 and aloha thanks so much for joining us at think tech Hawaii wherever you may be morning good afternoon good afternoon and we have the good fortune of having with us today two very very experienced scholars researchers writers and thinkers on the con concept of conflicts in society and how we try and develop rules including the rule of law that will lead us toward paths to resolution of those conflicts we have professor emerita vernelia randall from the university of date in the school of law professor emeritus ben davis from the university of Toledo school of law and still visiting professor at washington and lee school of law so professor randall you were talking with us a few minutes ago about some conflicts that are being actually encouraged invited and some in the florida schools among students do you want to tell us a little bit about that between students and teacher in the florida department of education in the florida statues has made it illegal to discuss about race isn't in a way that causes people to be upset so so if a teacher raises and and what that means for the teacher is i've been told by at least one teacher that they've been instructed that if they do anything but teach that racism stopped in 1964 they potentially invite lawsuits against them as individual teachers as students go home and complain my view is that that the law is supposed it attempts to be written in a neutral way so it doesn't say which side of race so my view is if they teach that racism stopped in 1964 kids of liberal whites and moderate whites in minorities should complain as well and should file a suit against the teacher as well saying that's that makes me feel really bad because it's race it's inaccurate and so i feel bad the the the law is not focused on my understanding is the law is not focused on the accuracy of the information but how the person feels about what's being taught and and um my and it's not just what's being taught but what being said so i think that that could be uh that teachers who say stuff in classrooms uh you know that could be used uh that if to the extent that parents teach their kids that they have a right now not to be emotionally disturbed by what's going on in the classroom that invites conflict and my view is is that we ought to be teaching our children that that that this shouldn't we shouldn't avoid the conflict by saying well we we don't want to engage in that behavior well that means then the if if we don't teach our kids to engage in that conflict then it means that the people willing to engage in a conflict will win and so yeah our kid it i think it does promote conflict uh uh because it as i said it it tells people they're feeling about what's being taught around race is what's important so um i wish this had been in place when i was in ninth grade this law would have been great because i in my world history class in ninth grade uh they did the entire history of africa in the 200 page book it was done in three quarters of a page and so i said to the teacher what the entire history of africa in three quarters of a page and she looked at me like well you know this is the book i'm using kind of thing but i would not have felt comfortable then so i could have maybe raised gay right then i'm upset i was upset at the time so i could have been upset and i have redress although i wasn't in florida right so yeah that that's in florida i mean between the don't say gay law which is not exactly that but and the uh restrictions on what how you can teach and about race and laws that tell it it's really interesting to me that the conservatives have uh spouted a philosophy for years that they apparently really don't believe in uh like one of the philosophies they have spouted is that businesses should be free of government regulation and should be willing to like to make decisions about how their business operates and let the free market control how businesses wash out burn that free market i mean we know the free market is a myth but that's what they have talked about but here in florida they're perfectly willing they have fast laws saying that businesses can't require masks that businesses can't require vaccine that business businesses can't require racially equity equitable equity training so that they can't require their employees to go to training on racial equity it's that that seems so counter to the idea of let businesses make the decision and see how to market response well you know what's great with this is that uh literally today that famous stop woke up which is saying you can't do that stuff us district judge down there in florida has given a preliminary injunction to two businesses who said hey we want to do our diversity equity inclusion training make it mandatory for and this infringes on our ability to do that and then there are a couple of people who are consultants doing that kind of stuff who also brought a claim they were found to have standing okay and the case and the court to conclude that you know that law that stop woke at needed to be stop thank you very much i'll be here all week because they had a preliminary injunction because it was clearly not viewpoint neutral and so you know there's a little glimmer at least at the district court level but i wanted to ask another thing on the teaching side and you know one of the most powerful tools of teaching is storytelling right telling a story that the students in the class listen to and think about you know of somebody like i went to the women's convention in houston uh this past weekend right and i was in the transgender one of the sessions on transgender and people were telling their stories right so here one story that a woman told is she was single mother with two kids and she had a boss who said he'd pay her a dollar more an hour if she wore tight pants and climbed up a certain ladder and she did it because she needed that extra dollar an hour to feed her kids now is that going to make somebody upset if somebody tells that story sure but is it a good story for you to hear i think so it's to give a sense of what could happen you know what i mean what people have to deal with and then there was another story i think it was north carolina there was a public school in a very christian area and four women ran for the top positions in that high school you know like the president of the class vice president and they all four got elected but the parents got upset because the bible says that men are supposed to lead women and so they rescinded the vote and then the teachers supported all that in that public place but there was actually a vote that fall by the teachers and it was a secret ballot and the teachers supported the women students in the secret ballot when it wasn't out in public and they were kept their position but this was like a 40 year old woman telling a story about when she was a senior in high school is that going to make somebody upset it's absolutely but is that a powerful story it was for me was sitting in the room listening to it you know what i mean so yeah so when we have legislative enactments and school board rules that basically encourage people to generate conflict for the purpose of censorship to prevent discussion to prevent exchange of viewpoints and ideas and experiences how does that square with our entire educational system well i mean it's not inconsistent to tell you the truth in my mind i mean it's i have not known a period in which school boards didn't restrict what information that teachers the question is is what using the power that they restrict uh to restrict around the discussion of race now but but my whole life up until i mean the tech none of the textbooks i had growing up had any discussion of race in them uh texas has always uh texas in florida the the have all in california the have in different ways i'm not saying california has done it the same way but people textbooks can only have so much information in it and so they have used the power of their purse in terms of the number of students they serve to control what goes in casebooks uh and it's been hidden from us essentially to the average person thinks there's some kind of objective way that case what goes in the casebook is decided i don't think that has ever been it's always been what's the political view of the people in control of the students with the most the student bodies with the most the school populations with the most students because they are going to buy the most books and so we've got to be sure that the books conform to their desire i think what is different in at least in my lifetime as an adult i'm not sure that it's different from from what went on as a child because i i am cognizant of the fact that board brown versus board of education came down in 1954 and my school did not integrate until 66 68 two years after i graduated so schools were restricting uh both their students and what their students learned in texas that's where i went to school so i i i don't know that i think that this is different in practice i think it's indifferent in the audaciousness of the explicitness and it's like not only are we going to do it pass the law so you have to do it uh because what in i think in without a law every school board newly elected school board sort of ignores like president executive orders they're good for the time but they don't have any strength for the next president unless they want it school board philosophies and policies are good for the time but they don't have any weight for the next school board state school board municipal local school board but by passing a law it sort of says okay you know what we are going to make it where you know liberal school board because that's basically what they're thinking about down here no liberal school board is going to come in and undo our philosophy of how race ought to be taught with their liberalism hmm but uh that gets me thinking about a couple of things uh one was there was a documentary by a guy who was real famous documentaries i think fred weissman called high school which was about a suburban white high school in like the 50s right and the thing about the documentary was how authoritarian the whole experience was for those kids in that school in terms of the absolute almost brutality of the control over them right you know that if you stepped out of line a little bit right so it was really a meditation or like maybe you know we talk about autocracy it was like an autocratic experience as a student at that high school in terms of a learning experience right and uh that got me thinking about students having fear okay i was speaking up because one of the things i learned this past weekend is that in 19 states corporal of punishment is still permitted in school and you know people have their paddles with dr feel good and all that on it so that you know if you've got a law that's saying you you feel upset you can say it but you've got a teacher that's saying i got a paddle that says you're not upset uh you know you can see how it could be a difficult thing for a student and that's got nothing to do with learning it's just about control and uh the other thing that it bothers me about it is that to the extent you do these limitations you know it's dumbing people down i i have complained uh years ago when i was with the side american law teachers to people department of education uh why are you all dumbing us down it's bad in the obama administration why are you dumbing down students i mean you know i'm i'm favor of bigger budgets for schools you know i have no kids in school anymore i'm in favor of paying teachers better i'm favor of smaller classrooms all that stuff that if you pay a lot of money you get as with 15 students in a class or 17 students in a class i see all those bright eyes and all those little kids four or five three years old and then you watch by the time they get to be 15 16 17 and that sort of spirit is kind of gone you know and i think there's something wrong with the system that doesn't build and build on that spirit as opposed to more crushing it you know and that's what i mean the crushing i mean unfortunately the crushing based on the the school is in full force by fourth grade okay and the reason i say that is because based on my study of school discipline and dropout and stuff kids are being dismissed and and and they are being sent away from school and not allowed to return in kindergarten first grade second grade third grade by the fourth grade many students are behind in their reading and the schools have adopted a passing on philosophy uh and i i went to all the school board meetings and Dayton and i looked at over all of their records records that was available for everyone but you know unless you go to those meetings you don't know how important they are and what they showed was significant portion of fourth graders could not read at the fourth grade level by the ninth grade it the majority of the ninth graders could not read at ninth grade level and by 12th grade overwhelming majority of those that were still in school and many of the schools could not read on the 12th grade level which is and and in fact didn't even read on the ninth grade level they you know how they test the scores to say what level is this 12th grade or reading on it wasn't the ninth grade and so then but these students were being graduated and parents i thought were pretty much unaware of how i mean how bad their child was doing because the grading the grading methodology was set up to hide that and like one of the ways they did that was uh by not uh by requiring teachers to give a certain grade level no matter how bad the work was so you couldn't flunk kids you couldn't give students f's because if you gave them f's they couldn't make it up and if they didn't make it up they couldn't they couldn't be promoted and so you you got to give students they i mean that's not as an opportunity they didn't say we want to promote this kid they basically said well we want to give students every opportunity to make it up knowing that they were never going to make it up because they weren't even reading at the 10th grade level or the 11th grade level so how are they were going to make up something that they couldn't really read uh and uh and so yeah i don't know how i went off on that tangent but the schools i mean the problems schools are failing in so many ways and it's like so many of our systems we just build solution and actually this goes into something i want to talk about because i don't know the answer to this because i haven't read the new law that comes in um the uh the big uh climate change health law i haven't read it so i but my past experience with these kind of laws is they want to adopt colorblind solutions which meant that by the time they spend all their money they will not have helped communities as colors as much as they've helped white and sometimes they adopt solutions that are counter to the needs of particular communities of color so they are made worse uh i think i i'm particularly thinking of obama and his housing bailout plan it actually caught i mean it didn't it was a bad model overall to bail out banks instead of houses but the idea that banks would pass that money on to uh uh to people who own house would meant that you would allow banks to engage in the racial discrimination that they normally do and that's exactly what happened yeah so so banks didn't do what they were supposed to do but to the extent they did it they discriminated largely against uh black and brown people who didn't who ended up worse off than they than they would so my concern is that if this and i i haven't read the law so i don't know but if there's not an equity office who is involved in all discussions and a monitor and developing measurements and having people report those measurements to them on a weekly basis maybe even a daily basis and then having programs change how they operate uh to deal with disproportionate impact or lack of impact on communities of color what we're going to spend all this money just to have some study come along and say oh yeah black and brown people weren't helped this much we know that's gonna happen you know yeah let's let's upfront to change that well it's like those black farmers who are supposed to get paid for the discrimination by the Department of Agriculture and it's focused on their particular horrendous experience with trying to get the agricultural loan whatever the stuff you do um and you know so yeah we're going to give some money to them and then it got there's a lawsuit brought saying it discriminated against the white farmers right and that ends up being blocked i mean that's that's that's the kind of upside down we live in sometimes uh right now and your your point on the environmental racism being played out is well taken it just reminds me of the GI bill after world war two where you could get your GI bill but it was locally administered and the locally ministered being segregated in the south in particular you could not go to university alabama with that GI bill you could go to hbcu but you you know or whatever it was let alone talk about housing and all the other type of things that were there were conscious policies so yeah it's it's good old american yeah the civil rights act in 1964 uh even though he was a veteran of world war two it should have been able to get the GI bill GI long but racial discrimination in the GI bill was explicit uh in terms of both uh education and in housing and then when which is why when people say well there's no you know why are you just looking at the past of life because the past is the future the present and we should look we can predict what's going to happen in the future we don't need to let it happen in the future but i do know i i i think i agree with these the conservative supreme court they there's no way that they will allow uh race-based equity uh they they're just they're not going to allow it they may not even allow colorblind uh which is developing things that don't explicitly uh look at race but that has the uh has the purpose of measuring and and and determining the impact of race so that you don't actually develop programs and procedures that explicitly take into consider race you just know how different races are being impacted i expect that uh this conservative court may say even that uh colorblind approach uh is going to be illegal it uh chuck if i could just say something here which is um that you know part of the idea of the session was you know how we do dialogue right how do we do dialogue to try to bridge these things and you know it's really complicated uh because you know there is sort of the strategy of sort of calling out things right call out this call out that we've seen that all along and then i heard about a strategy of calling in where you're trying to bring people in right calling in to get to to build those those coalitions and things like that um i do think that there is a part played by education you know of of learning things i certainly this past weekend at the women's conference learned a lot of stuff that or became exposed to a lot of stuff that really i you know i've had to think about but there's one dilemma i have is when you're dealing with folks who are absolutely basically determined to make you be subjugated i mean you know trying to get them along is like feels like i'm i'm being i'm being played for chump if i could say it like that and so it's like i like this one line i heard which was something along lines with regards to women's rights which was that you take away our rights we take away your power you know that was i like that line as a way of that moment so how you take away that power sometimes i don't know how i mean i'm not talking about violence but how you move the system to take away that power from people who are trying to hurt you that's the thing i don't know what the answer is but and we're already seeing an increasing number of very very serious conflicts in that area of reproductive rights. Professor Randall here in Florida where just this past week a 16-year-old girl with no parents who attempted to exercise the right to establish judicial approval that she had sufficient maturity to determine that she needed to terminate that pregnancy she could not take the responsibilities that it would entail the judge wound up substituting her judgment saying no i don't think she's sufficiently mature and the California sorry the florida appellate court affirmed that we now have not only executive and legislative mandated coercive childbearing we now have judicially mandated coercive parenting it's insane and then what's was insane it's about that if she's 16 years old and not capable not mature enough to make the decision to have an abortion she's certainly not mature enough to be to make a decision about adoption to make a decision about child rearing i mean essentially is the court saying we're going to substitute our value system for yours are we going to force you to adopt because we think you're not mature enough which i cannot be surprised because i i mean i would be surprised if they didn't end up taking the child away from her forcing her to have pregnancy and taking the child away from her as since she's incompetent too incompetent to be a parent and could i ask that there's the trauma of that pregnancy there's the trauma of the kid being taken away there's all kinds of levels of trauma that are in there that seem to not be sort of important you know what i mean it's just insane i'm just i don't know and we see in that situation that if almost anything had been different if she had had a parent to help make that decision she would have not faced that obstacle if the burden of proof imposed on her was not clear and convincing evidence of sufficient maturity that's not a burden that's imposed on anybody for any other kind of health care decision exactly we've now got situations where minority groups tracing the history that you've talked about professor randall of special interest influential vocal control groups basically mandating policy by their judgment their minority judgment and taking it away from whole sectors of people women minorities youth others yeah and the the problem of course is that that the local control in many of these conservative states the local the local control list you've got a conservative governors who are willing to overturn the wheel of less conservative jurisdiction which is another sort of like because the uh the you know talking about uh local control local value decision making obviously only applies as long as a certain viewpoint isn't it i i i would hope that democrats would do it differently that is not to try to impose their viewpoint on all of the state i think that that you know uh but i doubt that i think that the the the nature of our politics the nature of how we do things is we impose our value system on others uh and uh and that's unfortunate then last words as we finish up our time today uh well yes um i was just thinking uh from uh professor randall's comment the uh case of the district attorney who said he was not going to do the abortion cases and the governor has uh suspended him and replaced him and he's brought a lawsuit and so i think people know that i'm both christian and a jew right so my the thought came to me was look he fired a jew how christian and then on that note and professor randall thanks so much thank you i'm today folks thank you for joining us come back again we'll be back in a couple of weeks take care be well be safe thank you you too thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at think tech hawaii dot com mahalo