 I'm Ed Baker. I'm your host at the Addiction Recovery Channel for ARC. I couldn't be more pleased than to have our distinguished guest with us today, Dr. Leon Walls. Thank you, Dr. Walls for being with us. Thank you, Heaven. Dr. Walls is an esteemed associate professor at the University of Vermont's College of Education and Social Services. He is an avid advocate for racial justice in America. I'd like to begin by saying that I don't think this is going to be an easy show, but I think this is going to be an important show. And with that, I'd like to jump right into it. Dr. Walls, I'd like it if you would, using critical race theory, I'd like you to explain what exactly is white supremacy in America? So the definition that we use in my course for white privileges basically benefits that Europeans receive, that people of color, BIPOC people do not. And that includes not having to deal with a lot of the stress that people of color go through usually on a daily basis. And we know medically that stress builds up and that actually adds to a lot of health problems. White privileges is basically having a world that's built for you essentially. When you say BIPOC, just to clarify, you mean black, indigenous, and people of color. Yes, I'm sorry, I couldn't, thank you. So those populations then are not privy to what you're calling white privilege. So-called white people are privileged to white privilege, correct? Yes, absolutely. So one of the other tenants that I understand about critical race theory is that white privilege has been sewn into the fabric of American culture by legislation and law since the beginning of the country. Is that true? Yes, essentially, basically from the beginning at Jamestown 1619, those 20-odd Africans were brought ashore. In Jamestown, basically that was when the whole idea of whiteness was created. And that was particularly the distinguished themselves from the African studies that they had started to do. To accumulate in Jamestown at that time. And I do believe that the name of the ship was the white lion, is that true? Yes. Yes. So talking about, a lot of people don't know about that, but that's where it really begun, 1619. Yes. That, unless I'm mistaken, that's 402 years ago. Yes, and yes, 2019 was the 400th centennial of that of that arrival, yes. So essentially what we're dealing with today, what American culture is dealing with literally today is the result of 402 years of behavior, beliefs, legislation, laws and norms that have placed black people in a secondary position. And white people in a primary position. Yes, that was actually the whole purpose of the system of race. It was to set up just those dynamics and you described it very well. It was to make sure that white Europeans are who were defined as white. So keep in mind, not everybody, the term being white has been a very fluid descriptor throughout our history, but for those who were deemed white, the system was set up such that all of the institutions, all of the benefits, all of society was in fact, made to accommodate them. And it was not set up to be nor is it a benign system, meaning it wasn't a system simply meant to give benefits to one group. It did that, but it also was intended to hinder and hurt and basically cripple the other group, which was at the time where the enslaved Africans and subsequently the descendants. It's difficult to really, it's emotionally and morally difficult to look at it and to realize the extent of what has been perpetrated. It's not easy, but it's important. So it's of the utmost importance. I mean, there's no way to overstate its importance. So what we have then is we have first slavery, then we have the abolition of slavery by the 13th amendment, and then we have black codes and Jim Crow law. Can you speak about that a little bit? Sure. Let's first think about what the South was like at that time. The whole economy was based on it was in the agrarian economy. And basically those enslaved individuals were basically the ones who did all of the work. After the Civil War left the South pretty much in patterns, then you move from that to what was known as the period of reconstruction. And prior to reconstruction, because a lot of those Southern whites were very, very incensed about the fact that they no longer had not only their property, which were the enslaved individuals, but all of their wealth had been pretty much destroyed. And so that period in the 11 year period after the Civil War ended was known as reconstruction. And the 13th amendment, well, the 13th, 14th and the 15th amendment were amendments passed during reconstruction. And they were designed to address slavery and 13th amendment basically abolished slavery. The 14th amendment gave citizenship and I think 15th amendment was the right to vote for black males. Black females did not get to vote for quite a while as other women didn't need it. So the black codes were basically extensions of slavery. Those Southerners wanted to try to get those formerly enslaved people to control them outside of owning them as much as possible. So black codes were really designed to just criminalize those individuals. It was designed to make money off of them. It was designed to reduce them to just the second class status that they wanted to. And so you mentioned the 13th amendment and it did abolish slavery, but I always tell my students there was a loophole that was written into the 13th amendment. It says, all shall be, no slavery shall exist, except in the event that you are accused of a crime. And so that is when you saw a lot of the vagrancy laws and the black code laws which led into the Jim Crow laws after. And in the Jim Crow laws, as I said, after the Northern troops had basically left the South, had they grown tired of taking care of the newly freed citizens. And so after a while they said, you know what? I think everything looks pretty good, we can take off. And as soon as that happened, that was when the white Southerners really just jumped right back where they left off with the Jim Crow laws. And it was just designed, just again, to control and make sure that those black Africans did not gain anything. And that is essentially how it worked and it did work very well. So the like systemic persistent nature of this injustice, you know, just kind of morphed into something a little bit more disguised. People didn't call it slavery. It was more laws and codes and codified, you're free, but not really. It was that kind of the gist of it. Sure, and there was even a period and then a lot of people don't know this. There was a book written by a man by the name of Douglas Blackmon and it was called Slavery by another name. And it was a period, really when the United States was starting to get really industrialized and steel was really big and US Steel was, you know, one of the major companies. And what was happening gradually, as I said, the Southerners always found a way to make money off of black bodies. And so during this period, they created what was known as the prison lease system. And so what this system was, was you would arrest or get someone for some crime. In a lot of times, it was just standing around was a crime. And once you were ensnared into that system, it was all, it was over. Because at that point, you had Sheriff's writing contracts with companies like US Steel to ship bodies to work in the mines. And this happened over a period during the 40s, I believe. And it was worse than slavery because in this system, the bodies didn't matter. There was plenty of bodies, at least with the market of slavery, a black body was worth something, worth keeping alive and worth giving at least minimal nutrition to keep alive. Because the better condition, obviously, if you wanted to, again, sell that individual. But it was just basically a way the black codes were just, again, another way in which to keep control over situations that was quickly running, getting out of their control. Basically, I mean, it's very difficult, very difficult to hear. And I went to grammar school, and I went to high school, and then I went to college. And these truths, these realities of like American history are really neglected to be taught. And it's very, very difficult to hear, but we have to pay attention to this. Now, in one of our conversations leading up to the show, we talked about what happens when black Americans really begin to make progress. And I think we saw it in the 60s, there were assassinations. That was the solution to black Americans making progress. You had brought up another example to me. It was Tulsa. And I think that the 100-year anniversary of Tulsa has just passed or is right around now, is that true? It's in May. So the 100-year anniversary is in May. Would you mind describing what was Tulsa? What is it? Sure. Tulsa was one of, we talked about the Tulsa riot. Tulsa was one of many, many, many race, what we refer to as race riots. And mainly they were riots that were started by the white Europeans and in some way against something that they felt that someone, even the black community, had said or done or dishonored in some way. Tulsa was like just a lot of other cities. But what happened in Tulsa was the segregation that is a hallmark of the system of race was alive and well in Tulsa. And there was a section of Tulsa called Greenwood. And in Greenwood was where many of the black merchants and the businesses dropped. They were doing well. And in fact, it was known as Black Wall Street at the time. If I may call it right, like a lot of the, the way a lot of the riots began, it just began by word of mouth. Someone may have said, oh yeah, this person did this or said this or in the case of Emmett Till, whistle that this woman and what you saw was what we saw in January 6th when we saw them up. We saw that mom and Pallie getting together and saying, we will take what we want. Well, what happened in Tulsa was historic in a lot of ways. Basically, the town, the community of Greenwood was leveled in what wasn't leveled was looted and taken and stolen. And you have these individuals were displaced as a result. The unusual part of this is that you had even airplanes dropping bombs, kind of homemade bombs on these individuals, randomly shooting innocent people. It was just an amazing and a horrific thing that occurred in Tulsa. So it was an extreme vigilante sort of sick reaction to Black people. People found an excuse to go in there and destroy their success. Hard, very, very difficult, very, very difficult to hear. My initial reaction on some gut level is that that can't be true, that can't be true. That doesn't happen in my country. We don't do things like that. It's that hard to face it. The first thing I want to do is deny it. It's difficult. It's very, very difficult. Thank you for sharing that with me and thank you for sharing that with our audience. Now, I want to prepare to move on to the next segment, but what I'd like you to touch on, Leon, is when I was like a teenager in the Bronx in 1960, 61, 62, there were a lot of demonstrations around white castles, the white casual hamburger place. And people would, their cry was Jim Crow must go, Jim Crow must go. So the Jim Crow laws like persisted, like and still persist today in disguised forms. Can you talk a little bit just briefly about like the Jim Crow laws that follow us into the 60s and the 70s and today? Sure. An example, a law used for voter suppression, for instance, going to having things like poll tax, having things like writing rules by which say, oh, if you can vote, if your grandfather voted, well, of course their grandfather never voted, which was the, this idea of trickery and loopholes and ways to skirt around issues. And I'm sorry, I lost my camera. What was that? What was that the last thing? We were like, rightfully so, Jim Crow laws, how they morphed into sort of current, current, the jury legal procedures, legal legislation that supports the oppression and the suppression of black people. Yes. And so you look at something, and we refer to that as structural or institutional racism. People think that racism is some person, okay, let's just take for instance, some person yells the N word at me and they said, that's a racist. Well, okay. So you can say that, right? But that individual has no power whatsoever over me. You can yell at me and scream at me and call me names, but he has no control. But what that individual might have behind him or her is the government that has written laws and rules and policies that say stuff like, okay, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. But I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. You don't know what you're talking about. And there are policies and policies that say stuff like, okay, I'm going to make a war on drugs. As Reagan and Nixon did. And we saw what the war on drugs really was. It was a war on black people because basically what it did was individuals and destroyed their families. Laws like three strikes you're out, laws. Mandatory minimums or sentences where someone would go to jail, a life sentence for a low level marijuana offense. Can you imagine anyone in the state of Vermont realizing someone can spend the rest of their life in a prison because they smoke marijuana? And that is real story. So those were those types of things, those barriers that are sewn in, like into the constitution, the 13th amendment. It's actually written in that this is fine with this exception. So once we create that loophole and we can exploit that loophole. And so a lot of those Jim Crow laws, a lot of those laws that you see even right now that are designed not to move us forward because we know what our history is. We know how race was established in this country. And there are individuals who simply don't want to move past that. They want to keep us just like this is, even with the knowledge that the system itself is inequitable to a large percentage of the population. So yeah, so that's what those laws are. They're just called other things now. But as you rightly pointed out, they just morphed into different ways of doing it. Not as overt anymore because you're right. No longer visually, it's just the fact. Right, and well, thank you for that because I think we need to know about that because again, that's something that's not focused on in elementary school, it's not focused on in high school. We don't talk about it. We talk about, there's lots of other things to talk about while this one great wrong still exists in America. I have here like a copy of the Brenner, Brennan Center for Justice, State Voting Rights Tracker 2021. 2021 now. There as of March 24th, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states. These are all voter restriction bills. So again, it's like a Jim Crow tsunami is coming because of what's happening historically in America right now. Now, I'd like to just underline, I found a quote in a book that I'd like to recommend to the audience. It's called White Fragility by Robin D'Angelo. It's a book that is both easy and difficult to read. It's kind of easy reading, but the content is powerful and you have to feel it. I would recommend it to everyone, White Fragility. And she, the epilogue I guess to the book is a quote. And I'd like to read the quote. The quote is from Lillian Eugenia Smith, who is, she was a social critic of the Southern United States. She's known most prominently for her novel, Strange Fruit. Now, Strange Fruit with that title was taken up by Billy Holiday, a jazz singer in 1939. And she wrote and sang a song about lynching and bodies hanging from popular trees. And she called it Strange Fruit. I would recommend following this show that you Google Billy Holiday, Strange Fruit, and listen to the song, listen to the lyrics and feel the grief that should be felt over past behavior in our country. Now, this is the quote from Lillian Smith. She says, quote, these ceremonials in honor of white supremacy perform from babyhood, slip from the conscious mind down deep into muscles and become difficult to tear out. Close the quote. And I think that's what we're describing, Lillian, that these rituals of white supremacy, where I was born into it, you were born into it. Everybody is born into it. It is the environment. We're shaped by it, we're formed by it, we're informed by it. And it's difficult, it's so difficult to break away from it. Right now, I'd like to play a tape from a Bobby Dylan song, probably his most famous poem, Blown in the Wind. And the lyrics are, how many years can a mountain exist before it's washed to the sea? How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free? How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see? The answer, my friends, is blown in the wind. The answer is blown in the wind. And I think that that particular lyric is so poignant for today that on May 25th, 2019, George Floyd was murdered. And for a year, for a year, millions of Americans didn't turn their heads and they didn't pretend that they just didn't see. And the outcome, on April 20th of this year, this week, was three guilty verdicts for Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. So I think this is an historical moment for Americans. And Leon, I'd like you to speak to that for a moment. This idea that justice, and it's bizarre to even say it like this, like it's this weird exception that justice prevailed, but speak to that for a minute. Yeah, that's really interesting. We all, every one of us who has eyes, every one of us saw a man being murdered. And yet, as you said, a year went by, a trial, and still the outcome was still in doubt. Was still in doubt. If one juror, if just one juror would have said, oh yeah, possible. We would have had something different. I think we are at a turning point. I think we've also been here before, as I said. And every time we come to a point in where, when it looked as if, as you mentioned before, when progress was going to be made, there's always been a very vicious backlash that's occurred. Because that whole idea of this being a zero sum game, that if I get something, or if you gain something, that means I lose. And that is, if you look at it as individual, as we're not together, I'm this and you're that. So yeah, we might be at that point. And the thing that's good is I do believe that there are young people who see things differently than say our generation. And I always tell my students that my generation failed. We didn't do it. We didn't get it done. And it's kind of to you to do that. So just get past this to move forward. As I said, I'm very hopeful. And this may be a significant turning point as there have been before, but this might be the time where we actually do take that significant step where, where there are not people who are not simply not saying anything or staying silent. Keep in mind, it did. It took televising. You know, dogs ripping, you know, the flesh off of people in the 60s on television and in human beings being, you know, fire hose under tremendous, I mean, from a fire hose. So it took it. It took that long for many of much of white America to realize that that was going on then. That was in the 60s. So they did take George Floyd now for another generation of folks to see that this has been going on for the last 400 years. I hear you. I hear you. And I'm going to, I'm going to take a second here. I want to read a quote by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That that speaks to a lot of what you just spoke to. And I, I feel as you do that, that my generation or our generation, we, we, we supported incremental change. And it was white people and black people. It was all kinds of people who really got active. But we failed to embrace what Dr. King calls divine discontent. We, we, we thought we did enough or we got distracted with this or that or what have you. And we, we kind of relaxed. And I do believe that. You know, from my little. Relatively uninformed point of view. That divine discontent is probably the only thing is that's going to get it. And I'll read you the quote that I'm referring to, because I think it bears directly on what you're, you're talking about. This is from Dr. King's speech at Southern Methodist University on March 17th, 1966. So a long time ago. He says in the final quote, he says in the final analysis, racial injustice must be uprooted from American society because it is morally wrong. We must solve this problem, not merely because it's politically expedient, but because it is morally compelling. He goes on later in the speech to conclude. He says for all too long, we have had silent onlookers, but now there must be more involved participants who solve this problem and get rid of this one huge wrong of our nation. There must be a kind of divine discontent. Close quote. And, and I do believe that he's speaking, he's speaking directly to us. If you look at this whole George Floyd process, it's only because of. Involved participation. That it happened. The initial report that was filed by the police department. Had George Floyd's cause of death, medical complications following arrest. If we had turned our heads and pretended we didn't see, it would have gone away. And we would have never been at this moment. There's so much. There's so much legal activity. There's so much journalism. There's so much. Educational. There's so much. There's so much journalism. There's so much education on television in the streets and so many people talking about this. This wouldn't have happened. Without active participation. So my, my, my, my question to you going into the, the closing part of the show, Leon, you mentioned. German shepherds ripping flesh and fire hoses and people getting their heads bashed in. I saw that. And we, as. Americans. Define that as racism. So it's easy to say, I'm not a racist. But, but, but, but, but, but not doing that. Is not enough. We have to do something. So my, my question to you, I want you to really help me with this, Leon, help me to, to work through this. What, what, what, what do we do to become anti-racists? Not this neutral, I'm not a racist, but this positive forceful. I am an anti-racist. How do we do that? Help me with that. Well, first you got it. You have to identify that. You have to realize, okay, so. And I always like to use the example that Dr. Beverly Tatum uses in her book, why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? And one of the ways she does that is she says, there are three groups of people. If you, if you imagine those conveyor belts at the airport, you know that you, we get on and we've got a long way to go to the next. And she says, you know, if you're walking, it'll take us transport. She said that you could describe the active races as that person running past the conveyor belt. He's easy to identify. He's the skinhead. He's yelling anti-semitic stuff. He's doing all these other things. So he's easy to identify. So that's the active, active races. And on the other hand, there's the active anti-racist. That active anti-racist is also doing the same thing as the active races by identifying themselves as, I am not one of them. I am different. I believe in this. So you have these two different groups going this way and that way. And then you have the mass of people slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, silently riding along that out that, that conveyor belt. And their silence gives them perhaps solace. But what they don't know is that ultimately. They wind up in exactly the same place. As the active races. Right. So. I think. Yeah, how do you, how do you do that? How do you. You change the way you think. You change the way you speak. So we, we have to think of each other. In different ways. And I tell my students. We still don't. We lack the imagination. Of getting rid of that simple simplistic system of saying, Oh, I'm black. No. I'm not black, actually. You're not white, actually. And all of those things have been negotiable throughout history. Anyway, so. I think what has to be done is. People have. Have to stop waking up. Believing that. Just by the virtue of their skin color, they have. Right. That's not that that has been magically bestowed upon them. Just for that. That's what the system has taught us. It taught me as well as you. And you pointed out that no, we, none of us alive right now, we didn't construct this system. But we don't have to accept that as our future either. So, you know, we can do something to change that. Yeah, I think, I think there's a great. Like emotional spiritual relief in that. The idea that I didn't create the system. I was born into it. And the following idea is all I have to do is step up now. It's not, it's not just step up now. If I step up now and admit. That I've been supporting. Like a system. That has been based on white supremacy. And I no longer want to do that. And then I might stumble along and kind of try to not do that and say the wrong thing here and there. But if I'm spiritually motivated to move in the right direction, if I'm morally compelled to do something about this, and I'm committed to staying on that, then I don't, I don't, I don't have the time to feel guilty. I don't have the time to justify. I need to spend my time being an anti-racist because it is the morally correct thing to do. And I'm a person who cares about the difference between right and wrong. And I'm a person who tends to want to, to contribute and want to be active. And that's, that's enough. I don't have to. I don't have to do it perfectly. I can learn. I can learn from you. You can learn from me. We can have difficult conversations. And we can kind of trust that we're coming from the same place. We're not trying to hurt each other. We want to move forward. You know, I think that's probably an oversimplification. I think it's just going to be a very difficult time in America. But I, I for one am willing to, to do this and to also, you know, not Dr. King talks about political experience. And that doesn't work. We have to be morally compelling. I think there's also something that I would probably call emotional experience where you feel bad because something wrong is happening and you do a little something and then you feel good. So now you don't do anything because you feel good. I think we need to get beyond that too. That this is more important than how it makes me feel today or tomorrow. And this is more about who I am today and tomorrow and who I'm going to be today and tomorrow. Would you, would you care to comment on that? Yeah, I think. Hit it. Correctly. Who do you, where do we want that? What kind of society do you want? I mean, those are decisions you can make. And, and, and the, the whole idea. I could understand in part, part, part, part of the reason that many of the conversations are difficult, unquote, difficult is that once someone thinks that they, if they were to admit that the history is act real and, and where we are. Did actually occur. To them, many of them think, well, that's admitting my guilt. And I try to say, look, no, it's not about you. It's not about you at all. This is not personal. This is about us. What do you want us to look like, right? And so the only, the, the only thing that. That can work is action and guilt serves to do, to do exactly the opposite. It is a thing that paralyzes people. And once you're paralyzed, it, and you don't do anything. It's just, it's a waste anymore. It's, it's, it's not. I can understand passion and not if you can understand, you know, wanting to do things, but if, if, if that doesn't actually spur you to do something, then it doesn't really mean anything. Thank you. You know, I do, I have. I'm a, I think you and I talked a little bit before the, as we were kind of leading up to the show about cynicism. You know, that, that people of our age group, you know, we've been alive long enough. You know, to see things, good things, worthy things begin and end. And I don't, I don't feel discouraged at this point. You know, I, I, I, another Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quote is the arc of the moral universe bends slowly, but it bends toward justice. And, and I, I just see great, I know that's an incremental view, but, but, but there's something about the, maybe, maybe it's been that in the history of our culture of America, there's been kind of like a preparatory period where we've, we've had, you know, fits and starts and stops and lulls, but overall the society or the culture has been prepared, has been being prepared for something profound. And if, if ever that time were that, that time, that time is, is now, and I want to, I want to go into this period believing, believing that one of the other things I read recently, address that was that we can't, we can't succeed at change unless we, unless we believe in change. And, you know, can you speak to that a little bit? Yes, and I'm glad you mentioned that Dr. King, because that has always been a motivating fact to me to just believe in, in the inherentness of people. Ultimately, we'll get there. I mean, it may take a while, we'll get there. But I think I've been lucky in the sense that I get to be in front of a group of very young students who are looking to change. They are looking for ways how can we change. It's so different. And I think that this is, tell me, give me something that I can use to change this. So I don't, I no longer have to convince them that something's wrong. I just need to come up with ways to get them creatively thinking about how to solve the problem. So yeah, it is as, as discouraging at times as it may be, you know, same things like George Floyd and the most recent thing with, I'd say, Wright and Jacob Blake and endless others. Eric Donnell is being able to see the freshness each semester of this group of young learners who will be the future. They will be the ones who will have to take that mantle forward. And I hear their voices. I hear the passion and I see them just simply saying, I want to change this. And that gives me hope. It gives me a lot of hope. And that's, that's beautiful. And what it, and the group that you deal with, you know, teachers are going out to influence our children's children who are coming up. It's a beautiful place to be. All right, well, we'll, we'll, we'll end it on that. Leon on that note of hope for all of us. And I want to, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being on the show. And an extended invitation to you for some point in the future to, to rejoin me and we can, we can take a look at, you know, where we've, where we've come. Okay. It was my pleasure to, to be here this evening and I, I will come back anytime you want, buddy. Thank you. Thank you. If I could shake your hand and hug you, I would. I would too. All right.