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Hello thank you for joining us today, first I would like to take a moment to thank the sponsors who made it possible for Western Oregon University,

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To bring Tim Wise to our campus. The University Diversity Committee, Dr. Mark Girod, dean of College of Education,

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Dr. Gary Dukes VP of student affairs, and Dr. Rex Fuller Western Oregon University President, please help me thank them.

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Applause. 

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Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist, writers and educators in the United States. 

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He's lectured internationally in Canada and Bermuda on comparitive racism, race in education, 

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and racism in the labor market. He's the author of seven books, including his latest "Under the Affluence, Shaming the Poor Praising the Rich and Jeopardizing the Future of America"

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Wise has provided antiracism training to teachers nation wide. 

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And has conducted trainings with physicians and medical industry professionals.  

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on how to combat racial inequities in healthcare. 

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He has also trained cooperate, government, entertainment, military and law enforcement officials on methods on dismantling racism in their institutions. 

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Wise has appared on hundreds of radio and television programs, 

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Is a regular contributor to discussions on race on CNN 

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And has been featured on ABC's 20/20. 

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Tim gradated from Tulane University in 1990 and received antiracism training from the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, in New Orleans. 

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During the question and answer portion of Tim's presentation, if you have questions, 

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We ask that you please use the microphone which is located right up here in the front. 

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This will ensure that everyone in the audience can hear you. 

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After the presentation and the question answer portion, Tim Wise will have books available for book signing and book sales at the back of the room. 

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Please help me in welcoming Mr. Tim Wise. 

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Applause. 

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This is really healthy size audience, extra credit is a serious commodity as Western Oregon University. 

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No shame in that, I know how it is, I was a college student once. Extra credit is good I don't care. 

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Whether you're here for that or whether you're here because these are the issues that get you out of bed in the morning. Either way we're all in the room together, 

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It's only ten after four in the afternoon, I can't fathom there's there anything else going on in Monmouth that you'd might want to do this evening. 

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I'm not trying to be cruel I'm just saying it's 4. I'm sure it really gets kicking around 9, you know. 

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It's ten after 4, you might as well hang out and we'll spend about an hour together and then I will release you to do whatever it is that you do. 

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It is really good to be back at Western Oregon, and I will say that even though my guess that even the folks who organized my visit this time don't realize that I've been here before. 

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Most people would not realize that I've been here before it has been a long time, and it was a far smaller crowd. 

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Than this, it was actually October of 1995, so almost 20 years ago to the day, maybe a week or two away from that. 

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And I was brought over here by a professor at Willamette where I'd been speaking the night before and he said "Oh you know, I do a class over a Western Oregon" 

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I don't remember this professor's name by the way. This individual could still be here and if so, raise your hand and I'll totally recognize you. 

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I mean I wont recognize you, but I'll call you out and say "Yeah, that's the guy, whatever." 

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And he said "You know, I teach a class and we've got this class this evening, and why don't you come over." So I did, 

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So we made the drive, you know, from Willamette and came over here and I spoke to about 11 people. So I think that this is progress, this is good. 

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Sort of what you want to see. It would have really sucked to come back two decades later and have like 8 people.

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And then my ego would be horribly bruised and I would crawl up into a corner and cry or something, I don't know. 

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Anyway, its good to be here. And it's interesting to be back after twenty years. 

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Because when you come to place after a period such as that it's probably not just me, but any speaker, 

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And particularly on a subject like the issue of race, racism, and racial inequality in America

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Would feel compelled, as I do, to at least for a minute engage in something of a retrospective of what that twenty years has brought us.

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In term of this subject. Because when you've been at this kind of work for that period, and I'm sure there are many others in this room

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Who have talked about and taught about and been active on issues of racial equality for at least that long.

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Several of you probably even longer than that. 

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It makes sense that you would look back and ask the question "What has changed and what has largely remained the same" 

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And I think in both of those categories there are a number of entries that we might 

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discuss. In some ways I don't think it's hard to imagine, 

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that a lot of things have changed in that twenty years. On the one hand, the nation's attention to matters 

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of race and racial inequality and one might even say racial tension, I would suggest that the nation's attention as intensified. 

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For a number of reasons. First of all of course, during that period of time, in the last eight years, we've seen the election of a man of color as president of the United States and in the push back, 

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that came with that, some of which was that was race related, others of which was pure politics but without question,  

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That has intensified our acknowledgement of a racial divide in the country.  Whether we're talking about the actual election results, who voted for whom and why.

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Or the way in which that election has been responded to my millions of people, I should point out, that just because the election of a man of color,

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as president intensified our attention to matters of race is not the same as suggesting, and make no mistake, that we have as a result of that election have obtained 

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this place this vaunted location that we refer to a post racial America. And though I shouldn't have to say that,

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After seven years of this individual's political prominence in our country, I guess I do because there are those still around this nation whom I meet,

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Who want to suggest to me that the conversation that you've come to here this evening, isn't one that we have to have anymore. Precisely because of the election of a man of color as president. 

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In fact that discussion, that conversation, that kind of comment began the day after his election in 2008. Before he'd even been inaugurated, I woke up the next morning

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at about 6, I hadn't slept much. I had been up watching election returns, and I get up around 6 in the morning, 

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hadn't even had the first cup of coffee, I open up my email and there is this entirely unhinged email and I knew it was going to be crazy. 

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Because it was all capital letters, and it was in red font. 

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Which means this is not going to be a rational conversation. By the way, if I piss any of you off tonight such that you feel the need to write me with angry and hostile commentary, 

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You can take the caps lock off sweetheart and just write me in black font. I'll still read it, in fact I'll be more likely to read it if you do it that way, just so you know so, 

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just be angry in normal way, in a normal color of print, okay? 

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Because this person this writes to me the day after the election and says "ha ha ha" oh ha ha ha it's 6am I haven't had coffee why are you e-laughing at me? 

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e-screaming at me, and he says "I guess you're going to have to find a new hustle now" 

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Right, because Barak Obama had been elected and this work against racism is obviously just my hustle. 

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This is what I was thinking to myself at the age of 22, when I was trying to figure out what am I going to do with my life, what is going to be my hustle. 

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How am I going to get my hustle on, and then it came to me, oh yes oh yes oh yes, the best possible hustle I could have is to fight white supremacy, because that always works out. 

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So well for those who decide to take that on as a vocation, that always one brings one fame and fortune and lots and love and adoration and never violence or hatred so, 

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By all means let me do that hustle, but that was his implication, was that those of us who speak out against racism really didn't have a job to do anymore because the election, 

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of a man of color demonstrated at least to his satisfaction if not mine, that racism must be ended for how could such a person as that be elected to the highest office in the land. 

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if racism was still a thing? Oh I don't know, let's process it for a minute shall we? 

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It's really not that complicated, and you are all in college, which means an institution of higher learning which means this should not be a difficult lesson. 

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I don't know, perhaps racism can remain a problem even in a place such as this with a man of color as president for the same reason that 

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I'm guessing that sexism and the patriarchal oppression of women, still are operative in Pakistan despite the election of Benazair Bhutto, a woman, not once but twice. 

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As the head of state in that Country. I'm guess that the women in this room know better than to believe that at the end of this talk their best bet would be to go back to their 

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residence hall, or their apartment, or their home and pack their bags and move to Karachi. 

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Just so as to take advantage of equal opportunity that will certainly await them. 

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As the result as Pakistan having has a head of state who was a woman. 

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I'm just guessing. 

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Applause. 

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I'm guessing that we would know that the election of an individual from an otherwise marginalized group says absolutely nothing in an of itself. 

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About the treatment of others from that group. See we know that. 

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About women in Pakistan, despite Benazair Bhutto's two time election. By the way she is since been assassinated so that lets you know how much some folks love her.  

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I imagine that we also know that sexism has not been eradicated in Israel, or India or Great Britain or the Philippines, or Ireland, all of which have had females heads of state. 

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See, the individual accomplishments from otherwise 

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marginalized groups doesn't tell us anything in and of itself. 

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About the larger structural experience. And we know that and in every one of those examples no one would even argue the point. 

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But in this country, I am to believe at 6 in the morning after the election of a man of color that ha ha ha the hustle has been blown up.  And those of us who talk about 

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race and civil rights must find new work. 

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So the election of that individual of color has certainly brought out some of this. 

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And now our attention has been focused on it for the last seven or 8 years, we also now also see, relative to 20 years ago 

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An intensified, a renewed hostility and aggression towards new immigrants, but only those from south of the United States border. 

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Never from the North. The minutemen never ever seen to camp out on the Canadian border worried that sneaky Canadians will be coming across, 

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trying to take advantage of our superior healthcare system, because that would be crazy, why would the do that? 

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The minutemen never camp in little dinghies and boats off the coast of Nova Scotia trying to keep the crafty Canadians from sneaking into the country, it's only 

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those from south of the Unites States border, a border by the way artificially created as the result as the war of aggression begun by this country on false pretense. 

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Now I know that's not what they told you in your high school history text book, but that's what went down. 

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So when Mexican folk come back here, let me be clear, they are coming home. 

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Just so you know. 

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Applause. 

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Oh I know we don't want to hear that, I know we don't want to hear that, I know we don't want to hear that. Coming home? My goodness, no no no. 

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We won the war, might makes right, we had better guns, we had more power, we jacked your stuff, now it is ours. 

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Imagine the morality of that if were to come to your house, put all your shit on the street, and then you were to say "Can I come back in?" 

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And I was like "Nope, changed the lock." 

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Alright, that's what some say, "I'm going to build a wall like you wouldn't believe" What the hell is a wall that I would not believe? 

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What is that? I ask of those enamored of a certain candidate who likes to say he's going to do that? What is a wall that I wouldn't, you know that only wall I wouldn't believe, 

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I wouldn't not believe a wall made of butter, that is what I wouldn't believe, so is Donald Trump purposing that we should build a wall of butter?  Because if so, I totally do not believe that. 

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I don't believe that that is possible. I do not believe that that will keep anyone out. If he's talking about a wall of bricks, I would believe it but I know that Donald Trump wont build it, 

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because I know that Donald Trump has never built anything. You know who Donald Trump has builds stuff? Latino folk, including undocumented Latino folks. 

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Who build his casinos and build his office buildings and build his hotels.

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Applause. So we don't have to worry about Donald Trump building nothing. Donald Trump inherited ten million dollars from his daddy and then went around hustling up like a slum

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lord publicly subsidized publicly financed housing

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shaking down poor people for rent, that's how he made his fortune.

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Let us be clear and now I will get trolled on Twitter by Donald Trump and I 

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could not have one more shit to give, I will just let you know.

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Laughter.

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Oh we're only ten minutes in it gets better. Laughter.

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So, we have all this heightened attention 

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to immigrants we will talk more about that in a minute and why that is so wrong headed, I'm not just going to snark

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Donald Trump though it is fun. I'm not just here to entertain, I will in fact discuss this in a 

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much more erudite and scholarly way in just a few seconds. But introductions are for having a little bit of a good time.

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We also see a renewed intensified attention to issues of race as a result of the disproportionate killing of 

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persons of color, male and female not just black but also Latino and Indigenous 

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Native North American folk by law enforcement over the past several years. We'll talk more about that.

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But even as a lot of things have changed in that twenty years, including those things that I just mentioned, on the other hand a lot of things have remained the same.

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And it's important that we're clear about that as well. As was true then so to now 

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it appears to me that the dominant majority in this country, those of us called white,

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not all of us called white, but the disproportionate number of those who are called that,

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and who identify as that, are still unwilling

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as we have long been, to confront honestly the ongoing reality 

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of racism in America. The ongoing barriers faced by our brothers and sisters of color.

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And just as was true then so to now, we do not seem to be any more  committed 

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to equity and true democracy than was the case in the mid 1990's. The vast majority of those 

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called whites seem to continue to insist as we have for decades 

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literally for generations that people of color have fully equal opportunity in America 

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in employment, education, and housing and even treatment within the criminal justice system so that if they find themselves behind it must be their fault.

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And in fact, according to a survey taken 

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by folks at Harvard just a couple of years ago. Apparently, not only do we think that 

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people of color have equal opportunity we seem to think they have more of it

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than we do. This study done by folks at Harvard found that we white folks 

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are convinced that we're the ones who are the victims of invidious 

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discrimination, that we're the ones who can't find jobs, is what they say.

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Because all the jobs are going to black and brown folks. Really?

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Really? Where are all these jobs that black and brown people are taking from white folks? Are they 

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in a second life? Where in the hell are these jobs? Are they on Minecraft?

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Where exactly are these jobs because 

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in the real world, the world that the labor department surveys every month 

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and therefore the actual one as opposed to the one that we make up in our 

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fevered imaginations, people of color are twice as likely as white folks 

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to be unemployed. So if in fact black and brown folks are taking the jobs, they ain't taking them far. 

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They're taking them like a block and then dropping them like a hot potato because they are still twice as likely as we are to be out of work.

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And that is true even when they have the same education and experience as we do. So for instance, according to the labor department,

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African American folks with a 

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college degree, who did everything right, stayed in school, did what we said 

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to do, had the right value system, the right work ethic, all the right stuff that we like to lecture about.

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That black folks with a college degree still twice as likely than white folks with a degree to be unemployed even when their major is the same as white folks.

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Latino folks with a degree, about 50-55% more likely than white folks with a degree to be out of work.

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Asian Americans with a degree about 25-35% more likely than white folks with a degree to be unemployed.

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This is especially true for younger, newer graduates. Those of our

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Indigenous brothers and sisters, Native North American folks with a degree, about two-thirds more likely than white folks with a degree to be unemployed. 

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Which is to say that those who believe that people of color have even equal treatment 

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would be wrong. To think that they have better treatment and that it is we who are white who face discrimination as to 

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invert reality all together and yet the survey data suggests that we sincerely believe that.

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But again there is simply no evidence. Not only in the labor market but anywhere else.

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There are those who say, "Well if I was just black I would have gotten into Harvard."

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Yeah, okay. Here's the thing.

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If you'd have been black, you'd have been black for all eighteen years before you even applied to Harvard, precious.

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Which means that you would have been twice as likely to be in a family with unemployed parents, three times as likely to be poor, one-twentieth the net worth,

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You'd of had twice the likelihood of dying in infancy before you even went to preschool, let alone college. That is to say that to believe that somehow we who are white are better 

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off were we people of color is only something you could believe if you ignored every single day for the 18 years 

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before you actually applied for college and then 

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supposedly got this bump, supposedly got this advantage, an advantage 

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which I should point out has brought us to a place today where even today only 12 percent

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of college students at the nation's most elite schools are black or Latino combined.

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The idea that people of color are taking all of the quote on quote top college slots from white folks once again 

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is completely untrue. In fact, white students are more likely than any other group of students to get into their first choice college. And that has been true consistently 

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year in and year out, this year, ten years ago, twenty years ago.

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If you didn't get into Harvard it's because some richer, white kid whose daddy has better connections got their kid into Harvard, trust me 

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when I tell you that the anger is misplaced and yet we're being encouraged to believe

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that when we lose out on stuff it's because of those brown folks. That's what Donald Trumps whole

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political message is. A rich white man trying to tell working white class people 

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that there enemy is other working class people who just so happen to have darker color skin than themselves. Fascinating. 

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A rich white dude saying, "Pay no 

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attention to Oz behind the curtain, it ain't me 

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it ain't no body like me, it's not the companies run by rich white folks 

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who sent the jobs to Mexico, or sent the jobs to Sri Lanka, or sent 

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the jobs to Guatemala, or sent the jobs to Bangladesh, it's those damn 

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Bangladesh-ie workers who took the jobs.

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That is not how the global economy works, no no it's not.

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But we get mad at those at the bottom and not those at the top and 

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we act as if those at the top are right when they tell us to hate one another.

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Instead of thinking about the larger system. 

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The reason folks aren't finding jobs it's not because of affirmative action, it's not because of immigration, it's because we have an economy that 

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two people out of work for every job opening in this country. And that's almost always how it is. During the recession it was actually eight to one.

00:21:19.000 --> 00:21:24.000
Eight people out of work for every job but you want to blame unemployed people for being on unemployment insurance?

00:21:24.000 --> 00:21:31.000
You want to blame poor folks for relying on public assistance when there's only one job for every eight people who need one?

00:21:31.000 --> 00:21:38.000
In certain urban communities and rural communities that are white on the back end and black and brown on the front end 

00:21:38.000 --> 00:21:47.000
there might be as many as ten people out of work, even 14 people out of work in certain communities for every job that pays above the poverty line.

00:21:47.000 --> 00:21:50.000
And that's the problem, it's not brown folks poaching jobs.

00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:58.000
Black folks poaching jobs, poor people taking advantage, it's about an economy that doesn't believe in providing opportunity, and it's about an economy 

00:21:58.000 --> 00:21:62.000
that allows wealthy white dudes on wall street to jack 12.5

00:22:02.000 --> 00:22:08.000
trillion dollars of other people's money and escape without a jail sentence. 

00:22:08.000 --> 00:22:13.000
That is what the problem is because if you steal a hundred dollars worth of food stamps 

00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:16.000
in this country, I promise you you will 

00:22:16.000 --> 00:22:23.000
do ten years, a hundred dollars worth of food stamp fraud and you will be taken from your family and locked up.

00:22:23.000 --> 00:22:31.000
And these guys stole 12.5 trillion with a t that is 20 percent of the net worth of the United States of America which 

00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:37.000
took over two hundred and thirty years to build up and they wiped it clean in eighteen months.

00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:45.000
And people get mad when I say that they were rich white dudes, they don't like me to mention that. They say things like 

00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:48.000
why do you have to mention that they guys on wall street 

00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:52.000
were white. That's sort of racist. No.

00:22:52.000 --> 00:22:55.000
It's not, it's descriptive.

00:22:55.000 --> 00:22:60.000
And here's the thing, if they had been black all of you would have noticed.

00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:08.000
Everybody would have noticed, if black people walk off with 12 and a half trillion dollars of other people's money, oh that shit would be pointed out. 

00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:16.000
Somebody will make a point of noting that black people are obviously criminals and obviously dishonest, and will be known because of all of the loot that they took. 

00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:26.000
On wall street but when a bunch of rich white dudes with high SAT scores and MBAs do the same thing, nobody wants to talk about it like a group phenomenon, isn't that interesting? 

00:23:26.000 --> 00:23:30.000
See people of color do something wrong and it sticks to the group. 

00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:37.000
Right, whether it's street crime, whether it's terrorism done by brown folk, but only by brown folk. White folks do it, it doesn't stick to us. 

00:23:37.000 --> 00:23:45.000
Looting and theft done by black and brown folk on the street, it's a group phenomenon. Done by white folks in office suites and banks it's not. 

00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:53.000
Do you have any idea, how many years it would take for all the black and brown street criminals in the history of either streets, 

00:23:53.000 --> 00:23:57.000
or criminals to steal 12 and half trillion dollars, any idea? 

00:23:57.000 --> 00:23:60.000
Twelve and a half trillion dollars? 

00:24:00.000 --> 00:24:07.000
It would take like 5000 years, alright? And you would have to steal around the clock man, 24/7 just hand in the pocket. 

00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:14.000
Hand in the pocket, stealing your stuff, stealing your stuff. Never taking a break to pee, sleep, eat, do anything. 

00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:21.000
But steal and like 5000 years in, you'd be like "Hey, you got 12 and half trillion yet?" And the theif would be like "Nope, not even close"   

00:24:21.000 --> 00:24:27.000
But 18 months these rich white dudes did it in. Not one of them in the middle of jail cell right now as I speak. 

00:24:27.000 --> 00:24:29.000
That's the problem. 

00:24:29.000 --> 00:24:31.000
That's the problem. 

00:24:31.000 --> 00:24:41.000
Not black folk, not brown folk, not poor folk, not indigenous folk, not immigrants be they documented or not, but people with a lot of dough, a lot of loot more than all of us put together. 

00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:44.000
Who don't believe in creating an economy that works for us all. 

00:24:44.000 --> 00:24:50.000
But they pit us against each other and they do it very well. That has not changed in twenty years. 

00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:55.000
In addition, it's really more than just twenty years, it's more than that. 

00:24:55.000 --> 00:24:62.000
The fact is, this white denial, again, I feel compelled to say this. 

00:25:02.000 --> 00:25:06.000
Because it's easily misunderstood. When I talk about white denial, there are always white folks who get very uptight. 

00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:20.000
Like if I said that you were a serial killer and you know where you were last Wednesday, then we're good right? 

00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:25.000
We're good, you don't have to get all freaked out, you don't have to bother yourself. You don't have tweet stuff, 

00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:29.000
You can just like chill and we'll be done. In like a half an hour, right?

00:25:29.000 --> 00:25:35.000
So, I'm not saying that everybody is in denial, but I'm saying that in as a general rule, white folks as a corporate entity, 

00:25:36.000 --> 00:25:41.000
And I know we don't like to think as ourself as such, but there really is this larger social phenomenon known as white America. 

00:25:41.000 --> 00:25:45.000
And there have always been people who descent from it.  Very important. 

00:25:45.000 --> 00:25:52.000
There were always white folks who descent from the corporate entity known as white America. 

00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:58.000
There were white folks who stood up against indigenous native North American genocide and the expulsion of native peoples from their land. 

00:25:58.000 --> 00:25:66.000
They were the distinct minority but its worth noting that they existed. That doesn't mean that white America in general wasn't down with Indian removal though because they were. 

00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:11.000
There were white folks, who were mightily opposed to the enslavement of African peoples.  

00:26:11.000 --> 00:26:17.000
And we want to point that out and make clear that there were white folks who decent from that system but now that doesn't change the fact, does it? 

00:26:17.000 --> 00:26:25.000
That white America, in a general sense, didn't do much to fight for a very long time, the system of enslavement. 

00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:32.000
Plenty of white folks didn't own businesses in Jim Crow segregating. but very few white folks stood up against those who did, that's the point, right. 

00:26:32.000 --> 00:26:38.000
We can make some general assertions about whiteness as a social thing. 

00:26:38.000 --> 00:26:45.000
Even though we're not judging white people as individuals. It's not about white people. Sometimes people get tripped up on that "he hates white people" 

00:26:45.000 --> 00:26:48.000
Let me be clear. 

00:26:48.000 --> 00:26:52.000
I love me some white people. I love white people. 

00:26:52.000 --> 00:26:56.000
I mean really, my wife is white, I love her. 

00:26:56.000 --> 00:26:59.000
Love her. 

00:26:59.000 --> 00:26:64.000
Our daughters, 14 and 12. Love them. White girls. 

00:27:04.000 --> 00:27:14.000
Which is what happens when white people make babies, you get these white children, and then I love them. And then my mom oh my God, nice white lady, love her. 

00:27:14.000 --> 00:27:21.000
My dad and I don't get along but that's not because he's white, that because of some other shit. I don't even have time. 

00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:28.000
to talk about that tonight, that's therapy stuff so, write to me later and we'll work that out. 

00:27:28.000 --> 00:27:35.000
Anyways, it's not about white people, it's about whiteness. As a social function, as a force, as an institutional norm. 

00:27:36.000 --> 00:27:44.000
That's what I'm talking about, and if you look at that overtime, you find that this white denial has been an ever-present thing, like not just now,

00:27:44.000 --> 00:27:53.000
And not just 20 years ago, go back even to the early sixties, we're talking like before the civil rights act was even passed, civil rights act gets passed in '64. 

00:27:53.000 --> 00:27:60.000
It makes discrimination and public accommodations and employment and those sorts of things, illegal. 

00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:04.000
Before that, you could get away with a lot of discrimination and it wasn't even against the law. 

00:28:04.000 --> 00:28:08.000
In 1965 is the voting rights act, 1968 is the fair housing act. 

00:28:08.000 --> 00:28:13.000
So you can go back before that, 1963, that's the year of the march on Washington. 

00:28:13.000 --> 00:28:21.000
The "I Have a Dream" speech, it's the year of the Birmingham campaign, where the 16th street baptist church in Birmingham was bombed. 

00:28:21.000 --> 00:28:29.000
By clansmen, and where Sheriff "Bull" Conner turned his tanks and dogs on children on the streets of Downtown Birmingham. 1963 is the,

00:28:29.000 --> 00:28:39.000
year that Medgar Evers, the Mississippi head of the NAACP, is shot down dead in his driveway. 1963 is a high watermark for the civil right's struggle. 

00:28:39.000 --> 00:28:46.000
Which is to say that is must have been a pretty high watermark of systematic oppression, because people don't struggle when there's nothing to struggle against.   

00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:51.000
One would imagine, right, that in 1963, things must have been pretty bad. 

00:28:52.000 --> 00:28:55.000
That's why 250,000 people march on Washington in last August. 

00:28:55.000 --> 00:28:65.000
You ever been to Washington in late August? That is hot, people don't do that for shits and giggles. People don't do that because they've got nothing to do. It is really hot, it is really uncomfortable. 

00:29:05.000 --> 00:29:15.000
So if you're going to march on Washington August 28th, of any year, I guarantee you, you must have some type of grievance. 

00:29:16.000 --> 00:29:28.000
But yet, even in the midst of all that, even at a time when racism and discrimination were right there, in the news every night, 

00:29:28.000 --> 00:29:35.000
Every night, because remember there were only 3 television channels in the early sixties, some of us remember these days, I wasn't alive then,

00:29:35.000 --> 00:29:40.000
But it was way until about '81, you have 3 stations they all went off about midnight 

00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:44.000
Played the Star Spangled Banner and then it was static for 6 hours. 

00:29:44.000 --> 00:29:49.000
And it's not like you had today, you got 300 channels, you could theoretically avoid the news now, 

00:29:49.000 --> 00:29:57.000
You can just watch reality tv, and play videos games and you know, just play on the phone and never have to actually pay attention to the news. 

00:29:57.000 --> 00:29:67.000
in '63 the news was the only game in town. People were riveted to it, and yet apparently, white folks could tell what it was they were looking at. 

00:30:07.000 --> 00:30:13.000
because when white Americans were asked in '63 in the midst of all of this civil rights drama "hey do you think racial minorities" 

00:30:13.000 --> 00:30:23.000
This was a question asked to them by the Gallup Organization, they said "Do you think racial minorities are treated equally in your community, in housing, education and employment?" 

00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:28.000
And again, it's 1963 y'all, in retrospect, this is a really easy question. 

00:30:28.000 --> 00:30:35.000
With the really easy answer that no one in here is going to miss, 52 years later. 

00:30:35.000 --> 00:30:41.000
I mean even the clan would be like "nah it wasn't equal and we liked it like that" 

00:30:41.000 --> 00:30:48.000
Even the most overt white supremacist would be like "No it was not equal, thank God" right? Everyone knows it wasn't now. 

00:30:48.000 --> 00:30:54.000
But in 1963, when white folks were asked that question, a large sample of white Americans. 

00:30:54.000 --> 00:30:62.000
From all across the country, different parts of the country were asked that question, 2 out of 3 white folks said "oh yeah, everything's equal". 

00:31:08.000 --> 00:31:18.000
They couldn't see it. 1962, Gallup said in another poll they asked white Americans "Do you think black children have the same chance to get a good education as white children?" 

00:31:18.000 --> 00:31:23.000
And again, come on it's '62, in retrospect we know the answer is no of course not. 

00:31:23.000 --> 00:31:29.000
But in 1962, when the question was asked, 87 out of 100 white folks said yes. 

00:31:29.000 --> 00:31:39.000
Almost 9 out of 10 white Americans looking at the same thing that we can now look at in retrospect and see very clearly, totally unable to see it. How is that possible? 

00:31:39.000 --> 00:31:48.000
How is that basically decent people could be so wrong? Because I do think that those white folks were basically decent people, I think most people are good people. 

00:31:48.000 --> 00:31:57.000
I could be wrong, but as a parent of two young children, I have a vested interest in believing that maybe the world is a just and a decent place 

00:31:57.000 --> 00:31:65.000
And that maybe most people are good folks, so I tend to believe that when those white folks, 9 out of 10 virtually, couldn't see the reality, 

00:32:05.000 --> 00:32:11.000
of unequal education, or 2 out of 3 couldn't see the reality of discrimination more broadly. 

00:32:12.000 --> 00:32:20.000
it wasn't because they were bad people and it wasn't because they were uncaring, and it wasn't because they were just stupid and unable to see the truth. 

00:32:20.000 --> 00:32:31.000
Had to be something else, what's the only other possible explanation. The only one I can think of is this, White Americans didn't know the truth because we didn't have to. 

00:32:32.000 --> 00:32:39.000
And that too has not changed. Not in twenty years, not in 50 years, not in a century. What do I mean by that? 

00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:44.000
What i mean is that if you're white in 1963, and Gallup asks you that question 

00:32:44.000 --> 00:32:49.000
About your basic social reality about the country in which you live, 

00:32:49.000 --> 00:32:59.000
And you don't know the truth and you get it wrong as so many did by saying that everything was fine, what was the consequence you faced for being ignorant? 

00:32:59.000 --> 00:32:68.000
There was none. You didn't have to know the truth, you could be ignorant to people of color's reality because it wasn't going to be on the test, was it? 

00:33:08.000 --> 00:33:12.000
And by that I mean, whatever test you had to take to graduate from high school, 

00:33:12.000 --> 00:33:20.000
To get into college, law school, medical school, business school, to get a professional license in any career of your choosing. 

00:33:20.000 --> 00:33:27.000
You didn't have to know the reality of millions of your fellow countrymen and countrywomen and you could still be considered competent. 

00:33:28.000 --> 00:33:39.000
Isn't that interesting, that white folks could be totally stone cold oblivious to the reality of millions of their fellow citizens and still be considered competent enough to have jobs, 

00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:45.000
and receive education. See people of color don't have that luxury on the other side, do they? 

00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:54.000
People of color don't get to stay ignorant to the things that white folks think are important because that will be on the test, in fact that will be the whole test. 

00:33:54.000 --> 00:33:62.000
Whatever's on the test I promise you is something that the dominant group decided was important knowledge and people of color better damn well know it. 

00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:12.000
That's why they have to learn white literature and white theatre and white poetry and white art and yes I know we don't call it that, that is the point. 

00:34:12.000 --> 00:34:22.000
When your stuff is considered the norm, you don't have to racially designate it's origins you don't have to call it white literature, you can just call it literature. 

00:34:22.000 --> 00:34:24.000
Theatre. 

00:34:24.000 --> 00:34:28.000
Poetry. Art. 

00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:34.000
Those who are confused shall it we clear it up before February? This is why we don't have white history month, okay? 

00:34:34.000 --> 00:34:45.000
Cause you got May and June and July and August and September and pretty much every other month that hasn't been designated for people of color 

00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:54.000
That's ours and we will learn about white folks and we don't have to call it white history, that's just operative and normative and normalized, that's how privilege functions. 

00:34:54.000 --> 00:34:64.000
It normalizes the dominant group's experience at the expense of everyone else, here's what's interesting this obliviousness that white folks are allowed to have around race, 

00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:08.000
is something that every one of us has in some category. 

00:35:08.000 --> 00:35:17.000
This isn't just race. Men get to be oblivious to the reality of sexism, patriarchy and rape culture and how those things effect women, we don't have to know the truth. 

00:35:17.000 --> 00:35:22.000
I would argue we should, it's important for us to, but we don't have to. 

00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:31.000
Those of us who are middle class, upper middle class, or affluent we don't have to know the reality of poor and low income and working class experience, we can be oblivious. 

00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:42.000
Those of us who are straight or CIS gender, we don't have to know the reality of straight supremacy heterosexism, homophobia or transphobia, we don't have to know any other that.  

00:35:42.000 --> 00:35:46.000
And we can still be deemed competent. Those of us who are able bodies and be ignorant, 

00:35:46.000 --> 00:35:57.000
about the reality of those with various disabilities. Those of us who have the ability to hear, don't have to think about audism and how it affects those who are not hearing, those in the deaf community. 

00:35:57.000 --> 00:35:60.000
You see we have an interpreter here right now, 

00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:07.000
And those of us who don't face audism, those of us who've never even heard that word, 

00:36:07.000 --> 00:36:15.000
Because we don't have to hear that word. We don't have to know about discriminations and marginalization of the deaf community,

00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:21.000
That's a privilege, it doesn't make you a bad person that you don't think about it, right? 

00:36:21.000 --> 00:36:31.000
It doesn't mean that if you're a hearing person, that you're a bad person for not thinking about audism, but it does mean that you got a leg up, doesn't it. It means that you have an advantage, it means,

00:36:31.000 --> 00:36:40.000
That you have the privilege, the luxury of being stone cold ignorant to someone else's reality, and the danger when you're oblivious 

00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:44.000
Is that when you don't have to know something, the odds are you wont understand it. 

00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:52.000
And then when you're trying to build a community with the people who do have to understand it, just as function of daily life, it's really hard to do, isn't it?

00:36:52.000 --> 00:36:60.000
It's really hard to do, and then unfortunately, those of us who get to be oblivious still act like we know more, 

00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:09.000
than the people who don't have that luxury. So here's the deal, I'm oblivious to calculus. 

00:37:09.000 --> 00:37:12.000
You know why? Cause I didn't take it. 

00:37:12.000 --> 00:37:16.000
You know why? Because they didn't make me. 

00:37:16.000 --> 00:37:22.000
And if they weren't going to make me take calculus, I sure as hell was not going to take calculus. 

00:37:22.000 --> 00:37:31.000
No offense to math folks in the room who love or teach calculus, I'm glad you are all doing it, someone has to, it just wasn't going to be me, that's all I'm saying. 

00:37:31.000 --> 00:37:37.000
So I didn't take it, as a result, I wouldn't know how to do it. So if I were to stand up here and start doing it on a chalk board or something, 

00:37:37.000 --> 00:37:49.000
Or on a screen, on an overhead projector, you would all be like "wait a minute, didn't he just tell us that he didn't know how to do, he didn't even take the class" exactly. 

00:37:49.000 --> 00:37:56.000
But see, that's how identity works in America isn't it? Those of us who are white like to tell people of color that we know their reality. 

00:37:56.000 --> 00:37:61.000
Better than they know their reality and we didn't take the class. 

00:38:01.000 --> 00:38:08.000
Men like to tell women that we know their reality better than they know their reality and we didn't take the class. 

00:38:08.000 --> 00:38:13.000
Those of who are straight or CIS gender like to tell those who are LGBT that we know their truth, 

00:38:13.000 --> 00:38:21.000
better than they know their truth, and we did not take the class. You see what this is? This is the blue pill from the Matrix. 

00:38:21.000 --> 00:38:27.000
Is what this is. You ever seen that film? There's that scene early on, right, where, 

00:38:27.000 --> 00:38:33.000
Laurence Fishburne's character Morpheus, offers Keno Reeves's character Neo, two pills one is blue and one is red. 

00:38:33.000 --> 00:38:40.000
And he says something along the lines of the following, I'm paraphrasing but this is pretty close, he says "you can take the blue pill,"

00:39:13.000 --> 00:39:18.000
That is always a perfect metaphor for privilege and identity in this country. 

00:39:18.000 --> 00:39:25.000
Because when you're a member of a dominant group you get to take the blue pill as a matter of daily routine and not even know you're taking it. 

00:39:25.000 --> 00:39:30.000
You get to walk around with a blue pill I.V. drip. 

00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:38.000
And you don't even know it's attached to your arm, rights? So white folks are like, and black and brown folks are like "you don't see this racism" and we're like, 

00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:53.000
Women are like "don't you see this?" and dudes are like "No, blue pill" and I know that men and blue pill means some different shit. 

00:39:53.000 --> 00:39:57.000
Since the Matrix that's taken on like a whole different meaning. 

00:39:57.000 --> 00:39:63.000
I realize that, you can thank Pfizer for the fact that you get that joke, that's the power of pharmaceutical marketing. 

00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:09.000
So I realize that, but I'm not talking about that blue pill, I'm talking about the Matrix right. 

00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:16.000
So here's the thing, everyone of us in here, takes the blue pill on something, guarantee it. 

00:40:16.000 --> 00:40:25.000
So it's not just white people, it's not just white men, it's not just straight white men, everybody in this room has at least one area, I guarantee, where you are the dominant group. 

00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:31.000
And in that area, you don't have to know the truth about somebody else, so what I'm really asking us to do is to start to really think deeply, 

00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:37.000
about what it means to have that luxury, and how dangerous that is, see when you don't have to think about the truth, 

00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:45.000
And you get to ignore it, it's really hard to build communities, so you can't address some of these issues we're seeing right now. Like the problem in law enforcement. 

00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:54.000
Right, if you don't have to know that reality, either now or historically, how do you have a conversation across racial lines with people who have no choice but to know that reality. 

00:40:54.000 --> 00:40:63.000
See right now, in the midst of this current crisis of law enforcement where the data tell us that in the most recent period that young black men are 21 times more likely than young white men to be

00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:08.000
killed by police, and it's not because they commit crime 21 times more often. 

00:41:08.000 --> 00:41:15.000
over a ten year period, 9 times more likely to killed by police. 2 to 3 times more likely to be killed unarmed. 

00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:21.000
Relative to their white counterparts. I't's not about dangerousness, it's not about posing a threat to officers, it's about something else. 

00:41:21.000 --> 00:41:30.000
But it's very hard to have that conversation across racial lines because people of color, even if they don't know those exact numbers they know the context and history behind those numbers

00:41:30.000 --> 00:41:36.000
And a lot of times those of us who are white, we don't. So we don't understand how black and brown folks see cops so differently than we do. 

00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:39.000
We don't understand that, we get real uptight about it. 

00:41:39.000 --> 00:41:44.000
Because we've experienced by enlarge, law enforcement one way. 

00:41:44.000 --> 00:41:48.000
And people of color really have experienced it another way. 

00:41:48.000 --> 00:41:53.000
That's not a hyperbole, that 's not exaggeration, that's history. But we might not know that history. 

00:41:53.000 --> 00:41:62.000
So we don't know that history, and black folks stand up and insist that black lives matter and then folks are like "no, all lives matter, no" 

00:42:02.000 --> 00:42:12.000
Yes precious we know. The point is all the rest of our lives already were presumed to matter, particularly if we were white so we don't have to proclaim it. 

00:42:12.000 --> 00:42:16.000
You see you have to proclaim that which is usually ignored.

00:42:16.000 --> 00:42:20.000
White folks lives have been valued in this country since the jump, you see?

00:42:20.000 --> 00:42:24.000
Black and brown folk not so much, that's why we have to say it.

00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:28.000
Law enforcement folks say, "Black lives matter, that's a police assassination group.

00:42:28.000 --> 00:42:33.000
They're going to go out and kill police, police are increasingly being subjected to violence. 

00:42:33.000 --> 00:42:40.000
Actually again facts matter, your hyperbole, your opinion means nothing in the face of actual evidence. The truth is that we are right now 

00:42:40.000 --> 00:42:46.000
on a particular course to have a year which will show the lowest number of law enforcement deaths 

00:42:46.000 --> 00:42:50.000
on duty in the last 25 years. That is the truth.

00:42:50.000 --> 00:42:54.000
So no black lives matter is not out killing cops, no one affiliated with that movement 

00:42:54.000 --> 00:42:61.000
has killed any law enforcement officer and even of the 36 or so 35, whatever the number is, 

00:43:01.000 --> 00:43:09.000
law enforcement officials who have died on duty, five, six, seven of them weren't killed at all. They died in traffic accidents, one of them had a heart attack at the gym.

00:43:09.000 --> 00:43:16.000
One of them was detailing his motorcycle and dropped dead of a heart attack. I mean it's a horrible tragedy 

00:43:16.000 --> 00:43:22.000
but unless black lives matter is putting extra cholesterol in the donuts I don't think you can actually blame them for that.

00:43:22.000 --> 00:43:26.000
Just saying, you can't blame that on an activist organization. 

00:43:26.000 --> 00:43:28.000
So let's stop lying because the 

00:43:28.000 --> 00:43:32.000
number of young black and brown folks killed by law enforcement, unarmed is at a forty year high.

00:43:32.000 --> 00:43:37.000
The number of law enforcement killed by black and brown folks is at a quarter century low. Those facts 

00:43:37.000 --> 00:43:43.000
do matter and they explain the differential way in which some people see law enforcement as others do.

00:43:43.000 --> 00:43:46.000
But white folks don't have to know that history, we don't have to think about that. We act as if 

00:43:46.000 --> 00:43:50.000
police are the nice friendly people that come get your cat out of the tree.

00:43:50.000 --> 00:43:57.000
And drive you around in a ride along to show you how exciting it is to be an officer. That's not the black and brown experience.

00:43:57.000 --> 00:43:60.000
Historically, law enforcement 

00:44:00.000 --> 00:44:05.000
were the folks who caught run away slaves. 

00:44:05.000 --> 00:44:08.000
They were the folks who enforced the black codes after enslavement.

00:44:08.000 --> 00:44:16.000
They were the folks who participated directly in the lynching of thousands of black and brown bodies. They were the folks who participated actively in programs, race riots against 

00:44:16.000 --> 00:44:20.000
black communities in places east Saint Louis, Illinois, Tulsa 

00:44:20.000 --> 00:44:24.000
Oklahoma, and elsewhere all around this country from coast to coast. They were the ones 

00:44:24.000 --> 00:44:28.000
who pulled civil rights demonstrators off of stools, they were all in uniform 

00:44:28.000 --> 00:44:32.000
they all had badges, they all had guns, they all had the power of the state, they were 

00:44:32.000 --> 00:44:37.000
law enforcement. So to ask black and brown folks to act like that history doesn't matter of that they should ignore it.

00:44:37.000 --> 00:44:40.000
Everyone knows that not all officers are 

00:44:40.000 --> 00:44:44.000
implicated in that but let me ask you, how many officers during all of those things I just mentioned 

00:44:44.000 --> 00:44:50.000
actually stood up against the people who were doing them? You can count them on a couple of hands.

00:44:50.000 --> 00:44:52.000
So if you have a culture within law enforcement 

00:44:52.000 --> 00:44:56.000
that doesn't speak up against the brutality of some, then that is to suggest that 

00:44:56.000 --> 00:44:61.000
a handful of bad apples, it is a rotten orchard from which some decent officers emerged.

00:45:01.000 --> 00:45:04.000
But until they are willing to turn in their brothers and sisters 

00:45:04.000 --> 00:45:08.000
in blue, until they are willing to rat them out and end their careers 

00:45:08.000 --> 00:45:14.000
as professional law enforcement officers, then no one should mouth the words, "not all police."

00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:20.000
Applause.

00:45:20.000 --> 00:45:27.000
As long as law enforcement is enforcing the war on drugs, which I beg to remind you is not really a war on drugs 

00:45:27.000 --> 00:45:32.000
then I really don't want to hear lectures about how we have to go easy on cops.

00:45:32.000 --> 00:45:38.000
I worked 15 months in public housing in New Orleans as a community organizer and I saw fewer drugs 

00:45:38.000 --> 00:45:41.000
in those 15 months, poorest communities 

00:45:41.000 --> 00:45:47.000
in the city of New Orleans, some of the poorest in the United States, I saw fewer drugs being used or dealt 

00:45:47.000 --> 00:45:55.000
in those communities in 15 months than I saw in a typical Saturday in my dorm room at Tulane University. 

00:45:55.000 --> 00:45:59.000
I also knew that I wasn't going to get arrested, I wasn't going to jail.

00:45:59.000 --> 00:45:64.000
So the war on drugs has nothing to do but as long as law enforcement keeps enforcing it

00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:08.000
as long as law enforcement keeps playing that game, then they're implicated in it. That's why black and brown folks 

00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:12.000
have a hard time trusting law enforcement. See we have to rebuild trust 

00:46:12.000 --> 00:46:16.000
on the basis of facts and history and understanding but when people get to be a 

00:46:16.000 --> 00:46:21.000
oblivious. And even those good cops out there, and there are lots of them, those good cops don't know that history 

00:46:21.000 --> 00:46:24.000
right? They find themselves unable to change it 

00:46:24.000 --> 00:46:28.000
They find themselves unable to push back against it because they don't even realize it.

00:46:28.000 --> 00:46:32.000
So caught up in that idea that they're good people and that there's just a handful of bad 

00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:36.000
ones but if you don't understand this long history of oppression, the way that law enforcement 

00:46:36.000 --> 00:46:40.000
has been the cutting edge of that and you're a good conscious officer, you're 

00:46:40.000 --> 00:46:44.000
going to end up going up against a culture you can't defeat.

00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:49.000
Because you don't even know what you're up against, that's why a a lot of good officers end up leaving.

00:46:49.000 --> 00:46:52.000
Because they can't make the kind of changes that they want to make.

00:46:52.000 --> 00:46:56.000
There's this one young guy who looks about 12, I guess he's probably in his late 20s

00:46:56.000 --> 00:46:61.000
early 30s in Baltimore, I can't remember his name. But he's all over Youtube, he's been doing a lot of media lately.

00:47:01.000 --> 00:47:06.000
This young white dude, who was run out of the Baltimore police department for speaking up 

00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:14.000
against the brutality and the corruption of his colleagues. And his career has been ended by trying to do the right thing.

00:47:14.000 --> 00:47:17.000
Because when you cross that thin blue line and you call out folks for doing 

00:47:17.000 --> 00:47:26.000
illegal activity and framing people and brutalizing people in the name of crime control, they end your career. See that's a good cop right there.

00:47:26.000 --> 00:47:33.000
But he's not now because he's not a cop. He's a good man, but he can't be a cop anymore because he's not allowed to be.

00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:36.000
In a culture that says you have to keep your mouth shut 

00:47:36.000 --> 00:47:42.000
and whatever a cop says go. See that's what we do in police states, that's the kind of stuff they do in other countries that we condemn them for. 

00:47:42.000 --> 00:47:49.000
And we turn around and we do it and we act like nothing is wrong with it. But if you don't know the history 

00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:52.000
it's very difficult to get your head around that let alone 

00:47:52.000 --> 00:47:55.000
change it. Same thing with immigration. If we don't understand 

00:47:55.000 --> 00:47:59.000
see we have all this debate about immigration and the biggest thing getting in the way 

00:47:59.000 --> 00:47:65.000
of an honest conversation or a productive immigration policy is the mythology of this country.

00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:08.000
That so many folks have bought into, especially 

00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:12.000
white folks but not only white folks. And not all white folks but again mostly 

00:48:12.000 --> 00:48:16.000
so. White folks who will say things, "Well I don't mind immigrants coming, I just want 

00:48:16.000 --> 00:48:20.000
them to come the right way like my family did." 

00:48:20.000 --> 00:48:25.000
Really, okay. Let's talk about that then.

00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:27.000
The right way, what does that mean?

00:48:27.000 --> 00:48:32.000
People say, "well my great great grandfather came legally, why can't they come legally?"

00:48:32.000 --> 00:48:38.000
First of all, when your great great grandfather came, there was no law in place to break.

00:48:38.000 --> 00:48:44.000
So the fact that your ancestor didn't break a law that didn't even exist to be broken

00:48:44.000 --> 00:48:55.000
does not get your great great grandfather any brownie points, cookies, flowers, or awards. It means nothing. It says nothing about your character when you don't break a law that doesn't exist.

00:48:55.000 --> 00:48:60.000
It's hard to break a law that doesn't exist. Ever since 1790

00:49:00.000 --> 00:49:04.000
when the naturalization act was passed, the first law congress passed 

00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:08.000
after the constitution was ratified, ever since 1790,

00:49:08.000 --> 00:49:12.000
all free white persons and only free white persons were allowed to become

00:49:12.000 --> 00:49:17.000
citizens of the United States. So when our ancestors came, even if they caught hell, and many of them did,

00:49:17.000 --> 00:49:21.000
as Irish as Italian, as eastern European Jews, etc.

00:49:21.000 --> 00:49:27.000
even if they caught hell they were able to access certain rights and privileges and immunities that were off limits to 

00:49:27.000 --> 00:49:30.000
virtually anyone else. So let's stop the mythology

00:49:30.000 --> 00:49:37.000
that we came the right way and their coming the wrong way, whatever that means. And let's also stop the mythology that says

00:49:37.000 --> 00:49:40.000
our ancestors came for freedom.

00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:44.000
And they're just coming for stuff. That's what people are saying.

00:49:44.000 --> 00:49:48.000
They're coming to take our jobs or they're coming to take our welfare. First of all

00:49:48.000 --> 00:49:51.000
which is it? Because it's really hard to be both. I just want 

00:49:51.000 --> 00:49:56.000
all I ask for from bigots, I don't have a very high threshold of intelligence from them, I just ask 

00:49:56.000 --> 00:49:59.000
that if you're going to be a racist you need to pick a stereotype.

00:49:59.000 --> 00:49:64.000
Because if in fact brown folks are coming to take all the jobs, they are not going to qualify for any 

00:50:04.000 --> 00:50:08.000
of the welfare. And if they are coming to just take the welfare, I'm fairly confident 

00:50:08.000 --> 00:50:12.000
they are going to have no jobs, let alone all of the jobs.

00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:16.000
So let's just pick one and not be a moving target. It's much easier 

00:50:16.000 --> 00:50:21.000
to argue against stupidity when it is stationary. That is all that I am asking.

00:50:21.000 --> 00:50:27.000
But so we say they're coming for stuff, our people came for principles like freedom and liberty. No we didn't.

00:50:27.000 --> 00:50:34.000
Our ancestors didn't come for freedom and liberty are you kidding? If we were coming for that we would have set up freedom and liberty.

00:50:34.000 --> 00:50:41.000
But we didn't. Not only did we enslave some and steal the land of others and expel others from their land in acts of cultural and even physical genocide,

00:50:41.000 --> 00:50:48.000
But we even took it out on each other. Man, we were killing each other in Salem just taking people we thought were witches and burning them.

00:50:48.000 --> 00:50:52.000
And hanging them and drowning them in the name of what, freedom?

00:50:52.000 --> 00:50:61.000
Liberty? No. In the name of presumed religious superiority and religious inferiority. So we didn't believe in freedom or liberty. Our people came for stuff too.

00:51:01.000 --> 00:51:08.000
That's the dirty little secret. Stuff like opportunities, stuff like the ability to feed our families, that's why we came.

00:51:08.000 --> 00:51:13.000
Who are we to be high and mighty about brown folks coming over that artificial boarder for the same thing?

00:51:13.000 --> 00:51:16.000
Because that's why our families came. Make no mistake 

00:51:16.000 --> 00:51:24.000
Europeans who came to this country were the losers of their respective societies. I mean no offense by that, I'm just saying. Think about it for a second.

00:51:24.000 --> 00:51:28.000
They were the losers, they were the ones who couldn't make it, they ones who were starving 

00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:35.000
as James Baldwin said. Some of them were convicts and they couldn't make it in the old country so they came to the new country. But we have this fiction 

00:51:35.000 --> 00:51:40.000
that acts like our ancestors were these noble wonderful people. Noble?

00:51:40.000 --> 00:51:49.000
People say things like, "My family came over on the Mayflower." Okay shush, might not want to talk about that.

00:51:49.000 --> 00:51:53.000
If you knew who was on the Mayflower, those weren't the winners of England, that wasn't like 

00:51:53.000 --> 00:51:60.000
you know who wasn't on the Mayflower? The king. That's who wasn't on the Mayflower. The king wasn't and not anybody that the king knew or liked

00:52:00.000 --> 00:52:05.000
was on the damn Mayflower, that's why they left. If you were winning in England, you were not going to get on the boat were you?

00:52:05.000 --> 00:52:13.000
No if you were winning, if things were going well for you, you were not just going to wake your family up one strange summer morning and say, "Well you know 

00:52:13.000 --> 00:52:21.000
it's been going pretty swimmingly over here but I don't know, sort of up for an adventure, what do you say?

00:52:21.000 --> 00:52:26.000
I think the best thing we can do for our family would be to get on a boat, a rickety

00:52:26.000 --> 00:52:33.000
old god knows if it's even sea worthy kind of vessel and set out on the high seas 

00:52:33.000 --> 00:52:41.000
for weeks at a time. We might drown, we might be eaten by sharks. But it'll be fun."

00:52:41.000 --> 00:52:44.000
No if you were the winner you didn't take that chance.

00:52:44.000 --> 00:52:52.000
There was no need, the winners stayed put, the losers got on the boat as an act of resistance and there is no shame in that. None.

00:52:52.000 --> 00:52:59.000
No shame in that. There is no shame in that when we do it but by the same token there is no shame in that when they

00:52:59.000 --> 00:52:64.000
do it. Those who we have suddenly made impossible to see ourselves in.

00:53:04.000 --> 00:53:08.000
There is no shame in any of it. And we should not create such shame.

00:53:08.000 --> 00:53:14.000
See, but if we have created this fictional narrative that separates us from them,

00:53:14.000 --> 00:53:19.000
and makes them seem as if they have less belonging and less right to a land that was actually

00:53:19.000 --> 00:53:23.000
their ancestors in many cases, much more so than it was ours, 

00:53:23.000 --> 00:53:28.000
then we create an oppressive system that isn't based on justice because it isn't based on truth.

00:53:28.000 --> 00:53:31.000
It's based on falsehood, it's based on fiction.

00:53:31.000 --> 00:53:36.000
And that's never good. Because when you base your policies on fiction you don't' really deal 

00:53:36.000 --> 00:53:40.000
with the problems. You can't deal with the problems facing working people in this 

00:53:40.000 --> 00:53:44.000
country if all we talk about is building walls and deporting people and 

00:53:44.000 --> 00:53:48.000
closing the border. Think about that. Just basic economic policy. 

00:53:48.000 --> 00:53:52.000
Basic economic theory. If you close a border 

00:53:52.000 --> 00:53:62.000
to working people. If you close borders to labor so that labor cannot go in search of the best price for it's work product, for it's best wage.

00:54:02.000 --> 00:54:07.000
But you allow the border to remain open for capital to move across borders. 

00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:14.000
And you allow the border to remain open for goods to go in search of the highest price, for the highest rate of return 

00:54:14.000 --> 00:54:16.000
then basic economic philosophy 

00:54:16.000 --> 00:54:22.000
basic theory has told you you have permanently tilted the game in favor of owners and against workers. 

00:54:22.000 --> 00:54:24.000
Because what you've done is you've said rich people can 

00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:28.000
sell their stuff anywhere they want, they can move their money anywhere they want 

00:54:28.000 --> 00:54:32.000
but if you're a working person you will be chained to your country of origin.

00:54:32.000 --> 00:54:36.000
How does that help working people north or south of that 

00:54:36.000 --> 00:54:43.000
any other border? It doesn't by definition. It makes all working people permanent economic slaves of capital. 

00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:48.000
But we don't see that problem when we're talking about building walls and limiting 

00:54:48.000 --> 00:54:52.000
what working people can do even when we put no limits on capital at all. That's the problem.

00:54:52.000 --> 00:54:56.000
The problem is right now that we have approximately 

00:54:56.000 --> 00:54:63.000
one-tenth of one percent of the American population that has the same net worth as the bottom ninety percent of Americans.

00:55:03.000 --> 00:55:07.000
One-tenth of one percent, that's 325-330,000 people on this hand 

00:55:08.000 --> 00:55:14.000
three hundred and roughly twenty million people over here who have the same stuff.

00:55:14.000 --> 00:55:16.000
Ninety percent of the population 

00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:23.000
is the same as one-tenth of one percent. We have thirty people in this country. The wealthiest thirty people in the United States who have the same

00:55:23.000 --> 00:55:27.000
amount of wealth as the bottom half of the American population.

00:55:28.000 --> 00:55:33.000
one hundred and sixty, one hundred and sixty-five million people over here, thirty people over here.

00:55:33.000 --> 00:55:37.000
That's a greater level of disparity I should point out that existed in the Roman Empire 

00:55:37.000 --> 00:55:43.000
It's a greater level of inequality that exist in any of those countries that we like to call Banana Republics in 

00:55:43.000 --> 00:55:48.000
so called third world nations, underdeveloped nations. In fact 

00:55:48.000 --> 00:55:54.000
the six heirs to the Walmart fortune, the Walton family, 

00:55:54.000 --> 00:55:57.000
five of whom were born into the family, one of whom married into it.

00:55:57.000 --> 00:55:64.000
Those six heirs, four of them are the principle heirs, the other two are not quite as rich but let's put them together for the sake of argument.

00:56:04.000 --> 00:56:08.000
Six Walton heirs have the same amount of weath,

00:56:08.000 --> 00:56:14.000
just between the six of them, as the bottom forty percent of the American public.

00:56:14.000 --> 00:56:18.000
Approximately 130 million over here, six people 

00:56:18.000 --> 00:56:26.000
over here. In fact the Walton family has so much wealth that they could buy every home, every condo, every townhouse in the city of Seattle.

00:56:26.000 --> 00:56:32.000
Or the city of Miami, or the city of Dallas and still have forty billion dollars left.

00:56:32.000 --> 00:56:42.000
With which they could still buy all the homes in Napa if they like wine, or all the homes in Anaheim, California if their kids like to go to Disney. They would still have five or six billion left. 

00:56:42.000 --> 00:56:47.000
They have so much money that if you take the collective net worth of pretty much every rich person whose name you know 

00:56:47.000 --> 00:56:53.000
right from Mark Zuckerberg, to Phil Night, to Donald Trump, to Mark Cuban, to 

00:56:53.000 --> 00:56:59.000
George Lucas the film maker, even Bill Gates the worlds wealthiest man, you put them all together and they still don't have 

00:56:59.000 --> 00:56:68.000
as much wealth as just those six members of the Walton family. This is true even as the typical Walmart worker makes sub-poverty wages.

00:57:08.000 --> 00:57:12.000
And makes so little in fact that they have to go on food stamps 

00:57:12.000 --> 00:57:16.000
in many cities and many towns, Walmart workers are the largest single group of SNAP

00:57:16.000 --> 00:57:19.000
recipients, SNAP is what we now call food stamps.

00:57:19.000 --> 00:57:24.000
I want you to think about that. A company that has so much money that six of the people 

00:57:24.000 --> 00:57:28.000
at the top of that economic ladder own the same amount as the poorest forty 

00:57:28.000 --> 00:57:32.000
percent of Americans and they got people who don't make enough to eat so they have to go on 

00:57:32.000 --> 00:57:40.000
government subsidies. Which means you the tax payers are subsidizing the wealthiest corporation, possibly on the planet and the largest employer in this country.

00:57:40.000 --> 00:57:44.000
But who do we bash? Do we bash the Walton's for not paying 

00:57:44.000 --> 00:57:48.000
their workers sufficiently or do we bash the workers who have to go on food stamps just to stay alive?

00:57:48.000 --> 00:57:52.000
You know the answer to that. Folks at Walmart are having to set up food 

00:57:52.000 --> 00:57:56.000
drives at Thanksgiving, watch it'll happen again this November. They set up food drives 

00:57:56.000 --> 00:57:65.000
for their colleagues asking one employee to help donate a turkey so that another employees family can have a thanksgiving meal. This is out of Dickens. 

00:58:05.000 --> 00:58:08.000
But it's happening now, in our country. And here's the greatest 

00:58:08.000 --> 00:58:12.000
irony of all. Do you know where those Walmart employees who have to go on food stamps redeem their 

00:58:12.000 --> 00:58:19.000
food stamps benefits. They redeem them at Walmart. 13 billion dollars

00:58:19.000 --> 00:58:24.000
every single year that Walmart makes from food stamps, a disproportionate number of which are used 

00:58:24.000 --> 00:58:28.000
for their own employees. They are making it on both ends. They pay their folks on sub-poverty wages 

00:58:28.000 --> 00:58:32.000
they have to go on welfare benefits, they redeem their welfare benefits at the very same 

00:58:32.000 --> 00:58:36.000
place that wouldn't make the money if they just paid them 

00:58:36.000 --> 00:58:40.000
up front. That my friends is the problem. Not Mexican folks.

00:58:40.000 --> 00:58:44.000
Not black folks, not affirmative action, not multiculturalism 

00:58:44.000 --> 00:58:53.000
not diversity, not immigration of any kind but an economic system that is rigged for the benefit of not one person I assure you in this room

00:58:53.000 --> 00:58:56.000
while they sit back and they watch us as we fight

00:58:56.000 --> 00:58:60.000
over the pieces of a pie that not one of us in this room 

00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:06.000
actually owns. Until we decide that we will be as angry about that 

00:59:06.000 --> 00:59:11.000
as we are about someone trying to feed his or her family coming across that artificial border. 

00:59:11.000 --> 00:59:16.000
Until we decide to be as angry about that and put that 

00:59:16.000 --> 00:59:20.000
in the cross hairs of our politics as we are at things like affirmative 

00:59:20.000 --> 00:59:28.000
action or the paltry benefits received by those at the bottom of the economic ladder we as a country I assure you will be doomed.

00:59:28.000 --> 00:59:35.000
Only when we decide that there are real adversaries out there worth tilting out rather than the windmills 

00:59:35.000 --> 00:59:41.000
we have been tilting at up to now while we actually have a chance at building real democracy.

00:59:41.000 --> 00:59:44.000
Thank you all for being here. I appreciate your time.

00:59:44.000 --> 00:59:56.000
Applause.

00:59:56.000 --> 00:59:61.000
Thank you very much I appreciate it. We have a microphone down here 

01:00:01.000 --> 01:00:04.000
if you can get to the mic that is the best possible 

01:00:04.000 --> 01:00:08.000
way to do it, just so folks can hear you. If you are physically unable 

01:00:08.000 --> 01:00:12.000
to do so then we can run the mic to you, I don't want to leave anyone out.

01:00:12.000 --> 01:00:16.000
But I want to encourage you to come to the mic if you can. Yes, we'll start right here.

01:00:16.000 --> 01:00:20.000
Audience member: I remember being as excited when I was in 

01:00:20.000 --> 01:00:25.000
college as you've made many folks in this room. I was arrested in the free speech movement.

01:00:25.000 --> 01:00:32.000
I realized later that the police had hurt me an African American more than they had other people. I wanted 

01:00:32.000 --> 01:00:36.000
to make a difference. I married a white man, we have been married for fifty years.

01:00:36.000 --> 01:00:40.000
We really thought that our beige babies would make a difference.

01:00:40.000 --> 01:00:52.000
Last week I was walking in the streets of Salem, appreciating my market town and a car went by and yelled dirty n word to me. So here's my question for you Tim.

01:00:52.000 --> 01:00:63.000
Your writing is amazing. Have you ever tried to put on black make up and go out into the world as black?

01:01:03.000 --> 01:01:09.000
No I don't do black faces as a matter of routine just for lots of reasons. Mostly 

01:01:09.000 --> 01:01:16.000
because I think that for us, those of us who are white, though I think that experiment had real 

01:01:16.000 --> 01:01:20.000
purpose when John Howard Griffin did it in 1959,

01:01:20.000 --> 01:01:29.000
and wrote the book Black Like Me, I've long believed that the better course of wisdom for those of us who are white is to simply believe you

01:01:29.000 --> 01:01:33.000
and to believe other black folks when they tell us what it is to be black.

01:01:33.000 --> 01:01:42.000
Rather than having to go to sort of see for ourselves, is it really happening? It is really true? Like I feel like that was the weakness in Griffin's experiement.

01:01:42.000 --> 01:01:44.000
For those of you who've read Black Like Me, 

01:01:44.000 --> 01:01:49.000
and many of you if you're like me you had to read it in high school and it's still being taught and it's fifty some odd years after the fact.

01:01:49.000 --> 01:01:52.000
It's great and all, it's fine.

01:01:52.000 --> 01:01:56.000
And if you want to do that experiment I suppose go do it. But 

01:01:56.000 --> 01:01:60.000
I learned a long time ago that I should just trust people 

01:02:00.000 --> 01:02:04.000
to tell me about their lives and assume that they haven't lost their minds. Like 

01:02:04.000 --> 01:02:08.000
to me that's the flaw in his experiment was 

01:02:08.000 --> 01:02:12.000
white America couldn't hear it from people of color, maybe we still can.

01:02:12.000 --> 01:02:20.000
So as a white person what I'll do is I'll go and I'll add my voice to the cacophony of people of color, 

01:02:20.000 --> 01:02:27.000
hold up the work of folks of Black Lives Matter, and I'l hold up the works of writers like James Baldwin and I'll hold up the work of scholars 

01:02:28.000 --> 01:02:32.000
like Bell Hooks and Kim Crenshaw and others who have done such amazing work on intersections between 

01:02:32.000 --> 01:02:36.000
race and class and sexually and sex and gender.

01:02:36.000 --> 01:02:43.000
And I'll do that as a way of introducing people to their work rather than me having to go and experience first hand what I 

01:02:43.000 --> 01:02:44.000
know is happening 

01:02:44.000 --> 01:02:48.000
and I don't have to experience first hand to know that it is. Just like I don't have to 

01:02:48.000 --> 01:02:52.000
be gay to know what my gay brothers are experiencing, or be trans 

01:02:52.000 --> 01:02:59.000
to know what my trans men and/or trans women for that matter are experiencing. I don't have to be disabled to know 

01:02:59.000 --> 01:02:65.000
about ableism. So I hope that we can get to the point where we can hear about those stories.

01:03:05.000 --> 01:03:13.000
And start with the assumption that it's real. That it's happening, that people aren't exaggerating, that they're not seeing 

01:03:13.000 --> 01:03:16.000
things, that they're not hallucinating. If we could do that 

01:03:16.000 --> 01:03:20.000
we wouldn't have to adopt the epidermal camouflage 

01:03:20.000 --> 01:03:29.000
like John Howard Griffin did in 1959 when he did that experiment and wrote that book. We would be able to simply start from a position that says 

01:03:29.000 --> 01:03:32.000
if this many people tell me over and over 

01:03:32.000 --> 01:03:36.000
and over and over again that it's real and I 

01:03:36.000 --> 01:03:40.000
refuse to listen to them there's nothing that an experiment is going to do 

01:03:40.000 --> 01:03:44.000
to save me. I've got to begin by believing and by learning to listen.

01:03:44.000 --> 01:03:48.000
So I would say that that would be a more helpful thing for white folks 

01:03:48.000 --> 01:03:52.000
to do then to sort of live vicariously 

01:03:52.000 --> 01:03:56.000
as a black person for a while until it gets really tough and we take the make up off.

01:03:56.000 --> 01:03:60.000
Alright, because that's what Griffin did. He was black for the summer and then the drugs wore off and he was 

01:04:00.000 --> 01:04:04.000
white again. And that's the thing, we can always go back.

01:04:04.000 --> 01:04:08.000
So the better course of wisdom for me is to just believe you when you talk to me 

01:04:08.000 --> 01:04:12.000
about what happened during the Free Speech Movement and what happened with law enforcement and the experience 

01:04:12.000 --> 01:04:16.000
that you said you just had in Salem. That's real. I don't need

01:04:16.000 --> 01:04:20.000
to be black to know that it's real. I just need to be an alert, compassionate 

01:04:20.000 --> 01:04:24.000
empathic person to know that it's real. But thank you for the question, I appreciate it.

01:04:24.000 --> 01:04:26.000
Next question please.

01:04:26.000 --> 01:04:36.000
Audience member: So I'm a professor at Western and I was talking to my students about you coming and I don't really know that much about your background but I'm glad I came.

01:04:36.000 --> 01:04:44.000
So I asked my students if they were going to come and one of my students had read something in your bios or something that he found disturbing.

01:04:44.000 --> 01:04:54.000
And so I said why don't you just come and ask that question and he said you can't do that. and I said why not? And he said well 

01:04:54.000 --> 01:04:62.000
the administration of the college will get you and I said no they won't if it's one thing we value it's free speech.

01:05:02.000 --> 01:05:12.000
So here's his question and I don't think that the roof is going to fall down and I don't think you're going to be that embarrassed about it. So his question was 

01:05:12.000 --> 01:05:16.000
he said, you know he lives in a gated white community 

01:05:16.000 --> 01:05:20.000
Tim: No I don't. Man: I know I'm just telling. Tim: I know but I don't. Man: Okay 

01:05:20.000 --> 01:05:24.000
and that most of the people in that area are white.

01:05:24.000 --> 01:05:28.000
So I want to notice that the roof didn't fall down when I asked that and there's not going to be a problem.

01:05:28.000 --> 01:05:32.000
And so that's the main reason I'm asking the question, I don't even care about the answer. 

01:05:32.000 --> 01:05:36.000
Well I do, and I care about the answer and I care about the fact that 

01:05:36.000 --> 01:05:44.000
people believe things that they read without doing a little bit more homework. See Google is a dangerous thing.

01:05:44.000 --> 01:05:50.000
So a couple of years ago, a white supremacist organization started circulating this 

01:05:50.000 --> 01:05:54.000
idea that I lived in a gated community. I've never lived in a gated community. I live 

01:05:54.000 --> 01:05:61.000
I'm not going to tell you exactly where I live, I'm not going to tell you exactly and the reason I'm not is because white supremacists showed up at our door 

01:06:01.000 --> 01:06:04.000
and threatened me and my entire family a couple of years ago.

01:06:04.000 --> 01:06:12.000
They came to my very much non-gated community, which they then could see was not gated, but continued to lie and say that it was gated.  

01:06:12.000 --> 01:06:16.000
I do live in Nashville, Tennessee. I think everyone knows that. 

01:06:16.000 --> 01:06:21.000
And I live in the city, I don't live in the suburbs, I live in the city 5 minutes from downtown 

01:06:21.000 --> 01:06:26.000
And I live in a, I'll just say in a zip code, we're going to keep it general. 

01:06:26.000 --> 01:06:32.000
Because I don't really want to give too much away, for obvious security reasons. But i live in a zip code that is about 38 percent black.  

01:06:32.000 --> 01:06:36.000
Which is actually more than the black population of the City of Nashville. 

01:06:36.000 --> 01:06:44.000
I live in a zip code that is probably about 5 percent Latino, which is probably about the percentage in the greater Nashville area, 

01:06:44.000 --> 01:06:49.000
So it's a multicultural, multiracial community. 

01:06:49.000 --> 01:06:54.000
But what i found interesting about the question, right, is the premise. The premise is still very interesting. 

01:06:54.000 --> 01:06:62.000
Now I do think it's a problem to live in a gated community actually, I think that's a real problem. I think that premise would be valid, if that were true that would be really disturbing I think. 

01:07:02.000 --> 01:07:06.000
Because I don't think we should lock ourselves behind gates. 

01:07:06.000 --> 01:07:12.000
But to suggest let's say, that a white person who does live in a mostly white space is.

01:07:12.000 --> 01:07:17.000
ipso facto therefore invalid, I just want you to think about what this means. 

01:07:17.000 --> 01:07:20.000
And what the logic suggests.

01:07:20.000 --> 01:07:30.000
It suggests that a white person who speaks out against racism should almost by definition go live in a virtually all black or brown neighborhood. 

01:07:30.000 --> 01:07:36.000
And I want you to think about the implications of doing that, because we actually see all around the country, 

01:07:36.000 --> 01:07:45.000
what happens when large numbers of "well meaning" white people move back into mostly black and brown neighborhoods it's called gentrification and what ends up happening, 

01:07:45.000 --> 01:07:49.000
is that it actually drives people of color out of their own neighborhoods, 

01:07:49.000 --> 01:07:55.000
by jacking up the rents, by jacking up the property taxes, so that the people who've been living there can't even live there anymore. 

01:07:55.000 --> 01:07:63.000
How would that be an antiracist move? Like if I were to do that in the name of making myself feel better or pleasing someone who thinks I should do it,

01:08:03.000 --> 01:08:11.000
Then if enough people did that pretty soon what would happen is that the folks who'd been there the whole time would find themselves pushed out, that's happened in Nashville. 

01:08:12.000 --> 01:08:16.000
In many of the communities in question like that, it's happened in Portland. 

01:08:16.000 --> 01:08:20.000
God knows it's happening in North Portland tonight. 

01:08:20.000 --> 01:08:26.000
Right, and every night. So it's a really complicated thing, I think the issue is not that white folks shouldn't live,

01:08:26.000 --> 01:08:35.000
in black or brown communities but we have to be real intentional, and it shouldn't be that we do that just so that we feel more, I don't know, connected to something. 

01:08:35.000 --> 01:08:45.000
And if we do live in communities that are almost all white or 80 percent white, or 20 percent white, we do the work either way. You do the work no matter where you live. And in fact, I think, 

01:08:45.000 --> 01:08:56.000
it would actually be valuable for some white folks to live in virtually all white communities and subvert the paradigm in the those communities. I don't want to be the one to do it, 

01:08:56.000 --> 01:08:64.000
But I hope some people do it, because even though I want to live in an urban area that is more diverse but I understand that if you are someone who 

01:09:04.000 --> 01:09:14.000
Lives in a place that is not as diverse as Nashville is or New Orleans, where I used to live where I did live in communities that were up to 70 percent black in some cases. 

01:09:14.000 --> 01:09:23.000
if you happen to live in a rural or a small town area maybe that's where you're form maybe that's where your folks live, maybe you're going to go back and live in their home and there's nothing wrong

01:09:23.000 --> 01:09:24.000
with any of that,

01:09:24.000 --> 01:09:28.000
But regardless of the makeup of that communities, try to raise these issues. 

01:09:28.000 --> 01:09:37.000
With your neighbors with the folks on the school board, with your colleagues, with the folks you go to church with, or whatever so as it turns out

01:09:37.000 --> 01:09:40.000
His assumptions about where I live are incorrect 

01:09:40.000 --> 01:09:44.000
But even had they been correct, there are still these deeper issues, 

01:09:44.000 --> 01:09:49.000
about what it means to be an ally and at the end of the day, to suggest that white folks can't, 

01:09:49.000 --> 01:09:58.000
be antiracist and live most around white folks or somehow that makes them hypocrites would mean that anyone who cares about poverty has to go live in a poor community. 

01:09:58.000 --> 01:09:68.000
You know, that any man who cares about sexism has to just go live around women. I don't even know how you'd do that entirely, but I'm sure there's a colony somewhere. 

01:10:08.000 --> 01:10:14.000
where we could go live, I don't know how you'd do that, just to me that's a very tendentious 

01:10:14.000 --> 01:10:16.000
interpretation of ally-ship, you know.

01:10:16.000 --> 01:10:25.000
And a very simplistic one, so I think in this case it's unfortunate that the internet is filled with partial truths, inaccuracies,

01:10:25.000 --> 01:10:35.000
Bad data and people who are more than willing to use that in a particularly discrediting way without really looking 

01:10:36.000 --> 01:10:41.000
into the deeper issues and I think that's what was going here. But you're right, the sky didn't fall, 

01:10:41.000 --> 01:10:49.000
it's a perfectly valid question it just so happens that there's an even more valid answer and there you have it, so next question. 

01:10:49.000 --> 01:10:59.000
Woman: I appreciate your encouragement that we get angry about this issues and I feel lucky that I surround myself with people who talk about this regularly, 

01:10:59.000 --> 01:10:67.000
And think about it and try to educate ourselves more about it and understand other people, but what do you suggest we do with the anger? 

01:11:07.000 --> 01:11:15.000
Tim Wise: I think that the first order of business 

01:11:16.000 --> 01:11:25.000
is to take a deep breath when we find ourselves enraged by something whether that's in the news or something we read in a class, 

01:11:25.000 --> 01:11:32.000
Cause a lot of times that's our first exposure to some of this stuff, might be in a college class, most of us didn't have a lot of this in high school. 

01:11:32.000 --> 01:11:36.000
You know, unless you had some really great teachers who brought this to your attention, 

01:11:36.000 --> 01:11:40.000
You might never had a class that looked at systems of inequality, 

01:11:40.000 --> 01:11:44.000
And naturally if you've never been exposed to that, and then you are, 

01:11:44.000 --> 01:11:49.000
It's pretty overwhelming and if you're a good compassionate person, like I think most of us are,

01:11:49.000 --> 01:11:57.000
That can be really infuriating and then the natural thing for a person with some type of privilege to do,

01:11:57.000 --> 01:11:67.000
when they find out about a horrible injustice, is our first reaction is "we've got to fix that, my god, we got to get busy on that right now what do we do?" I've been there, we've all been there. 

01:12:07.000 --> 01:12:12.000
And it is a impulse, it is a wonderful impulse, it is a compassionate impulse, 

01:12:12.000 --> 01:12:18.000
but we have to take a breath, and the reason we have to, is because first of all, it's a matter of humility. 

01:12:18.000 --> 01:12:22.000
People of color have been angry about this for centuries. 

01:12:22.000 --> 01:12:30.000
And not just angry, but they've been active fighting it for centuries and it's still there, so let's just be honest and humble enough to say,

01:12:30.000 --> 01:12:36.000
That if people of color have been pissed off for a long time, and have been fighting these systems for a long time

01:12:36.000 --> 01:12:43.000
and haven't been able to break them yet, the odds of us nice white folks coming along and being like "oh I got this,"

01:12:44.000 --> 01:12:48.000
Very unlikely. I'm 47 years old, been white for a long time 

01:12:48.000 --> 01:12:54.000
reasonably intelligent, and for me to stand up and think that I at 47 

01:12:54.000 --> 01:12:58.000
have the answer, to the problem that black and brown folk have been trying to solve 

01:12:58.000 --> 01:12:63.000
for hundreds of years just would be incredibly arrogant, so I think take a breath and say okay, 

01:13:04.000 --> 01:13:12.000
First, let's try to figure out why we keep having to reinvent the wheel and deal with the same issues. 

01:13:12.000 --> 01:13:17.000
Why is that smart people, compassionate people can't seem to flip this system? 

01:13:17.000 --> 01:13:25.000
After hundred of years? Cause we're smart folks, and I think that most people who talk about this have good intentions and want to do right by each other.

01:13:25.000 --> 01:13:31.000
And we keep, I guess failing or only partially winning, so we've got to be clear on why that is. 

01:13:31.000 --> 01:13:33.000
And I think a lot of times, we're not. 

01:13:33.000 --> 01:13:41.000
A lot of times we keep coming back to that question of oh we got the racist over here, and then the non racist over here so if we cant just stop these bad people, 

01:13:41.000 --> 01:13:48.000
then we'll win. Well that's not, it isn't about good people and bad people, it's about systems that suck people in. 

01:13:48.000 --> 01:13:55.000
And trap us and so number one continue to educate yourself about how systems like this operate. 

01:13:56.000 --> 01:13:65.000
Read more and don't just listen to the words that I offer, go out and read the sources of wisdom, black and brown folks scholars and activists and educators of color. 

01:14:05.000 --> 01:14:10.000
Learn about the history so that when you're seeing these things in the news, you can being to put pieces together

01:14:10.000 --> 01:14:17.000
 that form a cohesive narrative. The second thing we can do is to being to interrogate our own role in this. 

01:14:17.000 --> 01:14:26.000
I think sometimes we're so focused on the activist work, we're so focused on  hey if we can just get out there and have a march or have a demonstration or get 100,000 people in the street, 

01:14:26.000 --> 01:14:31.000
Everything will be fine, but the reality is that's not how political movements are sustained. 

01:14:31.000 --> 01:14:36.000
Political movements are not sustained just cause we get out in the street with a bullhorn and some signs and we sing songs. 

01:14:36.000 --> 01:14:43.000
And that's all we do. The movements that have actually been effective in our countries history have developed counter narratives. 

01:14:43.000 --> 01:14:49.000
That were able to sustain the work, and those counter narratives could be, an in the case of the Civil Right's Movement 

01:14:49.000 --> 01:14:57.000
This idea that America had betrayed its promise or as Dr. King said in the "I Have a Dream" speech that is had bounced a check to black Americans. 

01:14:57.000 --> 01:14:60.000
And it had come back marked insufficient funds. 

01:15:00.000 --> 01:15:04.000
Like that was a narrative that said "you told us this, and you did this"  

01:15:12.000 --> 01:15:19.000
We don't have so many of those narratives today, it's just sort of this anger and vituperativeness and this bitterness instead of saying "you know," 

01:15:28.000 --> 01:15:33.000
That we're in a place in this culture right now, where we look down on poor people, 

01:15:33.000 --> 01:15:36.000
Not just black and brown, but poor white folks too. 

01:15:36.000 --> 01:15:40.000
And the reason that we valorize rich people and hold them up like geniuses, 

01:15:40.000 --> 01:15:47.000
so much so that if a billionaire runs for president people are like "well at least he can't be bought."

01:15:48.000 --> 01:15:54.000
That's your endorsement? He's got so much money he can't be bought? No he can just buy you, see that's how it works. 

01:15:54.000 --> 01:15:59.000
But why are we in a place like that, where we venerate and valorize the wealthy, 

01:15:59.000 --> 01:15:62.000
And shame the poor? 

01:16:02.000 --> 01:16:06.000
Is because historically we've had this myth in our country 

01:16:06.000 --> 01:16:14.000
that anybody can make it, if they just try hard, and I say myth because even though hard work matters, we know people who've worked hard everyday and don't have anything to show for it. 

01:16:14.000 --> 01:16:18.000
And a lot of us know people who were born on third base, and still think they hit a triple. 

01:16:18.000 --> 01:16:24.000
And they've never had to work really hard in their entire lives. So we know it's more complicated, we know that systems, 

01:16:24.000 --> 01:16:30.000
Keep us from rising many times, regardless of our work. If you've got two people out of work for every job, 

01:16:30.000 --> 01:16:34.000
it obviously isn't about your work ethic, it's about your system 

01:16:34.000 --> 01:16:37.000
But A, we don't believe that. We believe that it's just about us. 

01:16:37.000 --> 01:16:41.000
And so what happens is we look down on the people at the bottom, 

01:16:41.000 --> 01:16:47.000
and if they're disproportionally of color, we end up saying what that they don't work as hard, their values are weak, their culture is bad. 

01:16:47.000 --> 01:16:52.000
We look at women who don't have that many positions of power and say they just don't work as hard, they don't want it as bad. 

01:16:52.000 --> 01:16:56.000
We look at poor folks, if they'd just be more like rich folks it would be fine.

01:16:56.000 --> 01:16:61.000
So that's the first problem, is we really have to push a back against that narrative that we just get what we deserve. 

01:17:01.000 --> 01:17:08.000
That's never been true in American history. It wasn't true during segregation, but we still said it even then didn't we? I mean, that myth 

01:17:08.000 --> 01:17:13.000
of rugged individualism, that was the American myth even when segregation was in place. 

01:17:13.000 --> 01:17:17.000
That was in place even when enslavement was in place.  So clearly we never meant it. 

01:17:17.000 --> 01:17:24.000
But we said it and it trapped us, because it makes it really easy to look down on people doesn't it? It makes it really easy to vote for politicians who bash the folks down there.  

01:17:24.000 --> 01:17:32.000
And the second thing we have to do to craft that narrative is we have to actually tell our own stories. This is something we can all do, you don't have to be an activist. 

01:17:32.000 --> 01:17:39.000
Right, you don't have to be an organizer, who goes around and does really difficult community work, if you want to, 

01:17:39.000 --> 01:17:46.000
Please do, we need people to do that. But everyone of us can take control of our story and make sure that we tell it honestly. 

01:17:46.000 --> 01:17:50.000
And when I say our story, I mean the tory about how you ended up where you are.

01:17:50.000 --> 01:17:57.000
because every single one of us has got a story that involves unearned opportunities that came our way, every one of us not just white people.

01:17:57.000 --> 01:17:60.000
Not just men, not just rich people. 

01:18:00.000 --> 01:18:05.000
Every one of us if you're in college it's because someone encouraged you to do that , you were raised on an island. 

01:18:05.000 --> 01:18:11.000
Alone, without social input, without encouragement. You had mentors, you had relatives, 

01:18:11.000 --> 01:18:14.000
You can connections you got lucky sometimes, we've all had that too. 

01:18:14.000 --> 01:18:23.000
Some of us, our luck has been about racial advantage, or gender advantage or class inheritance. But sometimes it's just people that come into your life and steer you in a certain way. 

01:18:24.000 --> 01:18:35.000
Think about how much different our political discussion would be if we could all just admit that. Rather than getting wrapped up in "I came from nothing, I was a poor white child in Appalachia" 

01:18:35.000 --> 01:18:40.000
Every poor white person who doesn't want to talk about white privilege is apparently from Appalachia all of sudden every

01:18:40.000 --> 01:18:48.000
Every white person in America is from Appalachia when we start talking about whiteness. "well I grew up in the hills and hollers of West Virginia" 

01:18:48.000 --> 01:18:55.000
Well first of all, you probably didn't, but even if you did here's the dirty little secret, why do you think white folks in Appalachia are so poor?

01:18:55.000 --> 01:18:62.000
And so invisibly poor, so we don't even think about them. You know why? Cause we've racialized poverty in this country. 

01:19:02.000 --> 01:19:04.000
And we've racialized the idea of need. 

01:19:04.000 --> 01:19:11.000
So that we don't even see white poor people because we're so busy bashing black and brown poor people so that the white folks become invisible but that's not the black and brown people's fault. 

01:19:12.000 --> 01:19:19.000
That's the fault of wealthier white folks who don't want us to see any of those poor people, so if we could just get clear on our narrative and just acknowledge, 

01:19:19.000 --> 01:19:22.000
how much unearned stuff has come our way, 

01:19:22.000 --> 01:19:28.000
Then it would much harder, wouldn't it? If we share those stories and we're honest and upfront, and we create those narratives. 

01:19:28.000 --> 01:19:35.000
And we share them with people, it'd be very difficult to look down on people who need help when you've jut acknowledged how much help you've gotten. 

01:19:35.000 --> 01:19:43.000
See, part of this is just stuff we can do every day, to really get clear. To interrogate our position in this world, and if we do this enough,

01:19:43.000 --> 01:19:50.000
Then we go forward in the world with a very different mentality and then we can build solidarity and then we can build ally-ship. So those are some of things 

01:19:50.000 --> 01:19:53.000
that we can do right now. And I talk about a few other things in the book, 

01:19:53.000 --> 01:19:59.000
And in others of my writing but I think that's a good start and I think it's important that we stand up

01:19:59.000 --> 01:19:68.000
And that we stand up with those persons of color who are leading this work, whether its in Black Lives Matter, whether it's Leaders of A Beautiful Struggle in Baltimore. 

01:20:08.000 --> 01:20:17.000
Or lbsbaltimore.com doing some amazing work around police violence as well as education reform in a real progressive kind of way not a reactionary kind of way. 

01:20:17.000 --> 01:20:24.000
Malcolm X Grass Roots movement, I mean go look up these folks, look at the kind of things that they're talking about, share them with your friends, share them with your colleagues. 

01:20:24.000 --> 01:20:30.000
And then really spend the time critically assessing your own position in the world and a lot of door will open up. 

01:20:30.000 --> 01:20:32.000
Thank you. 

01:20:32.000 --> 01:20:35.000
Yes? 

01:20:35.000 --> 01:20:40.000
Male student: So systemic racism is a problem within this country but 

01:20:40.000 --> 01:20:48.000
How does it vary from location to location? Being from Oregon many of us think of ourselves as open minded and so on, 

01:20:48.000 --> 01:20:55.000
Are we? I think we've also been hearing the myth that it's the southerners or that it's those people. 

01:20:55.000 --> 01:20:60.000
Tim Wise: Yeah, it's my folks. 

01:21:00.000 --> 01:21:08.000
Well, here's the thing you know, the only difference between southerns and everybody else is that we're very aware of our crimes.

01:21:08.000 --> 01:21:11.000
We're so aware of them, that we lie about them just so we don't have to deal with it.

01:21:11.000 --> 01:21:17.000
But that's a matter of awareness, the only way you can lie about your crimes is to know you did them. 

01:21:17.000 --> 01:21:24.000
And so, in our case, you know, we have some people still wanting to wave the confederate flag because they're lying to themselves about what it means, 

01:21:24.000 --> 01:21:29.000
They're lying to themselves because they can look and see the words of the people that form that government. 

01:21:29.000 --> 01:21:33.000
And use that flag or some iteration of that flag as a symbol of it. 

01:21:33.000 --> 01:21:41.000
And see that that was all and only about slavery and white supremacy no other purpose was that government created for. None.

01:21:41.000 --> 01:21:45.000
And we lie about, the problem with non-southerners, 

01:21:45.000 --> 01:21:50.000
Is that they think that because they were on the right side of the civil war, they're done. 

01:21:50.000 --> 01:21:58.000
And it's one of those what have you done for me lately kind of things right. Here in Oregon this is a territory, let us remember 

01:21:58.000 --> 01:21:68.000
That told black folks that they could not be in at a certain point and expelled those who were and threatened any that were found in the territory with beating and whippings and even death.

01:22:08.000 --> 01:22:12.000
That happened in this state/territory so, 

01:22:12.000 --> 01:22:22.000
It's obviously a national problem, and it always has been the city of Portland is a really good example of a city that the first time I came to it, 

01:22:22.000 --> 01:22:33.000
I had this, image of this Portland, just like the first time I went to Seattle, first time I went to San Francisco, first time I went to all of these hip, progressive places, 

01:22:33.000 --> 01:22:38.000
And I was expecting, cause I'm from the south, I'm like "Oh my god this is going to be awesome" 

01:22:38.000 --> 01:22:45.000
And there's a lot of great things that I like about Portland by the way, lot of things I like about Seattle, lot of things I like about the Bay Area, 

01:22:45.000 --> 01:22:54.000
But I discovered, much to my surprise, how incredibly racist at a structural level many of these progressive places are. 

01:22:54.000 --> 01:22:61.000
So first time may second time I came to Portland, I was Lewis and Clark and the young black man that picked me up who was a student there,

01:23:01.000 --> 01:23:06.000
got me at the airport and we're driving back to the hotel and he was a junior,

01:23:06.000 --> 01:23:13.000
and he's telling me his story, his story involves over the two years that he had a car, freshman year he didn't one, sophomore year now junior year he did. 

01:23:13.000 --> 01:23:18.000
That he had been stopped by police 58 times in two years. 

01:23:18.000 --> 01:23:23.000
And I said how many times did you get a ticket, and he said zero. 

01:23:23.000 --> 01:23:33.000
Now i want you to think about that, what are the odds of being stopped 58 times if you'd actually done something illegal and never getting a ticket. 

01:23:33.000 --> 01:23:37.000
Probably not very likely. The first or second time I came out to Oregon State, 

01:23:37.000 --> 01:23:40.000
was back in 2000, and some of you will remember this, 

01:23:40.000 --> 01:23:48.000
So back in 2000, there was a young man who was a running back on OSU's football team who's names I've now forgotten but he was a preseason Heisman favorite. 

01:23:48.000 --> 01:23:51.000
he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated he was a brilliant athlete, 

01:23:51.000 --> 01:23:59.000
Turned out OSU did not have a great year that year and he had a bad year, rough year as well so he ended up not figuring into the Heisman stuff at the end. 

01:23:59.000 --> 01:23:68.000
This was 2000/2001 as I recall, and I went to OSU I spent like a week in Corvallis talking to law enforcement, talking to the athletic department, 

01:24:08.000 --> 01:24:13.000
talking to this young man, and he would come to the stuff where  was speaking and he would get up and talk about 

01:24:13.000 --> 01:24:23.000
his experience. Now keep in mind, this kid was like most visible, best known athlete on the campus probably in the whole state at the time. 

01:24:24.000 --> 01:24:32.000
And he's talking about he'd been stopped over Easter Break, I want to say he was from California originally, whatever it was he couldn't go home. 

01:24:32.000 --> 01:24:36.000
for Easter Break or something so he stayed in Corvallis when a lot of other folks were off campus 

01:24:36.000 --> 01:24:44.000
And he was driving around, and just in the week of Easter break or whatever it was, he got stopped 7 times. And a couple of times by the same cop. 

01:24:44.000 --> 01:24:51.000
Who never seemed to recognize him, he's been on Sports Illustrated they kept acting like he didn't belong in Corvallis. 

01:24:51.000 --> 01:24:58.000
Finally he got the point where we took his license, his registration his proof of insurance put it in a zip lock bag, put it in his glove compartment and every time he got stopped,

01:24:58.000 --> 01:24:67.000
He would just open it up, flip it on top of the hood and just sit and finally at the end of the week, or the ten days or whatever the break was he just sold his car and said I'm just going to walk.  

01:25:07.000 --> 01:25:16.000
This is a young man known to everybody in the community still perceived as not belonging. So let's just be clear

01:25:16.000 --> 01:25:20.000
racial biased may not look the same in every region 

01:25:20.000 --> 01:25:24.000
it might seem more subtle over here and it might seem more obvious over here.

01:25:24.000 --> 01:25:28.000
But at the end of the day, the difference is really only qualitative 

01:25:28.000 --> 01:25:33.000
not quantitative. I would say that sometimes the qualitative differences 

01:25:33.000 --> 01:25:38.000
and the qualitative differences are not necessarily worse 

01:25:38.000 --> 01:25:40.000
in the usual suspect places 

01:25:40.000 --> 01:25:48.000
sometimes they're worse in the ones you don't suspect. Madison, Wisconsin is dane county. People in Madison who are white think it's a very progressive place.

01:25:48.000 --> 01:25:52.000
People in Madison who are not white will tell you that it is often 

01:25:52.000 --> 01:25:56.000
exactly the opposite and in fat Dane county, where Madison is located

01:25:56.000 --> 01:25:60.000
it has the biggest racial disparity in law enforcement regarding drug arrest 

01:26:00.000 --> 01:26:04.000
and prosecutions in any county in all of Wisconsin.

01:26:04.000 --> 01:26:08.000
So what does that tell you? It tells you that even though Madison and other places 

01:26:08.000 --> 01:26:12.000
like that and San Fransisco and Portland and Seattle which have similar realities regarding 

01:26:12.000 --> 01:26:16.000
prosecution, differences in suspension rate, differences in school 

01:26:16.000 --> 01:26:20.000
might be sort of liberal and anti-racist 

01:26:20.000 --> 01:26:29.000
in their affect, in their outward sort of commentary and they might be more politically progressive, but at the institutional level

01:26:29.000 --> 01:26:32.000
there's virtually no differences and sometimes when there is one 

01:26:32.000 --> 01:26:36.000
it's not in the favor of those places and I think it's important 

01:26:36.000 --> 01:26:40.000
to remember that. Thank you. One more.

01:26:40.000 --> 01:26:44.000
Audience member: Hi, I have two questions 

01:26:44.000 --> 01:26:48.000
I'll accept as much answer as you have time for.

01:26:48.000 --> 01:26:52.000
What information do you trust? I don't 

01:26:52.000 --> 01:26:56.000
necessarily trust the media, I definitely don't trust the internet, 

01:26:56.000 --> 01:26:59.000
how do you find the truth?

01:26:59.000 --> 01:26:64.000
Do you want me to ask the second one? Tim: No it's a great question I think the real task 

01:27:04.000 --> 01:27:08.000
of anyone who wants to know the truth is you have to really 

01:27:08.000 --> 01:27:12.000
open yourself up to multiple sources of information, even the ones that 

01:27:12.000 --> 01:27:22.000
you know at first blush and you find it really difficult to stomach or difficult to believe. I remember back in 1996

01:27:22.000 --> 01:27:28.000
I was getting ready to debate, a name that won't mean much to you to some 

01:27:28.000 --> 01:27:32.000
it might, he's for the last 

01:27:32.000 --> 01:27:36.000
twenty-four, twenty-five years been one of the leading conservatives 

01:27:36.000 --> 01:27:45.000
commentators originally around issues of race, he does other stuff now and also went to jail for a minute for 

01:27:45.000 --> 01:27:48.000
voter fraud, or I guess he went to a half way house, I don't know 

01:27:48.000 --> 01:27:52.000
if he was really in prison or not, I can't recall. Anyways, good times. Anyway

01:27:52.000 --> 01:27:56.000
Denesh and I were going to be debating back in '96 

01:27:56.000 --> 01:27:60.000
and he wrote all these right wing books 

01:28:00.000 --> 01:28:04.000
that I found to be exhaustingly bad 

01:28:04.000 --> 01:28:08.000
and wrong headed and factually inaccurate but I knew I had to read it.

01:28:08.000 --> 01:28:12.000
If I was going to debate him, I needed to know not only 

01:28:12.000 --> 01:28:16.000
that he was wrong in my own head and why he was wrong. So I needed to read

01:28:16.000 --> 01:28:20.000
his stuff and then I needed to do some research and find out why it was wrong.

01:28:20.000 --> 01:28:24.000
So a lot of this is about critical thinking and let me say you

01:28:24.000 --> 01:28:28.000
should do that with all the things I said today. 

01:28:28.000 --> 01:28:32.000
I can footnote everything that I said today factually and I've got 600 footnotes 

01:28:32.000 --> 01:28:36.000
approximately in the new book I guess that I'm totally going to sell you when we're done here 

01:28:36.000 --> 01:28:40.000
in just a minute. That was my subliminal marketing 

01:28:40.000 --> 01:28:48.000
so you like that? And I think all those footnotes are solid and I think that the data is very solid but I invite you as you should 

01:28:48.000 --> 01:28:52.000
to look into it, to look up that information 

01:28:52.000 --> 01:28:56.000
and to cross reference it with other information. On my website 

01:28:56.000 --> 01:28:60.000
I have a recommended reading list 

01:29:00.000 --> 01:29:04.000
of books written by scholars on these issues that are 

01:29:04.000 --> 01:29:08.000
incredibly well researched and I think are 

01:29:08.000 --> 01:29:15.000
good sources. So if you go to TimWise.org, which is my website over on the right hand side when you scroll down underneath 

01:29:15.000 --> 01:29:20.000
the pictures of the books that I've written, there's a recommended reading list 

01:29:20.000 --> 01:29:24.000
and it's subdivided by category, so there's a bunch of books on race 

01:29:24.000 --> 01:29:28.000
and criminal justice, race in the labor market, race in history, 

01:29:28.000 --> 01:29:32.000
race in education, so you can look at those. I also have a blog 

01:29:32.000 --> 01:29:39.000
or set of links to organizations and individual scholars that I think do really strong research work 

01:29:39.000 --> 01:29:45.000
on these issues. Different non-profit organizations that have amazing research staff. And I also 

01:29:45.000 --> 01:29:48.000
use a lot, like in the new book, I use a lot of 

01:29:48.000 --> 01:29:52.000
just raw data from the labor department 

01:29:52.000 --> 01:29:56.000
from the department of health and human 

01:29:56.000 --> 01:29:60.000
services, from the FBI, from the department of Justice, 

01:30:00.000 --> 01:30:04.000
you know various sorts of official sources. Because sometimes even though that stuff is really 

01:30:04.000 --> 01:30:08.000
dry, when you look at it and when you start to think about what it means, I mean there's a great example 

01:30:08.000 --> 01:30:12.000
of this. You've probably heard at some point 

01:30:12.000 --> 01:30:16.000
that when it comes to something like unemployment or poverty, 

01:30:16.000 --> 01:30:20.000
that white folks are 

01:30:20.000 --> 01:30:24.000
almost twice as likely to be unemployed, almost three times, oh no sorry 

01:30:24.000 --> 01:30:32.000
black folks are almost twice as likely to be unemployed and almost three times as likely as whites to be poor. But it's actually a little more than twice as likely to be unemployed 

01:30:32.000 --> 01:30:36.000
and a little more than three times as likely to be poor but the official data 

01:30:36.000 --> 01:30:44.000
obscures it and it's important to know how to read official data. So if you look at the data for instance, in the labor department, or the census bureau 

01:30:44.000 --> 01:30:51.000
that it doesn't look like the disparities are as bad as what I'm claiming here. But the reason is 

01:30:51.000 --> 01:30:57.000
what the census bureau calls Hispanics, what I've called throughout the speech as Latinos or Latinas, 

01:30:57.000 --> 01:30:67.000
are classified about 88% of the time as racially white in official government data. Because Hispanic ethnicity is not a racial 

01:31:07.000 --> 01:31:15.000
designation so in those tables that you see in official data, Hispanics are being counted twice. They're being counted in the Hispanic data 

01:31:15.000 --> 01:31:25.000
and they're being counted 88% of the time in the white category, about 5.5% of the time in the black category, 1.5% in the Asian category, the rest in the Native American category.

01:31:25.000 --> 01:31:28.000
The reason that's important is because 

01:31:28.000 --> 01:31:32.000
if you have the Hispanic numbers, most of the them also in the white numbers 

01:31:32.000 --> 01:31:36.000
and the Hispanic population, the Latino population has a higher rate of poverty 

01:31:36.000 --> 01:31:40.000
and a higher rate of unemployment than non-Hispanic whites, putting them in 

01:31:40.000 --> 01:31:44.000
with the white folks will artificially inflate white unemployment. 

01:31:44.000 --> 01:31:48.000
It will make white folks look like they're doing worse because you just included 28 million Latinos in the white totals. 

01:31:48.000 --> 01:31:52.000
So now all the sudden it actually obscures the level of 

01:31:52.000 --> 01:31:56.000
disparity. So we have to look at those tables but we also have to look at them with a 

01:31:56.000 --> 01:31:64.000
very critical eye because sometimes they conceal as much as they reveal. So I would say start with that recommended reading list 

01:32:04.000 --> 01:32:08.000
start with those footnotes in my books or on my website. A lot of my 

01:32:08.000 --> 01:32:13.000
articles certainly the blog posts and essays that I've written in the last four or five years almost always have 

01:32:13.000 --> 01:32:22.000
imbedded links that are highlighted that you can follow for the source material on criminal justice issues, or unemployment issues, or on any of this stuff. 

01:32:22.000 --> 01:32:24.000
And so I invite you to do that 

01:32:24.000 --> 01:32:29.000
and never trust anything definitely just because it's on the internet. The internet is a great thing 

01:32:29.000 --> 01:32:32.000
It's a great thing in a lot of ways and social media 

01:32:32.000 --> 01:32:36.000
can be a very powerful tool and a very useful tool. The only downside 

01:32:36.000 --> 01:32:40.000
is it means, I mean the good thing is is that everyone can have a voice.

01:32:40.000 --> 01:32:44.000
The bad news is it means everybody has a voice and it creates a lot of noise. 

01:32:44.000 --> 01:32:48.000
Right? So it's a matter of figuring out how do you sift through all the noise 

01:32:48.000 --> 01:32:52.000
to get to what's real and when you see a number that seems outrageous 

01:32:52.000 --> 01:32:56.000
you should follow it up. I mean you should absolutely do it. For example 

01:32:56.000 --> 01:32:60.000
the six Walton family members having all that money seems ridiculous 

01:33:00.000 --> 01:33:04.000
but go look it up, it's really easy to find, as outrageous 

01:33:04.000 --> 01:33:08.000
as it happens to be. So never trust anything automatically just because someone 

01:33:08.000 --> 01:33:12.000
says it and especially don't trust it if you 

01:33:12.000 --> 01:33:16.000
are inclined to believe it. If you're inclined to believe the things I say, 

01:33:16.000 --> 01:33:20.000
be especially critical. I want people on my side who know 

01:33:20.000 --> 01:33:28.000
why they're on my side. Just like I wanted to know what I was on that side and it became very important to me to make sure that the argument was strong and solid.

01:33:28.000 --> 01:33:32.000
We don't need people who just sort of agree with stuff just because they like the way it sounds, we need people 

01:33:32.000 --> 01:33:36.000
who are willing to go out there and look it up for themselves and then have the courage of 

01:33:36.000 --> 01:33:40.000
their convictions to go forward with a certain politic in mind. 

01:33:40.000 --> 01:33:45.000
Thank you all so much. Applause. 

01:33:45.000 --> 01:33:47.000
Applause.