of the ways I think you meet people like that or are that you at some level resist in ways that they actually pay attention to, regardless of whatever he says, he very much pays attention to the news, right? And also he very much also pays attention to protests. That is apparent, right? So that's not, you know, it's not like we're having this conversation with him, but he is responding, not in the way in which at least political science or political communication would tell you that executives respond to constituents. But in a very kind of interesting different way, right? So there has been, even in like, what is it now, 34 days of the Trump administration, there has been kind of ways in which like things have happened in terms of the ban. That I think came about obviously through legal action litigation, as well as this huge kind of protest with people in terms of different areas. He also, I mean, there's also been kind of other ways that we see him kind of like, responding to outside pressure. So it's not necessarily discussion, but that's for me, where I see the opportunities in this administration is that kind of new groups of people can't believe what is going on, and at some level, they are out there in the streets. In terms of this last question, you raised the second one about different groups with vested interests and how can we get them all kind of, you know, together. I think that's gonna take a long time. That's always, I mean, the history of social movement organizing, right? But I think that's gonna be key to creating some types that come with more significant inroads in the administration. I mean, I was really excited about the Women's March, despite it being kind of initially organized around white women and then bringing more women of color onto the leadership team. But like, that just can't exist by itself. It has to be that, okay, some people who perhaps never really organized went to a march in their lives, went to the Women's March, and it's about how do we get these people consistently in movements, and how do we build something stronger, right? How do I get some skin in the game in some of these other areas that are wrong? But it's kind of to expand, people is at some level, idea of what equality looks like, not just in one sphere and a siloed sphere, but also kind of more broadly. Yeah, and I think the, you know, appealing to ego is also an effective tactic. I mean, the reporting after Trump held his Black History Month breakfast the first day, the reporting that came out of that showed that he took an interest in HBCUs after someone said, you know, they didn't get along with Obama too well. You could do better than him there. And then suddenly it's, oh, so let's talk about this. After the raid that happened in Yemen, reporting came out that said there was conversations that Obama would have never took this chance. And so that sort of made him, oh, okay, here's an area where I can invest. So there are ways to reach people wherever they are. You just have to figure out where they are and how to engage them there. Yes, here in the back and then we'll come forward. Thank you. My name is Todd Wiggins. My website's called DCceleb.com and my question is how many of you actually have read blogs that are produced by people who obviously are very different in their thinking, such as, say, right wing Republicans, if you've actually read some of the things that they were saying about Mr. Obama during administration, obviously you can go on YouTube, or you can go on social media and see some of the things that people say. One of the things that I noticed when I interviewed people who were Trump supporters that came to DC for the inauguration, that many of them were vehemently opposed to being thought of as racist. They were very, very adamant about that. They said we are not racist. It's not that we don't like black folks. It's this, that we do this because of this. Many of us supposedly voted for Mr. Obama for both terms. So I wanted to ask you, could we make more progress by just instead of just talking amongst each other, by talking to the opposition? Maybe we can't do it in the same room, but can we do it in a constructive way and actually accomplish something? Yeah, and I think this sort of dovetails into what a lot of folks have been writing about lately, where we live in a world with racism, but no racists. Where no one hates anyone because of what color they are, but never mind that racism still exists and sort of everyone recognizes that. So I hear the question of people saying, I don't have hate in my heart for these people why am I being labeled this way, without acknowledging the structural aspects of racism that has nothing to do with your personal opinion of someone's race? Panel, your response to the question? I tend to think that this is in some way an unintended consequence of the marketing genius of the civil rights movement, that they, through brilliant use of imagery, created an image of the racist, right? The racist is Bull Connor. The racist is a Klansman. The racist is beating someone on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, like a racist is not your family member or your friend, who is otherwise a decent person, but holds, if not negative attitudes and sort of caste attitudes that get about black Americans or other groups. So my own feeling on this, and this is in no way a political strategy, this is just my own feeling about it, is that that always strikes me as protesting a bit too much, that Trump ran an explicitly racist campaign. There's no other way to describe it. And you either voted for that or decided that that was not a deal breaker. And either way, the effect is the same for say, an undocumented immigrant or a Muslim American. The intentions of your vote matter not for them. So, I'm from a pretty conservative point of place, many of my high school classmates voted for Donald Trump. I am more than willing to have conversations with people who voted differently than I did, but I think those conversations have to start from a place of truth and honesty. I don't think you can coddle people and say that, no, your choice was not bad, was not morally fraught, that you were just acting in your best interest. No, I think you have to confront people with the truth of your choices. And the truth of a vote for Donald Trump is that it was a vote to, at the very least, defend and expand white hegemony. That's it. Maybe you wanted lower taxes, maybe you wanted stricter abortion laws, but in getting those things, you also got that and you also have to grapple with that. Yes, here up front. Hi, thank you. My name is Andreas Russ. I'm a newspaper reporter of Germany. I've been here four years. I've learned a lot of things. I do know that I will never understand race relations. I've learned that much. So thanks for taking my question. It's been a couple of years too. Right. We don't have a figure now either. One thing I do know after traveling the country extensively during the campaign is that not only Trump supporters, but also a lot of, say, a Democratic county party chairman in the Rust Belt told me, well, we cannot work with this platform where our party is sort of an addition of a number of minorities. And my constituents don't understand why it's not okay to say all lives matter as a response to black lives matter. There's this whole debate going on in the Democratic Party, how to get rid of that image of divisiveness by still being inclusive. I wonder to what extent is that even a debate among the African-American community? Is there any wing that would sort of pragmatically say, let's tone it down to avoid a backlash or would that just be a defeatist proposition right from the start? Thank you. What do you guys think? I think that we would be the older people in Congress that we talked about who would be saying, you know, let's tone it down. And then you would have the younger folks like the black lives matter folks saying, like, no, for what? We tone it down, it didn't work. Let's do something else. So I don't, I believe that the older generation of African-Americans who want us to be quiet and respectable would be willing to go along with us if we were successful. I don't think that works the other way around. Like I don't think the millennial black lives matter, like more activist group of black folks is willing to go along with black leadership. Anymore. So I think that it's their responsibility to get out of the way to the point that I think Jamil was making earlier. Like if you are not going to be who we need you to be, if you are not going to be responsive to our interests, we are not going to participate. I think we see what the consequences of non-participation are. So it will move everybody in my opinion for them to either change the way that they interact and not suggest this kind of tamping down or to get out of the way. I mean, is there a way to tone it down without saying tone it down? Arguably, Barack Obama toned it down. And it didn't work. Well, right, so you're right. You can tone the message down, but you're right. I mean, you sort of, you bring things with you, the baggage of the nation with you when you walk into a room. Right, yeah. There's, I recently re-watched Star Trek First Contact, great movie. And there is a line in sort of near the climax where Picard explaining why he refuses to back down and says, you know, if we do this, they take an inch, they take a foot, they take a yard. It has to end here. And I see this is sort of my approach, or my thinking on this sort of toning it down question. Because at a certain point, it is just going to be the case that black assertion of equal political and economic rights, it's going to find resistance from that portion of white America, which sees itself not just as workers or whatever other category they have, but also as white in occupying a position on a hierarchy that they want to defend. I think one of the things Democrats, or even just like lefties in general are grappling with is the extent to which that is true. And the extent to which democratic problems with the white working class are in some way a function of this fact that there are a lot of white people who are just not going to want to participate in the coalition where they are not sort of the primary beneficiaries in the focus of whatever the politics is. If that is the case, then like what's the point in compromising on that anymore? Right? Like if any sufficiently aggressive statement of equality, of this is what we deserve as equal citizens, it's going to be met with the backlash, then I myself don't see the point and sort of toning it down, because at a certain point, the backlash is going to come anyway. And I think if Barack Obama has done anything for younger black Americans, it's that Barack Obama has revealed the limits of that style of politics. That if the definition of respectable mainstream black politician incurs so much racialized backlash that people elect Donald Trump, president of the United States, then there is no point in making that sort of your main style of politics, that there needs to be a more aggressive and even more radical approach to these questions. And one of the things I think that the Black Lives Matter protests have made very clear is that one of the things I think is really crucial to think about is who we put at the center of our analysis and protests, right? And so one, you could put white people, right? And so I'm going to do a very quick story. One of my white colleagues comes to me and says that he doesn't like the Black Lives Matter protest and believes that it's not going to be successful because it's not based in churches. And I'm like, all right, let me entertain this for like a hot minute. And I'm like, why is that? And he's like, well, because it's not necessarily going to reach out to white liberals and white progressives like myself. And there's this idea of becoming, so much of the movement that Barack Obama did as president is kind of this concern about wanting to, at some level, frame it in a way to make it acceptable to so-called white liberals and white people at the center. But like, I mean, part of that, what I think is so interesting about the Black Lives Matter protest is it says it puts Black people's concerns, their human rights, their citizenship, their democratic rights at the center of the analysis, right? And it says that this is what we have to, this is what is most concerning to us to everything else, right? In terms of a very kind of very less thing, when Bernie Sanders came to Seattle was that big protest that got all the attention because the two women who identified it with Black Lives Matter were seen as disrespectful, right? People were like, Megan, I like this, but is there a different way they could have gone about their protests for him, right? And there was this huge kind of uproar because people did not like the way that it looked. They felt that these Black women were being disrespectful to Bernie Sanders. But I mean, kind of the pushback from a number of people from Black circles was that if your outrage actually comes from kind of the way that this protest didn't follow the lines in which you are comfortable with it and your outrage isn't that Black lives are being shot down in the street by officers of the state and private citizens, then you gotta reevaluate what your commitments actually are, right? And then the very last thing here is that I think kind of, I mean, what kind of both my panelists have said was this push against kind of a sanitized version of what rights actually look like and Black freedom actually looks like in this country, right? And just to sort of tie it up with a quick study really to show you how deeply embedded race is, a professor out at, and I think he's at UCI, Michael Tesler did a study where he looked at, he presented pictures of Portuguese water dogs, which is the dog that Obama owns and also the dog that the Kennedys owned. And so based on, when he took a survey of how cute the dog was and he would prime the people by saying this is President Kennedys dog, how cute do you think it is? And then he would ask another set of people, this is President Obama's dog, how cute do you think it is? And Obama's dog is less cute than President Kennedys and that is a register of racial resentment. Even though Portuguese water dogs, they all look the same, you know? So there's almost no way to negotiate that sort of deeply embedded views on race. Yes, right here. Thanks. My question might look, am I okay? My name is Brachan Ameskel Seni, just called me Brachan Seni. I'm from Ethiopia and it looks like my colleague's question from Germany. My question is, when I look at, I'm trying to understand the American politics. So, my question is, now it seems the urban poor mostly black and the ruler poor mostly white, both poor are fighting by lining up in the opposite political parties, one in the Democratic, the other in the Republican. Will making economic empowerment, I'm not talking about job creation, I'm talking about property ownership, making property ownership a central team will unite the poor for both from the urban areas and the ruler areas, mainly the white and the black. And my second question, this might probably come out of the context of this meeting, but will US policy on Africa inform in any way how it treats African Americans here? So, I'll touch, the first question, I mean, is there a coalition to be found among black working class and black folks living in poverty and white folks, white working class and white folks living in poverty in completely different geographies? Absolutely. And I don't, so when the Great Migration happens, we talk about it in terms of the black people who left the south and went to the north, but a bunch of white people went too, right? So, when we're having this conversation about the rest bells, it's not like black people aren't there, they're there too, like if we're talking about people who are losing jobs because factories went overseas, that's us too, like we are fighting the same fight. I love your approach to the question because I find it so pure. And the answer to the question is that we live in America in the system that has this other variable. So, you're like, do we have a poor person here and a poor person there where we could all get together and just stop being poor, right? Yes, except for white supremacy, right? And this idea that some Americans have that by virtue of the fact that my skin is white, I am poor but I am still better than you. And I am not willing to work together with you on these issues of economic security because I am better than you. Even if we are at, you could be, you could have more wealth than I have and I'm still better than you is the approach that many people have. And is it possible for us to work together? Yes, but we have to get past this idea, we have to get some Americans past this idea that they are better than and therefore unwilling to work with other groups of people who suffer the same ills that they suffer. And I think Jamele, you've written about like Jesse Jackson being a good example of bringing black people and white working class together in a pretty successful coalition even though he didn't win the primary, but, right. I think Jackson both shows the possibilities and the limits the possibilities and that I think it's completely possible to craft the politics and the rhetoric that speaks to not just the urban poor and the rural poor but different groups of people different groups of disadvantaged people and unites them under like a coalition of the disadvantaged. You see something similar in North Carolina right now with Mora Mondays and Reverend Barber. I think it's possible and it can be done on the same score. I think it's important to understand that like the limits are that it will always be a minority of white Americans. Now, do I think that people working on this side of politics have kind of hit the limit of white people? Not at all. I think there's, I think there's still the ceiling's a little higher than where it is right now but I do think that there is a limit. I think there's a limit in part because of white supremacy and not just personal feeling but how the very idea of American prosperity has been structured according to race so that when people think back to what it looks like to be prosperous, they do not actually imagine or at least white Americans don't imagine multi-racial communities, integrated communities because those just didn't exist but they imagine our white communities and white schools and white shop floors and a environment that is structured intently by race and as long as that's where the political imagination is for a lot of white Americans, I don't, I'm not sure you can convince any more than a decent chunk that they can work in coalition with black Americans who alternatively have been defined as also sources of disadvantage, right? That it's not just that my good neighborhood is white and my good school is white, that if black people come into it, it jeopardizes the goodness of those things and that dynamic, which is longstanding and in so deep seated that it's almost implicit that people don't even really think about it anymore, that dynamic is in my view like the core obstacle to any kind of sort of class formation in American politics or at least a class coalition in American politics because this isn't the thing imposed from elites down below. White workers, white middle class people, white people across all class spectrums have understood the world in these ways for a very long time. Here on the aisle. In fact, we're running short so let's do right here on the aisle and then follow up with your question and then the panelists can sort of answer both and wrap up at the sitting. Thank you all for being on the panel today. It's been very informative and quite enjoyable to listen to. My name is Kendrick Holly. I work for the ACLU DC and I was really engaged in the conversation about white fragility and the idea of kind of coddling this message towards white people about how they can be useful and saying, well, you know, let me shelter your feelings about my equal rights. But my question actually goes more to white explaining and the idea that I think you were a doctor grant, right? Yeah, I think you were talking about this idea of reaching out to networks and talking to individuals who can then be voices sometimes or allies for you. And I'm very cognizant about this premise of white people then taking the stage away from black people's stories and messages. And I'm trying to figure out how you all could reconcile or how you would suggest people can reconcile this fear that black people have who work in these communities who live this life, they have that white people getting involved will then take the steam out of their stories, will then co-op their stories much like the concern with the women's march, which was that they took this million women's march thing and then tried to turn it into a mission that was focused on white women's experience. And then later they did become much more intersectional, but like this fear still exists in every facet of community involvement that involves some white liberals or white women or white men who want to get into this message or be an ally. So how do you reconcile that for black people who are concerned about that and white people who still want to be involved? Different? Yep, no, go ahead, go ahead, we'll, we'll. Oh, thank you. Nima Blight and George Washington University. Julian Bonn notwithstanding, I thank you for stressing the importance of black participation in electoral politics. I'm a historian of immigrants, I study black immigrants and I'd like you to disaggregate a little bit. Patterns among, you know, newly arriving blacks, you know, if we want to include them in this conversation about black America. Right. Okay, so I do want Mark to get in very quickly and then we can, and then we'll wrap up. I really just have a very quick question because I think, you know, in the very recent past we've seen a number of attempts to kind of split the black political coalition around issues, particularly generationally around, you know, in some cases around abortion, which black voters are statistically more likely to be anti-abortion, but don't actually vote on that. Same-sex marriage was a kind of an attempt at a wedge. Ultimately didn't really matter. I do want your thoughts about immigration as a similar wedge issue. Yeah, and so I think all the questions are tied in this respect. I mean, we're talking about the ways that black America is not a monolith. There are black Americans who are not African Americans, you know, who are first, second generation. We do have white allies who want to be part of the movement but don't want to dilute the movement. And again, this question here. So are there demographic stratifications or ethnic stratifications or racial stratifications with that black America can either use to its advantage to realize its gains or need to guard against it to protect how far we've come? That's a, to answer the first question, I think it's difficult to reconcile. Like I think you're absolutely right that it is the case that if I give somebody my message and ask them to go out and make my message clear to other people that I might be lost in the dissemination of my message. When I was talking about utilizing your network, I wasn't so much talking about having me, like let's say I embody the plight of the HBCU. I am not saying that me as an embodiment of the plight of HBCU give this message to the president of Georgetown and let them run with it. I'm thinking of a more like hand to hand individual kind of interaction with people. I think that it's easier to move hearts and minds when we are doing that in interpersonal conversations with each other. I do recognize that it's possible for some individual on the other side of that conversation to go out and try to make themselves the face of that issue. But when I was saying that I was thinking more in terms about like how can I personally change a situation and I think that the best way to do that is to speak to people in languages that make sense to them. I don't like the fact that it's not possible for me to speak truth to a person and have that truth move, but I think more of a pragmatist than my ideological friends would like and that I'm like okay well if I can't speak truth to you and get you to move on the basis of truth, let me figure out how I can craft this message to get you to do what I want you to do. These are all great questions. Kind of following up a little bit on this first one as well. I think that's one of the biggest challenges right now in terms of movement organizing, right? It's about kind of at some level kind of a real, a legit worry about the co-optation of movements and the co-optation of movement issues. I don't have the perfect answer, kind of solution to that. I do know that part of the answer is having kind of open conversations and checking people and holding people accountable for their privilege. That is something, in 2017 I have very little time, very little time, and that is something in 2017 that I have been more willing to do. But I also feel from some of my white colleagues and friends that that is something that I've been actually more willing to take in because they know that something kind of, they felt kind of the ground moving beneath them. That this is a moment that a lot of my, I live in Seattle, Washington, that a lot of my liberal colleagues and friends have never kind of, they feel a bit off balance. And so they're like, all right, how can I be an ally and yet also not get in the way, right? I think one of the things that we have to work through much more in 2017 is about how to share labor, about how not to put the burden solely on people of color and or for those who are disadvantaged. At the same time, that does mean listening to our voices, right? And letting us be the leaders of some movement sometimes, right? This other one around black immigrants, definitely. I think one of the big issues around immigrants, black immigrants especially, whether we're talking about black immigrants from the West Indies and or from Africa, right? And so one of the things that I like about the movement right now is because I feel like there's been kind of more issues that have come to the forefront than ever before, especially around immigration, especially around immigration jails, right? And then also around religion. And that's just one of the things, I have a number of my students at the University of Washington are black Muslim students. And that, I mean, religion, I mean, race is one thing for them, but their experience of race in the United States isn't like black Americans in the United States who grew up here is, and they're, for them, especially for them who are Muslim, they very much feel that more than they feel like other things, but a number of my students are involved in Black Lives Matter because they feel that there's actually space around that now. But that, I mean, you're exactly right. That is something that we definitely have to talk more about, especially if we look at the ban and the countries that were hit by that, right? Yeah. To Mark's question about attempts to split black elected or black constituencies, especially using immigration. So, I'm, like this is obviously a thing that's from the right is an attempt to do. So far it hasn't really been successful, right? I think in some of this, please correct me if I'm wrong on this fellow panel. I think some of this, it's just that the basis of black politics, even though there are these real geographic differences and class differences, and it is not monolithic, there is, I think, a common basis, which is a kind of solidarity amongst the in-group and this solidarity also creates a heightened awareness of what might happen if unjust policy is allowed to be done to other groups, right? It's not dissimilar to Jewish-American politics, like Jewish-Americans tend to be kind of among the forefront of groups fighting for civil rights out of a shared recognition that what happens to them may very well happen to us. I think that dynamic is very operative within the black community. And so it kind of creates, it makes it more difficult to play this sort of naked, zero-sum politics game. To a remarkable extent, at least as it manifests in national politics, black politics is not that zero-sum. There's a recognition that a win for one group doesn't have to be a loss for another. And you see this, I mean, you see this in vivid form in the fact that black Americans across class lines basically vote the same way. There isn't a tremendous difference from how the handful of black families making a half million dollars a year vote versus those making $50,000 a year. So, you know, Republican politicians are going to try, I think, to reach out using immigration as a wedge. I don't think it's gonna work. It didn't work in California. It has not worked in Georgia, for example. Has not worked in North Carolina. I doubt it's gonna work anywhere else. And that's where national politics goes. As you get more local, things change, right? So like, there are friction points and arguments and disputes at the local level in big cities, for example, that make these things much more relevant. But then they're not happening in kind of a bipartisan context, happening in an intra-party, intra-group context. Yeah, and I mean, just to tidy it up, I mean, black political behavior in this country, the phenomenon that describes it best is the most well-known is linked fate or the black utility heuristic from Michael Dawson at University of Chicago, who essentially in his book called Behind the Mule says that black people vote the same because they come from a very common experience and they feel like if one of us is oppressed then all of us are because race is the primary social determinant about how we're treated. But I think it's, so in talking about immigrants, this behind the mule phrase is key because it harkens back to slavery, being behind the mule that common experience. And so if you're a first-generation American from Nigeria, that's a different background than your average African-American. And so the data's not very good. Normally black American is just black and they don't draw the distinction. But I find it very interesting that when we talk about how Hispanics vote, we say, oh, well, they're very liberal except Cubans. Cubans actually in Florida tend to be more Republican. And so there's this association that can happen between Cubans and Dominicans and Puerto Ricans that doesn't happen in black America even along immigration lines. And I think that's for just bad data, essentially. So I wanna thank you all very much for coming out. I think what we tried to convey is that black America is probably the most pragmatic block of people here. Like swinging for the fences is always the goal but we will take the bunts and the singles as we get them. And the long march of black history in this nation is proof that the bunts sometimes do get you on base and that there's a steady march towards progress but that doesn't mean that we are where we need to be and that we need to stop swinging for the fences. So in Trump's America, black politics will continue in my view to be what it has always been. It will just take different forms and shapes for political expression to accommodate and adapt to the political environment that we live in today. So thanks very much and thanks to the panelists for your attention. Thank you.