 I want to thank, first, the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, AMSA, which is here in the building. They collaborated with us and helped make this space available. So give it up to AMSA. Thank you for the Ambri Human Rights Program. They were a collaborator on this as well. And we've been working with them on a few different things. So I want to thank the Ambri Human Rights Program. I also want to thank Dallas Faces Race. We've been working with them on a few different initiatives around the city. There's a couple of seats over here on this side. I used to usher too, so I have to make sure people have seen it. So I also want to just mention that we're going to be live streaming via HowlRound. And I think the stream is live now. Is it not KC? The stream is live. Are we streaming? Yes, sir. Okay, great. So I also want to welcome the people who might be tuning in via HowlRound. HowlRound is based in Arts Emerson, but they have this channel called HowlRoundTV. And we're going to be certainly supposed to be live streaming. Or if you have questions, there's two hashtags that we're using. One is hashtag who we be SMU. The other hashtag is who we be Dallas. So just remember those. Hashtag who we be SMU, hashtag who we be Dallas. And we'll get into a little Q&A, the facts and housekeeping things. If you need to use the restroom, it's out and to the left, right by the stairs. The men and women's bathroom are right across from each other. So keep that in mind. There will be a Q&A afterwards. Hopefully you won't have a role of us conversation. There's some seats down the way over here and up this aisle. Also, Jeff will be signing books. I know some of you have purchased books already. We will be selling books also after the show. So if you're interested in getting a signed copy, Jeff is kind of a new net for us. And give it a time. I'm just going to go ahead and say, please give it up and welcome our friend, Jeff Chang. Thanks so much, Clyde. How's everybody doing tonight? Great. Thank you so much for coming tonight. I know that if I was at home, my folks, my wife, my son would be like, we're not quite to your thing, daddy. We're going to watch Cookie. It's like the same thing. Okay, you guys are right. I'm glad you're here. I really used my guilt a little bit here. So I know that we're in the middle of this right now. I'm really glad for all of you being here and everybody here on HowlRound as well. I hope you're, you know, DVRing as well. A big thank you to all the co-sponsors, to Daryl. Daryl, thank you so much for all of your help with everything. To the Meadows School of the Arts, to HowlRound, to all of you amazing sponsors. And a big, big huge, huge thank you to the Clyde Mountain team. I am working now at Stanford. I work at the Institute for Diversity and the Arts at Stanford University. Before that, I was, and still am obviously, a writer and organizer and activist. And I was able to meet Clyde about 10 plus years ago now, 10, 15 years ago, and he's a visionary. So it's an amazing thing for me to know that now we might be able to work together at Stanford and SMU and to be able to have more of an exchange there. And to know that this job here with Clyde, it's in good hands. You guys will be really, really happy with the nice supply. The bar will be high for you. So I've been often asked, you know, what I hope to accomplish with this book, with Who We Be the Colorization of America. And I should start probably with the title, Who We Be, right? It's a DMX song for those of you who know. And as you'll see, actually, in this presentation, it was in some ways a retort. It was an answer to that, right, to a lot of the anti-multiculturalists who came out in the early 90s and asked the question, Who Are We? And so I thought it would be really funny, actually, to name a book after a DMX song, first of all. And I thought, you know, sort of chip on my shoulder type of thing. I also thought, you know, this is a perfect illustration of how the country has changed, right? How hip-hop, in a lot of respects, has changed the country. And so Who We Be was meant to be kind of an extension of Can't Stop Won't Stop, a history of the hip-hop generation, that was going to pay more of a kind of attention to respect to the mentors who helped to make us, who taught us and kind of guided us through the culture wars of the 1980s and the 1990s in a way that Can't Stop Won't Stop didn't necessarily center them. I wanted to have a book that would. And I wanted, in that sense, to be able to help you spark some discussions around race, around arts, around culture and the role that the arts and culture played and how it played in pushing us towards racial justice and cultural equity. Now, the book came out in October of 2014, last year, late October. And events, of course, have a way of taking over. And so, especially after November 24th, or the day that a non-indictment came back in Ferguson, Missouri, against Officer Dare, most in the killing of Michael Brown, things completely changed and shifted. So polls now show that more Americans are concerned about race than at any time since 1992, the year that the LA riots took place. And the other peak before that was 1965, right? The year that Malcolm X was assassinated, the year of the Watts riots, the year that the Vony Rights Act passed because of the uprisings in some. And so, each generation, it seems, has had to kind of confront a moment in which the race conversation must be had again and again. And it seems like a loop. I talk in, we can't stop, we'll stop, but like loops, loops of history, that if we can resolve these kinds of questions that these things currently come back on us. So we're living kind of in interesting times, right? In this sort of old, like, fake Chinese curse that has been said, like, being living in interesting times. It's been interesting times, very much so over the last three months. And it's impossible to kind of almost keep up with all the stuff that's happening on social media. So today, right, we're sitting, Kyle and I are sitting and talking at breakfast and the video comes out of Jason Harrison, here in Dallas, right? Getting killed in his own doorway. It's the kind of thing where I've been giving a version of these kinds of talks really since the last, since October. And every week it seems like there's got to be a new edit to it, a new sort of thing that needs to be talked about, that has to be brought up. And so what I want to try to do today is to recognize and honor the fact that we're living in this very fraught moment, this very difficult moment. And to talk about the last half century, I'm going to cover a lot of ground and a lot of different types of things. Arts, politics, cultural work, images, philosophies, idealism, activism, organizing. And to kind of maybe offer an alternative cultural history of the last 50 years to maybe allow us to get to understanding why we are in this situation that we're at this particular point. So I wanted to start here because about two weekends ago, right, President Obama was in Selma, Alabama, to honor and commemorate the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Selma. And it was an uprising that was sparked by a particular incident. It was the killing of a young Black pecan named Jiminy Jackson who was a voting rights activist. And he had gone on to this rally in Selma with his mother and his grandfather. And he encountered a line of police and it turned into a police riot. So the police beat him. They chased him and his mother and his grandfather. They cornered him. They shot him at close range. And he stumbled out and they beat him again. And Jiminy Jackson died because of these injuries that were sustained in this particular protest for voting rights in March of 1965. And Obama actually did not mention the sparking incident. And we could probably guess why. He would probably have involved or brought up a lot of what's been going on, right, over the last three months with these extra judicial killings that we've seen. But what he did was he spoke instead of Selma being a battleground in the war for freedom for all. And in that sense he compared it to Gettysburg. He said it was not a clash of armies but a clash of wills, a contest to determine the meaning of America. And what I want to note right here is that there hasn't been a consensus nationally for racial justice or cultural equity in 50 years. And in fact during those past 50 years what we've seen more is a reversal of the victories that were gained by the Civil Rights Movement. And so the march from Selma to Montgomery of course eventually resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And this is the very same act that many people have been trying to overturn and succeeding the Supreme Court in 2014, the summer of 2013, a reverse part of the Voting Rights Act. And in many ways it's meant to try to stifle the new emerging cultural majority that appeared at the polls in 2008 and 2012 to actually elect President Barack Obama. So I want to give you one more year. We've talked about 1965, talked about 2008 and 2012. I want to give you one more year and maybe tie all these kinds of things together. And that year is 2042, 2042. Which has become sort of a demographic Y2K in a lot of ways, right? In some tellings, this is the year that it all goes to hell. It's the year that the U.S. is projected to become quote unquote majority minority. But what does majority minority even mean? Because if we're all minorities, we still have to figure out how to create a majority, right? And so part of what I want to talk about is that that's not just a political question. It is a question of culture. We have to get to this question through a cultural kind of way. So back to the speech. Obama as President, right? He got a lot of things right. How do you feel about Obama as President? He got a lot of things right in this speech that we can, of course without one stream bearing omission. But what he said was that some was a greater victory for quote the idea of a just America, a fair America, an inclusive America, a generous America. Well, what's happened to that idea of a fair, just, inclusive, generous America? What I want to say here is that what we brought into, what we've been engaged in, whether we like it or not, in some ways it's this other kind of war, right? It's a type of thing that I don't like to use like the militaristic metaphors or my forte. I don't like to use them, but I can't use these things lightly. But I want to argue that we're in a war over culture and that this war is, in fact, very hot stakes. But if we're to recover this notion of a fair, of a just, of an inclusive, generous America, then we've got to understand how we got to this particular point. We have to understand the whole of the culture place and getting us not only to the change that we've been in, so I wrote the book because I was interested in the notion of racial products and more specifically, I wanted to understand the demographic shifts and the cultural shifts of the last half century, the shifts that were made possible by the victories of the civil rights movement. And a key piece of the story I felt like, I still feel like, has been undertold, has been the story of artists, of the idealists, of the activists, of the visionaries who came after the civil rights era. And so, in large part, this book is about the way that artists and those who work in the culture can literally change the way that we see. The way that we see each other, the way that we see each other living together, the way that we see our community in our country. And in many respects comes down to this question, how do we see race? Because in so many ways, the question of race has driven centuries of civil and cultural schisms and periodically, of course, brought us to the brink of civil dissolution. What we've seen is a national culture that trends naturally almost, it seems like, towards segregation and inequality. And we've also seen on the other hand, ways of idealists and visionaries challenging us to change that culture, to move it forward. So I'm going to try to talk about this issue today, of the rise and fall of this notion of multiculturalism, the return of the culture wars and the arc of change, the role that culture can play in change. So let's start with this. We can all agree upon, as a starting point, that race is not a question of biology. Instead, it's a question of culture. It begins as a visual problem, as one of vision and visuality. Race happens in the gap between appearance and the perception of difference. And it's about what we see, it's about what we think about when we see. And in that sense, it's bigger than personal preferences, than affinities, than tastes, than bonds. Before we get to the point where we have to clarify one thing, that difference is human. And noticing difference is human. For us, it begins as babies. So if you remember that great book, Are You My Mother? Right? That's what it's about, right? It's a mom's nautical look for worms, bird falls out of the nest, bird asks all kinds of animals in succession, Are You My Mother? Trying to figure out difference, right? Noticing difference is not a problem. Seeing difference is not a problem. So what can we attach to difference, right? What Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other folks have told us about through the years is that in history, throughout history, difference has been attached to notions of superiority and inferiority. Sorted into vast, we can sort it into vast systems, right? Freedom and slavery, a commitment of neglect, of investment and abandonment, of mobility and containment. And then a veil is kind of drawn over these systems. We pretend that these systems don't even exist in the first place. We pretend that we don't see difference at all. So racism is supported by a very specific kind of refusal. It's a denial of empathy. It's a mass-willed blindness. And this creates, for those who are seen as other, what we could call the burden of representation, right? And in 1952, Ralph Ellison, of course, describes this burden very well before he walked into this great novel. He says, I'm an invisible man. I am invisible, I understand simply because people refuse to see me. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings themselves or figments of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me. So for decades, for centuries, of course, for a very long time, people of color were not even seen, right, by the white main street. The lack of images of people of color and the culture and the exclusion of artists of color from institutions that circulated these images, media, museums, galleries, publishing industry. As Ellison said, people refused to see me. But then we arrive at a point in history when due to these cultural uprisings and demographic shifts, suddenly people of color do become visible. Ralph Ellison was also present. He said, when they approach me, they see only my surroundings themselves or figments of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me. And so, misrepresentation. The image is that don't represent the real me. The stereotypes that arrive ahead of you. The distorted shadow of the self that arrives and defines you, right? The kinds of images are preceded, and Michael Brown, the American art narrator, Washington, Pascal Washington, Antonio Zambrano-Montaz, and Guan Chang-Gao, and Renisha McBride, and Tamir Rice, Tony Thoreau Robinson, Madison, two weekends ago, an unarmed 19-year-old boy shot in his own apartment by a policeman. And of course, Jason Harrison, right? As Ellison said, when they approach me, they see only my surroundings themselves or figments of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me. And so, these are serious times, and these are times that are defined by hashtags, right? Black Lives Matter, Hands Up Don't Shoot, Tony Robinson, Jason Harrison. In November, President Obama issued executive orders to shield millions of law-abiding, millions of law-abiding undocumented immigrants from deportation. And conservatives vowed to fight this, and the government, instead of the Congress, and said, please, the congressman, and said, the congressman, the congressman said that there would be violence and anarchy in the streets over this particular decision. Sure enough, in Austin, we saw a government then going to shoot up the federal bill, and it was about to burn down the Mexican consulate when it stopped him. And during that same week, the grand jury decided not to indict Darren Brown and the killing of Michael Brown. And then, of course, in December, a few weeks afterwards, Eric Barnard choked to death in New York City in his last words, being a kind of terrible poetry, but I can't breathe, I can't breathe. And so protests have happened across the country every single day, almost every single day, since August 9th, the day that Michael Brown was killed. And they disrupted the biggest shopping weekend of the year. They've interrupted sports contests, they've emptied college campuses, and here's, of course, a picture of congressmen and congressional staffers in the shadow of the American Capital Project, the American Capital that is still clearly under construction and reconstruction. And this is a picture, of course, of students in Madison two weeks ago shutting down the state capitol to protest the killing of Tony Robinson Jr. So it's a serious time. What does it mean when some of the most beloved athletes in the world are telling the world that they too can't breathe? That we have a black president, and we reaffirm the very idea that black lives matter. But what we see is that there's been a return of the culture wars during the Obama era, and they've had an impact. A poll that was taken two weeks ago has shown that four in ten Americans believe that racial divisions have gotten the worst during the Obama administration. And Obama came in as a candidate of reconciliation. But what we've seen, again, is the return of the culture wars, and therefore a belief in the ideal homogenous nation. But like all wars, the cultural wars weren't inevitable. These wars erupted because demographic changes and multiculturalism prompted new discussions about democracy, about values of inclusion, of empathy, of recognition, of expression. And so after Obama's election in 2008, especially these wars, and their frame was a struggle for the soul of America, a clash of competing narratives. On the one hand, the story of a great America that were in danger of losing forever versus the narrative of a hopeful, emerging America, the end of civilization, American civilization, versus the beginning of a national transformation. Both sides understand that the stakes in these culture wars are very, very high, that the battle between restoration and transformation, between retrenchment and change, are had in the culture. So cultures where change can happen or where it can be thwarted. So I want to take it now back to the civil rights area and give you kind of a sort of a mini brief history of the rise of multiculturalism and the fall of multiculturalism as well. We can go back to Martin Luther King Jr. and his speech in the March of Washington in 1963, and his dream for America, and his speech has been primarily remembered for one line, right, that King had a dream that his children would not be judged by the color of the scheme or by the content of their character. But one of King's speech writers Vincent Harding has said, well, the speech is profoundly and willfully misunderstood, saying we take the parts that require the least inquiry, the least work, the least change. And so in the 1963 March of Washington speech, King praised the new black militancy that was happening in the country at that point, and he strongly condemns police brutality. These are the lines, of course, that we don't remember every day of the night, right? He also said this. He said, the world is a revolt. We'll continue to shape the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. And he says, all of this before he understood words, I have a dream today. And so this is Dr. King and all his photos who believed that the act of protest was a creative act, who believed that we couldn't wake up, believed that until America came to address a shameful legacy of discrimination, of segregation, of inequality, that until America committed itself to racial justice, that the nation would be shaken by the war lines of protest. Now, the laws passed in the mid-60s began to take down the legal infrastructure of segregation, right? But they couldn't tell. Laws couldn't tell people how to live together. And so for visions of a post-segregated America, we had to turn to folks working in the culture and to the artists in particular. So this is the work of the late great Maury Turner from Berkeley, California. He grew up during the Depression in West Oakland, which was a segregated neighborhood at the time. Because it was segregated, he actually had the chance to be able to meet people from all kinds of different backgrounds, Portuguese Americans, Irish Americans, Native Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans. And so he was inspired by Charles Schoes, the creator of Peanuts, right? Charlie Brown's new music Linus, to create his own comic strip. He created Weepouts and it debuted in national newspapers on February 15, 1965. It was the first multicultural comic strip and he became the first nationally syndicated African-American cartoonist. And what he did was he poked fun, right, at the racial divides. And the same kind of way, in fact, he anticipated a lot of the jokes that Dave Chappelle would tell, actually, 40 years later. And in this scene, what we have is Nipper, who is the alter ego of Maury, Maury, the Confederate cap, and flagging, taking around his Confederate flag, and of course, he's making fun of the kind of amnesia that we have around these kinds of questions that we are not learning these histories from generation to generation. So they have to be kind of retarded. In 1968, the Third World Strike breaks out. It's the longest student strike in U.S. history on any kind of campus. And it quickly spreads these, you work in a college, San Mateo, and it forces universities to begin to look at the question of diversity, right, to look at these histories, these stories of people of color, the need for ethnic studies. And as these programs begin, a kind of cultural renaissance starts up as well. So that's why I include this post here by Rupert Garcia. Because it set off the formation of feminism color collectives, collectives of artists of color. Writers like Alice Walker at the Zaki Chalier, Jessica Haggidon, they can all trace their beginnings to these events. And in 1975, the Oakland transplant and the writer Ishmael Reed, who wrote this amazing novel called Mumbo Jumbo that precedes this, and sort of maybe the first great global hip hop novel, right? He makes the first announcement of multiculturalism in the Berkeley bar. And he frames it as the new counterculture, me and his colleagues at Yarborough Reader, make the case that America had never been a unitary amongst kind of culture. It had always been a multi-culture. And at this point, this idea, just this word multi-culture, is radical because nobody could think of, at this point, culture being anything but one thing. And everybody else has to kind of assimilate to it. So he's saying, well, let a thousand cultures move, let a thousand American cultures move. And by the mid-80s, the fruits of the civil rights victories and multicultural uprisings manifest themselves in the bodies of young students of color arriving on college campuses in larger numbers than anybody had ever expected. And they don't stay quiet. They are demanding the institutions transform to meet the needs of a new, diverse campus, state, and nation. In 1990, in a kind of a manifesto, Cornel West wrote, a new kind of cultural worker is in the making. The new cultural politics of difference are out to trash the monolithic and the vaginists in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity. And this actually begins the backlash. In the early 1990s, as I was saying before, the question of the day becomes, who are we? It's as if the U.S. itself is undergoing some kind of identity crisis. And some people kind of look at the image and they say, well, yes, this is how the country needs to look as we move forward, right? But others would look at this image and say, what's a travesty? This is an example of how multiculturalism is revising our history during this time. And so, who are we? We came to this question at that particular moment. And at the time, the cultural creator Michelle Wallace understood that the stakes in these battles were very high. She wrote, the wars over multiculturalism are about whether former outsiders will be assigned a new status closer to the inside or actually inside. And what we see at that time is that folks begin to organize against multiculturalism on the campuses. They're pressing an attack against multiculturalism in the humanities, efforts to transform the county. And they also push in Congress to attack and defund the National Endowment for the Arts. Precisely at the moment that women and artists, color and queer artists are actually beginning to be seen. And any year becomes this lasting casualty of the culture wars. And so, while we see students and intellectuals and artists pushing for diversity and multiplicity and heterogeneity, the other side is pushing back in the arts and the humanities. And the Los Angeles rise proved to be a pivotal moment. It hardens the backlash to multiculturalism. And so in 1992, the happy canon, the Republican dimension declares that the culture wars have begun. He says that the combined forces of open immigration and multiculturalism constitute a mortal threat to American civilization. Multiculturalism is an across port assault on our Anglo-American heritage. But the riots also proved to be pivotal in a different kind of way. It began to shed a light on the new generation, more diverse than any previous American generation. The hip-hop generation, right? And the questions of style and inclusion, these kinds of things that hip-hop raised. And so they're also a wake-up call to American consumer corporations, because they're having to wonder, right? How do we look at the new emerging market, the global market, right? Most of the world is not like the white suckers that we've been selling into for half a century. For a century, really. Most of the world is young. Most of the world is urban. Most of the world is not white. So hip-hop becomes a way, too, for a lot of these consumer corporations to rebrand themselves for the new millennium. And in 1993, multiculturalism crosses over. So this is the cover of Time Magazine. What they did was, they didn't have Photoshop in time. They had a proto-photoshop program. So they created this table of images of people from all these different races, put across the top, and images of the same races that people would put all the way down. They pulled this out from the middle of it, and she looked like a county like Soledad O'Brien. And they called her heave. So this was the new face of America. So, in 1993, multiculturalism suddenly sexy, suddenly edgy, suddenly hip, something very cool, and it feels almost as if multiculturalism now is losing its radical edge. And I want to stop here and actually say, look how fast this happened, right? In 1990 and 1991, backlash against multiculturalism forming, 92, the riots, 93, suddenly sexy, suddenly the end thing, right, to be multicultural. So the novelist, Paul Beatty, which if you want to read one of the best hip-hop novels, if not the best hip-hop novel of all time, it's a book called White Boy Shuffle, and it's an amazing book. He writes in that book, everything is multicultural, and nothing's multicultural. And by the end of the decade, even folks who have opposed this have came in now on the question of diversity. So one of the biggest opponents of affirmative action, Nathan Glazer writes a book called We Are All Multiculturalists Now. And by the time we see the end of the millennium with George W. Bush and 20 years in cabinet, suddenly issues of invisibility are being joined by issues of visibility. People who are now visible with the what is being seen actually here. And so this is a painting by the quote-unquote post-black artist Corey Newkirk, Channel 11. And what he was trying to do was to make a series of paintings and photos based on the proliferation of police reality shows in which the criminalized suspects, criminalized bodies of color, black and brown, their faces are pixelated out. But Corey also seemed to be speaking to the new color violence. At the same time that race had permeated visual culture in which popular culture began to desingredate, the refusal to see or empathize was still all-powerful. Because what the multiculturalists had believed was if we tell our stories that a well of empathy might open up, and out of that we might move towards cultural equity and racial justice. What was that really happening? And so fast forward, telling his story, Barack Obama positions himself now as a symbol of these demographic and cultural changes. And it's a symbol people begin to pour their hopes and their dreams, its explosion of posters and street art that begins to happen at this particular moment in history. And what we see is that what they pour into the image spills beyond the candidate, spills beyond the party platform, spills beyond the candidate's agenda, and the symbol of change becomes a prompt for all kinds of visions of change. And so this is an era 2007 to 2008 in which we see some of the greatest popular outpourings of art, street art, popular art since the New Deal era. And again, it's a symbol of change that prompts all kinds of visions for change. Energy, alternative energy, gay marriage, ending torture, immigration, even this image over here on the right of unity that harkens back to the third world strike era. And so this is a point in which people like to say that politics is the art of the possible. This is a point where maybe art is making possible in new politics. But almost immediately a picture of Black employment who's a symbol of reconciliation colorized literally as an image of hope to the symbol of all things other. It's not just Black, it's not just a product of miscegenation. He's also suddenly, quote unquote, a Muslim, a socialist, a political, a legal alien, and the culture was about in full swing. And the result of this, the economic result of the politics has been this, right? The worst income inequality that we've seen in generations and generations. And in the end, only the elites win, right? And the folks who lose the most, of course, are folks of color. Incoming equality between whites and people of color has barely changed since the height of the war on poverty. People of color still earn as little as half of the world by whites. And if we look at wealth inequality, Black and Latino household media network and the white household media network. And what's worse is after a peak of desegregation 25 years ago in 1989, we've been seeing rising rates of desegregation in our schools and in our neighborhoods. So in 2010, 80% of Latino and 74% of Black K-12 students attended the majority of non-white schools. But whites are made the most segregated group of all. The average white student attends a school that's 75% white. The average white person lives in a neighborhood that's 77%. And I want to show you one more graph. I'm showing you a lot of graphs. I know we're supposed to be talking about a culture. I want to show you one more. Do you want to make one more point here? Americans in the age of 18 will become a majority minority in 2023. The rest of the country will follow by 2042. But what we have here is a map of some of the states with the hugest, what they call cultural generation gaps. So the red graphs are percentage of whites over the age of 65. And the blue graphs are percentage of whites in the age of 18 in the states. And the states are Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas, New Mexico, and Florida. All states where the cultural wars have reached the most intense. These are the states with the largest cultural generation gap. This is another way to kind of look at the map. States that are darker have larger and what may be interesting to anybody who is following the 2012 elections is that the battleground states of North Carolina, Colorado, and Georgia are all in this map. And the tragedy of this is that baby boomers are going to be dependent on those of you who are in your twins for the entitlements and pensions for Medicare and Social Security. So if your generation comes up resegregated undereducated, unemployed, it's going to be a disaster for everybody. So we're seeing resegregation, racial inequality rising. And on the horizon we see this demographic way of coming in. And so this brings us, I think, to let me be the most important question of your time. Those of you who are in your 20s right up there with climate change is if we're all minorities, how do we begin to imagine a new majority? And it has to start in the culture. We can't get to an agenda for racial justice without the culture for racial justice. And no one says this will be easy. Polls still show we're very divided on these questions. We're very far from a consensus towards achieving racial justice in 2015. It's in fact a time where it's very difficult to imagine change. It's a time in which we're told to go over it. Or it's an era in which all our dreams are a dream for us and then sew back to us. Or it's an era in which it feels impossible to imagine how our politics can be fixed. In which there's confusion about changes and how it can be achieved. And there are elders who criticize young protesters as being irrational. They don't seem to offer a rational analysis of how you get from this sort of protest here to advancing the policy change. But what I think the protesters recognize aside from the fact that they're very clear about what they demand on its own websites you can go to the websites and read them they also recognize that the nation state is much different than it was 50 years ago. We don't live in a state anymore that's reactive to protests. We live in a state that's reactionary in a lot of respects. And it's impossible to imagine a bill that could decriminalize young people or read desegregate schools of neighborhoods. We can't imagine that with the public of Congress and the Democratic president at this particular point. The politics be what they are. So what it takes to change the world in 2015 is much different than what it took to change the world in 1965. So the protests are not regarded, they're not irrational. They're regenerative. They help us to really imagine the change through these cultural interventions I can point to in new kind of politics. I want to talk very abstractly right now about change for just a little bit. I want you to stay with me. Because what we know is that all we need is for people of goodwill or bad to do nothing. That's all we need for things to stay the same or get worse. And what we also know is that we haven't had a consensus for racial justice and cultural equity for 50 years. And so it's no wonder that we've gotten so bad. So we need change for how this change happened. And so I try to use this metaphor of a wave because it's used as a metaphor for change. It's a very powerful way. People talk about elections in 2008 when Obama got elected was a wave election. When the Tea Party moved into office in 2000 they say that was a wave election. In 2012 when Obama got reelected they say that's a wave election. 2014 when the Republicans took over that's a wave election too. But what is a wave as a metaphor actually mean? Are we throwing this metaphor out a little bit too loosely? We think of a wave as an event. We see this water breaking over this reef here on the South Shore. But it's scientific and Mexico terms. It's a paradox. It's not just the event. It's the motions, the process. It's forces gathering around the South Pole, around an article under water. And also the atmosphere. These invisible forces that press across thousands of miles of open ocean to meet this reef. It's that motion and process. To meet this reef on the South Shore we give the wave. It's also this motion, this process that's generated by these invisible forces that are pushing against each other all the time. A lot of our thinking about changes towards discrete events in time an election or a protest or a judicial decision. But what if we thought of change as this process that's never ending? Right? That never stops moving like the ocean itself. So there's a vast world outside of these discrete events in which change is in the making. So if we think of culture as the ocean as this realm of ideas and stories of sounds this narrative that we're immersed in all the time we think of culture as a place where we come together where we form identity where we share our deepest values where we find our community where our collective will to change is formed and moved like a wave then we can understand that cultural change always precedes political change. Put another way, political change is the last manifestation of shifts that have already occurred. There's a one to one effect that if I tweak today that I want this to happen in the world that's going to happen tomorrow it's not it at all. It's not mystical like that. But it's to say that even in times where it's impossible to imagine how change can be accomplished through our institutions like the culture is the place where we can continue to make that stuff happen. Where everything that we do individually and collectively ripples out we make change. We change with a shift and a culture and a shift in the values and that starts with empathy and so I like to bring back these words from James Baldwin who always seems relevant but especially now he says pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people's pain and insofar as you can do that with your pain you can release from it and then hopefully it works the other way around too insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer and what it does. So a year before he was assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at Riverside Church in Harlem. He said some very controversial things there. But at that moment in history if we had really listened to his speech then the last several decades he called America the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today and he called for Americans to take a stand against the war against the Vietnam War and because of that the beyond the Vietnam speech became his most criticized and applied speech ever. Since 1965 and the summer spring King had argued that poverty, militarism and racism were the triple scourges of America in the world so the struggle to end segregation the struggle to end the war the struggle to end poverty these are all part of the same struggle and what he said was our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit to go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism and in this speech King noted that values were was central to change. If the US was to get on the correct side of history the US needed to undergo radical revolution of values. He said a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies because see King recently aware that our reform agenda a policy reform agenda that resulted in important pieces of legislation getting passed would not by itself bring about the country and the world that he wanted to see in fact policy reform is only part of the larger revolution that needed to happen we have to change the culture and through the culture we could express these new values that would lead us away from segregation towards inclusion away from fear towards creativity from wounds and towards healing and so this is why I'm especially interested these days in young artists and activists who speak in a language of dreams groups like the dream activists and the dream offenders who argue that we need to be able to dream together again they'll not just one movement they'll take us towards another world because every generation receives the problems that the previous generations could not resolve and that's where it's left to you and so it's up to you now to reconstruct our vitality to develop new visions to help move us towards racial justice towards racial peace because when 2042 comes those of you who are in your 20s will be my age and it's kind of over and so if you can do something great for me and my kids I have Madison actually I think it's in some of these protests he's at the University of Wisconsin in Madison but if you can do something for me my kids and my grandkids yours as well it's to start thinking and acting on these questions right now but those of you who are older than your 20 those of you who are post young like me post youth right a new consensus for intergenerational for racial justice has got to be intergenerational as well so we've all got to find in our communities in the places that we live in the places that we work the ways that we can intervene as well to create this culture that will form a strong democracy for all of us we can't wait another 50 years to establish a consensus for racial justice and cultural equity we have to do it now if you have questions or comments just to raise your hand Melanie and I will go around and let you all and pass your mic so who would like to go first that's right here I just want to talk about the civil rights that you mentioned it's very eye opening what there was to know about racism and that was very naive within a couple of days I was very much part of the amnesia that you mentioned you mentioned that a form of changing before was protesting I think that it was left unclear on what your recommendations are to create cultural and global change if protesting is still effective enough I think I was arguing that it is protest is a part and I don't think that it's everything but I think that particularly now when we're so far again in our political structures we're immediately able to imagine a change in the form of normal bills civil rights lawsuits and those kinds of things where in this moment where change seems to be impossible we can just point to what happened right this is a movement that started from three friends three black women two of them queer who after the Trayvon Martin a quiddle the quiddle of George Zimmerman of the Trayvon Martin said we've got to do something and created this hashtag that has now become a way for us to be able to organize themselves in a decentralized manner there's no central kind of authority there's moments when people will say we're going to have joint protests or joint art making or joint stuff in these kinds of days and we'll solicit that and distribute that through hashtags as well that these are ways for us to be able to move the agendas forward in November and early December one of the tangible effects right away of the protests was that the Obama administration invited in many of the key young people under the age of, all under the age of 30 to come to the White House to talk about these issues and these questions and I got an action of that help to solidify you know tendencies within the administration and the Department of Justice and the Obama administration and the different kinds of ways to move the ways that they wanted to move around you've seen it in immigration where cultural interventions have triggered action around DACA and around the executive actions where Jose Antonio Bartiz has the cover of Time Magazine to talk about we are Americans and that triggers Obama to act to install DACA, by the way, when there's debate about whether or not Obama's going to move on these executive actions around immigration. Deanna Guerrero from Oranges in the Black puts an op-ed in the LA Times saying, well, I'm from a family that's been broken apart by these unfaithful immigration laws. My parents were reported when I was a child. And I've got to imagine that that in turn as well is something that moves the needle. So in that regard, protests and culture, these sort of moves that happen, can make things happen a lot faster than they would imagine, trying to push it all through as they did during 1964, 1963, 1964, 1965. Can I ask just a follow-up? What strategically or tact-wise would be your criticism or advice for effective, legitimate, cultural change for these people who are anyone who wants to contribute to racial equality? And then what is a strategy or a tact politically criticism or advice that you would give to people who want to be involved versus what you see versus what you think would be more effective? Let me ask you a little question. What are you getting at here? What is your criticism? I feel like you're meeting me somewhere here. I want you to just leave me there and talk about that. So a lot of us were frustrated at the end of our coverage about what do we do now? How are other GAs from his brutality? There you go. That's one. Well, sorry. I'm sorry. What are the others against his brutality? There's a lot of stuff going on here. We're getting involved. Talk to them. Great. I'm sorry. I see what you're going to make sure we all move things around so we have one person here that has two people over here. Yes? Thanks. So I was wondering where you had to say sort of about the backlash. I just came from Selma and Reverend William Barber, the president of North Carolina and WACP, says that what we hear now from the backlash. It sort of shows the farther we've made progress. Right. And so that's a hopeful statement, which I'm hoping is true. And I just wondered what you sort of had to comment on that, because it feels like it gets so loud and so ugly, as some of your pictures showed. On the other side, this must be working in some ways. But the other part of it is what we saw in the culture wars of the Bays and the 90s and we lost a lot of battles because we were not as organized. I think we want, eventually, the popular culture for better and for worse. And so in some ways, we want some big things. But the issues that are still left these days are, of course, the ones that people do have to kind of resolve. If we're going to push for change, there's always going to be that backlash. As folks who believe in change, the burden's always going to be upon us to try to push for new images, new stories, new narratives that help to illustrate the kind of world that could be, the kind of nation that could be. That's always going to be our burden. All the other folks have to do is to figure out how to reappropriate those images to maintain the status quo. And I think that in that regard, it is a sign, I think. It is maybe a hopeful sign. But in and of itself, it's not sufficient to tell us that world needs to be. We need to keep pushing. It's a continual type of thing. So in the same way that the language of the civil rights movement was used during the 80s to undo civil rights break through, such as affirmative action or equal opportunity programs. In that same kind of way, the cycle is always turning. As soon as a story gets framed or an idea kind of gets put out there in a game's mass traction, then we, who are about change, have to continue moving that forward. That's never going to end. It's something that we're always going to have to move in each and every model. It's part of being an ocean, swimming in the ocean, or trying to move the ocean as it were. So we're going to go over here. Stronger, I think, on here. I see that there's a question over here. Jeff, first I really congratulate you. It's a wonderful presentation. Thank you for this. Also, as a lifelong student of Dr. King, I very much appreciate your bringing out details to help people understand more about the variety and depth of what he said. I think that I have a dream speech that's been badly co-opted. So thank you for your depth of detail about Dr. King's speech. I just turned 64, speaking on behalf of the really old people here in the back row. I've been an activist for 50 years, and I'm thankful every night that tomorrow morning when I wake up there'll be something else to work on. It's a blessing. It's supposed to be hard. And yes, we're making progress. I've lived in Dallas since 1976, and even a few years ago, this room tonight, you in the same room on this campus, would not have happened. That much alone is progress. Give yourselves a hand. Tonight, by itself, is an indication of change. Change, I think, must be looked at in two ways. One is to internalize change. Part of the reason that you protest and march in the streets is because it empowers the protester. Whether you change a law or not, if you empower people, they go on to make further change later. The other thing about change is to institutionalize change. And that is when you do change laws. And there are many ways to do that. And we've rewritten all the building codes of the city of Dallas to make every building built in Dallas more green. So there are specific ways that you can go about institutionalize change and the internalization of change. Two words, internalize change, institutionalize change. Thank you. On this side. So I really want to just start with saying thank you for mentioning Jason Harrison in your presentation. And I think it's important for folks to know that the tape was just recently released, but he was killed nine months ago. And those officers are still patrolled. They're on full patrol duty, those two officers, right now, as we speak. And the legislation around this, the policy changes, President Obama's calls for lapel video cameras. And those two officers were part of the test run for lapel cameras in Dallas. So it's not enough just to wear lapel cameras. But my question is this. So we talk about segregation, but a lot of the reforms and policy pushes to address segregation have been looking at segregation as an issue of separation. So we need to integrate. We need to live near each other. We need to go to school with each other, et cetera, but I would argue that segregation was never about separation. It was about subordination. So when do we and how do we create the policy changes that address the subordination issues and not the separation issues? Segregation and resegregation. And in a lot of ways, you're exactly right. The notion of integration was, I think, derived in a lot of quarters through the 60s and 70s as sort of this false assimilation. And so we need to kind of recover the notion of the fact that separation wasn't meant to be. It was never meant to be equal. And move away from just the cultural kind of sub-construction. So let me give you a perfect example. Perfect example is just to point out the fact that Michael Brown was killing Ferguson and Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Florida. These are resegregated suburbs of the nature of metropolises. So Sanford is a resegregated suburb of Orlando. Ferguson a resegregated suburb of St. Louis. And so we often think, for instance, in terms of the city, we actually place a lot of emphasis on questions of gentrification, but what happens when people are displaced? We go somewhere. And that's when a lot of our language right now about what's happening in cities disappears, the people that we need to be thinking about the most. And then when you have surplus weaponry, coming back from these wars overseas, where do they go? They go to the resegregated suburbs. They go to these police departments that are structurally set up to contain folks in these suburbs. And in that regard, that's what happens. And they're also tested just to bring in another twist on the border, where the border's been set up to be militarized to again sort of regulate immigration. So all these issues, immigration, militarization, poverty, resegregation are all related. And I think that those are the kinds of questions that we don't have language for yet. We're not really talking about these kinds of things yet. I like to try to tell people one easier way to kind of rethink about this is that resurgitation or gentrification is resurgitation. And if we look at the other side of the equation and we can start seeing all these other kinds of connections coming together. So if we're able to do that, we can express these kinds of things through our art, through our culture, through our work that we do, then we'll have changed the frame in a lot of ways. We'll have gotten really in the heart of these structural issues that create these disparities that lead us to the kind of situations. So we'll go over here, and then we'll go back. One of the old people, too. But I want to just contextualize something for us, because if you understand that all of that civil rights activity that Jeff talked about was done by people your age, I mean, it wasn't old people. The old people were afraid of it for the most part. And so it's very important to understand your power in unity and organization. And that's the difference that I see today, is that there are a lot of things going on. And all of the activity is very encouraging to me as someone like Dave, who's been an activist for my entire life practically, because I grew up in an activist family. But I don't see enough organization amongst those different elements that are engaged. I mean, the one thing that Selma brought out in terms of the movie was that there was cooperation between SNCC, CORE, and eventually you had cooperation between the Panthers and SDS. You had cooperation amongst those who were interested in change. That I'm beginning to see some now, but there's not enough of that. And that I can't stress enough organizing. I mean, Sarah talks about you want to be involved in Dallas, get involved with mothers against police brutality. That's a new organization, but it's an organization in the short time that it's been in existence has made some major changes in this city already. And that's the one thing. I mean, I'm not from Dallas, but I've been in Dallas a long time. If I was back home in Philly, none of this would have happened. Philly does not change. I don't care what goes down. Philly doesn't change. So that's the thing to keep in mind, that it's not enough those young people got off their campus. That's what made the change. They got off their campus and protested. The protests on campus is now, it's great. You've got to make sure people understand what's going on. But that's not going to make the change that needs to happen in community. Yes, sir. First of all, I just want to say thank you for bringing more awareness and more consciousness to this discussion. But however, I feel as if at times the media has a way of embellishing stories and magnifying situations and forgets to even acknowledge the accomplishments that we've made. I think with that being said, it's very disheartening, because we have grown so much. I mean, it's the reason why we're all here right now, here in Holland Park at SMU, with the history that it has here. But beyond that, I just wanted to hear your take on so many negative stories, these isolated incidents that kind of overshadow some of the accomplishments that we have made. And also part two is based on the campaign that Starbucks is putting on right now. How do you feel about that? Well, let me take the first question first. I mean, part of what is difficult about the moment right now, as we're in it, is to create part of it. So the problem for me as a writer is to try to understand that things are very much in flux. So part of the presentation I'm making here is to say, yeah, hip-hop and multiculturalism change a lot of things. But at the same time, it hasn't changed a lot of things either. So it's not all good, and it's not all bad. I try not to be defeatist all the time. I believe in being critical about looking at history, about looking at the kinds of things that have happened. But I don't believe in being so critical that it puts us in a state of paralysis. In the heart, I want to believe in something, because I have kids, because I know all the young folks because I care about their future, whatever the second year. So it's about kind of being truthful and trying to be able to highlight the good as well as the bad that's happening. Media, somebody told me this who's a reporter actually, not sweet, really good words. Media, mass media is defeatist, and it's polarizing. So I just remember the night in Ferguson, I was watching TV in November 24th, I was watching TV. And I was watching all the networks, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, whatever. And I started feeling very disempowerment. And so I was like, I'm going to turn the TV off, I'm going to look at Twitter and see what my friends are saying. I got thousands of friends. And they're all talking about this stuff in ways that were deep, compelling, shocking, sad, tragic, but also that were about like, let's have an honest conversation about how we can move things forward. And so that was really empowering in that sense for me. So I think it's a lot about trying to establish that sort of zone around yourself to be able to continue to do the work, to be able to get up every day like you do and say there's more stuff to be done. And I have the hope and I have the energy that we're going to be able to move these things. And so this is, again, why I like to talk so much about the imagination, that we have to maintain the imagination for these kinds of things. Even when corporations are cognizing our imagination, even when it's impossible to see any images that are out there that are going to help us to think about what a new world can be like, we can create those things and share those with folks and then sometimes they reach critical mass and the way it forms. Things start happening. Thank you once again, Professor Cheng, for being with us today. My name is Angelica Yardo and I'm a graduate student here. I had two quick questions. One, I'm wondering if, well, you mentioned earlier that 50 years ago there was a consensus on racial equity. And to me, I mean, it seems like your main argument or your main analogy being that of a wave seems to kind of undermine that. And so because the nature of a wave and of a notion is that there is no consolidation, that there is constant flux and movement. And so I'm wondering if you can maybe elaborate on what you see as the consensus existing 50 years ago and where did it go. So that's one. And also that President Obama ran as a kind of racial reconciliation sort of candidate, a kind of a hybrid mixed person who symbolized many things for us. And given the scenario that you've outlined for the last 10 years, I'm wondering if you regarding the height of racism or the kind of reemergence of it, I'm wondering if you think that he has failed to deliver on that vision of reconciliation that he ran on. First, I might actually have you repeat the first question. Not right now, but you can pick one so we can get to somebody. Well, what I would say, I wasn't interested in presenting Obama as the person who was going to resolve racism for us. I'm saying that he stood before the Democratic Convention and said that there's no blue America, there's no red America, there's the United States of America. And in all of his speeches, he presented himself with somebody who was going to help with trying to solve these questions of division in the country, in Congress, in communities, amongst folks of different races and cultures. So I'm just repeating what he said. Things have happened, obviously. And I think that the book began as something that was going to be about the rise and fall and then the success of multiculturalism, because I got inside in 2008. And then after I got inside, he won the election. And so we're all irrationally exuberant at that point, really irrationally exuberant. We've seen happen, right? And I was like, ah, this is going to be great. But what happens is, of course, the forces gather to kind of form the backlash that begins to set it. So this image of reconciliation comes, this image of division. And now four in 10 Americans plead that the US is more, we should revive it before the whole administration began. So I'm just stating what I see, you know what I'm saying? And I don't think that it's on any one person ever to be able to resolve these kinds of questions. I believe in movements. I believe in ways. I believe in people getting together and figuring it out. I don't have solutions, right? I know you've got a lot of solutions. I know you guys have got a lot of solutions. I know you've got a lot of solutions. Like, we've all, I believe in the power of folks coming together and figuring out together, right? So that's eventually what I would like to see us kind of move towards. Because again, all of these different kinds of forces are working really to divide us, right? To segregate us, to atomize us, to make us feel like we have no agency in our very own lives, right? That we should just kind of sit back and accept, right? And all we need for change, or all we need for things to get worse is for nobody to kind of step forward and say, that's, you know, that's, for somebody not to say, that's not right, and I want to change that. For everybody to just kind of stay back, ask them things will get worse, right? So that's essentially what I was trying to say tonight. My question has more to do with your previous writings on hip hop and how, like the past 30 years of hip hop, how it's been really entrenched in like our cultural divides and like social injustices, like in the 80s with the drug war and the 90s with the riots. I guess I kind of have a two part question. Do you feel that this millennial generation still has that sort of impact on hip hop? Is the relationship still the same? And if so, who do you feel like some hip hop artists that kind of are involved in that movement? Because my question stems from during the Black Lives Matter protests, like Nos and Russell Simmons were out protesting with that movement in New York City, but also during that time, like a lot of hip hop artists were being criticized for not, you know, being vocal and standing with, you know, their fans and audiences who kind of look for them and the role music has played in sort of like a kind of healing process for these like cultural injustice. What do you think about that? There were a lot of folks who went to Ferguson. And there was one rapper in particular in Ferguson who was, I think, very influential on a lot of these rappers who came in, his name is Ted Pope, he is Ted Pope. He was an amazing rapper. Somebody very deeply involved in the movement there with the New Yorkers, you know, I think it had something to do with that. And I think it used to be, young millennia's rise here in New York, and different points have been a call for folks to come. So when folks got to town, people like David Banner, young G's, Italian quality, all of these folks would come and they were not about trying to like steal the spotlight. They were about like, let's get down and try to find out what's really happening. So what I think we're gonna see actually is this year, before we see it, the Angelo Rush released his album because he felt like he really needed to in the midst of all of what was going on. He'd been thinking about these issues. He felt like, I'm gonna get this out right now because I just have to get it out, right? Kendrick Lamarzo was rushed out of his costume this on Monday, great record, amazing record, speaking to a lot of these kinds of issues as well. I think what we're gonna see is a lot of artists feeling free in a way to be able to comment on the moment. And that might be just me being the optimist, you know, but I do think that this is a moment in which the artists realize that relevancy has to do a lot with being able to localize what's happening on the ground, right? In these scenes, everybody wants to keep it real. This is what real is right now. So I think that there's that, I think that that's happening and it's been a good positive thing. What I've been most excited about is that we've begun building these networks around cultural strategy. So John Legend got up at the Oscars and gave a speech in which he talked about the prison industrial complex in a very straightforward, open, direct kind of way to audience of millions and millions of people, right? That speech was written by an organizer, activist, artist, for him, you know? So the links are, I think, coming together in more ways than I've ever before. And there are these kinds of interventions that make it possible for folks to kind of see, hey, this is not just something that's happening over there, right? This is something that a lot of folks, people who we look up to, believe in as well, right? And that I think contributes to the changing, the shifting of the culture. You know, even the discussion around the appropriation of Black Lives Matter, I'm definitely, when the sisters were started, the hashtag movement, that kind of thing. But the fact that people are appropriating and reappropriating that kind of thing shows that there's a power behind it that they created, not just grassroots creative, right? So that's changing, you know, the way that folks, you know, like, play, that environment. Artists, you know, people who are selling millions of records, who throughout the years have no confidence to get out of here. So, I wanna make sure we get more questions from... Shaan Shan, I don't know if Shaan Shan's in the room, is she? Shaan Shan, no? Okay, good. What role does social media play in new age protests? Yeah, this is the thing, is people like to have, like, to derive hashtag activism, slack activism, clictivism, you know, that kind of thing. But when we have this nationwide protest movement, it's like a word for folks up to it. And that's, I think that's the bottom line. So the whole conversation has changed, right? Around this. And there's not either five, there's not either four. It's that when these things work together, like the grassroots organizing alongside the social media organizations in the country. So, Jeff, I feel like we could probably be here for another half hour, but I think we have room until nine o'clock, and I wanna make sure you guys have time to sign up. So, I wanna thank all of you for being here and showing up tonight. And I wanna thank you, Jeff, so for also showing up and making this happen. One more round of applause. Thank you. Please be on the lookout for more things coming from arts and urbanism over at SMU Meadows. We're gonna continue to work collaboratively with our colleagues here on campus and our colleagues across the city. So just be on the lookout, good things are coming. And Jeff is gonna be up by the tables here on the way out, signing books if you wanna purchase one. Thank you.