create society programs. >> exactly how an administration within the space of four and a half years, five years, you know, built all of these programs. after they pass congress and they signed them into the law which is where the story normally ends, how did they build medicare and medicare from the ground up in the first year and create the first programs like head start or food stamps, the anti-cedants of food stamps and nutritional programs of children and how did they do that while desegregating a third of the country, housing and nursing homes and schools and places of public accommodation and fighting wars in vietnam and dissembling about it. >> "q&a," sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span. wednesday morning we're live in santa fe, new mexico for the next stop on the c-span bus 50 capitals tour. former new mexico gov richardson and house speaker

will be our guests on the bus during "washington journal" starting at 1:15 eastern. >> brown university professor juliet hooker who is the author of "theorizing race in the americas" took part in a discussion on race relations in politics in the u.s. the event was hosted by the group new america. >> all right. i think we'll get started. good afternoon. thank you all for coming. thanks for c-span for coming. my name is mark schmitt.

i'm the director of the political reform program here at new america and all i want to do is welcome you to this discussion on race and solidarity in the united states and the future of solidarity as a way of thinking about -- thinking about race. this discussion was organized by ted johnson who has been a fellow in our national fellows program and also a fellow in the political reform program. his work on the complexity of black voting behavior and political attitudes has been eye-opening to me, and, you know, tremendously important. he's now a fellow at the brennan center for justice which is an organization that as you can see, the signs here, it's occasionally here. we often do things in partnership with the brennan center which is a wonderful organization and ted is bringing a bit of a -- of a non-legal -- beyond legal, i guess he would say, scope of analysis to their work and continuing hopefully to

work in partnership with us. i'm going thank you again for coming and turn it over to ted who will introduce the panel and get us all started. thank you all. >> okay. so thank you all for coming. this is a topic that sort of originated in my book project that i started here at new america that i'm continuing at brennan around the question -- it started really about whether the solidarity we see in black america that expresses itself most noticeably in presidential elections in the uniform way that black americans vote, i wondered in there was something in the solidarity that we see in black america that the nation could take a lesson from and try to create a solidarity that can bridge the gap that we see when it comes to race. so the panel here today stems from a basic question that i ask the myself early on and a question that i've come to learn

and many have asked before me naturally. is solidarity the thing that can save us? is it the thing that can health u.s. address its race problem? i don't know the answer to that. i -- i hope that there is such a thing as a national solidarity that can bind us one to another. it's certainly when you hear most presidents speak, they sort of call on the american civil religion, this idea that there are ideas and principles that bind us together and there ice rutials we go through together to solidify this bond as president obama has said like many presidents before him, america is the only country found on an idea. you know, so if -- if we're all americans who subscribe to this larger idea, certainly there must be some way for us to identify some measure of solidarity that we can all get behind. the question we'll tackle a little bit today is a

multi-racial version of the black solidarity that sort of piqued my interest, is that possible? and what we do know is that race has proven to be an instrument that's been put to use to divide us. is it possible that we can create and establish a solidarity that can unify us despite the racial issues the country has faced? so one thing is certain though that we need some solution. i was looking at a few polls before coming on the stage and in 2009 i saw this poll from nbc and the "wall street journal" that said in twin the month obama took office 77% of americans thought that race relations were good in this country. this was the post-racial obama era that we all welcomed and soon learned was not a real thing. just last summer this -- this poll was taken again and 74% of

americans think that race relations in this country are bad, and so we've done a 180 on our view of race relations. lots of reasons for that. we'll talk a little bit about that, but i -- but the question of solidarity, national solidarity and political solidarity, can it get us back to a place where americans feel a bond of kinship, one to another, based on the idea alone? if you look at the state of race relations today, there's no shortage of cause for concern. if you look at the debate around immigration, the muslim travel ban, if you look around conversations about black nations in the caribbean or in subsaharan africa, race relations are not getting bert and the rhetoric around race relations seems to be a bit more pitched over the last year or so. and so at the heart of my

question is without solidarity is it possible for us to close the gap when it comes to racial disparities? is it impossible for us to improve ration relations? my sense is even if we did everything possible, for example, let's say we passed a huge federal reparations bill, my sense is if we don't feel a bond of kinship to another, the money sent to descendants of slaves would just be a really creative incentive for the industries, banking and otherwise, to find ways to get that money out of people's hands. there would be a mechanism for one of the most creative, innovative and financial instruments to figure out how to transfer that wealth back out of black america to other places. this is not a question of policy in my view. this is a question of how we view one another. it's a question of who gets to be american and -- and do we see the americanness in each other despite class, despite race and despite gender, et cetera, so

that's what we'll talk about today. to push this conversation forward i've got three experts on the panel who i'm lucky who said yes to the invitation. first, we have juliet hooker there on -- on my far right. juliet hooker is a professor of political science at brown university and specializes in racial justice, multiculturalism, latin american political thought and black political thought and of a crow descendant and indigenous politics and she's the author of "race and solidarity," a book that's become a good nightstand and "theorizing race in the merks." and her current research project examines the politics of loss, aspectsch which have appeared in a couple of journal articles discussing black protest and white grievance and black lives matter and the paradoxes of u.s. black politics. next to her we have tehama lopez

bun yaes, assistant professor for school of conflict resolution and analysis at george mason university. she has specializations in racial attitudes and ideologies. dr. lopez bunyasi is creating a manuscript, "breaking the contract," and this project examines the role and perceptions of white privilege on racial attitudes and white americans. she's co-authoring a book called "stay woke" which includes the movement of black lives as a contemporary movement. "stay woke" is under contract with nyu press and hopefully out by year's end and then closest to me we have carole bell, an assistant professor of communications studies at northeastern university and her research includes that of social

media and public attitude and is interested in the role of communication and change, related to group identities, race, sex and she looks at how communication can influence and help to eliminate social divisions. dr. bell's professional experience expands media and marketing and has worked eight years in interactive media development, working with fortune 100 clients on strategy and campaign execution, and with agency management on new business development. and so what we'll do is we'll first start with prove southerly heroic and allow her a chance to give some remarks and then we'll move to professor lopez bunyasi and professor bell and then go in a moderated discussion about race, identity, america and the politics of solidarity and we'll open it up to the audience for questions before wrapping up. thank you.

>> good afternoon. thank you, ted, for the invitation for organizing in panel for new america for hosting us and thanks for all of you from taking time for your afternoon and coming and being part of this event. soy i want to say a little bit about how in moy work i understand the relationship between race and solidarity and also what i mean when i talk about solidarity and how we should understand what this has to do with democracy and why it's so important to cultivate. so one of the premises, right, for people writing about democracy, for good reason, is political solidarity is necessary for democracy to function. the reason for this is because democracies are diverse, right? citizens need to be able to come

together to see themselves as immeshed in relations of mutual obligations with strangers. sitting in d.c., we may not know the people in utah face-to-face, but being part of the same political community, we can understand that we have relations of mutual obligation with them. and so the premises for the idea that i grapple with in my book referring to race and the politics of solidarity is that we have written about or in political science we have analyzed solidarity as if it were something that we -- that exists or is something that we are working towards without thinking enough about the ways in which that solidarity is shaped by race fundamentally.

and so i'm going to say what i mean by solidarity and talk about why i think it is shaped by race. what do i mean when i talk about solidarity? often when we think about solidarity, we think of a concept that emerges from labor unions on the left and the idea of relations. we might think about solidarity and often people think about it as empathy or sympathy. feeling the pain of others. but in my view, and i think in the view of people who write about solidarity in the context of politics, solidarity is not simply empathy. it can't be just empathy or sympathy, it's not just an emotion, but an ethical orientation that moves us to action. one example of this, the recent very tragic events in parkland and the shooting there.

it's one thing to say thoughts and prayers are with those people and it's another thing to say i may not have been in that situation, but i understand that this is a problem and i am moved by what happened and i am going to organize to make sure it doesn't happen again, right? for me solidarity is not simply feeling the pain of others or feeling sympathy or empathy, but rather being moved to action, right? as a result of identifying with the pain and suffering of others even if it's something that is not happening to me. another way of thinking about this is in the united states, people who support, for example, single people who don't have children, but support education policy because they think education is important to the well being of the community as a

whole even though they themselves may not have school children and may not have a sort of direct stake in that particular policy area. so that's what i mean when i talk about solidarity and the way in which ted is thinking about it when he can book this for discussion. one of the core arguments in my work and this book was that political solidarity continues even if what we have no longer legally mandated discrimination or race continues so that political solidarity even in this moment continues to be shaped by race. so that decisions about who merits care and concern as a fellow citizen are mediated by whether we see those persons as like us. and race is key to whether we see them as being like us.

so it's more difficult for us to see the pain and suffering of those we see as racial others. and so one way to think about this is to think about, for example, many people have pointed out, right? that the response to the devastating hurricane in puerto rico where citizens have been left without power, without food for months and months. if that had been happening let's say in new york city or someplace that was closer in the imagination, whatever way, that it would not have been able to happen. there is a reason why when people say how can this be happening to american citizens, they are not invoking a larger human community. they are invoking the citizens that they are supposed to have

towards each other even when they are separated by vast distance. we may not all have gone to puerto rico or know any puerto ricans, but by the fact that we are part of the same community, we are supposed to have relations of obligations towards them and have care and concern for what is happening to them. so in the book, i develop this concept of racialized solidarity to talk about the way in which i think race shapes solidarity. instead of functioning in this ideal way i describe, instead i think because of racism, the pain and suffering of nonwhites is often rendered invisible or when it's visible, it is seen as less deserving than that of whites. i'm using whites as the dominant group in this case in the united states. so then racialized solidarity

then for me refers to the way embodied racial difference, that is when we look at other people and see somebody who is different from us or hear them speak or have an accent or see snag is not like us results in differential care and concern towards their pain and suffering. and this leads them to differences in policy. if we are able to say in some way these people are not american or they are less or morn or somehow undeserving, we are not moved to support policies that take their needs into account. this is the way in which i argue this partialized solidarity shapes our political preferences and the kinds of policies that we enact as a community.

i want to end by my rarkts by reflecting a little bit on where we are today versus where we were when i published this book. you spend a lot of years working on a book and you don't control the context in which it comes out. my book was published in january 2009. barack obama had just been elected president and we were in this moment that everybody thought the legacy of racism had been overcome. we were in this post racial moment and there was a sense in which the argument didn't make sense to a lot of people. the argument that race continued to shape whether we saw each other as fellow citizens to the extent to which we thought we had mutual obligations didn't seem to make sense at a moment

when it seems like the racial fault lines of the past were being bridged by the election of the first and only nonwhite president. now, it's certainly not coincidental that in 2018, the argument of the book seems much more relevant. that of course is because the backlash that followed obama's election, of course, which was heavily shaped by race in many ways and was deeply racist, i think uncovered the fact that we hadn't transcended the racial fault lines of the past. of course this was followed by the insurgence of outspoken white nationalism in the past

year. and the bombing where nine church goers were murdered in south carolina. these questions of resurgent white nationalism and the nativism attacks on foreigners i think make it no longer possible to deny that race remains a major factor and the way in which we think who are the people who whom we have relations of mutual obligation to? i'm going to leave it at that. thank you. >> good afternoon, everybody.

>> i would like to sanction ted johnson for allowing me to participate and thank you to new america for hosting and thank you for coming on a really warm washington, d.c. day. to help kickoff our discussion, i would like -- to kickoff the discussion, i would like to think about the opportunity for white americans to help bridge the racial divide. we have seen important changes in our society since the civil rights movement, but we continue to fall short in realizing egalitarian potential. a multitude of studies say that white people have better life chances relative to people of color. when we compare white individual to those situated on those on the other side of the color line with home ownership, whites tend to land higher paying jobs and accrue more wealth. being white doesn't make someone immune to hardship, but can

serve as a valuable asset. when it comes to bridging gaps, a crucial question to ask is how do americans see the society they live in? do they understand themselves to be advantaged or think we are living in a country where everyone has a fair chak regardless of color or do whites see themselves as the new underdog where being white is a liability? is it at the will of white americans to close the racial gap has something to do with whether they believe there is a gap and which side of the gap they fall on? just weeks before the iowa caucus in 2016, i conducted a national study of color blindness and had over 900 whites and 300 black participants. i asked them to think about the worth whiteness in american life. jobs, education, one's interaction with law enforcement and the kinds of treatment that

one receive when is participating in the economy as consumers of goods and services. what i learned is that whites evaluate their status differently depending on the context. i found that whites who believe the group is advantaged are significantly more likely to reduce inequality. let's take employment. i asked in general who do you think has a better chance of getting a job or promotion? whites or blacks or do they have an equal chance of getting a promotion. the majority of white, 50% believe there is an equal chance in landing this job. about a 30 of whites think that their racial group is advantaged and not to be overlooked, but 10% of white people believe that blacks have an edge when it comes to the world of the job market. i wanted to see whether one's understanding of whyte life

chances relative to blacks had anything to do with attitudes regarding work-related policies. indeed it does. whites who believe their racial group has an advantage are more likely to support laws protecting racial minorities and racial discrimination and more likely to support ark firmative action. we see here to read the graph is when whites think the group is privileged in some way, they have a 91% probability of supporting a policy such as one that would protect minorities from discrimination in the workplace. i asked two different types of questions about affirmative action and in either case, we see the majority, a slight majority of white who is believe their group is advantaged are more likely to support affirmative action in comparison to those who had a level playing field and those who perceive white disadvantage.

affirmative action has never enjoyed great support among whites, but when one foresees white privilege, they are more inclined to get behind the policy. when affirmative action is a way of making up for past discrimination, we find support from whites who believe their group is at a disadvantage than when we asked the same question for purposes of diversifying. keep that in mind when we come back to it later. let's also look at the question of education. a similar question. who do you think has more access to good schools? whites, blacks or do you think the whites and blacks have equal access? again, what we see is there is a majority of whites who think that whites have an edge here. that's different than the last question, but not far behind are those who give a more color blind answer. comparing whites who give a race

conscious answer where their group is privileged, those who answer to those, they seem to be more -- those who answered that question rather than color blind, they seem to give more support to an increase of funds for schools in black and latino neighborhoods for early education programs such as preschool and more supportive of disseminating college scholarships to black and latino youth. to round out a look of other do mans. they are asked who they think have a chance to be treated fairly by police, we see the highest percentage of whites reporting a privilege. this has to be because of what we have seen in the news with the black lives matter movement brought attention to in the streaming videos over and over again of police brutality. this is not new, but the advent of social media and the smart phone is disseminating this information in a way that for most people we can't deny

something is going on even though in courts not everybody is being brought to justice. for that we should be upset. when we look at the realm of experiencing good customer service which is something that is one way or another engage in. that's not as consequential as how you interact with the police, most whites think we are doing pretty good. 65% believe there is an equal chance of being treated well and getting good service. when one goes out to a dining restaurant or going to a store. each one of these four measures predicts support for a meal yourative and egalitarian policies. although the proportion of whites who report racial privilege fluctuates when taken together about 20% of white americans believe it is beneficial to be white in all four of those domains of

american life. domains of american life that are racialized not just because of the way we perceive what's going on, but because of studies over and over again, showing there is a difference in the way people are treated. i would like to think of this fifth of the white population is being wokish. they will report their group's racial benefits and work to bring about greater equality and undermine their own racial privilege. they have important foundational components to help usher a more just america, but solidarity believes more beliefs than preferences. it requires commitment and will. i believe we are seeing evidence of this spirit in this mounting in the trump presidency. based on ek perimental studies as well as anecdotally, i believe there is room for this.

in order to accomplish such a shift, we need a full throated and accessible challenge to the color blind narrative, one where dominance will be treated in earnest and with nuance. thank you. i look forward to the next panelist's comments. >> thank you, that was great. i would like to thank ted johnson and the brenson center and the native american foundation for the opportunity to speak to all of you and i appreciate you coming. it's a high of 73 today. i appreciated that. i love to be outside. i know you have that choice. i would like to address the

social identity and political psychology. by that i mean how american elites and american citizens talk about politics and reflect how they think and feel about society and the different groups within that including the social groups to which they wrong and those they see as the outsiders. that largely symbolic discourse shapes the policies and politicians that we support. media discourse and framing should be seen as one component although an important component. i see two themes related to national identity as dominating the discourse right now. and therefore also the american psyche in this moment. so first, as we have heard many times, we have america's changing demographics. the much discussed idea that

america is changing rapidly and white americans will soon be outnumbered. so that is framed, first of all, as a problem. the second theme is closely related to that. it's that white americans sense that they are under threat. that they will lose dominance. that they will lose status and their place in american society. the way that the media frames certain policy issues associating both societal problems and their potential solutions with particular racial groups both reflects and contributes to the sense of threat. it pits different groups against one another in competition. this media flaming helps to exacerbate divisions, but was not created in a vacuum. bill clinton, for example, talked about how progress, how every single advancement that has been made has been made on the backs of white men.

so politicians play upon and exploit fears to mobilize groups of voters and they define what it means to be american and implicitly and explicit terms as well. i will point to two examples that illustrate the real world consequences of the racialization of political issues. so first we know from guillen's work investigating why americans hate welfare that the racialization of poverty in which poverty is visualized and personified in the media as black and brown. this depresses support for social safety net programs like welfare. recent ethno graphic research by catherine cramer support this is finding. her multiyear study of whites in wisconsin show that white residents of that state felt deep resentment towards the

government. in large part because they believe the government spending didn't go to people like them and that it instead disproportionately benefitted other people. undeserving people who do not work hard and who live in cities. these people are again envisioned as being black. largely. so the economic anxiety that was often discussed in 2016 is not in competition with that it was largely about race, but many white americans do feel as though they are forgotten people. and that made them right for a figure like donald trump who promised redemption and restoration of their status in society. so the second example of how facts and references comes a

research that shows the idea that blacks are disproportionately involved in and incarcerated for crime reinforces existing prejudice and can actually encourage support amongst whites for more sentencing laws like the three strikes law. so media representations matter because they spread and they reinforce these divicive beliefs about who is affected by centrally important issues that should matter to everyone. these faulty assumptions have serious consequences. they are seen as affecting others and will not be seen as relevant by the dominant group. images matter because they shape public opinion and reverences and also shape election outcomes. beyond specific policy, they added to the perception that

minority groups comprise the much larger percentage of the american population than they actually do. in mealt, after can americans are 12% of the population. whites have estimated that it's more than 30% or double that. they get this idea largely from the overrepresentation of african-americans in the media and in particular in news about crime and sports. this further exacerbates the sense of threat that whites already feel. at the same time i think it's important to contextualize a long standing element in social identity. even though it's a more visceral and visible thing in our rhetoric right now. social identity theory shows

that cohesion is closely connected to group identification mean a strong connection and a sense that your fate and success are connected to the fate of the group as a whole. this can be activated by context by events by the media and by that growing sense of threat. how can we have political cohesion when americans have not thought of themselves as having a shared fate and shared values when most americans self concept, the image of themselves does not include large chunks of its citizenry. one of the reasons puerto rico becomes less relevant is because so many americans don't even realize that puerto ricans are american. the media's racialization of

poverty and welfare and crime works within the constraints of the psychology and the sense or historic lack of an inclusive collective identity. political rhetoric, verbal and visual, are vehicles that media, candidates and officials use in the social construction or framing of societal problems and keep with their own world views, but again i don't think that is created in a vacuum. thinking about it, what does the phrase all american conjure up. how has it been visualized? how has a president or first lady been consuptualized. this is not just in mass media, but in how individuals hear and speak about their leaders and

themselves through social media and at rallies we saw in quick effects. most importantly when we asked how americans speak to each other in their own homes. the conflict between american ideals and the reality of race has been a problem for social coregion. the election of drum with racial conflict and resentment in explicit terms than we were used to revealed the struggle as come to a head in reaction to change. it's in reaction to the changing demographics, but symbolically it's also a reaction to and a backlash to the presidency of barack obama which accelerated and catalyzed these divisions and we noticed not just from our own sense, but research and in

an article, for example and books shown that they are old fashioned racism during the obama presidency. we have these two president who is have shown a light on the competition and the vasilation between two narratives about america. one narrative or traditional america is by definition christian. heterosexual and white. that is the national order of things. in this version of america, unity can only flow from cultural uniformity. this is an inherent threat and impediment to a strong national identity. they are not inheriters of the american dream and citizens have been protected. and all those who challenge and

those who challenge the identity. this is the america that screams i want my country back and we need to make america great again. in the other narrative, the one repeatedly referenced in almost every one of barack obama's speeches starting with his 2004 key note at the dnc in which he declared there was not a black or white or blue america, but only the united states of america. that's inclusive and egalitarian with race, but gender and sexuality. diversity can be a strength. and now later in the presidency he said those who were born in other countries and came here as person or adults can be inheriters of the american dream. as bill o'reilly gave way to barack obama's vision of america on the rhetoric on the left, the people privileged within the

existing system felt increasingly under siege. they felt that their version of america was slipping away. in closing, i want to say that don't think of course that cohesion is impossible, actually. i don't think it is impossible in a multiracial democracy, but it is obviously very challenging given the struggle between groups that is reflected in the two competing narratives. none the less, both of these narratives contain paths to solidarity. the first supported by bill o'reilly and conservative writer david brooks and given lip service by donald trump rejects multiculturalism and denigrates the idea that it decries identity politics and said america doesn't need to change. instead, solidarity requires the submission of many groups as a dominant culture. some outside of that paradigm are required to participate in

miss america as long as they uphold rather than challenging hierarchies and norms. marco rubio, ted cruz and fox news would lead us down that path. barack obama and hillary clinton are considered public enemies number and football player who is call attention to inequality. the other narrative that is symbolized in the figure of the first black president, the multiracial president told us that it entails relinquishes dominance in one group. it said we must make change to realize the promise of america. which path do we choose? i don't know the answer to that one. thank you. i want to leave time for questions and i have to

follow-up with some of what you said and the work you have done. one of the things that struck me about a recent piece is how you contrasted the way people experience loss and what that communicates to the world at large. if we think about what happened in ferguson after the killing of michael brown and how protests, riots and the confrontation in the armed police force, that played out on the screens and then we saw how charleston reacted to the killing of nine church members which was more prayerful and forgiving. the reaction was very different to loss and tells us something about how the experience of loss contributes to the larger

discussion about how we feel empathy or solidarity with other cultures. can you talk a little bit about the phenomenon of loss and how the display tells us about who we are and who we identify with. >> yeah, sure. i think one of the things that is at stake there is that -- and it has to do with a point carol made in her marks. the terms of inclusion. if you think about the famous james baldwin line about the price of the tickets and the ways in which white identity is disported rather than what is required of nonwhite people, but the interesting thing about this question is i think that there are certain reactions to loss that are accepted with others that are not. first the reaction was rage and anger. in some ways anger at a horrible

event and an injustice is a reaction. who gets to reaction to loss by being angry, that is not an option that will generate sympathy. one of the critiques of ferguson was that you will never generate white empathy by reacting in that way. should you react the way people in the civil rights movement did or as an example, the folks in charleston. and we are being asked, do you forgive the shooter. in what context does that make sense?

even if your particular religious convictions say this is what you should do, it's somehow an interesting expectation that you would simply forgive this really terrible act. i think part of what's going on is that we need to think about the differential different losses. all of the people about the trump voters and how we need to understand them and think about how they are suffering loss and economic anxiety and this is why they are voting for trump or think about the trying to understand the folks who are drawn to these new neonazi organizations or whatever. that's an action to the perceived loss that is different from the people in ferguson who are saying this terrible thing

happened and i'm angry about it. i think we have different standards for whose loss we can understand and what range of reactions we think are permissible to those losses. >> that's a really interesting point that after trump was elected, the endeavor to understand the people that elected him, but after obama was elected, it wasn't like people were scouring communities trying to understand why people voted for the black guy. he was black and he was a democrat. just the amount of interest and what moved people in those two elections. you talked about color blindness and consciousness, it doesn't required and is the policy required to be color blind to be

acceptable or is color conscious policy the only hope we have of closing gaps in racial experiences? even barack obama said it's a policy where the rising tide must vote. they are that seems to speak to color blindness, but i'm not so sure. actually, i am sure, but i would like to hear your thoughts. at least for part of this, this was real support for race conscious policies. 96 an was at some point an advocate of affirmative action. we backed that up rather strongly for a period. this was also in the idea that

these policies do lift numerous votes and not just the people of color. then there is attrition in support around these matters as i think whites start to agree. not all. the idea that they are being forced to integrate and the schools and that's not what they signed up for when they moved to the neighborhood. i think race conscious policies are important. there is an articulation of race when drafting policies. color blind policies had effects such as the new deal. when you write into legislation

that funds are supposed to be an opportunity at the local level, you give that instruction to the local level to do, they'll carry out the will of the local level which say hostile type of politics. i you can't find that impact, but the gi bill, the same kind of thing. whether you want to put actual racial labels into policies or not, what's more important is how it's draft and carried out. and if we are really going to do this right, we need to take race into consideration and let's be honest with ourselves. let's talk about poor white people. let's do that. white people need to be talked about in various ways. they are not all the same.

the idea of let's shine light on the forgotten whites. well certainly, but they haven't been articulated as white and poor. possibly articulated as poor. are they white and poor? that's a different type of poverty. we should do that, but also the way that poverty and racialized and gender and all kinds of a number of things. >> this rolls right into your area. racializing policy often determines whether or not that policy ever sees the light of day or not. we can look at obamacare and when people were asked, the polls have shown the different elements in obamacare, they liked them. when they are talked about as a whole as the affordable care act, they liked it, but they hate obamacare. a professor in irvine has done

studies where he showed one group of people a picture of a portuguese water dog. jfk had this dog and president obama had this dog. depending on what he told who the dog belonged to, the level of cuteness of that dog differed. even though it was the same dog, obama's dog was less cute than kennedy's dog. this has nothing do with policy and dogs, but once you stick a race on something, it's devalued. is it possible to talk about racialized policy and still get it past or is the only way to get good policy passed is to talk about it in a color blind fashion? >> i agree with what you said because we have to be cautious about the impacts of policy, but

perhaps not really focus so much on the labels and on who it benefits and not an elevated way that. does tend to invoke and activate thatresentment. i referenced the research that talked about the return of racism. not just attitudes, but the voting behavior. i think of it as a reversed my as touch. everything associated with his name would suffer in the eyes of some people. i never ever refer to anything as obamacare. i told my students put the

benefit in the name, not the person. when you put the person in the name, you are asking people how they feel about that person. also it proves them of the opportunity of why they should support this bill. unless we have a way of changing the beliefs and add tuts and feelings, we have to work and not necessarily activate and exacerbate existing resentments and i think we have seen as soon as we got rid of barack obama, we have seen that affordable care act and also because it was being threatened. the popularity increased

substantially. we have to stop associating policy so much with race. i think that's a really important component and to your point about poverty, i often thought i can't imagine what it would be like to be a poor white person in america where you are invisib invisible. the media pretends as though you do not exist. in terms of the news media and entertainment. the only whites that are on television predominantly are upper middle class at minimum. i can list on one hand the shows that now attempt to depict working class americans. i think that helps exacerbate resentment. >> i want to move to questions, but i would like each of your

takes on really the fundamental question. is it possible for a multiracial, multiethnic democratic republic to exist? we have seen it before in places where it failed. what's the cause television? i tend to think america is big enough for all of us and the principals are good enough to want to create the country our founders produce. are there examples we can learn from on what can we possibly do? what can we do to bridge the gap between americans? >> can i speak to that because you mentioned the military. when we look and at the social psychology literature, one of the ways it is reduced and when

you can create that sense that's missing of that shared fate. when people come together around a common goal, when they are working in concert rather than competition, that tends to reduce prejudice. that's equal status on the common goal. having that equal status and really endorsed. you see the requirements in the military at certain stages and you do see people working together and seem to have more of a common kinship than we do in the general population.

>> what i would say is we have to not presuppose the answers will work the same way. if you look at latin america, you have the racial democracies that argue there is no racism even though there are existing racial disparities and people are equal citizens. on the one hand they funk and some argued as forms of color blind racism. and the people accused of being racist, they say hey, there is racial disparities and they become the people who are threatening national unity by bringing race into a discussion where it doesn't belong. on the other hand, they have been used by people to say this is the official claim.

you need to live up to ideals. you have to be aware that this forces in multiple ways i thank as they mentioned, there is cause for hope in the fact that many have been activated to a pose what they see as the resurgence in support for white supremacy. think about the people who protested people like heather heyer and people came out and said this is not my vision for what the country should be. at the same time there is still a lot of reluctance to recognize that racism is the major

problem. we see this in economic anxiety or tribalism it's wrong to think about it as an either or and as long as we don't recognize that racism is bound up in whatever this other explanation that you are putting forward is, we are not going to be able to solve the problem. >> i'm agreeing with both of you, but i think we need to have a real reckoning about how we got to where we are and have a reckoning about exploitation of people on the basis of their race and a reckoning about who

did build this country. that was on forced child savory. that was on the the people that became white. that's another discussion. we should have that discussion. if we're going to be in solidarity, we need to know what we are coming together around. the idea of by being in concert, certainly we do. we have quite a bit to gain from working together rather than against one another. we have seen peaks and valleys around solidarity. i have been reading some more about redirection period which is fascinating and we could have and then and this thing slips away. there is a lack of will on the part of white americans who are both at the time republican and democrat.

a socialist or communist language and there are people who are functioning in a capi l capitalist society. let's recognize people as workers. we need a reckoning if we have long standing solidarity. it could be very scary, but we are not going anywhere. we have to deal with this. i think that's where i stand. the mike is coming for you there. in order to get the most questions in r, that really lea to the question of is it too late to have a truth and

reconciliation smith kind of convening so that these things get out on the table where you have descendents of the victims of a system of slavery and descendents of and my ancestors were brick layers, but the scope of the truth and reconciliation commission maybe makes it completely burdensome and you couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel in putting all of this suffering out on the table. >> truth in reconciliation? is that a viable step?

>> it has been done in north carolina. fairly recently. it seems to have been a good thing. a hard thing, but a good thing in that there was a compassion and a forgiveness where i don't know if people did this, but what are we doing right now that replicates these inequalities and is it possible for people of color to make things difficult for people of color and colorism. that darker skinned people are treated different than lighter skinned. that is shown to be the case.

that doesn't need to be historic historical, but ongoing. i believe that's possible. sure. >> right here in front? >> thank you very much for a great conversation. some of the comments you made have been taking us in this direction, but what the panel believes using a class identity and seeking class as an approach to begin to see the shared humanity and interest between the trump white voters and people of color, so to speak. and to be able to achieve some solidarity on that level and

through that approach, perhaps devaluing the racial identity that is polarizing the country. >> so my take on that is that i think the problem is that we can't separate class from race. i think part of what we need to grapple with -- i think absolutely as a strategy, i think poor and working class and white and nonwhite people seeing that they have shared interests. absolutely. for many working class whites, the way they experienced

economic success is by measuring their distance from nonwhite people. to the extent that both poor whites and they are suffering in the current economic configuration, the the problem is who are they ascribing that suffering to? as long as it's the other and the foreigner and the immigrant coming to take your jobs and you are suffering anxiety and you need to reclaim dominance, that's a notion of shared interests. simply arguing for a focusing only on class is not going to get at that feel iing the ways which class is experienced

through race. >> i agree with that and i think it's penitentiary to we can also have racial denial. that shouldn't be a requirement. the awareness of how class is intersected with race needs to be a part of that. it's not helpful if we subscribe to what john roberts said in the supreme court. the way to stop talking about race, that's not going to work. this is part of the argument for not needing the voting rights protections and approval for states to not have approval when they change some of those voting

laws. that's why we are in the midst of legal fights like north carolina. we have seen what happens when you retreat to just color blindness. we have to be able to come together across class. part of the definition of the threat rather than being each other can be exploited of capitalism. you don't have to believe in socialism to believed the way tax reform is functioning really disadvantages working class people. focussing on that is solidarity, but i don't top the do that at the expense of racial denial. >> i think rob and kelly's work speaks well to the potential to

be in the socialist communist lynns we are talking about and the solidarity around work and class identity that race and class are being articulated rather well in the 1930s. that black communists in the south were articulating this axis and they were also able to articulate the belief in god. not that it means being an atheist, but that perhaps that brand or strand of socialism or comp in addition is native born or indigenous to the united states. we can be reckoning with succ s

particulars. it can be done again. >> i can add that a lot of times he turn ed ed to comp nichl, bu was almost like i can't achieve equality. we looked to other systems to do so. sort of where i began is fundamentally if racism has not dealt with the problem, no matter what system begins to infect everything. democracy tends to be a good thing and capitalism when properly regulated can be a good thing, but if we don't account for the racial divisions, no matter which systems we have, we create something undesirable. we have two or three minutes.

any parting words? i am a hopeless optimist. i do believe that the nation can find a way of solidarity. i don't know what the path looks like, but believe it's for being an american to achieve it. i think that the nation that does figure it out will leave a legacy for posterity, for hume innity of a system of government that is inclosive that the world has never seen before. any final thoughts before we wrap up here? all head nods. >> i'm also an eternal optimist and i have seen in my own life people who bind their lives to one another will go the distance for each other.

we are further from that because we live segregated lifestyles and at times more and more for their part. to the extent that they are greeting and knowing and loving one another and really testing the capacity for compassion, i thank we can get somewhere. i think compassion is hard work and we need to love each other and be interested in one another's life and be in a similar boat. i have seen people's lives change because they care enough to do hard work and say am i benefiting from a systemic and

should not benefit from and am i wrong? that gives me hope. >> so one thing that i have been thinking about is the role of education in this. right now i think the educational system is at odds with us achieving any solidarity because the summer we saw this fight over how the confederacy should be thought of. if we are not teaching, if high school students don't have any sense of america's history with slavery or of reconstruction or of the confederacy and why the civil war happened and if we are revising the narrative to leave out important components and if

we know all of these things necessary flux and really problematic and there is a retrenchment and a specific effort to pull back on this idea on knowledge of safely and civil rights and there is such an effort from text books to the ap exams to say that we have been concentrating too much on what america did wrong in the past. i don't want to see more questions about genocide or safely. the changes have been implemented. we are going backwards in terms of people having an awareness of history and why inequality exists. i think more attention to the educational system not just to the media, but how we are socializing children.

i think that is.

if we can turn to those and value them rather than marginalize them, that's one way forward. >> so thank you very much to all of you for coming out. i appreciate you and it was a great conversation. thanks for your questions. >> for nearly 20 year, indepth on book tv featured the nation's best known nonfiction writers. this year as a special project, we are featuring fiction writers for the monthly program fiction edition. join us live at noon eastern

with jeff whose novel, gods and generals was made into a major motion picture. his other books are the final storm, to the last man, plus 11 more that recount the military history from the american revolution. we will be taking your phone calls, tweets and facebook messages. our special series with author jeff cherra sunday live from noon to 3:00 p.m. eastern on book tv on c-span 2. >> monday on c-span's landmark cas cases, we will explore the civil rights cases and the supreme court case that struck down the civil rights case that granted all people access to public accommodations like trains and theaters regardless of race. john marshall, known as the

great decenter and his decent eclipsed the legacy of the majority opinion. explore this and the high court's ruling, dean of howard university's law school. attorney and a member of the u.s. commission on civil rights. watch landmark cases live monday on 9:00 eastern on c-span, c-span.org and radio app and for background, order your copy of the cam pan yon book available for 8.95 plus shipping and handling on c-span.org/landmark cases. there is a link on our website to the national constitution center's interactive constitution. >> next, health and human services secretary alex azar lays out priorities. he spoke about the opioid epidemic and the needs of