 Mark Hughes, I am the executive director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and you caught me again. It's just a position. Black folks experiencing issues here in the city. What we like to say is there are the issues that are affecting black folks and black folks affecting change. So welcome. I'm so glad you are with me tonight. We're going to, first of all, I just want to start by just sending some thoughts and prayers out to the folks who are experiencing just so many challenges with this catastrophic storm that is making Irene look like a child. So we want to send our thoughts and prayers out to folks who are impacted and these impacted communities. This is a no-joke time. I was reaching out across the state to folks that I know I would encourage everybody, let's come together. I appreciate the fact that the senators are also in the state. This is all hands on deck. I want to also give a shout out to our first responders and let's just continue to pray for one another. That being said, tonight we're going to have some conversation a little bit about equal protection. We know that in the last couple weeks or so that Tuscotis, the Supreme Court of the United States has delivered yet another blow to the rights and the freedoms of black folks in America. The alliance, what we did is we did in fact put out a press release, we'll cover some of that. I'm excited to let you know that we've got some great guests with us. First of all, we have the director of the Richard Kemp Center here with us today. That is Christine Longmore Hughes. She's with us today. So thank you for joining, Christine. And also we have Deacon Roy V. Hill II, who is the one member of the board of directors here. So, Roy, thank you for coming out. I'm definitely appreciating your being here. Thank you, Reverend. No problem. I wanted to just share a couple of things with you. First of all, everything's rooted in the 14th Amendment. Take a look at this slide right here. I brought a slide of the 14th Amendment with me, a slide up from the control room. And I think that just to kind of root everybody who's watching, we don't have a whole lot of time there. First of all, those who are watching, we do not have enough time to tell you all of the twists and turns that goes into this affirmative action, this whole decision. And where it's coming from, not only that. There's probably not enough attention span out there. Thank you for that slide. The Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, what we did was, as I said a moment ago, we issued the press release. Some of that language there, I'll just share with you, the 14th Amendment was intended to rectify the deep rooted legacy of slavery and the discrimination faced by African Americans in this country. Its original purpose was to ensure equal protection under the law, regardless of race and ethnicity. However, the implementation of the 14th Amendment has been marked by history of resistance and rejection, undermining its intended impact. Instead of serving as a powerful tool for racial justice, it has been distorted and manipulated to advance agendas contrary to its original purpose, some pretty strong language. So definitely, I wanted to, first of all, just chime in with y'all on the top. First question, and I know we didn't get a chance to talk much about this off air beforehand, but what's your original thought when you first saw this? I know we've had various sessions, we'd anticipated it, we knew it was coming. Roy, what was your first thoughts when you saw the Supreme Court announcing the, I guess, removal of the remnants, if you will, of affirmative action in, I think it was the Harvard University and University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill? Quickly, one, to affirm, is to affirm that which is right, to take away that which is right, is an injustice. That injustice speaks at the heart of what we say in this country when we say one nation under God with liberty and justice for all, it speaks at and guts what we see in our currency wherein we say in God we trust. So if we remove the foundation, then what do we have to actually stand for? Right, right. What do we have to stand for? And I think, again, I think there's another slide that's up right now. And this is, I think what we were doing is we were looking forward to it. We pulled some information offline and we were doing some research we had. If you all recall, we had some community discussions on the subject. We were talking, we've already began to organize. We'll have more about that conversation later. But yeah, a lot of experts, they expect the court's conservative majority. They expected the court's majority to rule against it. And this observation here is colleges and universities will no longer be able to consider race as a part of their admissions decision. The thing I want to highlight more than anything before we go to you, Christine, is that this is, thanks for that slide, what this is is when we talk about affirmative actions and what this court did is this was the last of a sequence of a number of decisions that have been made decade over decade in dismantling systemic racism or dismantling rather the whole 14th Amendment in affirmative action. What we're talking about right now is we're talking about as it pertains to education and even now with the, or before with the way that the policy was being implemented, it was only considered to be one of many criteria that can be used. And let me just qualify that. It was already illegal to use it as a sole criteria. And again, we're only talking about the remnants of affirmative action being remaining in education. So I mean, the thought there is is that a lot of people are losing their mind and the thing is is that I think that a large portion of the battle was lost decades ago. Your thoughts? I mean, I guess my my first reaction was kind of like, here they go again. There's really there's really nothing new under the sun. And I think that it's it's really sort of more of the same. I mean, at first I had this reaction of like, you know, we make a couple of steps forward and then there's someone or something pushing us back. And then I thought, oh, boy, here we go with the, you know, everybody's going to be running around with their hair on fire. But that doesn't really feel like it makes a lot of sense to me either. Because when I thought about it more, I just thought about the history, especially of black people in this country where things like this and laws, you know, including the Constitution, where all the laws lead back to has always been a racist construct. And so what has what our response as and our resilience as black people and as the descendants of slaves, especially, has it has often been and has historically been a call to action. Right. It's historically been a call to action. And, you know, as far as who we are as a nation, I think that's something that some forget about. And it's something that many have never embraced in terms of who we are, who we truly are as a nation. This this slide that I'm pulling up right now, what it talks about is it's talking about the fact that this blow, you know, as I indicated before, it's it's a, you know, it's, as you said, here we go again, another gut punch. But this pretty much turns off the lights for this conversation about correcting harms that have been done by this nation, intentionally correcting harms that have been done. And, you know, my concern, and I stated this a number of months ago. Well, actually, it's back last year. Well, this is that this also opens the door to challenging all things DEI. Now, of course, what we're facing, what we're looking at is racial justice. And we're having conversations about, you know, the whole idea of justice in our communities, justice in our schools, justice in our economics, justice in our land, in diversity and equity and inclusion has largely been used as as a term that's really a little bit more docile and a little bit more palatable inside of organizations and and agencies and so forth, just so folks can talk about it. But at the end of the day, what we're really talking about is is is correcting the harm that's been done. Roy, I know you've been around for a while and you've seen this diversity, equity and inclusion thing playing out in Burlington forever. In fact, I know you were responsible for the some of the initial work done with the reparations, the reparations proclamation of the governor at the statewide level. Is this is this do you see this blow as being significant? Have you seen others other activities that have occurred on your watch that are comparable? Yes, and that's a deep, deep well, but we only have so much time to talk about it. But, you know, if we look at the fundamentals, for example, affirmative action, affirmative action has always been around for white people. That card of their affirmative action pass is white skin. And what we have done, that is, people of good will say, wait a minute, if we have a state Constitution's model that says freedom and unity, then we're talking about a comprehensive, inclusive, as opposed to the divisiveness, which has come about by solely focusing on the rights if you are white. Now, what that ruling really says is we don't want the hold of the community, the community of people to be educated about who we are and what we really, really are. Well, how is that new? I mean, is it doesn't that go back to slavery 101? Oh, absolutely. It goes back. So are we regressing then? Is it is that is that what it feels like? It's beyond regressing. It's destructive. You know, even if it is biblically in terms of scripture, there's a word that says people perish without education, without knowledge. So systematically, that's what we're doing. We find many children in school now for so frustrated by adults, by the teachers, by their parents until they're actually turning against. So you see a K 15 or whatever that gun is called in the hands of children who are killing the siblings who are killing the classmates who are killing adults, etc. And for some reason, you know, baseball players and places like Florida, etc. are refusing to acknowledge what education is about across the board and benefits everybody stuck in education though, because, you know, my thought process on this thing is, as we know, in, you know, this is this is much bigger than education. And, you know, what the unfortunate part about it is, is, you know, from what I've seen here, because this started with the 14th Amendment, which was the third of the second, rather, of the Reconstruction Amendments. You can bring that slide up control room. So the 14th Amendment was intended, originally, intended to protect black folks. It was in this is little known in our schools. You know, I was talking to some youth yesterday and nobody knew what reparations was as 40 kids in the room. So this is little known that even though we had a constitution that perpetuated a preexisting state of slavery with seven key tenets at the close of an insurrection, the Civil War, what we tried to fix that with was these three simple constitutional amendments, not a constitutional convention. And the 14th Amendment was the second amongst them. And what we know about the 14th Amendment is it's not only did it essentially officially declare that black folks were people, humans, but also citizens and deserved equal protection because they were historically being slaughtered and due process. So this is where this is where affirmative action was derived from, because the inequities that were created by slavery, the legacy of slavery. Now, everything's gotten so convoluted over the years, you know, with all of the Supreme Court's decisions. There was also in the 13th Amendment the right for the legislature to establish laws to undo the badges and incidents, if you will, is the language of slavery. What is that? That is the legacy of slavery. That's what we see today, what we refer to as systemic racism. The challenge here is, is half of America doesn't believe that systemic racism is even a thing. And I'm wondering, Christine, you could bring that slide up, control room. We don't like folks to get off of our program without seeing the definition of systemic racism. I'm wondering, you know, the work you've been at this in Burlington since, you know, I'm not going to, I ain't going to tell on you. No, it's okay, you can. But I'm just saying, you know, the language of systemic racism before leading up until now, during the last number of years, what's your take on that? Have you seen a lot of conversation about it? Is there are folks embracing this? I know, I haven't necessarily seen a lot of conversation about it. Thanks for that slide. And it could be that I'm not necessarily putting myself in positions to hear about it, but I do want to go back to two things that you said. One, I think it is very important to make the distinction between the work of eradicating systemic racism and anti-bias, DEI, like all of that other stuff, because it's really just even in the word. Systemic racism means that we are looking at systems of oppression and trying to dismantle them or change them so that there's a broader impact, whereas all of the DEI stuff has more to do with how racism and oppression occurs on an individual one-to-one basis. Systems. And because we know that DEI has turned into an industry, and not only has it not produced the progress that it was supposedly intended to produce, we're actually going backwards. So it does really lend to questions about what is the usefulness of DEI. But I also wanted to go back and not just, you said that you don't want to just stay narrowly focused on education, but I do just got up this morning reflecting on all of this and was really thinking about our trip to DC in April. We went to the National African American History and Cultural Museum, but we also visited the Mary McLeod Bethune House. Now she was an educator who was born a decade after the Civil War. And this has just taken me back to resilience, in particular the resilience of black people in this country who are the descendants of slaves, who my father was, and who you guys are obviously descendants of black people and our black men yourselves. So I think that when I look at her and look at her life experience and acknowledge the fact that to this day right now, Bethune Cookman College exists. Because a woman who came from people who it was illegal for them to even read, somehow or another decided out of her resilience and out of knowing that she could do what she did when about doing it. Yeah, and I appreciate that. And I think the sad part of that story was is that I didn't know who she was. And I don't think that much of America knows who Mary McLeod Bethune is, which kind of goes back to not only education, but just proper training and so forth. Take a look at this slide. So when we start talking about what it is we're here to correct, I think we need to come to terms with the fact. Before we get out in front of ourselves and say, hey, we've got some work to do. We can do some grassroots efforts in our community. We can definitely do the work, which we're doing. We're doing a lot of this work in our community. But I think a lot of us don't understand the magnitude and the source of the challenge. So you start to think about the fact that you've got all of these government-inflicted challenges that have created these wealth disparities over hundreds of years in America. And you've got judges sitting on the United States Supreme Court talking about, oh, well, should we do this to create diversity or should we not do this? And that's why the program is diversity or justice. Are we talking about diversity or are we talking about justice? Because all we're really talking about here is do we use a system to correct, do we use a government to correct something that a government created? So I think that's where the United States Supreme Court in the legislature got lost in the sauce along the way because now the conversation has been distilled all the way down to whether or not we're just getting excited whether it's one criteria that colleges are using to make a decision for admission instead of saying, wait a minute, we need to be looking across all systems of state government in doing the work and correcting the mess that has been made. Well, I mean, I guess I would also imagine that a concern comes up that when something like this happens, it ends up becoming legal precedent so that it opens the door to just continue to erode a lot of progress that's been made. So I mean, I guess that would be another concern. Yeah, definitely another concern. I know we're headed towards the end but I did want to share with you a couple of things that are relevant and one is here with, just take a look at this here that we'll pull this up real quick. We've got, there is different perspective on what it is we're doing and I think this is worth noting because many of us, I've lived outside of the United States for 10 and a half years so sometimes we got to take a step back and say are we talking about civil rights or are we talking about human rights? You know, is this racial justice or are we looking at United Nations observations? Next slide please. So you take a look at that and what the United Nations is saying is we're talking about a crime against humanity and they're saying that it needs to be addressed with reparatory justice and what you're looking at right here is that that is from this report from the working group of experts of people of African descent and the reason why I bring this up is so important for us to understand that it's not like we're not being urged to do the right thing. It's just that, you know, you've got this, you've got this situation here in the United States where this nation, the latest nation was founded as you said, Christine, it was founded on racist principles and it has been throughout all history as the pendulum has swung with the exception of the Warring Court that we've had a majority conservative Supreme Court and they've made some hugely lousy decisions historically and I won't start going down cases because it just makes your eyes roll back. One of the things that I noticed too about the side that you just brought up is that, you know, the United Nations, of course, was exactly right about what they were saying and it was really a cry for our country to like finally address this. Not sure how many people actually heard that but crimes against humanity, that's a pretty serious accusation but some of the other language that was in that is saying, you know, xenophobia and a couple of other phobias and another way to talk about a phobia is a fear. So what's the fear? What is it that people are afraid of? What is it in particular that white men who have always dominated and had the control in this country, what is it they are afraid of? I think that since day one, 400 plus years back, they have always been afraid of retribution. One of the reasons even Lincoln said, if we let them go, they're gonna come get us. That's one thing. I think the other thing, and this is a little bit dangerous to say but I think there's this thing about inferiority and superiority and being afraid of becoming irrelevant in the face of black excellence. Or that somehow or another that black people will just take over the country if they're able to read or get a college degree or have some advantage that is perceived as unfair. So I think there's a lot, if you really, really want to drill down into it, those words, phobias are fears and we have to ask ourselves and maybe ask other people, what is it you're afraid of? What is it you're really afraid of? Right, yeah, there's that. And Roy, you attended a HBCU, right? Correct, Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama. So I mean, how does this play into the HBCU world as we head towards a close? How does this decision, Supreme Court decision, or not? How does it play into the Supreme Court decision? How does it play into the HBCU role? It plays exactly in the manner in which Christine laid out things here, the fear factor, the denial factor, et cetera. Because in accepting and being fair, we see the expertise and that positive stuff that has been shared within our country. Well, then, if we're looking at that reality, the question arises, well, why have you kept all of that hidden? Why have you denied it? Is it a fear factor? Is it something in your DNA, et cetera? When the chips are down, whether it's sports or science, when you really want expertise, someone like George Washington Coward, there are many more like George Washington Coward which can take something as small as a peanut and turn it into masterful, industrial, and gainful this and that for the citizenry at part. Well, then you have to look in the mirror, and when you look in the mirror and you say, oh my God, you know, those people are great. Absolutely. Look at the sin which I am in the meanest, which I am in the genocide, which I am, and I am responsible for heaping up on not only African-Americans, but Native Americans, so on and so forth. So it's like looking at African-American history and saying African-American history didn't start in 1619. No, it didn't. That history, that richness, that profound expertise was there long before. So some people find it very difficult, our white brothers and sisters in America in particular, to acknowledge that truth, that reality. And black, I think I've come across recently, some black folks who just are not, because this is about our culture. Just about our culture, and if I could say something here, it is that you don't have to be white to be a racist. That systemic belief indoctrination, that hate factor, it says something about how you act and how you act upon others. If you hate yourself, then how can you love somebody else? And essentially, that's what we're saying. Yeah, we'll push back on that a little bit, but we're gonna do that on the next episode. Before we do close out, though, the thing here is, is if we really process this thing, what it really comes down to, it's just like we're having a conversation about critical race theory, or whether we're having a conversation about filling the blank, is that this is a question as to whether or not systemic racism is a thing. Because if systemic racism is a thing, and it's acknowledged as a thing, and public policy acknowledges it as a thing, and the legislature, and the executive, and the judiciary acknowledges it as a thing, then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Because of course, like the United Nations said, it is imperative that we clean this mess up that has been created in America as a result of slavery. And it has last generation after generation. And what's ironic and what's kind of odd about it is, is that we've got so many things, we're gonna flip through about three slides, four slides real quick here. And this is the first one. You may recognize this one, Roy. This is state statute that Juneteenth is a thing in Vermont. Then you've got a proclamation. Of course, the governor proclaimed First African Landing Day. There's Juneteenth recognition in 2020. If you read this real close, there's language in there that says, we need to do more to openly acknowledge the struggle for equality only began with the Civil War and openly confront and eliminate the legacy of slavery, is what it says on the third whereas from the bottom. The significant racial inequality and systemic racism that continues to exist in our country and our state today. This is the language that we have that's being communicated. The reparations task force is a thing. Right here in Burlington, the resolution that racism is a public health emergency is a joint legislative resolution saying basically we're gonna do everything that we can do. It's also a resolution of the city council and it's a declaration of the city of Burlington with 30 other major designated agencies across the state. Thank you for those slides. So you've got this thing that's going on here that it's just as always, like Dr. King said, is I hear what you're saying, but you're not doing what you're saying. You're saying one thing, but you're doing another. So as we continue to go on, we march on, we continue the work. A last slide I have for you is, as we go into this Juneteenth, remember the first African landing slide I had up just a minute ago, hold the date. Everybody that's watching, first African landing day is back for his fifth time, fifth consecutive time at the Intervail Center. It is on the 26th of August. Everybody's gonna be there, there's gonna be food, music, drum, it is a commemoration and this is to commemorate 1619. So be there or be square. If you wanna talk about a little bit more, thank you for that slide and we're closing. We wanna talk a little bit more about what we're doing and some of the constitutional amendments that we're considering to address equal protection that will push directly back up against this affirmative action call. The constitutional amendments and if we didn't have time to cover them today, we will be at the Richard Kemp Center at 6 p.m. On the 19th, that's a week from tomorrow, we'll be at the Richard Kemp Center and we'll be talking about organizing and getting some power behind those. So thank you for coming. I'm glad you came out. This has been just a position. This is a program that's all about black folks that are experiencing issues and what we're doing is is we're trying to push back and we're doing it in our own way. I sure do appreciate you joining us tonight. Thank you, Christine, for joining. Thank you, Roy, for joining. Goodnight, Q.