for the stars come even when we are bounded by human constraint and that is something i think that the root of both by politics and personal life. >> host: ben shapiro has been our guest on "in depth." thank you. >> guest: thank you so much. ..r moderator, tina campt. >> thank you. [applause] >> good afternoon, everyone. it is my pleasure to welcome you to our third panel of the day. the title is "50 years later."

the panel is framed around what kind of pesksa what kind of progress blacks have made since the civil rights movement and the enduring challenges and inequality that face african-americans in the 21st century. the organizers have formulated two major questions for us to talk about. the first is, what historical and contemporary factors continue to make racial equality a contested and elusive concept in the 21st century and second, what kinds of knowledge can we mobilize to face the specific challenges of racial inequity. we have two or three dynamic speakers today and i'd like to introduce you to them before opening our conversation. joining us is sara griffin, the william b -- at columbia and has

also served as the director of the institute for research in african-american studies. her most recent book is forth coming in september, harlem nocturne. women. politics during world war ii. our second panelist is camille joseph, the founding direct oroff the center for race and -- and the author of the award-winning, "wait until the midnight hour." and "dark days to bright nights. from black pour to barack obama" our first scheduled speaker is kendall thomas who is traveling from brazil and has not yet arrived but we are heaping he will take the stage once he comes. i'll introduce him in his absence. ken cal is nash professor of law and cofounder and director of the center for the study of law and culture at columbia

university, and professor thomas one of the editors of the volume -- so we have three powerful thinkers and visionary speakers. [applause] >> hooray. >> welcome, kendall. get settled. make yourself comfortable and we're glad you made it. i was saying to neil and sarah before he came on that in so many ways, barack obama has set up our conversation about blacks in the 21st century, through his comments yesterday. but i want to put that into a larger context, because we're talking -- we are trying to take a 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 the -- in the 50 years

since the march on washington. right? at the same time, this particular moment is framed by three undeniable events. the first is that in the last -- in the three and a half weeks ago, actually, 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 yesterday 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 a really key moment to reflect on 50 years later. and what kind of progress have we made? in black america. so, to start out with, i'm going to ask you each to comment on what 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

21st century. >> thank you, tina. thank you all for being here. that's a very provocative question. it's difficult to come up with quick answers in the heat of this particular moment, but i'll try to address it. i think that those three -- they're all three legal interventions, so to speak, at this moment -- tell us the importance of understanding what racial progress has meant historically, progress that -- he historical nature of what we call progress in the area of race equality. it's always characterized by a movement forward and retrenchment. so that there's never any straight sense of progress. we can look and say that we certainly have made great

strides since the 1963 march on washington. and one of the key things we accomplished following that march was the voting rights act two years later, and yet here 50 years later we have a retrenchment on that key piece of legislation. 50 years later we have something that many of us know to be an act of racial violence, where the person has been found not guilty, and yet i think the difference is, 50 years ago, we might not have been attacked for calling it an act of racial violence. right? and that shows you the way the kind of retrenchment works. that the -- it becomes a more sophisticated, more difficult for us to name things we know have to do with race, and those of us who call it an act of racial violence, have been accused of being divisive. i don't think that would have been the case 50 years ago. so there's progress but there's

always retrenchment, backlash, one step forward and maybe two or three or four steps backward, and we have to be aware of that, and i think these acts show us that. doma is a step forward. striking down of the race -- the roting rights act is a step backward, and trayvon martin, i think, is both, because it's a step backward but the mobilization -- i'm so heartened by the mobilization around expected the refusal to give into the kind of dominant narrative that was spun as a result of it. so progress and retrenchment. [applause] >> thank you, tina, and thank you, max, for organizing this panel. owe max rodriguez a big round of applause for the 15th 15th anniversary of the harlem book fair. [applause] >> is in book fair is part of

national conversation about race and democracy we should be having in our communities everywhere around the country, that should be multicultural, multiracial, multigenerational, and we have been having these conversations in our communities historically throughout, but we need to have these conversations among white americans, latinos and gays and lesbian and young people, and it's really -- it should be national priority. first of all, i'd like to throw out a provocation. i'd like to throw out a provocation that the difference between 1963 and 201 is -- and 2013 there, 1963 black people knew they were being opposed in 1963 they new they were being politically, socially, economically sub jugletted. i'd like to throw out a proposition that when we think of the civil rights movement in 1964 and 196 5:00 what black did then is transform

fundamentally american democracy and did so with white and latino allies but did so through blood and bloodshed. when you think about trayvon martin, trayvon martinned had at seed departments in emmett hill, the 14-year-old black boy who was asassanid it in mist -- assassinated for allegedly violating racial etiquette and speaking to a white woman. his body was placed in the river with the cotton gin fan belt tied around his neck. was shown in jet magazine, and that spurred the nation to look at the price of white supremacy on our democracy. we think about 1963. 1963 is the year of birmingham, and the year that dr. king writes his famous letter from a birmingham jail, and in the letter he says the activism going on in birmingham and the young women and men who are being rainfalled, sometimes as

young as eight, nine, ten years old, are taking this nation back to the great wells of democracy that were dug deep by the founding fathers. king was being too kind because this country is founded on racial slavery. a conversation that we still have not had. but 50 years ago, with the march on washington provided was a litmus test for american democracy. when king speaks at the march on wednesday august, 28, 1963, he says that americans of all colors and all races are going to have to struggle together, they're going to have to go to jail together to try to fundamentally transform american democracy. 50 years later, and especially in the aftermath of president obama's 2008 election, we have all celebrated an unearned victory. we have all celebrated an unearned victory and talked about post-racial america. we're celebrateing the mythology of the end of racism and that's why people were surprised about trayvon martin i'm heartened that the president finally spoke out yesterday, but he spoke out

and started to speak truth to power only because of the grassroots activism that has forced and compelled him to speak. barack obama is not martin lieu thunder king, jr. he is not frederick douglass. when you look at a picture of dr. king next to jfk and dr. king next to lyndon baines johnson, barack obama is lyndon baines johnson and john kennedy. he is abraham lincoln and as soon as the black community can understand that they can level a critique to the united states for not discussing the black agenda and not discussing black poverty. he says he is not president of black american. i say fine but black americans are american citizens no matter what anybody says. we are american citizens and should be advocating for an end of poverty, the end of racial inequality, and the end of mass incarceration, so when we think about president barack obama, we need to go back to what dr. king

said in his last speech. he said the greatness of america lies in the right to protest for rights. whoever is in the white house, should be someone who is talking about an alleged -- an agenda that affects african-americans, even if that black person is the president of the united states. [applause] >> good afternoon. it's great to be here and i too want to join in the congratulations of the harlem book fair for the black book fair, for organizing this event, and allowing us an opportunity to talk about the contemporary state of black politics. tina, you offered three images, one of the u.s. supreme court's decision in the shelby county case, the voting rights case. we ought not to forget that the

court this past term also decided and affirmative action case, the fisher case, from the university of texas, in which affirmative action survived by hair, and 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. but taken together, i think we can say 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 court, the chief justice, justice roberts, said something that i do not think could have

been said 50 years ago. would not have been said 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, particularly here in voting, exists. and goes on to say, no one denies that. right? and yet by the end of the opinion, what he has given us is a legal judgment, a reading of the constitution, which effectively says, racial discrimination exists, no one denies it, and we don't care. so, we're living in a peculiar moment in which, at one in 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 is something about which we are justified as a nation. in not caring about. so there's this principle of culture, political culture, of indifference to questions of racial inequality, which i think distinguishes our moment from 1963. and after the speech by obama -- i may be getting into some hot water here because i read the speech quickly, and i 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 insights into the nature of race and racism in the united states today. don't get me wrong. i'm very glad that the president chose, albeit a week after the

event, chose to address the verdict in the zimmerman case. and that he acknowledged the real and widespread pain that african-americans and all americans who are friends of racial equality, who are committed to an antiracist politics, felt in the wake of the verdict. but mass so many of his other prooffense -- pronouncements about race, the president reside remarks pretty much remained win within the framework of what i call racial moralism. the telling of the late philosopher once put it of sad and sentimental stories. this could be your daughter. if i had a son, trayvon could have been my son. if it were 35 years ago i could have been trayvon martin.

and the speech only gestures through the use of the word "context," which can mean everything and nothing to the the structural forces that have produced a trayvon martin, and to the meaning of racism in the age of neoliberalism and that brings us to the moment of the zimmerman verdict itself, in which a judge instructed a jury, which reached a verdict, which effectively held -- and this is another provocation -- that when it comes to circumstances like this, at least, a black man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect. i'm paraphrasing. [applause]

>> i'm paraphrasing the decision of the supreme court in the dred scott case. the notorious case from then set century which predated the civil war. and for all of celebration about the sea change that we have seen in this country in many ways about racial equality. as we think about moving important, it's important 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? no. i'm not claiming that. what i think i can say is that we live now as we lived 50 years ago, in a moment of racial

contradiction. and we need to wrestle with the realities of those contradictions instead of wishing them away. that simple for me. [applause] >> i think everybody will agree those were very, very provocative statements and i want to follow up on a few of them. i would love to hear you talk more about the contradictions that each one of you was pointing out. the contradictions that you were mentioning between a historical moment during which there's a recognition of oppression and the contemporary moment that kendall is describing of indifference, and i think that relates directly to the cycle you were talking about, farrah, of progress and retrenchment, progress and retrenchment. one of the things you're putting on the table is the question of how in this contemporary moment is race being erased in a way

that takes away the possible for action, legal action, protest. protest is being put back on the table at a grassroots level. but i'm wondering if you would like to comment more on the implicit criticism you're 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 that he cannot lead that conversation. saying that government is not necessarily a most effective place to have that conversation. but it should be had. so, i would love for you to tease out more of the contradictions that all of you are speaking to in terms of what is race in the contemporary moment and mobilize against it in a different way, than we mobilized against jim crow, for example, other years ago. -- 50 years ago. >> i think the most important thing is to recognize and acknowledge that contradiction. i mean ex-think that niel is

right that for so many people there was shock in the verdict. there were two kinded of responses, people who say i wasn't surprised. what you expect, didn't expect anything different, the system wasn't made to treat us fairly, and other people who were stunned that in this day and time that was the verdict we could get, and i think therein is the -- there's so little ground and in a moment when our country made tremendous strided and elected an african-american person, president, as kind of an exceptional african-american person, president, the civil rights movement was quite successful in that it did knock down certain barriers that gave a fuse of us access, few exceptional individuals access, and yet there's so many black people who 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 absurdity in them -- i'll stop her -- the absurdity in the judge's instructions to the jury, or to the prosecution, that they could say profiling but couldn't say racial profiling. so, there's a way that the cases -- what are the possibilities when we can't even call racial profiling racial profiling, but when the prosecution can use race all the time, can show a woman who is afraid of young african-american men bus one robbed her house, can have pictures that evoke these racial narratives that will strike at the heart of the jury, and yet we can't say in the sense of trayvon that he was racially profiled, and the final thing i'll say, with president obama reside reside's -- presidt

obama's speech, the problem with personal anecdotes. we all have personal anecdotes s and i guest it's supposed to strike a kind of empathy in the hearts of the listener. i like obama, i thought he was like me. i voted for him, and yet he can't get a cab in manhattan, and that becomes there -- therea personal drama to anecdotes and that becomes the end all and the be all of the story, so what gets lost when people are doing the kinds of post speech discussions, they say, oh, he said trayvon could have been me 35 years ago. what gets lost is exactly what tina says when he says, but i can't do anything about it as president of the united states. the united states government -- i want to acknowledge your pain, black america, i understand it, but as president, and as a brother, i've experienced it, but at president i can't do anything about it. and i watched and i looked at twitter and i look at facebook, and everyone quoted that trayvon

could have when 35 years ago. but very little people paid attention to the part it's not the place of government, politicians cannot start the conversation but the conversation needs to be had. personal anecdote is good but it's really not in our service when it overshadows, when it trumps the work that really needs to be done. [applause] >> i'd like to build on what farah is saying here. i think one thing thing we have to do even for our audience out here is to talk about a definition of racism. when you think about racism, it nose about personal prejudice. it's about institutional subjugation and oppression. so the new racism is not about white and colored signs. the new racism is about outcome. racial disparity, who is in jail and why? who has no health care, who is unemployed, who it racially profiled and stigmatized.

who goes to freedom nantzly segregated schools nationally and why. who is poor and living below the poverty line and why. african-americans, 43 million in the united states, only 1.6% make over 200,000 a year or more. 28% live below the federally mandated poverty line. another 27% make under 35,000 a year. so, for that group of people, things haven't gotten better in the last 50 years, and when you think about president obama, think president obama, what we all have to question is this. is the euphoria and the cultural transformation of having a black president, beautiful first lady and the first kids, enough if that black president cannot provide substantive public policy transformation that impacts the african-american communities? and go beyond even the affordable healthcare act which i believe is substantive, that go beyond the stimulus package

which i believe is substantive. but there is no urban agenda this president has. no confronting what michelle alexander called the new jim crow, a mass incarceration. no confronting what the -- the condemnation of blackness and why it's connected to why black people are treated and dehumanized in the criminal justice system. the reason trayvon goes from victim to criminal is because of the cultural racism that infects the united states. what i'll say is this. the contradictions we're talking about up here are not crickets. they're part and parcel of race and democracy in america. what dr. king and malcolm x -- and fanny lou hamer said is this america before the credentials committee. 44 years old from louisville, mississippi, being beaten and brutalized for voting rights. the says, is this america? lyndon johnson organizes a press

conference to take her off of national television because he said who is that exposing the lack of democracy in the united states? so the contradictions we're saying that you can have a black president of the united states, and you can have 841,000 black males in jail. right? that's not a contradiction. that's part and parcel of how american democracy has always worked. what the civil rights movement did, what the black power movement did, what multi -- tried to transform democracy and saying there's a different way for democracy work. doesn't have to work by condemning black people. by denying racism. the fur the we deny racial discrimination in this country and institutional racism and slavery, the worse it grows like a cancer and a tumor on our body politic. the further we refuse to confront racial discrimination and institutional racism, the more we just -- we're less

confused about the outcome. how come there's so many poor black peep, mommy? may they don't like to work. it's not about institutionalized discrimination. it not about harlem and brooklyn getting gentrified right now as i speak, and black people are left out. right? this is about institutions and certainly president obama is not confronting it but we need to confront it and force president obama's hand. the reason he discussed trayvon martin is because of the grassroots insurgency from activists in this room and all around the country who demanded that the commander-in-chief speak out about this. remember, john kennedy, under11, 1963, talked about racism as a moral crisis that was infecting and distorting our democracy. that kennedy. and kennedy did that because of mlk. kennedy did that because of grassroots insurgencies that forced the president's hand. by the time medgar efforts eve

rs dies, president kennedy says its everything, and until we solve the'm inequality in the united states this democracy does not have a progressive future. [applause] >> so, what is the nature of this contradiction and why? i would simply join what my co-panelist said and read to you a few lines from a letter written in march of 1913. exactly 100 years ago. it's called, an open letter to woodrow wilson, and its author is w.e.w. due boys. you face no insoluble problem, talking about the so-called negro problem. the only time when the negro problem is insol automobile is when men insist on settling its wrong by asking absolutely

contradictory things. you cannot make ten million people at one in the same time century vial and dignified, docile and self-reliant, servants and independent leaders, segregated and yet part of the industrial organism. disfranchised and citizens of a democracy, ignorant and intelligent. this is impossible. he writes. and the impossible is not factitious. it is in the very nature of things. so, the possibility and the imimpossible of black politics are in what we might call the age of obama, is the contradiction of race and racism, is that contradiction, again, of a president who can engage in a certain kind ofite politics, -- kind of identity politics, identify with and as trayvon martin on the one hand, and yet is willing to allow the

complete and effective privatization of any conversation about this public issue, that he has just publicly identified, as an issue that ought to concern all americans. that privatization of race, i think, is the nub of the problem. this notion that race is 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 even begin to scratch the surface of racism today, the rest of it is all a matter for private resolution. now, i think that a good part of

the power of that vision, of what rachel is and how it should -- what racism is and how it should be addressed, has to do with the extent to which our economy and our politics is governed by a world view that the is called neoliberallity. , as an economic program and as a public philosophy, holds that everybody and everything is grist for the market. and that the imperative of the capitalist market, and of economic elites who steer 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 peoples of color in this country, is economic in justice. and yet under neoliberal order, this question of economic injustice is simply not on the agenda of public policy. we can nibble around the edges of it to be sure in talking about raising the minimum wage, in setting up healthcare collectives. no single pair, thank you. but 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, i think in our poverty than it has

been almost at any time since the creation of the republic. and president obama, who represents at his first social secretary put it, a valuable brand, is himself a commodity in the market place that we call politics. right? in an age of citizens united, when politicians can effectively be bought and sold to the highest bidder, one of the deepest challenges, i think, facing us, not just as people of color who are american but as american? is generally -- american citizens generally, is the absolute and utter bankruptcy of a political system that claims to be democratic, which in fact is controlled and won by corporate financial elites. and unless and until we are

willing to acknowledge the eagerness with which a president who embraced ronald reagan, the architect of neoliberalism, as one of the greatest presidents in history of the country, as a tool of neoliberalism, we're not going to get anywhere. but i belief that president obama and the interests he represents rely on our acquiescence in the name of a very narrow and ultimately disempowering understanding of identity politics. 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.

so that's the contradiction. the removal as a question of the democratic decisionmaking of these large questions of economic justice, which are also questions of racial deficit. [applause] >> i want to follow through on many of the statements you have made, which is on the one hand a critique of leadership in its present form, and at the same time to ask us to consider the power of grassroots insurgency, and i think that's a -- not a contradiction. we use that to much. i think that is a twin concept that are being recreated in the 21st century. so i would love to hear you talk a little bit more about, given, again, the provocation that barack obama has given us about the need for a conversation on

race, and at the samethe creation -- the offloading of that conversation into a private sphere, what would leadership look like? would it need to look like in order to connect to grassroots mobilization, that barack obama is responding to. so, i'm asking you to think the critique towards another moment. so what would it mean to actually be able to bring together effective leadership? what would that entail in how would the government be involved? how would it connect to the forces that are actually soliciting a response, albeit ineffective one. i'm going to make farrago first on this one. we'll switch it up. >> i think one of the interesting and most powerful things -- i think that's a great question -- that is happening already. we have everything from color

changes online to different grassroots activists for the environment, for antipoverty, certainly mass incarceration, the book, "the new jim crow" oohs been a betts seller and activists are using that and mass incarceration is 0 now on the agenda of the naacp. i think one of the main things that mainstream black leadership has done which is the age of barack obama -- and i think it's the age of trayvon as well -- they abdicated their roles as protesters. they abdicated their roles as leadership that is going to critique the executive office, the congress, the senate, the different branches of government, and an rick indicated this role for access, for access, and the access means you get photo ops with the president. he might cam to your conventions or organization's dinner, but when its comes to tangible

public policy initiatives, zero. you're not getting anything. what the black community has allowed obama to do -- i'm speak ag as somebody who has been supportive of obama. i'm not just attacking the president of the united states and understand his plight as a black man, the right-wing assaults and day tacks on him, but the fact we are citizens of this republic, and you can never abdicate your role as a citizen and let the president of the united states have a free pass, saying that brother has so much problem he doesn't have to care about the poverty rate of the mass are black community and what the clinton crime bill does to the black community, doesn't have to carry about the given black cocaine and powder cocaine and at the federal level it's still 18 to one. he has said he wants ray kelly, who is nation's biggest racial profiler to be head of homeland

security. we have 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 19ful -- 1968 he traded acces to lynn -- lyndon johnson's white house. dr. king died advocating for 1,000 black men who are sanitation workers in tennessee in memphis, and the reason he is assassinated because dr. king is bringing together writes, blacks, rat teen knows, native americans to come to washington for a poor people's campin for the entire summer and is trying to bend the nation's will into effective legislation for poor people. so people talk about dr. king as a nonviolent activist, and he was, but dr. king is a

revolutionary, 20th century american revolutionary, and he is using nonviolence as a tactic to bend the nation's will and to save what he calls the soul of america. so we can't have a black president that, because he is black, we are unwilling to say, look, this is the black agenda that we need. these one, two, three things, and that you have to push for this both rhetorically and public policy-wise, and this brother gave a great speech yesterday but then told him that him, as president of the united states, not just an activist, he can't do nothing about it. and we're supposed to say, that's good? that makes no sense. that makes absolute -- he can't sign an executive order? he can't make a speech about racial profiling? he can't say that we have to bring blacks and whites and latinos and asians and all these people who live in the united states, which is about to become a majority minority country, we have the bring them all together to have an up to date conversation about what is

racial integration mean, what does racial justice mean in the 21st century, and the fact that outcomes are part of our democracy. we can't just do the color blind racism game and color blind racism in ian lopez coined the term -- and say equality is a fact when we know racial young shows pervasive inequality and discrimination in america. [applause] >> i'll go next. how are -- how can you that act? some of you may be fame with the powerful essay published in 1964 by the man who organized the 1963 march on washington, the great black gay activist, byron ruston. he wrote 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 high schools of legislatures to the court, and to the executive branches. there was something powerful about that call. and in the context in which ruston made it, it made some sense. we have the 1964 civil rights act and we were soon to have the 18965 voting rights act. so the legal architecture had been put in place for us to make the shift from a protest-based politics, to an electoral institutional government organized politics, in which we sought to gain office to get on the school board, the city council, to be in mayor's offices to become governors, and

yes, even, president. i think, however, that what the current moment ought to be telling us is that those of us who understand that the black freedom movement was a freedom movement, and not just a movement for civil rights, can no longer rely exclusively on the strategy of electoral government politics. we can't do it. we simply cannot continue to do it. and we certainly can't continue to do it when the people we've elected are committed to a vision of leadership that involved, how do you put it, leading from behind. that vision of a leadership around questions of racial

equality, and the elimination of racial injustice, a basic feature of our common likes it's simply not going to work. so, then, for me, the question becomes, what forms of leadership do we need and where ought that leadership come from? i pamper suede -- i am persuaded that the leadership is almost certainly not going to come from the mainstream of the democratic party, and there's no hope in hell that it's 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 intransgent resistance of a liberal democratic understanding of racism and racial justice. in pursuing that project, that eman's pa torry project of black freedom, right, 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 creed. to have full equal and substantive citizenship. that's where this question of outcome matters. heat when you have full equal and substantive citizenship. so my suggestion is that we need

to combine in a way that i think is actually beginning to happen, protest politics and electoral politics, because i see no way out of the contradiction which on the one hand gave us two election cycles in the 2012 and at the 2008 elections in which black people were the democrats that voted in -- at the highest percentage, and on the other hand, has given us an unemployment rate, 13%, which is higher than the black unemployment rate was in 1963. those questions of social and economic justice are questions that for me demand and can only be confronted through a double strategy of protest and politics, which is informed by a left vision of social democracy,

or, if you will, of democratic socialism. [applause] >> i agree with everything that's been said and i would just add one thing. over the past 50 years, a lot of the work that's been done, and maybe hasn't gotten popularized, has been work that has challenged to us think differently about leadership, and i know that work has been done. i've read it, seen it, taught it, and yet i think we have very kind of old fashioned notions of what leadership looks like. it's still messianic, charismatic, and we saw those kinds of narratives working that had us making posters, sitting barack obama between malcolm x and martin luther king, and some of us cringed because president obama was running for president of the ute and was running to be

leader of the united states, and for some people that also meant his interests were protecting these kind of corporate elite interests that are often against the interests of poor people, regardless of color, and the questions of economic justice were never on the table, ever. so that the work in the past -- i don't even say 30 years -- 20 years, that taught us to look differently at what leadership looks like, it seeps into our analysis every once in a while. seeps in when we mention the name of ella baker or sammy lou hamer, but what did ella baker -- not only but what did they stand for? what did ella baker and ida b. wells -- the usual women who are much more involved on the protest end because the editor end wasn't open to them. the freedom struggle always knew

that electoral politics was not the way to the so-called promised land, but we seemed to have given that up when we put everything behind all of our wishes in a basket that would elect president obama, but they were leaders-grassroots leaders who understood their positions were only as significant as they were capable of representing the interests of people who put them there. elly baker said strong people don't need strong leaders, right? i think we look to communities and groups of people who are organizing in their own interests, who put questions of economic justice and mass incarceration and all of these, domestic violence, all the thing that assault our community front and center, to the things that have fought our community on a daily basis is that front and center on the agenda that so-called leader are presenting to us? we don't think it's only people who we elect, and we don't think

that black bloc leaders or leaders of the community are the people who have access to the media. the media doesn't make our leaders, and i'll live you with the most recent vision of leadership that could be a model for us and it's not a leadership of an individual. it was an article the times, yesterday, or certainly earlier this week, about an organization of people, some of them former gang members themselves, who have organized to address violence, black on black violence, in -- i think it's east new york, and where there has not been a murder for 353 days abuse the work these people have done. right? [applause] >> and it's work that goes on every single day, every minute of the day, work that guess on in the schools, work that goes on in the prisons, work that goes on at every level. there's a beautiful image in that story of young brother on a bicycle who sees one of these organizers and said -- hotep when he sees him bus he knows this person.

there are those kind of model of0s lead children -- leadership when we look at what leadership looks like. they don't get on msnbc all the time but they're out there. [applause] >> i'm very aware that it want to leave a good 15 minutes for a conversation with the audience, but i want to end by asking you, by putting one more thought out there, and it goes back again to president obama's speech. and the way the which he really did address this panel, because at the end of that speech he said, i -- he wanted to leave us with a sense of hope, and he wanted to talk about the extent to which he does think we are making progress, and that things are changing, and that he described looking to his daughters, and the way in which his daughters encounter race,

and saying that they are different than what he experienced. right? now, that was one of those moments when i thought about, not necessarily the privatization of the question of race and dealing with it, but institutions. churches. education. the media. and since all of us are involved, deeply involved in each of those institutions, i want to end with a question of what is the role of the law, of the academy, of the media, of social movement, of churches, in intervening in this conversation to reshape it? >> yes, kendall, time for you to go first. >> the short answer would be there's no single role, i think to be played by any of those institutions, speaking of someone who professionally is part of the legal community, i

want to be real clear that one thing i would not urge is an expectation that the law can do this work. if there's anything that i've learned in the over 30 years i've been thinking and working on questions of law, it is that the 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 the generation to which his children belong, as a generation which is experiencing and, therefore, feeling and thinking differently about these questions of race and racial justice than someone, say, of my generation or yours. a part of me finds that --

cannot help but find that really powerful and very beautiful insofar as as it holds out the hope for a transformation, a change in the hearts and minds of people and the way they think about what it means to have a race, or to 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'm willing to concede, as feminism has taught us that the personal is the political, the

possibility of those encounters, of 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, and of african-americans. and so for me the question would be, how do we go about building a racial public -- by racial public i mean communities of people that include but are not restricted to people of color, committed to an antiracist agenda, under conditions in which, in schools, in the work place, in 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. and i think the institution, the actually existing institutions, in our communities, can do a lot of work that they have not yet taken up. 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. think there's a role for the emerging secular black public to play as well. but this working not be done by any one segment of our community, and it cannot be done in any one way. >> i agree with -- [applause]

>> very quickly. we're doing this already. at tufts university we have a center for the study of race and democracy, and we are a research center that is connecting race and democracy to public policy. we're working with ngos and scholars and activists. the late chester hines said that fighters fight and writers write, and we're supposed to do whatever we can, wherever we can, so i think we have extraordinary activists and scholars in this room, education is a big part of what we're trying to do, but we're trying to -- we're launching a national dialogue on race day, september 12th, at the csrd at tufts, and we're doing that to connect not only trayvon martin but mass incarceration, violence against black women, poverty, to a genuine public policy debate. so in the aftermath of trayvon, have been talking about 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 and this country. we are made to feel as we are the other, as we are 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 who fought in every single war this country ever had. so black people have fought, died, struggled and bled for democracy, including the black women that farah was talking about as well. ... i'm not talking about advocating our own leadership role and for those of us who were in the academy in ebony and ivory towers we have to connect the access we have two places like schomberg communities in 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 where mainstream communities trying to talk to barack obama he understands their other voices who are substantive to have power who are telling him something else and that is what we need to do. we need to be the voice that same look we want substantive public wolesi and we are not just going to settle for the cultural release and cathartic release of barack and michelle michelle obamaand such and malia. we love them and we love their existence and they are are safe and they are 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. we are optimistic that they can be better and we have to organize. stokely carmichael said organize organize organize and that is what we need to do.

[applause] >> you know, i love anything sasha and malia and so any kind of image of them is beautiful and i do love them and i believe the notion put forward of that kind of new generation set of conversations but i also think and i know that is a set of possibilities as kendall said that is very limited, very small, very narrow and very elite. the two images that are notions of communities talking to each other and having dialogue has stuck with me this week where the interview with juror 37 that anderson cooper did and i'm really glad for that interview. i am very thankful for the honesty of juror p37 and what she said and the insight that she gave us in when she referred to people like rachel gentile and those people, they don't

live like we do. we don't see -- they don't see the world like we do so clearly she is not having dialogue with people who are just different from ourselves. when she sees a picture of trayvon he is unfamiliar to her except as a predator. that same night there was -- she kept using a refrain. she said where we are from. this is what we think that people like that where i am from. i don't know what it means where you are from, right? those images of those ways of belonging that do not talk to each other, that do not in any way -- i think rachel jentel said you don't understand really come from and the juror was saying i don't recognize that. i don't know who that is. that's different from sasha and malia and their friends in school on the basketball court. so our measure of how far we are

moving can't just be the measure of two beautiful little girls with great access but it also has to be the measure of these people who don't necessarily, into contact with each other for the kinds of dialogues we are talking about until it's too late, and till it's in the courtroom and a juror can't fathom, can't comprehend this young woman who is sitting in front of her. so that is one thing that i will say. the other thing that i will say is all of these are important. they are all a mess. they are all places where we struggle and where we fight with each other. we fight with her colleagues colleagues and they're all sites where work has to be done and i think a new site that we are seeing and that we really need to attend to much more is the side of social media. twitter frankly gives me a headache. it really does. it gives me a headache. but twitter, i get angry at the

ignorance. i get angry at the access that raises have to me and especially to my husband. i get angry about that but i don't think there is anyplace with a kind of dynamic dialogue where people are back and forth, where people are strategizing and organizing. the immediacy of the organizing around trayvon was extraordinary. we haven't seen anything quite like that so i think for all of its messiness, no more messy than all the other ones, it's just bigger. it's messy and there is a lot of ignorance but there is a lot of educating that goes on. there's a lot of organizing that goes on. there is 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] >> now i'm going to invite you to pose your questions to this conversation and add your voice is.

there is a microphone there. i would ask that you take that microphone so we cannot hear what you are trying to say and in the meantime i do want to thank our panelists so far for their powerful statements. [applause] >> first of all thank you very much for the conversation. it's really enlightening for all of us i think. how do you sell and left-wing juror p37? i asked specifically because she is a voter and it's kind of obvious that the thrill is gone in the black community with reference to president obama and i'm certainly no difference myself. i found these comments yesterday yesterday -- anyway the important point is that those people who dislike the idea that george zimmerman isn't completely within his right to waste trayvon martin

like like he is trashed in the street as people vote. they have been voting against us the entire time and they weren't attacking us or being more violent and president obama has been dealing with the fact that they voted number structurally that his side simply can't win against. we have watched democratic african-american politicians essentially get edified into certain districts where they can always win there but never statewide so i'm kind of wondering what happens next when we bring an antiracism agenda to all the people of color in this country and around the world, bring together latinos and asian-americans and the and the straight and everyone went structurally speaking we still have a tea party that was doing better than us for most of president obama's administration when he came to demographic organizing in the same people who are voting in the "stand your ground" law and keeping people and ideas like like stop

in frisco life today here. so i'm just kind of 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 a long revolution. and in the president's defense, one of the great things about his speech had to do with that moment in which he asked 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 done. the great british cultural theorist from whom i have learned a lot, stuart hall, said right after the election of

margaret thatcher that one of the things that those of us who were on the left needed 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 than it is of how we imagine ourselves. how we imagine ourselves in relationship to one another and so one of these potentially fruitful things about the strategy that the president shows was that he was inviting the juror of b37's of the world and indeed all of us to think about the ways in which we imagine ourselves in relationship to one another.

another great british theorist benedict anderson said in answer to the question what is a nation? a nation is an imagined community and so 50 years ago when martin luther king talked about this dream he had, he was inviting the people on the mall and all the folks who heard his speech on the media, to imagine themselves in a different way. now this politics of the imagination, some folks have called it politics and fantasy, is not the whole of politics and it's not going to be a substitute for hard roll up your sleeves organizing but it's one of the things that motivates people to think critically about and maybe even refuse the primary identity that is being imposed upon us under late

neoliberal capitalism, mainly to see ourselves not as citizens but as consumers, people who buy stuff. and that's understanding of who we are, of who we might be and who we have been, that a politics of the imagination makes possible edits a culture politics. it has producing meanings, making black mean something other than criminal, and car serval, dangerous. that kind of work is cultural work which has to do with the politics of making new meanings, and that work is down here and takes us here and takes place at the level of the mass media. so i think that is a very important component of the work that lies ahead of us, is this

what someone once called the politics of meaning. this politics of imagination. so that is why i -- on this question. >> i would add to that also that we might not get juror number b37 and we probably won't convince you of anything and i know it's the job of electoral the electoral politicians to get every single vote and not offend people and all of that so maybe we don't get b37, maybe we looser but i heard one of the representatives, one of the black representatives from the area say 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 uphold and maintain the "stand your ground" law's at intellectual positions at the local level and jesus blood people don't vote in the same numbers so juror p57 -- b37

and -- so the mobilizing we are talking about we are very good at mobilizing at the local level. we let that go. we put so much in behind the election of barack obama but those in between elections where we maintain laws like stand your ground we sometimes seek those out and we need to be just as vigilant and those kinds of elections as well. [applause] >> i came a little late. many of you may be old enough to remember -- many of you may be old enough to remember, we had a trayvon

martin called michael griffin and we had a trayvon martin called yousef hargis and we had an attorney by the name of alton maddox junior 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 calm the expert at doing this, how come he is not on "msnbc"? how come he is not on cnn? he is an expert when it comes to these racial slight motivated cases. he was illegally suspended from the practice of law because he absolutely dominated the criminal bar. they couldn't beat him. and so i ask when you go about talking about these things mention alton because our

children need to know. we have a lawyer, still alive, that one these cases and if he was working as an adviser in the trayvon martin case b37 may not have made it on that jury panel. [applause] and that's what i have to say. i heard you refer to somebody that is the cultural whatever and you look up to him. i look up to attorney alton maddox junior. [applause] see it's very painful but i have been told i need to cut our conversation short now, so please i invite you to come and talk to the panelists afterwards please do and in the meantime i thank them again and i thank you all fo >> this event was part of the 15th annual harlem but fair.

for more information visit the website. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2. here is our prime-time lineup for tonight. big -- beginning at 7:00 p.m. he said we hear from greg of tree he talked about his book that the 2013 eagle forum collegian summit. a 7:45 p.m., george becker presented history of the united states of the past three decades . at 9:00, craig steven wilder joins book tv in an interview with joe madison he talks about his book ebony and ivy, race, slavery, and the troll history of america's university. then at 10:00 p.m. eastern meredith whitney explains why states and the midwest would become the new powerhouses for the american economy. we wrap up tonight primetime programming and 11:00 p.m. eastern