 Welcome to New America, New York. I'm Suzanne DiMaggio. I'm a fellow and a director here at New America. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you this evening. As you know, we here at New America are dedicated to big ideas and lively conversation. And I think tonight's panel discussion will not disappoint. It's a collaboration between New America and the NAACP, Legal Defense Fund. And specifically, I'd like to thank Jennifer Parker, who is a New America alum, and Janaye Nelson for helping to bring this great panel together. Thank you so much. Now, I'm going to hand the baton over to Janaye. She's going to lead the conversation. She's also going to introduce our great panelists this evening. Janaye is associate director counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Education Fund. And she's also a professor of law at St. John University School of Law. So without further ado, let me hand it over to you. Thank you, Suzanne. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for hosting this event with the Legal Defense Fund. It's been wonderful working in partnership with the New America Foundation to put this together. And thank you for turning out for this conversation on the new civil rights agenda. And thank you for the overflow crowd. That's always a good thing to see. I have the easy job as moderator of this group to introduce a stellar panel of public intellectuals, who I'm sure all of you know well in different capacities. To my immediate right is Tanahasi Coates, the national correspondent at the Atlantic Monthly. Next to him is Sharlene Eiffel, the president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And last but certainly not least is Jonathan Holloway, a professor of history at Yale College and the new dean of Yale College. So please join me in welcoming our guest. So as many of you may have guessed, the impetus for this gathering was the article, the uber-viral exquisite disquisition journalistic phenomenon that is Tanahasi Coates' cover story for the Atlantic Monthly this month. You may not have seen it because it's no longer on the stands. That's how hot it has been, the case for reparations. And so we wanted to gather this group to continue the discussion, the re-energized discussion about racism, history, and status in America that was spawned by this incredibly provocative article. And it's important that we're having this discussion this year in particular because we are in the 50th anniversary year of many milestones in the civil rights movement. Much of the transformative legislation that was passed during that era is now 50 years old, this year and next year. So it's a wonderful time to stop and pause and think about the new civil rights agenda. And this is a wonderful context in which to begin that discussion. Actually, Tanahasi, I'm going to start with you and ask you about an observation I've made and seeing you be interviewed about your article and in the article itself. It seems as if you've gone through great pains to modernize the discussion around reparations in an effort to distance it, if you will, from the historical grounding of slavery, to update it and make it more present for us. I wanted to know, you're thinking behind that, why you did that, and what it means for informing a modern civil rights agenda. Well, I think it's a couple of things. First of all, thank you for having me, Janay. Janay asked me to be on this panel. I could not refuse. I suppose we write no book, but I can refuse Janay. I think there are two observations to be made here. The first is a disciplinary observation. We all have different ways that we go at things depending on what field we come from. And for journalists, the great power of journalism and unfortunately the great weakness of journalism is that things have to be made new. It has to be, OK, so what's going on right now? What have you done for me lately? I came up in a period of time where there were a great many people in this country, I guess there always are commenting on the force of racism or race in America. And many journalists doing so without trying to be nice here. Don't be nice. We're in a safe space. Without the slightest grounding or understanding of American history and the force of race and racism in American history to be perfectly frank about that. And I think people maybe who are specialists in Africa or maybe specialists in the Middle East or specialists, whatever journalists tend to dip their toe, might have a similar complaint that folks don't understand the historical complexities of which they're writing about. And so that I think comes from the fact that journalists have to be very much up to date what's going on right now reporting the news. But at the same time, that doesn't have to be a weakness. It can actually be a great strength. And so when I went to approach a topic like reparations, I had to make it new. But I think I actually, I hate to speak in such crass terms, but I think I actually made it a more compelling narrative. So thinking like a journalist was so crass. The first thing I thought was knowing, having read quite a bit of the research that you guys did, knowing that the story does not end with enslavement that after 1865 there was not a great party and then we just let black people in. Now we can't figure out what's going on. Understanding that, and having seen so much work done around the New Deal and so much work done around the GI Bill and so much work done around housing. I mean, even at the beginning, if I had done any reporting, it was quite clear that there must be living people on behalf of whom you could make a claim. And one of the great frustrating things about the conversation about reparations. And we can have a conversation about whether slavery in and of itself is enough. But the notion that it's just slavery, again, that it just sort of ended right there. And I wasn't so much trying to distance it from enslavement, but what I did want to do is say, there is a path, a policy path that you can track from 1619 right into the period right now, where you can see people taking things from black people. People plundering black people, people taking resources out of African-American communities. And that was the anger I really tried to attach to it. And that is one that just so happens regrettably to not end in slavery. Well, thank you. You say that there are still living people who suffered the plunder. And it's interesting, Charlotte and I just received an email from a colleague today who ran into John Lewis at an airport and recounted that fact to us. He was so taken by meeting this living civil rights hero, someone who actually suffered the brutality of trying to ensure that black people could have an enforceable and expansive right to vote. And so, Charlotte, let me ask you this. When we talk about a modern civil rights agenda, voting rights is really a key issue that is still at the fore. I mean, African-American men got the right to vote in 1870 under the Constitution, but it wasn't until nearly 100 years later with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that that right was really expanded and came to fruition. Why are we still fighting for voting rights, not only after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, but 50 years later, we're still fighting some of those battles. What remains to be done? Well, I think, so first of all, thank you for having me and thank you all for coming out. And this is just terrific to be on this panel with such amazing people. But I think Tanahase has already kind of laid out that path, which is that there's a lot of forgetfulness that is kind of a part of American public policy. And you hit it yourself, Jenae, when you first said that we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the 60th anniversary of Brown versus Board of Education. Next year, we'll celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. So what do all those things mean? Well, to me, what they mean is that, in fact, this country, as you and I know it, is certainly no more than 60 years old. I mean, if it's 60 years since Brown versus Board of Education and that's the beginning of the end of legal apartheid that makes this room possible and the lives that many of us have led possible, then we're talking about a country that is in its infancy as the country that we know. And yet, we have not been taught to think of it that way. We've been taught to think of ourselves as kind of hundreds of years old. And therefore, it leads to all kinds of things, like why are we still talking about the right to vote? What's wrong with black people? Why can't they get it together? Didn't slavery end in 1865? We forget that essentially we had the end of slavery. We had very few years of reconstruction. We had this awful backlash. We had the door shut and we had the recreation essentially of slave-like conditions for African-Americans and all of the promises of the Civil War amendments of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were with deliberation, with state constitutional amendments, with the brutality of lynching to enforce it, with Jim Crow and the complicity of the United States Supreme Court. All of that was crushed in its infancy and it took the work of the Legal Defense Fund, it took the work of civil rights activists, it took the blood and the martyrdom of Goodman, Cheney and Swerner and all of that to get to the point where we can say 50 years later, here we are, but here we are as a country that's 50 years old. So it's important to me that we recognize that. So first of all, we won't be so impatient with ourselves. We actually just kind of are getting started at this thing called equality. And secondly, so that we won't forget how really far we still have to go. And what's so powerful about Tana Hase's piece is that it is a command to confront this reality and confront this history. Now the tricky part and the difficult part is that it's not just journalists who write or engage in discourse about race with having no kind of clue about American history, it's most people. And for those of us who have taught law, as Diney and I have, the two hardest courses to teach are criminal law and constitutional law. And they're really hard, not just because they engage really difficult issues, they're really hard because every student feels like they know something about this. And they know something about criminal law and they know something about constitutional law because they have feelings about it. And feelings are not the same thing as knowing. So part of the problem that we have around race, and we see it to bring it back to your question about voting rights, we saw it last year when the Supreme Court decided the Shelby County versus Holder case, which was a case that we litigated and argued in the court, where the Supreme Court basically professed to have a kind of superior knowledge, not withstanding the 15,000 page record that Congress had accumulated, the 90 witnesses that they had heard from in the course of hearings around reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice Roberts just has a feel, he just knows. He knows that the way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating based on race. He just feels like that must be the formula. The rest of us have just, I don't know what. Justice Scalia, he knows why the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized, he said. I know what this is, he said in a five minute, incredibly slow, painful, insulting soliloquy with our clients that we had flown in from Shelby County, Alabama, sitting in that packed Supreme Court well. I know what this is, he said. It is the perpetuation of racial entitlement. So how does he know? How does Justice Scalia know this? From whence comes his expertise? You know, I was at a conference last Friday and I was talking about a case that Justice Scalia wrote a concurrence in last term. It was the case about patenting the human genome. And Justice Scalia, in that case, concurred with the majority decision, but he said I could not concur with Section 2B because it was all about microbiology and he said I don't have any reason to know that. I'm like not an expert, but that's science, right? But race, but race, there is never any hesitation. And those of us who work in this field know that to understand race means that you are, and certainly to engage in anything to do with race and the law means that you're talking about history and biology and neurology, if you're talking about bias and labor statistics and economics and demography and political science and all of those disciplines are part of understanding how to litigate a voting rights case or an employment discrimination case or any case involving race. And yet, you don't need any expertise for that. You just kind of know. So part of why Ta-Nehisi's piece for me is so powerful. It's just I just love hearing people say I feel so, I'm so convicted by it, right? Because the conviction is not that you should feel guilty. The conviction is that you have to stand humble before what you don't know. There are lots of reasons why you don't know. You weren't taught in an effort to try to hide this history and shame and people don't want to talk about it and all that stuff, but you don't know. And that's the beginning of, I think, coming to a place where we can really talk about how we change policy, where we can have a honest engagement about why we still need a robust voting rights act in 2014. So Jonathan, let's talk a little bit about how we get to know about race and racism in this country. So Jonathan has written a wonderful book called Jim Crow Wisdom and the title comes from an essay by Richard Wright called The Ethics of Jim Crow Living. And he has in this book very poignantly and personally talked about how race and racism is conveyed through families, through narratives, and how it informs social and political narratives about race and racism. And so I would like to, one, just hear your thoughts about how we come to acquire this knowledge about racism, how it leads to this feeling that we know about race and yet we have this very simplistic understanding that empowers folks to opine about the future of black people without having the appropriate grounding. But I also want to add to that this context of reparations and I want you to hypothesize if in fact we had had this narrative and it wasn't this marginalized narrative. If we actually talked about reparations and redress from the start, what new Jim Crow wisdom would we have today? That's a lot. That was, pull it apart, pull it apart. Whoa, okay, well, let me thank you all for being here. Stalling. Yeah, this is stalling, but when I was invited, I'm like, I just want to be in the audience. Since it's impossible to get a ticket, I'll sit in front of it. So, you know, what I, the historian in me obviously loves the past and loves great stories about the past. We are who we are because of the stories that we're told or the stories that we're not told. Just trying to pull together the different conversations that are on the floor, I started thinking about what makes a nation. This is a way to get to your question, I think. And Ernesto Renan, a French philosopher, wrote in the late 19th century, and I'm crudely paraphrasing it, but a nation is made by forgetting. Like, that's what makes a nation, it forgets. And that's what the reparations conversation is about, at least the one you're trying to start, by trying to have a grown-up conversation, which we are not good at in this country. I mean, this country succeeds because it forgets. And, intentionally? Oh, structurally, yes. It's built into the logic of this country. And so, I think the mindful work of honest scholars, historians, speak just for historians. The mindful work of honest parents is to tell stories about the past and how we got to where we are. Sometimes that story, when I'm thinking about parents, now involves forgetting that some things are so terrible, we simply cannot afford to talk about it because you will be damaged, the thinking is. And that's the story, sort of the story behind the Richard Wrights getting beaten, knowledge beaten into him, basically the mother said, you can't afford to do certain things. That you develop, that black parents develop a system of not telling their children things or beating them, Ralph Ellison referred to, black mothers beat their children as homeopathic, preparing their children for this terrible world. That a system is created where that makes sense, tells you something's deeply flawed in the system in the first place. That if survival is contingent upon forgetting, something's wrong. And so, how do we get to this point? We get to this point because after every so often, people get frustrated by forgetting and they want to tell a story. Or at least we're gonna say, have a conversation. That's not hyperbolic, that's not about blaming this person or that person, that is simply about, let's actually think about who we are as a nation and let's see what comes of it. I don't know why that's so terrifying, but it is for many people. I think it's terrifying because it starts to, having an honest conversation takes you back to original sins of this country. Having an honest conversation invites people to think about persistent structural inequality. Having an honest conversation means that we don't just celebrate the 50th anniversary of a civil rights bill, but think of all the people who aren't alive, who fought to have those, to have these bills. Schrodinger and Cheney should be 69, 70 and 72, but they aren't because people were afraid of change, of confronting original sin, of being honest about what this country really is. So we need to think about all of these things at once and it's hard and it's messy and it's inconvenient, but that's the ethical way to live. Can I just reply to that? Yeah, absolutely. There's been a lot of interesting things that were just said and the exciting, really exciting thing about like, I mean obviously I hoped that H.R. 40 gets passed and I hope we have a discussion, but as a writer I'm really selfish and I think you kind of have to be and it was kind of great to sit with the philosophical question of whether a nation can actually remember, like whether, you made the point that we're bad at this and I was trying to think if any nations are actually good at it. Japan for instance is one that has a huge, huge problem with this and is going through it right now. People say Germany does a good job of remembering, but that was after it killed most of the Jews within its borders. So that's a very, very different project than what America has to do. And so it becomes this almost philosophical question of whether we actually can remember, whether a democracy actually can do that, whether a nation can actually do that. And that collides with something else and I was just thinking about this notion you're talking about about success through forgetting. And Tony Jutton's book post, where he talks about this, we were able, the nations of Europe were able to emerge and keep going because they forgot. Had they been obsessed with these bloods and deads back and forth and all of this death, they never would have been able to consolidate in the successful nation states. And yet, I think about the great existential crisis that's facing us right now, which is climate change. I wonder whether we'll be able to forget because this is all about history, right? This is all about challenging what you're doing, like what you did to the earth, which you've been doing to the earth. It's a very similar challenge to what we face in terms of race and racism in this country and some really, really direct ties. For instance, when you start thinking about how our cities are set up and sprawl, you start thinking about car and I know you'll talk a little bit about. She'll have a little bit about transportation and that sort of thing and how that ties in. It's all tied together. So I guess what I'm saying is, we often think of reparations as this sort of luxury, as this confrontation, as optional, something that we should do, but if we don't, we'll be okay. And I wonder, and I'm getting speculative here, but if it's actually existential, that if you don't do it, we may not be succeeding by forgetting, we may just be putting off a debt that's gonna come upon us in the worst possible way, something much worse than black people riding in these cities. You know, I mean, that just kind of gets me right in the chest because I think it's an open question too. Like I don't know that we can. I do think there are things we can do to make ourselves do this thing we don't wanna do, which is to remember and to engage. And you raise the issue of transportation, that's a longer subject, but the issue of place, which is also why your piece was so important, I really believe that the physical space, I mean, we do it, right? We set up monuments to remember. We set up Arlington National Cemetery. We recognize that the physical space is a powerful way to make us confront the past, so we all know that. And I think that it is an important place for us to start. When I was writing about the last two recorded lynchings in Maryland, I was really meticulous about the physical space, right? That this is where they broke into the hospital. These are the streets they dragged him down. This is where they hung him. The police officer was standing at the corner of Mainham Division when he was directing traffic while the lynching was happening. This is where they dragged his body to in the black section, it was burned here. They went to that gas station and they got, I mean, because to just walk through the physical space as though certain things didn't happen, right? We allow, that's something we allow. We don't have to allow that. I mean, if you think about it, you walk through the city and streets are named, you know, I don't know, Spike Lee Way or whatever, you know? I mean, we do this. I mean, we commemorate in the physical space. And we could commemorate in the physical space other things that have happened as well. And it takes a decision to do it. So one of the things I was pushing for in these communities was, you know, the name of the book I wrote was called On the Courthouse Lawn because all these lynchings took place on the Courthouse Lawn. And I wanted to say that lynchings did not happen in the woods with hillbillies, which is what I grew up thinking, right? That that's not how it happened. That in fact, most of the time they happened downtown and most of the time they happened outside the Courthouse because it was a statement about who is in control of the law. We are the mob, not you, because very often the person who was killed was taken from the jail, which was in the Courthouse. So when you go and you drive to the Eastern Shore of Maryland there are all these beautiful Courthouses and these beautiful lawns. They're so picturesque and lovely. And they have commemorative plaques on them. They have war memorials and they have trees that were donated by the garden club and they have little plaques. But none of them mentioned that in one case 500 people, in one case 2,000 people and in another case 1,800 people were standing on that very Courthouse Lawn trying to kill and effectively killing and hanging and burning somebody. I'm not talking about in the 1800s, you know. I'm talking about in the 1930s in very small towns where the descendants still live. So there's a way in which the disappearing of the physical space is actually part of what allows the rest of it to happen. And that's one of the reasons why I really love the piece that Tanahasi wrote about housing because I'm always asking people like, how do you think this city got to look the way it does? We didn't just wake up and say, black people just decided to all go this way, white people all went this way. I just like to live in this really big tall thing that has really small rooms. I was like, that just didn't happen. It's all the result of affirmative policy decisions and investments that were made in this country that controlled the physical space. Bronx looks like the Bronx looks because certain highways were built in certain places. Queens looks like it looks because certain investments were made in Long Island, take those potato fields and allow people to live. Like those were decisions that were made. We didn't just kind of come out into the planes and just start running and claiming land and putting down stakes. There were decisions that were made and we're still making them. We're still making policy decisions that are transforming the space. Climate change is a perfect example. And that's where the memory is, at least to my mind, in that physical space. So I wanna build on that a little bit because it's easy, right? When you have something like lynchings, when you have this physical event, this physical brutality to point to and that everyone can viscerally react to. But these days, it's very hard to find something that explicit. And that's what makes the challenge of addressing racism in this current modern context that much more difficult. That's why we have such a struggle with our students, right? Because they don't quite have the physical markers to look at in the same way. And so what I really appreciated about Sherylen's book on the courthouse lawn is that she talks about lynchings and she talks about not only the physical violence and the white perpetrators, but also those folks who just passively looked and allowed it to happen, right? So folks who knew that this was occurring, that this was, in many ways, government-sanctioned terrorism and allowed it to happen. What do we know today that we are witnessing, that we are on looking to, that is contributing to black subjugation? What can we bring to the fore? Well, I mean, it's criminal justice, right? I mean, that's the... That's the one. That's the one. Teen it up. No, this is not what I spent the last two years researching, and you guys can probably speak a lot about it, but there was a great article in the New Yorker last week, and I cannot remember the journalist's name, and it was absolutely incredible. We have data prisons in this country. I mean, we just do, you know? Still, still. Thank you, thank you. Sarah Stelman, thank you, Sarah Stelman, for the camera. Incredible, incredible. I mean, I just had to stop at some point. It was just so, you know, like, terrifying. And we just don't know. So, you know, I wonder whether it's the lack of like explicit provocative thing. I mean, I was plenty explicit and plenty, plenty provocative. Or is it just the looking away? You know, are we actually, are we that? And that, you know, gets us into, again, these existential questions. You know, are we just looking away? Like, do we just kind of have to look away to get throughout, you know, our every day? I mean, you're talking about one in three, you know, black men of a certain age going through, I mean, that, and the effects are very, very real. You know, they're very, very real. And they're felt and they're there and they're demonstrable. You can put a number on them. You can, you know, what is it? We, you know, African-American men represent some minuscule population of all humans on this earth, but like 8% of all humans in prison. I mean, I, you know, that's pretty stark. That's pretty stark. And yet, we're looking away. And, you know, I brought up that piece by Sir Stone because the beautiful thing about that is that it's not the product of mass incarceration. It's a product of reform. That's what that piece is all about. It's about the effort to do things besides, you know, besides, you know, lock people away. Halfway houses was the big thing. She was critiquing in there. And in effect, you see, like, you see the thing almost like a virus. I won't reduce it to racism, but that's definitely part of it. Almost like a virus reproducing itself. Even in our efforts to reform. And when you got something that deep, you know, I don't want to be a total pessimist, but, you know, it speaks to something at our very roots is what I'm trying to say. That, you know, can't be just made to go away because, you know, some governors want to cut budgets. That's not going to be enough. You know, it actually, it, thinking about forgetting again. People make choices to get to your point. I mean, a lot of people in this room are younger and so may not remember that it wasn't always like this in terms of scales, that conscious decisions were made, policy decisions were made to do this, to create prisons, to create prisons for profit, for God's sake. And that was, that's recent history. That's 30 years ago. This just happened really successfully. And it's now created multiple generations of people who at minimum will have bad faith when it comes to interacting with police. Minimally, the same thing with stop and frisk. Minimally they'll have bad faith. And this is not to say that things were perfect beforehand, but the scales of this kind of physical and psychological violence have just gone off the charts. And people, either because they're bystanders or they're innocent, they're innocent to history is what we like to say politically, to be politic. They're innocent to history. They put their heads in the sand. They're enjoying their modern, all modern gadgets that I love as well. And they're really happy to enjoy those things and not worry about the terrors that are there. I mean, gosh, we got little kids in detention camps on the Mexican border. We have people who are detained, even though they are actually detained improperly doing as a dollar a day labor in the New York Times story a couple of weeks ago. How is this place? What is it? I think there has to be as, people are so tired of hearing the word narrative, but, well, here it is. I'm not tired. I'm not either, because I'm telling you, it's a secret, this is a secret, because listen, I started writing this book about these lynchings. That was not my area of study. I have been a civil rights lawyer and when I moved from New York to Maryland, I left the Legal Defense Fund and I went to teach and I started these clinics with my students. I was bringing a Title VI case, challenging the routing of a, talking about Place Again, the routing of a highway through the black community on the eastern shore of Maryland. And it was the third time in 60 years they'd run a highway either through or next to the same African-American community. We actually had plaintiffs who lived there and then moved and now they were running the highway through their community again. And whenever I go to do a case, I always ask people in the community about the history of race in their community. It doesn't matter what I've read, I ask the people because there are always these stories. And those people told me about these two lynchings. And the reason that it struck me is because every time I ask in any community about the history of discrimination, since I became a civil rights lawyer, I was always told these stories about violence. It happened when I was in Texas. It happened when I was in Tulsa. That's how I first heard about the Tulsa race riots. It was always there. Not because these people that I was talking to had been there, speaking about memory, but because they remembered it. The story was so powerful. So I think that when I started then researching and getting involved in the story and it's obviously a fairly gruesome topic, I became obsessed with trying to understand the bystanders. How do people do this? How do people watch this? How did they do it? I mean, they're human beings. You can't just say they're white, they're human beings. And they watched this brutality. And I mean housewives and homemakers and storekeepers. And I don't mean the people who got the rope and lit the fire. I mean the people who just came out. So I was trying to understand it. And what I believe is that the power of narrative, the story that you are told about the other, infiltrates you so deeply. And black people are not immune to it either. Which is why we also can watch a lot of stuff happen. That the story about who this person or this group of people are. Somebody said the other day, if this was all these Irish toddlers at the border, would we be having the same reaction as hearing that all these Mexican-American, Mexican toddlers are at the border, right? That the story about who people are get so deep, I think, in us, that it allows the return to your gadget. And it's why we have to engage the narrative. In 1966, the U.S. prison population was 250,000. That is now the same number as the federal prison population, right? Our prison population now is about what, 2.1 million? 2.1 million. But interestingly, today, our crime rate is the same as it was in 1966. So we went through all of the fear of crack and carjacking and we would always create a new law every time a new crime could carjacking, gotta have a federal law. And now we're back to the crime level of 1966, but we have this prison population that looks nothing like the prison population looked in 1966. So where is that demand that we make our prison system look, be commensurate with the threat, right? I think because there is a story that has been developed about who African-American men are in particular and the worthiness of their lives, what they would do with their lives. I think people just think, well, would they ever do anything with it? I think prison has been put so out of sight and out of mind that prison conditions used to be like a thoroughgoing conversation in the 1970s. Now we're holding people in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day for decades, which means we are deliberately driving people out of their minds. And that's like a daily conversation. So I think that, and for us, it's a struggle as civil rights lawyers because we're relitigating and we're engaged in advocacy, but we are not unaware of the fact that narrative is so important and the constancy of trying to think through how to shape narrative within the narrow confines of litigation or even of policy advocacy. It's very, very difficult, which is why the work of historians and journalists are so complementary and have to be part of that struggle that these are not like separate vocations because we can't do it without somebody pushing to change and shift that narrative. You know, other piece that I'm sorry about. I don't know a couple of them. I'm just. The other, you know, he's my sister. That's why I'm just messing with him. The other piece that I think, like when you talk about narratives, so when everybody knows this, people are very happy because there's this broad coalition that seems to be emerging right now. And I think, you know, I say that just a little skeptically. We'll see how that goes between left and right where people have decided that our policy around incarceration is bad. I don't think that'll be sufficient though. It's very, very similar to, you know, the conversation that, you know, we had, I would say, you know, around the civil rights movement. I ended up coming out of the civil rights movement. I don't say we all had that conversation, but came out and that is, if we stop doing what we did, everything will be okay after that. This is, was a disaster. And no matter what gets fixed after this, it will be a disaster for a long, long time. It will not be enough to just fix our policies. This was a moral, probably economic disaster for African-American families and for this country. And it won't be enough to just stop doing it. And that was like one of the big things, you know, I was trying to push in the piece. It's not enough to say, okay, you know, I've been kicking you in the head for the past 50 years. Now I stopped. Give me a medal, you know. We should all celebrate and have a holiday now. Now you got to fix things. You got to repair, you know. You got to, you know, bandage folks up and heal them. This, the African-American community has taken on, and I'm not even capable of, you know, quantifying this or, you know, qualifying this. I'm sure, you know, somebody who knew more could do it, but you can just feel it. Those of us who live in the community and walk around understand it. This has been a disaster and it won't be enough to just stop doing it, you know. There's going to have to be some sort of repair done. So let me ask a question because there's a statement in your piece that is almost anathema to what many of us grew up hearing and what we try to beat into our kids in terms of how achievement can uplift the race. I don't want to butcher your words, but you say something along the lines of the entrenched or the trenchant racism to which black people are subjected will not change or will not be eradicated by us becoming more respectable. Right, right. So it speaks to the systemic racism, right? That this is much bigger than us. It's not just a matter of us rebranding ourselves, right? Or coming up with some new image of black people. Black people 2.0. Yeah, exactly. We've tried that, by the way, several times. And we've done that. We have tried that. But I want to ask, I mean, and I do want us to get back to the bigger policy question. So just giving you a heads up, we are going to end with our top civil rights agenda points that you want the audience to take away. But I also want to talk on a very practical level. And maybe, Jonathan, this is a good one for you when we talk about Jim Crow wisdom and passing on messaging to the next generation. How do we get youth to buy into some level of personal responsibility, some inspiration, some sense that there is a future for them in the face of these systemic problems? How do we contextualize Jim Crow and the history of subjugation and discrimination in this country in a way that can still leave folks inspiring? If we hear Ta-Nehisi's comment, there's nothing we can do, right? I mean, we'll never be respectable enough. So how do you say, keep marching on, that there is still something that you can gain and there still is some way to uplift the race through achievement? So, since you want to head towards a policy conversation, I'm going to answer with a very non-policy thing. So this is, you know, you can say, he still didn't do it. I believe you need to have systemic changes and you need to have very non-quantifiable small changes. You know, these problems can be so overwhelming that you're like, I can't do anything about this. And so you just don't do anything about it. And since I'm so vested in narratives and storytelling, essentially, I think we owe it to our future to start talking, having conversations like this, talking to our children, talking to our nephews and nieces and explaining some things to them. And if we start having honest conversations, difficult conversations, conversations that aren't about heroes and villains, because I think everybody's the same center, but like, are just tough conversations, maybe we can teach our children to grow up. I mean, that they can actually have grown-up conversations because we just don't have them in this country. So tired of, you know, spin doctrine in 30-second news and, you know, reality TV, and I mean, all that stuff, it's a polite way of saying it. But, you know, I want to have like real honest to goodness conversations because if you start changing consciousness, you actually can get somewhere. Now, this is not a replacement. Let me be clear. It's not a replacement for the real need for also structural, economic, I mean, you need to have people get jobs, you need to have decent housing, you need to have decent healthcare, you need to have fundamentals. But if you also can't remember who you are in the process of doing it, it's just gonna come back again. It's gonna boomerang around again. And next time, it may not be black people, maybe, you know, pick your object that you want to pick on. We're gonna divide and conquer somehow. And we'll just keep doing it. So if we don't have small conversations, honest conversations, I don't care where they happen, frankly. It happened in a church, you can have it around the kitchen table, doesn't really matter to me. We're not gonna go anywhere. So I like to see people reading more. How about that? Reading is fundamental. Reading all kinds of things. I like to see them talking with one another more. And I want to see them turn off the television set. Or electronic world in which we live. TV doesn't really, well, laptop screens, all that kind of stuff. Why don't we interact with each other? I know this all sounds very squishy and soft, and it's not gonna change anything, but I can guarantee you if we don't do it, nothing's changing. If we don't find a way to convince people to get concerned about the quality of life around them, about the faces that they don't see, about the people who, like, your room is clean. How did your room get clean? Somebody cleaned it for you. If we can't find it about those people, we're sunk. I mean, if you remember, many of you won't remember, you weren't live, my God, we're getting older, but Jesse Jackson's convention floor speech in 88 in Atlanta, he started talking about all the people who clean your hotel rooms into the bedpans that took the early bus. You never saw that work their tails off, so you could be here and have a nice comfortable room, have a place to go if you're sick, and enjoy whatever convenience it is. If we don't tell their story, we're sunk. I mean, yeah, it'll be short-term success, but we're sunk. I mean, it is on teetering on fragile legs and it's gonna collapse. So I want to have a moment to open it up to questions shortly, but I am gonna ask each of you, what is on your new civil rights agenda? My? Yeah. Yes, what's at the top of that agenda? That's my name, that's my name. What's at the top of that agenda? Roll out the skull. Reparations, you know, reparations, and I, we're sick, right, and it's root level. And it's root level, it's root level, and it just keeps reproducing itself, and just to tie this back really quickly to this conversation about personal responsibility, which is, I'm not gonna say I make an argument against children not doing their homework, or a favorite of them not doing their homework. There certainly is a conversation about personal responsibility. I have with my son, there's been an ongoing conversation about personal responsibility in our communities and our places of worship, whatever we organize, probably from the moment we got here. That, you know, that has to be there. It's tough to say this, right? Because I think like there's a need, you know, and I don't know if this is like us as Americans, or if there's a human thing to believe that there's something that can be done when you don't have to depend on other people. And I think a lot of black people feel this need, you know, you don't wanna see your fate, your power over to other people. But at some point we made a choice to be Americans. And there's some things that come with that. And part of what comes with that is that we are we're in a minority. And there are people with a great degree of policy control over our communities. That doesn't mean we have to be hopeless, you know? That doesn't mean there's nothing that can't be done. What it does mean is I am skeptical of that being changed by going into communities and denigrating little black boys who idolized LeBron James. I don't think that's gonna get us there. I don't think the problem is, and I'm speaking to a larger thing here that I've been engaged in, I don't think the problem is that those young black boys idolized LeBron James. I think young boys across this country idolized LeBron James, be they black, white, or whatever. The problem is there is not enough going on in those communities that they idolized something besides that. Right. There's a lack of options, there's a lack of other things being seen. And then we have to ask the question of why that is. And regrettably, the most depressing thing in this world is that that takes us right back to policy. It's not an accident, you know? It's not a lack, and I'm just gonna say this, you know, I've lived around African-Americans, all my life I've been African-American, all my life, you know, whether I liked it or not. You know, and I just, I have not detected a lack of will, you know, among black people. That just has not been, you know, my perception. And, you know, going out into the world and being around white people, I have certainly not detected a superior will among white people at all in any respect. You know, in mediocre black people and mediocre white people, the problem is if you're black and mediocre, you could end up in jail. That's a policy problem right there. And so, you know, I don't wanna be depressing. You know, and I don't wanna say, you know, we shouldn't have these conversations about personal responsibility. We should, we are, we'll continue to. But, you know, just to, I'll give you where I'm coming from when I say, when the president of the United States, who is the author, you know, of American policy, who brings with them all the history of what America did, who is the representative of the American public, stands up before us and says that, you know, this is part of the solution. I have a problem with that. I have a problem with that. I have an issue with that, you know, because, you know, when you become president, you're not just a black man anymore. You know, you're still a black man. We recognize that as your private identity, but when you're standing in the White House, you're a public official, you should be held to account. I would have a problem for white president said that. And so, I'm just gonna tell you, you know, for all the energy I got in the world, I'm gonna push back on that. You know, I don't, again, I don't wanna denigrate the private conversations that we have that are essential to who we are, that are part of our humanity. But policy got us here. Policy got us here, not a lack of will. You know, we did not become enslaved because of a lack of will. We were not victimized by Jim Crow because of a lack of what? We were not redlined because of a lack of will. Policy got us here, and policy is the way out. Can we get ourselves out? And I wanna, as I ask you all to identify the civil rights issue on your agenda, how do we get there? I mean, I know there's this obviously concept of linked fate. I mean, you know, you made a very eloquent point that we're all in this together. It's so integrated and interlocked. But if really we have this pessimism, right, that our own respectability is not gonna get us there on our own, and we know these constructs did not just come out of thin air, that there's really some deliberation behind this. What is the solution? Can we get out of this on our own? Can I interrupt? Because there's no way I wanna go after the head of the NAACP. That's all. That's all. That's all. That's all. You know your strengths and weaknesses. I'm not going after them. I'll be very brief. Real jobs and real education. People can debate Ta-Nehisi and other people about reparations or even what I was just talking about conversation to the blue in the face. But if we don't find a way to give real jobs to this country, if you have a real job, you can do things. Now you may not be able to do everything. That's a different conversation. I'm talking about fundamentals. I mean just fundamentals. A real job. And because education is the world in which I live, a real education. Which looks like different things to different people I think. But like a real one. Not one for profit. Not when it leaves you with no skills, critical thinking skills or vocation skills that you can use. Real education, real jobs. Oh God, you set me up. I believe that, and this very much is consistent with I think both Jonathan and Ta-Nehisi's points, that the ability to make substantial change for black people in this country, for racial minorities in this country, will and must happen as a result of public policy. But we very often forget the word public. Racism in this country has now become wrapped in a language about public life. And the attack on public life is in my view what is choking the black community. If you think about all of the ways in which we have privatized elements of life that we thought of as public. Private prisons, private education, private transportation. It is the public apparatus, the robust public life that gives that chance that you're talking about. It's robust public education. It's public transportation that allows people to be able to get two jobs and allows them to be able to move around the public space. It's public space, parks, bike lanes, all that other stuff that allows us to interact with each other. It is taking responsibility for people who are the most powerless or the worst of these, which means public prisons. It's all of those pieces of public life that when they are strong allow people who have gotten this short end of the policy stick to be able to move their lives forward. And in my view the attack that we have been seeing, particularly over the last 25 years and it's growing in intensity, is an attack on public life in America. Every institution of public life is under attack. That's what you see on the top, but race is right underneath it, right underneath it. And so you're able to talk about public education and public school teachers and you're able to talk about all of these things without mentioning race. When we're in Maryland and we're having a debate about whether to raise the gasoline tax to pay for public transportation, everybody knows what that means. That means building a train in Baltimore, right? That's different than building the Intercontinental Connector Highway that's gonna get people from Washington DC to Montgomery County. People know what that means. So all of those words that signify public life and the reason why I'm saying this to you is because we are in New York and you have no idea what it is like in the rest of the country that does not have a robust public life. You're on the subway with each other all the time. You walkin' down the street, you went to Central Park and you watched the World Cup game, you go into the public theater and you did all this public stuff and you take it for granted and it's like air to you and you don't even notice it. You don't even notice it, but you don't notice what it is like in, yes, the Shelby counties and the Kilmichael, Mississippi's, but in the Baltimore, Maryland's, where the train goes 10 stops, it's not even a circle, it's just up and down. Up to Johns Hopkins and back down again. So I'm always talking about this woman who's standing at the bus stop in the nurses uniform who's got the job at Johns Hopkins that starts at seven o'clock. Yeah, she did leave her kids in the dark because we don't even have the transportation system that she's got a job, but that would allow her to get to that job in a ride in a car that would be 15 minutes. It's gonna take her an hour and a half because our bus system is still the maids route. It's gonna take her all over the city before it gets her to her job. So now she's left her kids, they have to go to school by themselves, maybe they didn't have breakfast, maybe she didn't check the homework, maybe they are bullied on the way to school, maybe they do something. And all the narratives is gonna happen that night on iNews is gonna be about what happened to her child that she left. It's not gonna have anything to do with the bus system or the lack thereof. That's the farthest thing from people's mind. But the public infrastructure that working class people need to be able to live their lives has been under relentless attack. I think we're at the point now where even voting is thought of as like welfare too. Like everything public is welfare. Everything public is welfare. So if I were gonna think through how to frame all of this, for me it is hitting at those places of public life that are so important. It is hitting at education. It is dealing with crime and the prison system. It is dealing with transportation and public services because every piece of transportation that you see is the result of a decision and an investment. And the investment was not private money, the investment was our money, it was public money. So we have the ability to make those investments differently. So for us, obviously, coin of the realm is voting, remains the coin of the realm because that's your indicia of citizenship and they're coming for that one. They want that one. So if they want it, it must be really important. You gotta have that. But you gotta deal with mass incarceration, which will, when we look back, be seen as kind of the human rights crisis of the 20th and 21st century. It will, there's no question about it. It will be absolutely, your grandchildren will say, well, what? Why are you kidding me? How did that happen? We must deal with public education because we must have a real opportunity for people to be able to get that thing that you get from America. You get your 12 years. You get your 12 years. And institutions of higher learning too. I'm the youngest of 10 kids. The ability to go to city college in the 1970s paid that $50 registration fee. Allowed my older siblings to be able to go to college. So we really have to be focused on all of these places of public engagement and public investment because that's our money. We have the right to be concerned about that. We have the right to the privatization of America. We have a right to be concerned about that. And understand that right underneath the conversation about the public and the private is race. Which is right underneath it. And it's covering up the robust conversation that you all are trying to push us to have. If you read Tana Hase's article, every decision that is in there that results in the kind of suffering that those individuals lived has to do with public policy and decision making at the public level. So before we open this up for questions, I'm actually gonna answer my own question. And I'm glad you raised the issue of voting. And I just wanna underscore that in my view, voting and elections, that is our most public of processes, that we need to protect. That gives us the entry point to make a difference in all these other levels. And Sherilyn alluded to this already, but voting rights are fundamentally under attack. This coming Wednesday, the Center Judiciary Committee is conducting a hearing on an amendment to the Voting Rights Act. And Sherilyn will be testifying, will be hosting a link on our site to watch that testimony live. And I hope you'll join us and do that. But it's critical that we as the public put pressure on those elected officials who can make the decisions to ensure that we get those protections back to protect the right to vote, to enable us to make these policy changes. We've been talking about policy. Policy doesn't just change itself. It comes through a political process and we have to be engaged in it in order to make that happen. So that is at the top of my civil rights agenda. And I would love to hear from you. We're gonna open up the floor for questions. And Tyler has the mic, so just raise your hand if you're interested in posing a question. We'll start over here. Hello. So one of the main questions that I always have coming from Texas is a suburb. I come from a conservative black family and I sent Tanasi's piece to a lot of people who I thought would think it was very relevant and interesting. And it was hard to get them to sit down and read it. And I realized that- It's long. They wouldn't have read it if it was any of the two words. It's just a struggle. It's not too long, but there's a... In the broader context of America, there's a lack of attention span. And so I get really frustrated because we sit here and have these amazing discussions. Public intellectuals have all these great ideas. And I just wonder when Kim Kardashian all of a sudden posts something about how racism is relevant because now she's married to Kanye West and millions of people have thought about it. I just think back to something a pastor of mine said, meet people where you are. And I wonder if you guys have an opinion on figuring out ways to meet Americans realistically where they are. Because I agree with what Jonathan said about getting people to sit down and read and talk to each other. But that's not what I see. And I'm frustrated by it, but I want to be realistic about it. So I just want to know what you guys think about that. Thank you. So two quick things. The first thing is I think we should all be aware of the limits of knowledge. Progressives often think if everyone had access to the right information, everything would be okay. It is very, very hard. What's that saying? It's very hard to get a man to realize something as paycheck, depends on if not knowing. It's very, very hard to get people to, you can't make them read that. It's not in your power. And I think that's the first thing to deal with. A level of personal frustration, people always ask me when I write, especially with a piece like that, well, what did you hope to happen? Well, I hope to figure out a problem for myself. After that, there's not too much you can do. You just can't make people want to know. And behind every bit of that public policy that Sheldon is talking about, this is the depressing thing. There is to some extent people who have been deluded into doing things against their own interests. But the fact that it might as in American history, white supremacy is an actual interest. It's an interest. And you can see people supporting it, even if you want to say it's a short-term interest. It's an interest that people actively support. So I think we have to be realistic about that fact. Everybody isn't going to want to know. At the same time, I believe you would have optimistic, no, I'm not gonna be a total coward. At the same time, I'll just speak, and I hope I'm not embarrassing anybody at the Atlantic by saying this, but I think I can say this. You make a decision to put reparations on the cover. And you make a decision to put no pictures on the cover. And you make a decision to put all text on the cover. You're not expecting it to sell out. That's not, you know, you're kind of taking one for the team with that one. You're thinking, hey, you know what? We really should just do this. You know, like, I mean, everybody was happy about it journalistically, right? Like everybody was like, yeah, this is really cool. But, you know, this ain't the one you're gonna sell out on. But it did. But it did. And the last, I heard the last sales figures we had, we had already sold out and we hadn't even gotten the newsstand numbers yet. We had only just on bonds. You know, we had basically sold out, you know, more than the issue from this time last year. You can't find it on the newsstands. I mean, this is absolutely incredible. And it was like that right away. We were doing some stuff with MSNBC and Joey really was doing the piece. He said, look, I went all over Brooklyn looking for this. And I can't find it. You know, this was like right after it came out and I had black folks come up to me. You know, I bought 10 and five, you know, MSNBC is trying to get one, but I'm not giving them 400 and people writing me, yo, you got to hook up. Can you say like three of those out? I'm not even joking. Like I got the text messages in, I'll show it to you. Like people like just straight up, like trying to, that like has to be a good thing. You know, like that is the optimism. I think a lot of us have just really, really taken heart, you know, from that. So why, at the same time, you can't make people know. There is an appetite to know. You know, there is a number of people in this country really do want to know things. The number of people who've just come up to me, you know, with, and you know, showing we talked about this, they've just come up to me. I mean, white people and they just say, I had no idea. I just didn't know, you know. And for a person like me who can be center coin, you know, kind of cold hearted about the writing and about our future, it has been heartwarming. You know, and it has been enlightening that there is, you know, a group of people in this country, a number of people in this country who are concerned and do want to know. Well, you can say what you want about the cover. The cover is incredible. It's compelling. And it's powerful and compelling without pictures. We all thought it was, but you know, like selling is a different thing. We thought it looks good, but we didn't know. Thank you to all our panelists. I also wanted to thank Sherlyn for talking about public life and recovering public life. I think that's a really important theme that really runs through all of these conversations. So I just came back from a conference in Detroit called the Allied Media Conference. And it's a conference that is primarily attended by people in Detroit, mostly queer youth of color. And my question somewhat relates to our previous questioner, but maybe in a different sense. And I was hoping that the panelists could really address this question of how do we engage young people in these debates and these questions? Because what I witnessed in Detroit was amazing, right? There was a huge push for talking about things like disinvesting in our cities, which is a very important topic in Detroit, about how that relates to race and empire, really thinking through the historical markers in our racial history. But at the end of it, I also heard, and these are young people that are very technologically engaged. They're always using their gadgets and they're talking about these issues. But at the end of the day, one of the things that I heard is we don't trust the rule of law. We want to build our own systems and our own communities. We don't believe in the system of democracy. And I'm wondering if you can address that. Hmm, sure. Well, so I would say quickly, there are so many conversations happening among so many young people right now that I'm not surprised by what you're saying. I actually just was saying this the other day. It's the million hoodies had their conference and freedom side is meeting this week. And there are so many groups of young people who are completely engaged and they are studying. They want to know. They are educating themselves about the history of this country and it's extraordinary. I think that young people should feel that way. In other words, I think young people should be mistrustful. SNCC was mistrustful of King and the SCLC and that's the way it should be. And there should be that push and pull. After Trayvon Martin was killed, I was going to the bank with my daughter. It was maybe six or seven months later and she had her hoodie on and we were going into the bank. She was gonna get some money out. And I just said, very, didn't even think about it. I said, you know, take your hood off before we go into the bank. And she said, no. And I thought, what do you, you know, take it on, going into the bank. It's a respectable place. She said, I'm going to get my money. And it's cold and I'm keeping my hold on. Now, you know, my thought as her parent, right, is that I don't want her, I don't want any trouble, right? You know, and I'm a civil rights lawyer, right? But I'm going to, you know, saying, take your hood off. And she's saying something different. I mean, the whole thing about the hoodie saying was actually, I mean, this was not grown people who was saying, you know, let's take the pictures with the hoodies or million hoodies and all that stuff. That was young people because they were saying something more than we were saying. We were saying, of course, that stand your ground is terrible, that you killed this child, we were saying all the things that you could have made, but they were saying something else. They were saying, also, I don't have to be respectable. I don't have to dress a certain way. I get to be who I am and get to walk on the street. And that's what the hoodie represented. It represented an articulation of themselves as citizens of this country, as people in this country. So young people should always be saying something different than we're saying. That doesn't trouble me at all. I think the problem is, what does trouble me is when that becomes like some kind of competition. So I am not one of the people of my now generation, sadly, who tries to convince young people that they should see it my way. I just don't think, I mean, I have to learn too, right? Just like my daughter kept her hood on. And I'm like, yeah, why can't you keep a, why did I tell her take it off, right? So I don't think that's a competition. And I think sometimes when we're in the same space together, when I'm at conferences, there's like a thing where somebody's trying to convince the other side. I just think, I don't, you know, I'm very, I'm very mindful of just the process of maturation, the good and the bad of it, right? The good of it in that you learn how to be strategic and you learn how to play the long game and you know, all the things that maturation gives you and the bad of it and that takes some of your boldness away and you take, you know, one of the best things that I found when I was researching my book was a petition signed in 1933 by 19 lawyers, 13 lawyers, all asking for reparations. Literally that's what they were asking for, for lynchings. And they were basically saying that the local town should have to pay for the sheriff not protecting the victim. And it was $20,000 for this and $20,000 for that and the property damage. It was signed by 19 lawyers. And the last lawyer who signed it, it was very young and only two years out of law school was Thurgood Marshall. Now I'm sure in 1972 you'd ask Thurgood Marshall to sign a petition about reparations and you'd say, well, probably not, right? I mean, you know what I mean? So that is natural, that is what is supposed to happen. And I think that, you know, we shouldn't worry so much about, I mean, the difficult periods are the dry periods, but there are waves. That's why your article sold out. There are waves when people wanna know, when people are onto something. The 2008 economic crisis, as devastating as it has been to this country, you know, people started to see the strings of America and it made people wanna know. We're in a time of curiosity. And so we're on a wave and when that wave comes because it does leave, you have to have your stuff together to go with that wave. You know, when you're coming into the shore and you gotta come with the wave. So that's our job. Our job is to get our ducks in a row so that when people are ready to know, you know, Ta-Nehisi like rolls it out, you know what I mean? And there it is, right? And now the question is, so now he's rolled it out and some people have read it, not all, but some. And now, so now people wanna know now what? And now it's my job, you know, like now, so what do we do about housing? So what do we, so that's the, it's catching the wave and then building on it and recognizing that then you go back and it retrenches again, it retrenches again. But these waves will come. They will come. So even though this new civil rights agenda is very much faced in the historical struggle of African-Americans, how do you think that new alliances with other racial and minority groups can play a role in the struggle moving forward? I've been sitting like a bump on a log, so I'll take that. One of you said earlier at some point, I forget. I mean, there's a long history, structural, it's policy, but also we're talking about human beings. And human beings get hungry and they need shelter and they need clothes and they need jobs. I think if we start to recognize alliances are there, are in that space, is that we all know what it feels like to be picked on. Everybody does. If we're honest, most of us know what it feels like to pick on somebody else as well. If we can find ways to recognize that helping, like what is it, a rise going in the water theme, a rising tide lifts all boats. And now, that's easy to say. The trick is, is that I'll keep it crude and simplistic. Our own self-described ethnic groups are not free of our own ethnic presuppositions. That there is lots of tensions between historically, like in Los Angeles, Korean shop owners and the black community that they largely served. There are lots of tensions between blacks and Latinos who are taking their jobs in quotes in different places. So there's a lot of heavy lifting to go on that has nothing to do with the man in a sense. It's about getting past your own ethnic particularisms and racisms and ethnocentrisms. I wonder, I don't, it's an honest wondering, thinking about the youth of today. Are they different? And I just don't know. I don't know. The historian in me says, sooner or later, that sucker punch is coming. But I don't wanna take the possibility of a different kind of future way from younger generations. That's their role, frankly, to prove us wrong. And so I do wonder if it's possible to be hopeful about cross-racial, cross-ethnic alliances in a way that it's harder for me to understand in a practical sense. I'm not answering the question, I just wonder it openly. I don't know if anybody else has any thoughts on that. Well, I mean, I would say we, certainly, I, having been a voting rights lawyer for such a long time, it feels very natural to me because that's the way we've always worked. We've always had these very close alliances with Mexican-Americans and Asian-Americans in fighting for voting rights. And we're very often litigating cases together. The very first case I litigated in Texas was with Lulac, the League of United Latin American Citizens. And so I'm always seeing, frankly, this work together. And it feels very natural and organic. It doesn't feel tense, actually. But that's not to say that tensions don't exist, but I see it happening very naturally. I think what I find interesting, and I can't speak for young people because I have three daughters who were young, and so I see their lives, and their lives are certainly much more ethnically dynamic than mine was growing up, even though I was raised in New York City and went to a very ethnically diverse school and so forth. But to me, I think it is figuring out how to invest everyone in the idea of that future that I think all young people should feel that they can possibly have. I mean, I think one of the scariest things that's happening in this country right now is the sense among many young people that like, it may not happen. Like, I may not get to where I may not get that job. I may not be in a situation where I'm solvent for most of my adult life. I think it's kind of joining together around a set of principles about what we want this country to be that's gonna create that set of alliances. And I think there are just places and issues around which it's already happening. And as I said, happens actually quite organically in some particular civil rights spaces really and has without interruption for decades. When I was first beginning to even teach in this area and beginning to teach civil rights law and even teaching a seminar on reparations, which I did for two years, I always did it with a kind of circle around the whole community in the US. There was always, we came frankly to African-Americans last because I knew that's what people expected. So we did the Japanese-American internment, we did Native Americans, we did international stuff, we came to that last because then it made them have to hold off on what they thought they knew. So I think that there are ways we can be very intentional about making sure that the gaze is not only on African-Americans but really is towards the entire community. Hi, I wanted to ask, especially given that half the panel or lawyers slash law professors, whether you see any possibilities for using the law, not just all the policy and conversation and social stuff we've been talking about but using the law through litigation, et cetera, to try and accomplish anything. But some of this, obviously the current Supreme Court is a challenging site for these kinds of issues for all the reasons that you've talked about but whether in state courts, lower courts, et cetera, what are the possibilities in that direction and how do you guys see that? Yes and yes, yes. Several of my lawyers are right here litigating cases and we don't lose all of them. Yeah, you know, it's so interesting. People talk all the time about the Supreme Court and how conservative they are and that is true. I am not actively trying to get any case to this Supreme Court, right? So that is not the place of progress for us. However, I worry less about, I worry less about, it's kind of cool and jazzy though, I like it. I like it, no, it's kind of cool. It's time for the party. You know, I worry less about, and I say this to my lawyers all the time, I worry less about the current Supreme Court being so conservative and I worry more about whether when the court changes and it will, because it always does, whether we have anything teed up that's gonna do what a Brown did. What have we been working in the lower courts? Winning and losing, experimenting, that when it changes, we're ready to really move the needle. That worries me, that keeps me up night. It's not worrying about Scalia and Thomas and all that because it always does change. I remind people all the time that, Brown versus Board wasn't gonna be Brown versus Board until Chief Justice Vincent had a heart attack in between the first and second oral arguments. And President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren, who nobody expected. So, I'm not wishing ill on anybody on the Supreme Court, I'm just saying, I'm not, I'm really not. I'm just saying, it changes, right? But your job is to be there, is to have laid the foundation and have done, have created the theory, developed the strategy, begun that litigation, whether it's in the state courts, or where you're beginning just as Marshall and his team did over 20 years, they didn't just wake up and litigate Brown, it was 20 years. And then the moment was right, and then there's a wave again. So, that's what worries me. It's like, are we in that space where we're creating that thing so when the moment turns, we're ready to really do something that's gonna change this country? Because Brown wasn't everything, but it certainly changed this country. Thank you. I think you all spoke about very interesting points. And looking at my challenge is the new generation today lives, and I agree with that we forget, and I think it's institutionalized. When we think about institutionalized prisons, some of these prisons are offering the basic amenities that they can't find at home. So you get three meals and healthcare in prison. So it's probably a better choice. Not for long. And when all you look at all these things, when you have all these young people today who will look up to Kardashian and to all these other role models where you are talking about us giving them a different new option today. How do we take this conversation beyond you here and take it and bring up this new option, new face, new conversation to the young people so that LeBron James is not only the option that it's only basketball or it's only sports, but it is good to be intellectual. It's good to aspire. How do we move that conversation beyond here and start bringing up the new voice, the new young people who can connect to them? I just, and I'm being just a little contrary on this. I think kids are all right. I think we've got a lot of worry about kids. And that's natural. I'm not trying to disrespect anybody by saying it's natural that we worry about young people. But I see very little evidence that this generation is, look, every generation will have a specific challenge. Let's be really clear about that. Mass incarceration is a specific thing, that another generation. But I'm much more worried about the adults. I'm much, much, much more worried about the adults and it's very hard at this point. And listen, I'm just speaking for myself. But at this point after the conversation that I've been engaged in over the past month or so, over reparations to say that the conversation is just here, I was just down in DC. I spoke at two high school graduations for young people in schools in Southeast DC, Anacostia area. Folks were very, very excited. It was not a bunch of eggheads sitting around. And once I got done, you know what they wanted to talk about? They wanted to talk about reparations as soon as I got done talking. So, you know, it's very weird, because I'm used to being a pessimist. One thing I'm not pessimistic about is the will and the intellectual curiosity of young people today. I know it's a different world. I know you have Facebook and all these little things and gadgets and people, 100 channels or 200 or 300 channels that we didn't have when I was a kid. But, you know, I can remember being a kid and people saying the very same thing about us. You know, and the very same thing about me. And, you know, I was a big like comic book reader. It was all I wanted to read when I was a kid and people saying, well, what are you gonna do with that? You know, how are you gonna change the world with that with those comic books? You know, I just think while we should be very concerned about our young people, I really think we gotta watch that. You know, I watch ourselves is what I mean. You know, I just, I don't see much evidence. That they're any less engaged or, you know, any less intelligent or any less curious than my generation was. We have time for one more question. I'll get you right here. She's easy, she's right there. I have a question about public policy and intersection of that with economic development because often their address was like separate spheres but they seem pretty connected. And I'm curious, I write it on business and technology and there's this whole wave of entrepreneurship and efforts to get people to start their own businesses and especially in tech but there's also a sense that it's left black people or minority communities behind that they're not being able to tap into that. So I'm curious if you've done any efforts around that or what you think you could do to address that because you mentioned real jobs being an issue and what we can do to build up economic development in the community. I'm really very curious, but I don't have the answer. I'm very curious about it actually. I mean, Ta-Nehisi and I were on a panel in DC a month or so ago and we were talking about the differential and the persistent differential in wealth between whites and blacks, right? And just what happened in 2008 as a result of the housing crisis, right? Which was that what America learned the secret that black people did know which was that middle class status for black people is quite precarious, right? Most black people who purport to be in the middle class are actually like white knuckle middle class they're holding on like this and the loss of three paychecks pretty much does it. It's salary middle class. And the lack of accumulated wealth, the lack of ability for your parents to help you start that business, for example, to help you get the capital or to co-sign that loan for you to have sufficient credit to help you get that loan for your business and so forth is to me part of this whole issue of like how we develop an economic engine in our own communities because without the accumulation of wealth, we now live in a society where and I fear that this is where we're headed. We do this litigation now around employers using criminal background checks to keep people from employment, right? Something that shows up from when you were 18 and it's 20 years later. But we're also looking at the issue of credit and using credit checks to keep people from employment, right? So we're fast becoming a society in which if people who have credit people who don't have credit, right? Which might be another way to think about kind of how our society is stratified. So the ability to have credit, to have wealth is and again, by wealth I don't mean rich, right? I mean just wealth, which is the accumulation of something that allows you to make those steps into the business world. I think it's really part of what is harming our ability within our own communities to generate business and independent employment. And I'm very kind of curious about how we interface in this area. We have an economic justice team and we spend a lot of time talking about like how do we interface in that place to deal with what I see as that ongoing issue? It is still true that for white families when their parents pass on, they inherit something and for black families when their parents pass on they get debt, right? That there is still this way in which we're not developing that cushion that actually allows you to make that step forward. Everything is just kind of on the day and sometimes 30 days late, right? Everything is, you're waiting for that paycheck. Everything is just kind of right to the day. And as we could see from 2008 when 25% of African Americans either lost their home to foreclosure or ended up in foreclosure proceedings, you basically wiped out a generation of progress in the middle class. So your point is very well taken. It's something that's very much on my mind. I don't have the answer yet, but it's something I'm quite interested in. I just really, I just want to piggyback on it. The important thing to understand about that is that this is not, as you said, this is not like natural sort of like the wealth gap. This is not like, well, Nero's a bad with money. You know, it's not, like there were policies that happened, that happened, right? And then continuing to happen today, right? You know, the great example is, why do we live where we live, right? We have actual housing policy that put black people in certain neighborhoods. Well, when the era of subprime mortgages came about and folks were looking for people who might be susceptible to take out loans, they didn't just look at credit check. They didn't just look at, you know, who could, you know, what down payment you can make. They didn't just look at, you know, what you had in the bank assets. They looked at race. And we know this. I mean, we have, you know, a barrage of studies that now shows that you control for everything. Folks were specifically looking at race as a way to exploit people. Why were they doing that? Because we African-Americans are the most segregated community in this country, okay? If you were looking for a pool of people who are exploitable, guess what? They all live in like a five block radius right there. They're all like a fish in a bell right there, just waiting to be shot. You can just go at, it made it, it made exploitation, it made plunder efficient. And it was our inability to deal with the past. You know, to say, okay, well, we're gonna take down the white only signs now and everything will be okay after that. You know, it was the willingness to, you know, speak a policy of integration, but not actually do the hard work of desegregation. And we will continue to pay for that. We'll, so this wealth gap, they're showing, they're talking about, when you talk about African-Americans having, you know, 120th of a wealth or something like that, whatever the number is, of white families. I had a guy who came into our Atlantic offices a couple weeks ago and he showed us a map of a city and you could see where they had been building affordable housing. And all the affordable housing was exactly in the same area where they had been redlining and exactly where they had been black. You know, look, nobody's against affordable housing, right? Everybody wants affordable housing. But why are you only building it in one area? What's that about? And what's the impact on other people who are living there and are trying to build up equity, trying to build up wealth? When they alone have to shoulder the burden it is. So this is a policy conversation that is ongoing today right now. The wealth gap, it's not magic, you know? It's the exact result that should happen if you look at what our policy has been towards African-American communities. So on that note, on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the New America Foundation, I wanna invite you to continue that conversation over wine and snacks. We'll be in this space for a little while longer. But before you do that, please join me in thanking our guests today. Thank you.