strong christian anglican background. i gave my father's last rites on his deathbed. one of the major reasons we are so terrified of death is we are no longer in touch with the ritual of the end of life that old religion did so beautifully for us. one of the good people i interviewed for the book said the purpose of religion is to guide to the living through the experience of death and i think we need to recreate some of those rituals because giving my father last rites was immediately relieving of my anxiety and suffering. it helped me know that i had left my father and wherever he was going, whatever form it would take i felt i had done the right thing and i was being reassured by an ancient tradition that was there to do

exactly what that volunteer chaplain was doing for me. >> were you able to aggregate how much the u.s. spends in taxpayer dollars on end of life care? was that easy to find? >> it was not easy to find the right statistic. there are a lot of wrong statistics floating out there but the reality is a quarter of what medicare spends is spent on the last year of life so when you consider people may be in medicare 20 or 30 years that is an extraordinary imbalance and it shows something majorly wrong with our decisionmaking get the end of life. >> this is a preview of katy butler's new book "knocking on heaven's door: the path to the better way of death" 11. you are watching tv on c-span2. >> next on booktv and discussion on african-american history and the twenty-first century. from the 2013 harlem will carry

an annual book fair in new york city. [applause] >> good afternoon, everyone. my pleasure to welcome to our third panel of the day, the title is "50 years later: blacks and the 21st century". the panel is framed around what kind of progress blacks have made since the civil rights movement. and the enduring challenges african-americans face in the twenty-first century. a formulated two major questions for us. the first is what historical and contemporary factors continue to make racial equality a contested and elusive concept in the twenty-first century. and what kinds of knowledge base specific challenges of racial inequity in our contemporary moment. i am thrilled to be able to be in conversation with two and

possibly three dynamic speakers and dynamic thinkers today. i would like to introduce them. joining us is sarah christian who is a professor of english comparative literature in colombia and she served as director of the institute for research and african-american studies. her upcoming book in september, women artists and progressive politics during world war ii, pardon me. second panelist is camille joseph whose founding the race of study and democracy and professor of history at tufts university, and author of the award winning wait until the midnight hour, black america, and bright lights from barack obama. our third scheduled speaker is kendall thomas who is travelingy

has not yet arrived but we are hoping he will take the stage as soon as he does come. i will introduce him in his absence right now. he is nash professor of law and co-founder and director of the center for the study of law and culture at columbia university and professor thomas is one of the editors of the seminole volume critical race theory, the form of the movement. the three powerful thinkers and visionary speakers. [applause] >> get settled, and make yourself comfortable and we are so glad you made it. i was saying to camille and sarah before we came on that in so many ways barack obama has set up our conversation about blacks in the twenty-first century through his comments

yesterday but i want to put that in the larger context because we are trying to take the backward and forward look on this panel in our conversation. the backward look is about where have we come, where have we come to since in the 50 years since the march on washington. at the same time, this particular moment is framed by a three events, the first is in the last three weeks the supreme court overturned the domestic marriage act and struck down the voting rights act. at the same time seven days ago george zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of trayvon martin and the first african-american president of the united states, barack obama, made his second public statement on the state of race relations in the united states so this is the really key moments to reflect on, 50 years later and what kind of progress

have we made in black america? so to start out with i will ask you each to comment and let you see as the impact of these three events on black political culture and what they say about what kind of progress is or is not being made in the twenty-first century. do you want to open it? >> thank you all for being here. that is a very provocative question. it is difficult to come up with quick answers in the heat of this particular moment, but i will try to address it. i think those three, there are three legal intervention so to speak at this moment. tell us the importance of understanding what racial progress has meant historically. the historical nature of what we call progress in the area of

race be quality is always characterized by movement forward and retrenchments so that there is never any straight sense of progress. we can look and say that we have made great strides since the 1963 march on washington and one of the key things that we accomplished following that march was the voting rights act two years later and 50 years later we have a retrenchment on that key piece of legislation. 50 years later we have something many of us know to be an act of racial violence where the person has been found not guilty and yet the difference is 50 years ago we might not have been attacked for calling it an act of racial violence and that shows you the retrenchment, it becomes a more sophisticated, makes it more difficult for us

to name things we know have to do with race and those of us who've called it an act of racial violence are accused of being divisive. i don't think that would have been the case 50 years ago. there is progress but there's also retrenchment, backlash, one step forward and two or three four steps backward and we have to be aware of that and these acts show us. striking down the voting rights act is a step backward and trayvon martin, i think, is both because it is a step backward but the mobilization, i am heartened by the mobilization around it and the refusal to give in to the dominant narrative that was spun as a result of its of progress and

retrenchment. [applause] >> thank you for organizing this panel. i think we ♪ rodriguez a big round of applause for the fifteenth anniversary of the harlem book fair. this book fair is part of the national conversation about race and democracy, we should be having in our communities everywhere around the country that could be multi-cultural, multiracial, multi generational and we have been having these conversations historically throughout but we need to have these conversations among white americans, latinos, gays and lesbians and young people and it should be a national priority. first of all i would like to throw out a provocation. i would like to throw out of provocation that the difference between 1963, and 2013 is in 1963 black people knew they were being oppressed. in 1963 they knew they were

being politically, socially, economically subjugated. i would like to throw out a provocation when you think about how it appeared in the civil rights movement from 1964-1965 when black people transformed fundamentally american democracy and they did so with white allies, latino allies but did so through blood and blood shed. trayvon martin has antecedence in the first black boy who was assassinated in mississippi in 1955 for allegedly violating racial adequate and speaking to a white woman. her body was placed in the tallahassee river with the 25 -- nugent. it was shown in jet magazine and that spurred the nation to look at the price of white supremacy on our democracy. when you think about 1963, 1963

is the year of birmingham and the year dr. king writes his famous letter from a birmingham jail and in that letter dr. king said the activism going on in birmingham and the young women and men being arrested sometimes as young as 8, 9, 10 years old are taking this nation back to those great wells of democracy dug deep by the founding fathers. king was being kind because the country was founded on racial slavery. a conversation that we still have not had but 50 years ago with the march on washington provided, a litmus test for american democracy. when canes speaks at the march on washington on august 28, 1963, he says americans of all colors and all races are going to have to struggle together, go to jail together to try to fundamentally transform american democracy. 50 years later especially in the aftermath of barack obama's elecon we all ce all

celebrated an unearned victory and talked about post racial america. we are celebrating the mythology of the end of racism and that is why people were surprised about trayvon martin. i am heartened that the president finally spoke out yesterday. he spoke out and started to speak truth only because of the grassroots activism that has forced and compelled him to speak. barack obama is not martin luther king jr.. barack obama is not frederick douglass. when you look at a picture of dr. king's next to jfk or lyndon baines johnson, barack obama is lyndon baines johnson and john kennedy, not frederick douglass but abraham lincoln. the sooner the black community has enough maturity to understand that they can level respectful to critique to the commander-in-chief and president of the united states for not discussing black poverty. he has said he is not president of black america. i say fine but black americans are american citizens no matter

what anybody says. we are american citizens advocating an end of policy and the end of racial equality in the end of mass incarceration. when we think of president barack obama we need to go back to what dr. king said in his last speech, the greatness of america lies in the right to protest for right. whoever is in the white house should be someone who is talking about an agenda that upsets african-americans even if that person is the first black president of the united states. [applause] >> good afternoon, great to be here and i too when to julian in the congratulations for organizing this event and allowing us an opportunity to talk about the state of black

politics. you offered three images. one was of the u.s. supreme court's decision in the shelby county voting rights case, not to forget this past term also decided an affirmative-action case from the university of texas in which affirmative action survived by a hair. i am persuaded that in that decision the supreme court is setting up the law to strike down racial diversity as a compelling justification for race conscious affirmative action programs. taken together weakens a three things about each of those events or images, each of which offers us a perch on to the

state of black politics in the united states today. about that supreme court decision, in his opinion for the courts the chief justice, justice roberts, says something that i do not think could have been said hist 50 years ago, would not have been sent 50 years ago by a member of the u.s. supreme court. there's a moment in the opinion in which he frankly admits that racial discrimination in american life, a particularly here in voting, exists, goes on to say no one denies that and yet by the end of the opinion what he has given us is a reading of the constitution which effectively says racial discrimination exists, no one denies it and we don't care. so we are living in peculiar

moment at which at one of the same time, we can admit the existence of racial discrimination, indeed of racial stratification and subordination and on the other, declare without skipping a beat that that is something about which we are justified as a nation in not caring about. there is this principle of a political culture of in difference to questions of racial inequality which distinguishes our moment from 1963 and after the speech by obama i might be getting into some hot water because i read the speech quickly and read some of the press coverage and what strikes me about the press coverage is the extent to which the speech has been universally lauded for its sensitive and

probing and profound insight into the nature of race and racism in the united states today. i am very glad the president shows a week after the event, he chose to address the verdict in the zimmerman case and he acknowledged the real and widespread pain, african-americans and our friends of racial equality, committed to an anti racist politics in that verdict but as in so many of his other pronouncements about race the president's remarks pretty much remain within the framework of what i call in my own work racial moralism. the telling as late philosopher

richard brody once put it a sad and sentimental story, this could be your daughter. effect had a son, trayvon martin could have been my son. if it was 35 years ago i could have been trayvon martin. the speech only gestured through the use of the word context which depending on how you use it could mean everything and nothing. the structural forces that produced trayvon martin and to the meaning of racism in the age of neoliberalism. that brings us to the moment of the zimmerman verdict itself in which a judge instructed the jury which reached a verdict which he effectively -- this was another provocation, when it

comes to circumstances like this, a black man has no rights, which a white man is bound to respect. i am paraphrasing the decision of the supreme court in the dread scott case, the notorious case from the nineteenth century which predated the civil war. for all our celebration about the sea change, and racial inequality since the early 60s, it is important for us as we think about moving forward, not to lose sight of the continuity. am i saying there is no meaningful difference between the structure of racism in 1963 and racism as we know it today.

i am not claiming that. what i can say is we live now as we lived 50 years ago in a moment of racial contradiction. we need to wrestle with the reality of those contradictions instead of wishing them away. [applause] >> everyone will agree those were very provocative statements and i want to follow with two of them. i would love to hear you talk more about the contradictions each of you is pointing act, the contradictions you were mentioning between a historical moment during which there was a recognition of oppression and the contemporary moment kendall is describing.

that links directly to the cycle you were talking about of progress and retrenchment, progress and retrenchment. for me it seems one of the things you are putting on the table is the question of how in this contemporary moment is race being erased in a way that takes away the possibility for action, legal action at the grassroots level. i wonder if you would like to comment the implicit criticism you are making to the way in which for example barack obama is asking us to participate in a national conversation on race but at the same time saying he could not lead to that conversation saying government is not the most effective place to have that conversation but it should be had. i would love you to tease out more of the contradictions more of your speaking to in terms of what is the contemporary momen and how do we m

mobilize against jim crow for example 15 years ago? >> i think the most important thing is to recognize and acknowledge that contradiction. for so many people there was simply the shock in the verdict. there seemed to be 2 kinds of responses to the zimmerman verdict, those is that wasn't surprise, what would you expect, i didn't expect anything different, this wasn't made to treat us fairly and other people who were stunned that in this day and time that that was the verdict and there is the contradiction, and there was a middle ground we need to be able to discuss that yes, we are in a moment when our country made tremendous strides and elected an african-american president, exceptional african-american person president, the civil rights movement was quite successful in that it did

knockdown certain barriers that gave a few of us access, a few exceptional individuals access and so many black people still suffer from all kinds of inequality that was not addressed significantly enough that therein lie those contradictions so i think one of the things we have to do is acknowledge their existence, see how the aty in them, for instance i will stop here, the absurdity in the judge's instructions to the jury or the prosecution that they could say profiling but they couldn't say racial profiling. there is a way, what are the possibilities when we can't even called racial profiling racial profiling? when the prosecution can use race all the time, afraid of the young african-american food to because one robbed her house, and have pictures that evoke

racial narratives that will strike at the heart of the jury yet we can't say that trayvon martin was racially profiled. the final thing i will say with president obama's speech, the anecdotes, we all have personal anecdotes and it is supposed to strike empathy in the hearts of the listener. i like obama, and i thought he was like me, i voted for him yet he can't get a cab in manhattan. there's a certain drama to personal anecdote, a drama to that story and that becomes the end all be all of the story. when people are doing the kinds of post speech discussions they say he said trayvon martin could have been me 35 years ago but what gets lost is that i can't do anything about it, the president of the united states, the united states government, i

want to acknowledge your pain, black america, i understand it but i have experienced it but as president i can to do anything about it. and i watch and look at twitter and facebook and everyone quoted at trayvon martin could have been me 35 years ago but very little pay attention to that part that it is not the place for government, politicians can't start this question with a conversation that needs to be had. personal anecdotes is good but it is not in our service when it overshadows or trumps the work that really needs to be done. [applause] >> i would like to bills on that, one thing we need to do even for our audience, talk about a definition of race. when we think about racism racism is not about personal prejudice. it is about institutional subjugation and oppression.

the new racism is not about white and colored signs. the new racism is about outcomes, racial disparity, who is in mail and why, who has no health care, who is unemployed, who is racially profiled and stigmatized. it is about outcomes. who goes to segregated public schools nationally and why, who is poor and living before the poverty line and why? african-americans, forty-three million in the united states, only 1.6% made $200,000 a year or more, 20% live below the federally mandated poverty line. another 27% make under $35,000 a year. for that group of people things haven't gotten better in the last 50 years. we think about president obama president obama, what we all have to question is this. is the euphoria and a cultural transformation of having of black president, beautiful first lady and the first kid enough's

if that black president cannot provide substantive public policy transformation that impacts the african-american community and go beyond the affordable health care act which is substantive and the stimulus package which is substantive but there is no urban agenda this president has. there is no conflict in what michele alexander calls the new jim crow or mass incarceration or the director -- khalil mohamad called the condemnation of blackness and how that connection to why black people are treated and dehumanized in the criminal justice system. reason trayvon martin goes from victim to criminal is because of a cultural racism that infects the united states. what i will say is this. the contradictions we are talking about are not contradictions but part and parcel of race and democracy in america. what dr. king and malcolm x, 49 years ago fannie lou hamer said

is this america before the credentials committee in atlantic city of the democratic national convention. 44 years old from louisville, mississippi, being beaten and brutalize for voting rights, she said is this america? lyndon johnson organized a press conference to take her off national television because he said who is that, exposing the lack of democracy in the united states? the contradictions saying that you could have a black president sidney united states that you can have 841,000 black males in jail, that is not a contradiction. that is part and parcel of how american democracy has always worked. with the civil-rights movement, the black power movement, what multiracial, multicultural progressives try to do is transformed democracy and say there's a different way for democracy to work. it doesn't have to work by condemning black people. doesn't have to work by denying raises and. the further we deny racial

discrimination in this country and institutional racism and slavery the worse it grows like a cancer or a tumor on our body politics. the further we refuse to confront racial discrimination and institutional racism the more we are left confused about the outcome. how come there are so many black people? maybe they just don't like to work. maybe it is not about industrialization or institutionalized discrimination, not about harlem and brooklyn getting gentrified right now as i sit here and speak and black people left out. this is about institutions and certainly president obama is not confronting it. we need to confront it and force president obama's hand. the reason he discussed trayvon martin is because of the grass roots insurgency from activists in this room and all around the country to demanded the commander-in-chief speak about this. john kennedy, june 11th, 1963,

talk about racism as the moral crisis that was affecting and distorting our democracy. that is kennedy and kennedy did that because of m l k and grassroot# the problem of racia

inequality men insist unsettling it wrong by asking absolutely contradictory things. you cannot make ten million people at one and the same time servile and dignified, docile and self-reliant, servants and independent leaders, segregated and yet part of the industrial organism. this franchise and citizens of a democracy, ignorant and intelligent, this is impossible, he writes. the impossibility is not -- it is in the very nature of things. the possibility and the impossibility of a black politics in what we might call the age of obama is the contradiction of race and

racism. is that contradiction of a president who can engage in a certain identity politics identified with and as trayvon martin on the one hand and yet is willing to to allow the complete and effective privatization of any conversation of any public issue to identify with all americans. that privatization of race is the nub of the problem. this notion that raises something, that affects our public lives but which at its root, apart from racism narrowly

defined as knowing purposeful, intentional discrimination by the government, apart from that very narrow situation which we know doesn't begin to scratch the surface of racism today the rest of it is all a matter for private resolution. i think that a good part of the power of that vision is how it to be addressed, has to do with the extent to which our economy and our politics is governed by a worldview that fancy your titian's call neoliberalism, economic programs, public philosophy holds that everybody and everything is for the market. and the imperative of the

capitalist market and economic elites who steers that market ought to determine public policy. we live in a situation in which the heart as i see it of racism against black people and other people of color in this country is economic injustice and yet under a neil liberal order this question of economic injustice is simply not on the agenda of public policy. we can nibble around the edges in talking about raising the minimum wage. and setting up repairs, the transformation, the fundamental transformation of the economy in a way that would subject

decisions about the distribution of shared public resources to democratic decisionmaking, that idea of economic democracy is weaker than it has been almost at any time since the creation of the republic. president obama who represents his first social secretary put it, a valuable brand is himself a commodity in the marketplace of politics in an age of citizens united when politicians can effectively be bought and sold to the highest bidder one of the deepest challenges facing us not just as people of color but american citizens generally,

the absolute bankruptcy of a political system that claims to be democratic, which in fact is controlled and won by corporate financial elite. unless and until we are willing to acknowledge that eagerness with which a president will embrace like ronald reagan, the architect of neoliberalism, one of the great presidents in the history of the country as a tool of neil liberalism we are not going to get anywhere but i believe president obama and the interests he represents rely on our acquiescence in the name of a very narrow and ultimately disempowering understanding of identity policy.

identity is being mobilized in fact to disable, disempower and defeat any claims to justice on the part of the collective us who embrace that identity. that is the contradiction. the removal as question of the democratic decisionmaking of these large questions of economic justice which are also questions of racial justice. [applause] >> i want to follow through on many of the statements you just made. on the one hand critique of leadership in its present form and at the same time to ask us to consider the power of wheat -- resurgence the. that is not a contradiction.

that is the twin concept being recreated in the twenty-first century and i would love to hear you talk a little bit more about given the provocation barack obama has given us about the need for a conversation on race and that the same time the creation, the offloading of that conversation into a private sphere as you point out, what would leadership look like? what would it need to look like in order to connect to grassroots mobilization that barack obama is responding to? i am asking you about the critiqued for another moment. what would it mean to actually be able to bring together effective leadership? what would that entail? how would the government be involved? how would it connect to the forces that are actually

soliciting response albeit an effective one? i will not make sarah go first on this. we will switch it up. >> one of the interesting and powerful things, that is a great question, that is happening already. we have got everything from color changes on line to different grassroots activists for the environment, anti-poverty, mass incarceration, the book the new jim crow is a runaway best seller and activists around the world using it and mass incarceration is even on the agenda at the naacp. one of the things mainstream black leadership has done in the age of obama which i would add is the age ofonartin as well, abdicated their role as protestors. they abdicated their role as leadership that is going to critique the executive office,

the senate, different branches of government and abdicated this role for access and access means you get photo ops with the president, he may come to your conventions, organization dinners but when it comes to tangible public policy initiatives, you are not getting anything and with the black community allowed obama to do and i am speaking at somebody who has been critically supportive of obama, not somebody just attacking the president of the united states and understand his plight as a black man, understand the right-wing assault and attacks on him but the fact the we are citizens of this republic and you can never abdicate your role as a citizen unless the president of the united states gets a free pass because you say that brother has so many problems he doesn't have to care about the poverty rate in the black community, doesn't have to carry out mass incarceration and what the clinton crime bill continues to do to the black community, doesn't have to care

about the difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine and that the federal level still 18-1. doesn't have to care about racial profiling and even said he wants ray kelly, the nation's biggest racial profile to the head of homeland security. we have got to say respectfully brother, no, you can't do that even if you are the first black president of the united states. we have to have the ability, martin luther king jr. was leading a poor people's campaign in 1968 and if the trade access to lyndon johnson's white house for the moral clarity that there needed to be anti poverty and job legislation in the united states, dr. king died advocating for 1,000 black men who were sanitation workers in tennessee and the reason he was assassinated is dr. king was bringing together white, black, latino, native americans to come to washington for a poor people's camp in for the entire

summer and he is trying to bend the nation's will into effected legislation for pour people. people talk about dr. king as the nonviolent activist and he was but he is a revolutionary, a 20th century american revolutionary using non-violence as a tactic to bend the nation's will end save what he calls the soul of america. we can't have a black president that because he is black we are unwilling to say this is the black agenda that we need, these one, 3 things that you have to push for this rhetorically and public policywise. he gave a great speech but told us as president of the united states, not just an accident, he can't do anything about it. we are supposed to say that is good? that makes no sense. pecans sign an executive order?

the can't make a speech about racial profiling, he can't say we got to bring blacks and white plaids and latinos and asians of all these people in the united states which is about to become a majority minority country, we got to bring them all together to have an up-to-date conversation about what does racial integration mean, what does racial justice mean in the twenty-first -- twenty first century and outcomes are part of the democracy? weekend just to the color blind racism game and colorblind racism, colorblind racism and say he quality is a fact when we no racial outcomes show a pervasive inequality and discrimination in america. [applause] >> i will go next. how can you follow that up? some of you in the audience may be familiar with the very powerful essays that was published i think in 1964 by the

man who organized the 1963 march on washington, the great black gay activist who rose an article called from protest to politics and in that article he contended that the time had come for black people to move their political activities from the streets to the halls of legislatures to the courts and the executive branches. there was something powerful about that call. in the context in which he made it it made some sense. we had the 1964 civil rights act and we were soon to have the 1965 voting rights act so the legal architecture had been put in place to make that shift from

a protest based politics to an electoral institutional government organized politics in which we get on the school board and city tells will, to be in mayors's offices and become governors and even president. ..

that vision of the leaders around questions of racial equality and the elimination of racial injustice that is a pervasive feature of our common life is simply not going to work him. so then, for me the question becomes what forms of leadership do we need and where pot that leadership come from? well, i am persuaded that that leadership is almost certainly not going to come from the mainstream of the democratic party. and there is no hope in hell that it is going to come from

the republican party. so i think we need to look, my brothers and sisters, my friends, my fellow citizens, to the left. and to a left which understands the fundamental and intransigent resistance of a liberal democratic understanding of racism and racial justice. in pursuing that project, that project och of black freedom in which black folk, brown folk, asian folk, native americans and others would be able, as king put it in 1963, to live out the full meaning of the american

treat aids has -- the american creed, to have full, equal, and substantive citizenship. that is when you have full, equal, and substantive citizenship. my suggestion is that we need to combine in a way that i think is actually beginning to happen. protest politics and the electoral politics because i have seen the way out of a contradiction which on the one hand gave us two election cycles in the 2012 and 2008 elections in which black people were the democratic graphic that -- democratic demographic devoted at the highest percentage in on the other hand is give us an unemployment rate, 13 percent, which is higher than the black unemployment rate was in 1963. those questions of social and economic justice that for me

demand and can only be confronted through a double strategy of protests and politics which is informed by a left vision of social democracy or, if you will, democratic social leaders. [applause] >> i agree with everything that has been said that would add one thing. over the past 50 years a lot of the work that has been done -- maybe it just does not gone popularized -- has been work that has challenged us to think differently about leadership. i know that work has been done. i have read it, seen it, taught it. and yet i think we have very old fashioned notions of what leadership looks like. it is still messianic, so charismatic to and is no, we saw those kinds of errors workingman had as making posters.

and some of us criticize that not because we did not support obama, but because president obama was running for president of the united states. for some people that also meant his interests were protecting these guys a corporate elite interests that were often against the interest of poor people's regardless of color. and the questions of economic justice were never on the table. ever. so that work in the past, i would even say 30 years, 20 years, has taught us to look differently at what leadership looks like. it sits in our analysis every once in awhile policy is and when we mention the names of baker, were others amongst leaders, but we have to go deeper. elevate, not only were the women, but what they stood for, what did ellen baker and qaeda

b. wells will -- these are women who were much more involved in the protest and. i think that freedom struggle that has been talked about always knew that electoral politics was not the way to the so-called promise land. we seem to have given that up when we put everything behind all of our wishes that would elect a president obama, but there were leaders progress rights leaders who understood that there positions were only a significant as they were capable of the people who put them there. strong people don't be strong leaders. i think we look to community and groups of people who were organizing in their own interests, who put questions of economic justice and mass incarceration and all these domestic violence, all the things that assault our community front and center --

that should be one litmus test -- the things that have from our community, that front and center on the agenda the so-called leaders are presenting to us. i think we don't think that is only people who we elect three electoral politics, and we don't think that black leaders or leaders of our communities of the people who have access in the media. the media does not make our leaders. and i will leave you with just one of the most recent versions i think of leadership that could be a model of leadership for us, and it is not an individual. it was an article in the times yesterday or earlier this week about an organization of people, some of them former gang members who have organized to address violence of black-on-black violence. i think it's east new york. where there has not been a murder for 353 days because of the work that these people done. [applause] and bill read is work that goes

on at every level. there's a beautiful image through that story of the younger brothers on a bicycle who sees all of these organizers ino's to this person is. there are those kinds of models of leadership that we ought to be also looking to when we think about what leadership and the 21st century looks like. they are out there. they don't get on in snb see all the time, but they are out there. [applause] >> i'm very aware that i want to leave a good 15 minutes for a conversation with the audience, but i want to and by asking you by putting one more thought out there. and it goes back, again, to barack obama's speech and the way in which she really did address this panel. because at the end of the speech he said -- you wanted to leave us with a sense of hope, and you

wanted to talk about the extent to which he does think we are making progress and that things a changing and that he describes as looking to his daughter's and the way in which his daughter's encounter race and saying that they are different than what he experienced. no that was one of those moments when i've thought about not necessarily the privatisation of the question of race in dealing with that, but institutions, churches, education, the media. and since all of us are involved, deeply involved in each of thosetutions, i want to end with a question of what is the role of the academy, the media, social movements, churches intervening in this conversation. yes. it's time for you go first.

>> well, the short answer the question would be there is no single roll to be played by any of tsetutions. speaking of someone who professionally part of the legal community, i want to be real clear that one thing i would not is an expectation that the law do this work. if there is anything i have learned in the over 30 years that i have been speaking and working on questions of law, it is that laws limit -- law's limits are sometimes greater than what it can accomplish as a political tool. but i want to go back to this question of the image that the president offered of that generation to which his children belong as a generation which is experiencing and therefore

feeling and thinking differently about these questions of race and rachael -- racial justice. my generation or yours. a part of me fines that -- cannot help but find that really powerful and very beautiful in so far as it holds out hope for a transformation and change in the hearts and minds of people and the way that they think about what it means to have a race or tow experience race. in community with, in common with, and in concert with people who belong or profess or identify across the color line.

at the same time, however, as i am willing to concede, as feminism, i think, has taught us, the personal is the political. the possibility of those encounters, the president's daughters and of the sons and daughters of those who belong to the economic class from which the president and mrs. obama come, that is the experience of a very narrow subcommunity of african-americans. and so for me the question would be, how do we go about building a racial public -- and biracial public ammine communities of people that include but are not restrict peoed toe of color,

committed to an anti racist agenda, under conditions in which in schools, and the workplace, and our neighborhoods we are, in many instances, as segregated as we were 50 years ago. i do think that the media has a role to play in that. can i think the institutions, the actually existing institutions in our community can do a lot of work that they have not yet taken on. i am not a person of faith, but i believe that institutions of faith and communities of faith have been doing extraordinary work on these issues of racial justice across denominations. i think there is a role for the emerging secular black public to play as well. but this work cannot be done by

anyone segment of our community, and it cannot be done in any one way. >> i think we are, you know -- [applause] >> very quickly, we are doing this already. we have a center for the study of race and democracy, and we are a research center that is connecting race and democracy and public policy, working with ngo, scholars, activists. the late chester himes said that fighters fight and writers write and we are supposed to do whatever we can wherever we can. so i think that we have extraordinary activists and scholars in this room. education is a big part of what we're trying to do, but we are trying to -- we are launching a national dialogue on race day, september 12th at this the srd, a steady embracing democracy, and we are doing that

to connect not only the martin situation, but mass incarceration, violence against black women, poverty, a genuine public policy debate. i have been talking about a national conversation on race and democracy because too often this issue of race and racism and black people are made to sit outside of democracy. this country. we are made to feel as we are the other, marginal human beings, even though black people are the people who have lived here the longest who had the right to vote for the shortest amount of time but fought in every single word that this country is ever had. black people have fought, died, struggled, and bled for democracy, including the black women that were being talked about. so we can be part of this dialogue as leaders. and not talking about advocating our own role. and for those of us who are in the academy, in ebony and ivory towers, we have to connect the access we have to places like

the schaumburg community in harlem, oakland, boston where i live right now. and if we do that and we connect on social media -- and i invite people to join this conversation , we will have enough leverage were even if mainstream black leaders are trying to talk to obama in one way, he understands that there are other voices who are sensitive who have power you are telling him something else. that's what we need to be, the voice saying, look, we want substance of public policy transformation, and we are not just going to settle for the cultural relief and the cathartic release of barack and michelle obama and fashion -- sasha and melia. we love them and that there existence and safe and beautiful, but we want public policy transformation for our communities and our young sons and daughters who are living and dying all over the united states. things should be much better now than they were 50 years ago.

they are not, but we are still optimistic that they can be. we have to organize, organize, organize. organize, organize, organize, and that is what we need to do. [applause] >> you know, i love anything sasha and melia. so any kind of -- that is beautiful. i do love them and i believe the notion that he put forward of a kind of new generation set of conversations, but i also think, and i know, that that is a set of possibilities, as kendall thomas said, very limited, small, narrow, elite. the two images or notions of communities talking to each other and having a dialogue that stuck with me this week for the interview with juror b37 -- and i am really glad for that interview. very thankful for the honesty

and what she said and the insight that she gave us, and when she referred to people like those people, they don't live like we do, see the world like we do. so clearly she is not having dialogue with people who are different from yourself. she does not know them. when she sees a picture of mr. martin, he is unfamiliar to her except as a predator. in that same night there was an interview. she kept using a phrase, where we are from. this is what this means where we are from. this is what we think of people like that where i'm from. i don't know what it means where you're from. and so images of those communities, those means of belonging that to not talk to each other, that to not in any way -- i think said, you don't understand where we come from. the juror was saying, i don't

recognize that. i don't know who that is. that is very different from sasha and melia and their friends in school on the basketball court. and so we have to measure how far we are moving. it cannot just be the measure of two beautiful little girls with greater access, but it also has to be the measure of these people who don't necessarily come into contact with each other for the kinds of dialogues we're talking about until it is too late, until it is in a court room and one is a juror who cannot understand or fathom or comprehend this young woman who is sitting in front of her. that is one thing i will say. the other thing i will say is that all of these fights are important. they are all mess. right? they are all places where we struggle, where we fight with each other, fight with our church leaders, fight with our colleagues. but there are all flights were the work has to be done, and i think a new fight that we're seeing is that we really need to attend too much more, the fight

of social media. twitter, frankly, gives me a headache. it really does. it gives me a headache. but twitter, for all the -- i get angry at the ignorance. i get angry at the access that races have to me, especially to my husband. i get angry about that. but i don't think there is any place with the kind of dynamic dialogue where people are back-and-forth, strategizing and organizing the immediacy of the organizing around mr. martin was extraordinary. we have not seen anything quite like that. so i think that for all -- it's no more messy and all of the other. it is just bigger. it is messy. a lot of ignorance, but a lot of educating that goes on. a lot of organizing that goes on to read a lot of democratic debate that goes on. so i would add social media to those arenas that tina talked about earlier as well.

[applause] >> and now i'm going to invite you to pose your questions to this conversation and add your voice is. they're is a microphone there. we ask that you take that microphone so that we can all hear what you're trying to say. and in the meantime, i do want to thank our panelists so far for their powerful statements. [applause] [applause] >> first of all, thank you very much. the conversation was and lightning for all of us, i think. how'd you -- juror b37? [laughter] i ask because she is a voter. and it is kind of obvious that the thrill is gone with many sectors of the black community in reference to president obama and i am feeling that myself. i found his comments yesterday

-- anyway, the important point is that those people who dislike the idea is that george zimmerman is not completely within his rights to waste mr. martin like he was trash in the street. those people vote. they have been voting against us the entire time when there were not attacking us. and president obama is dealing with that in numbers structurally that his side simply cannot win against. i mean, we have watched democratic african-american politicians essentially -- certain districts where they can always win, but never statewide. i am wondering what happens next . during an entire race is imagine that to all people of color in this country and around the world, you know, bringing together latinos and asian-americans and the gay, straight, everyone when structurally speaking you still have that tea party that was doing better than as for most of

president obama is administration when it came to grass roots organizing, and that same tea party are the same people voting in these stand-your-round loss and ideas like stop and frisk alive today. i am wondering, given the opposition that is still very much as entrenched as it was 50 years ago, what happens next? >> i think we are talking here about all along revolution. and in the president's defense, one of the great things about his speech had to do with that moment in which he passed to the people listening to him to imagine trayvon martin in that situation with a gun, and what the response would likely be if trayvon martin had had that

kind. now, the great british cultural dearest from whom i have learned a lot, stuart hall, said writing after the election of margaret thatcher that one of the things that both of us on the left need to understand about why thatcher won is that people don't always or maybe not even most of the time vote on the basis of their rational self-interest. politics is much less a matter of calculated interest and reason than it is how we imagine ourselves. how we imagine ourselves in relationship to one another. and so one of the potentially fruitful things about the rhetorical strategy that the

president chose was that he was inviting your b37 of the world and indeed all of us to thinke e imagine ourselves in relationship to one another. and anoer greti purist said in answer to the question, what is a nation? it is an imagined community. and so 20 years ago when martin luther king talked about this dream that he had, he was inviting the people on the mall and all of the folks who heard his speech through the media to imagine themselves in a different way. now, his politics, the ion th folks have called politics of fantasy is not the whole politics, and it is not going to be a substitute for hard roll up your sleeves organizing, but it is one of the things that moti people to

think critically about and mayey that is being imposed upo u this moment underal capitalism, namely to see ourselves not as citizens but as consumers. people who buy stuff. and that understanding of who we are, of who we might be and who we have been, the politics of the imagination makes it possible, and is a cultural politics. it has to do with producing meetings. making black mean something other than critical -- criminal, and perceval, dangerous. that kind of work is cultural work which has to do with the politics of making new meaning. and that work takes place down

here, takes place here, and it takes place at the levels, of course, of the mass media. so i think that is a very important component of the work that lies ahead of us. would someone once called, i think, by analyzing the term, the politics of meaning, the politics of imagination. that is where would leave you on this question. >> i would add to that also that we might not get your number b b37. we probably will not convince her of anything. and i know it is the job of the electoral politicians to try to get every single vote and not offend people and all that, but -- so maybe we don't get to be 575p37. maybe we loser, but i heard one of the representatives, one of the black representatives from that area said that one of the problems down there is that we get so excited about national elections and we mobilize for barack obama, but many of those

people who up hold and maintain those stand-short-ground lost are in positions, and black people don't vote in the san numbers at the local level. juror b57 can get people in there because we kind of sit those out. and so i think that the kind of mobilizing you are talking about that the tea party did, there were very good at mobilizing at the local level. and we let that go. we put so much -- so much behind the election of barack obama, but in between elections people who maintain laws like stand your ground, we sometimes set those out. we need to be just as vigilant and those kinds of elections as well. [applause] >> i came of the late to. so i did hear some of it. many of you may be old enough to remember --

[inaudible] [inaudible conversations] >> many of you may be old enough to remember, we had a leadership called michael griffin. we had a trayvon martin called hawkins. and we had an attorney by the name of max jr. who won those cases. and the people who killed those young black men went to jail for 30 years to life. [applause] so the question is, how come alton is not on the panel? the expert at doing this, how come he is not on ms nbc, cnn, these situations? key is an expert when it comes to these racially motivated cases.

he was illegally suspended from the practice of law because he absolutely dominated the criminal law. they could not beat him. and so i ask that when you go about talking about these things, mention alton because our children need to know, we have a lawyer still alive that when these cases. ..