updated. and this is a book i have been meaning to read by walter isaac, called the innovators. it is about these people who have come up with all of the great ideas we have seen in the tech world. i do not read fiction, i read nonfiction. , butof it is a collective normally it is related to the work i am doing here in congress, and i'm very grateful from thehe help library of congress and the folks over there to recommend books to me, and i can take them to read them and return and ask for other resources if i find anything interesting in the book that interests us. >> send us your summer reading list via twitter at book tv or , or posted to our facebook page. book tv on c-span 2 -- television for serious readers. now, a discussion on race and politics. sociologyence and

professors and representatives from advocacy organizations discussed the challenges and solutions for dealing with race relations. posted by arena stage in washington, d.c., this is an hour and a half. [indistinct conversations] >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen. thank you. welcome to arena stage and our civil dialogue. i serve as the deputy artistic director here. i am curious, how many of you have been to arena stage before? raise your hand if you have. oh, fantastic. well welcome back. , i thought i would give you a little bit of context about the civil dialogue program we are doing here at arena stage. a few months ago, the professor sitting behind me and to my

right approach does, feeling frustrated like many of us were about the lack of civil dialogue in our nation and how polarized we seem to be. and he wondered whether arena stage could be a place for civil dialogues to take place were we -- where we deliberately bring together people with multiple perspectives on a topic that might be difficult to discuss and engage in the act of listening and speaking with one another civilly. when he approached us about this, we felt that it was a very good match with our mission, because as a theater company, that is what we strive to do every day in our shows. put up some ideas on stage and gather the community and the audience. and hopefully, you then leave the theater with conversations. so we thought well, would people come to dialogues that we host here without the show? and so we did a couple of tests. this is the third of the tests.

so many pleased to see of you here and say that people are hungry for this. so we are going to be continuing these dialogues into the late summer and fall. at the back of your programs, you will see the list of upcoming dialogues. as this is about dialogue, to whet your conversation maker, i would ask you to turn to somebody near you. and hopefully someone you didn't come here with and just -- we're only going to take 30 seconds for this. just share why you came with one another. so go ahead and just take 30 seconds for that sharing. [indistinct conversations]

>> wonderful. wonderful. so hopefully, you had the

opportunity to meet someone new this evening. and, just a reminder to turn off your cell phones or any other noisemaker you might have on you. special thanks to c-span , who is covering this dialogue this evening. without further ado, let me turn this over to the professor who will shepherd us through this conversation. dr., thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much. i greatly appreciate the decision of arena stage to give us this opportunity to continue a conversation with you. before we proceed, indulge me for just one minute. because we need to talk for one minute about a subject we will not discuss tonight.

i cannot, as an immigrant, parent, a human being, and , disregard the situation of our government taking children from their parents, many younger than four, and incarcerates them separately. this is clear that they have a hard time uniting with their children. and in the past, in many cases, these children ended up with human traffickers. i'm not going to tell you what to feel. but those who share my feeling, i hope we hear your voice. now, what we try to do in this series is to do two things at the same time. one, to show that people come from different backgrounds and different viewpoints, they can have a civil dialogue. we tried twice before, and it is by far our most challenging topic.

especially calling on each other to have a frank conversation, but one that is mutually respectful. and second, the topic for tonight is what we envision race relationships should be in the united states 30 years from now. and how are we going to get ? in preparing myself tonight, i talked with a lot of people. some of you and some others, and it may not surprise you that it is an extremely complicated issue. and in these communities, each with their own viewpoint. it is far from it. and to my surprise, i found the differences in each community. it is hard to believe, but it is true. they exceed the difference among the communities.

so mexican-americans and cuban-americans are further apart than mexican-americans and followers of bernie sanders, and so on. and so among the foundations which keep coming up in the conversation, i would like to mention something before i turn it over to you. one issue coming up is, do we really want to aspire to a colorblind society? or, as more and more people tell me, this integration is something most of us are losing faith in, and instead, we're thinking about the policy which is a race conscious policy. i'm not sure exactly what that means but that is what we are discussing. other people do the distinction between structural and personal racism.

i understand that, what i mean, is to say, some people believe that if you work hard enough, dedicate yourself, you can pull yourself up with your own bootstraps and, whatever things are in your way, and anointed person should be able to -- a minority person should be able to bulldozer ahead. some of the discussion came up in the role of black fathers. again, if just minorities would do their thing, everything would be dandy. in contrast, the factual idea is that racism is deeply embedded in our power structures and our economy, and therefore is not that an individual can tackle on their own. another thing i found intriguing is the role of class.

on one hand of people, to avoid the bad class, discrimination, we should really focus on helping all people. all disadvantaged people, disregarding the racial background. then, the push back of this idea is that minorities especially, african americans, suffer extra injustice. so if you go to class-based, you for not be able to correct that extra important in balance. often get caught up in different combinations. race and class and so on. finally, one idea i found particularly intriguing is a phrase which is controversial but i find it actually surprisingly helpful as a

conversation trigger, and that is check your privilege. now, some people take that to mean that white people should shut up because they have been privileged so long it is not time for them to speak, and just said in a book by the author so you want to talk about race, she explained that is not at all what the phrase means. when whitemeans people feel they did better because they worked harder, save more, and such. they should check and see, to what degree they have extra achievements and whether they are really due to their own efforts or advantages that they had that other people did not. to sum up the frameworks in which the conversation might be

framed here, they came to hear from you and you promise each other, you made a commitment that each of the speakers will speak only for five minutes in the first round and there are trapdoors. [laughter] to save time, we will not introduce those speakers. you have the full bio in the program. >> thank you so much. it is wonderful to be here. professor and this distinguished panel. you posed a challenging question for us. i guess i would start by saying i am hoping that by 2050 we will be much further along in our race relations than we are today. that people will see the basic humanity in others that is lacking. just today, many of you know roseanne barr tweeted out a horribly racist statement about

valerie jarrett. we have a president who, to my mind, consistently and in a mind-boggling way denies that humanity of others. a mexican-american judge cannot be fair, he says. muslims, immigrants should not be allowed into the country. i mean, these are astounding coming into the 21st century. so, we would be much further along in 2050. how to get there, i think, integration has a lot to do with it. i have spent the last 20 or 25 years writing about efforts to integrate schools at the k-12 level and at the elite college level. i am now starting to get into

housing which is -- which lisa knows far more about than i do. at the end of the day, we want to be in a position where a politician, who runs for office trying to denigrate and demographics -- and demonize other groups of people would be unsuccessful because everyone will have gone to schools and lived in neighborhoods where they know individuals from different backgrounds and would know how wrong it is to paint a broad brush about other people. now, in the integration effort, and here i will probably be more controversial. i think we should emphasize issues of class as well as race. take, for example, the challenge

of integrating our elite colleges. a place like harvard university is now majority minority. which, is a wonderful thing, but what they tend to do is assemble wealthy students of all colors on their campus. so they have built, in essence, a multiracial aristocracy. which is better than an all-white aristocracy, but it is still an aristocracy. so at harvard, they have as many students coming from the top 1% by income as the bottom 60%. there are more students from the top 10% in the bottom 90%.

the problem is that our diversity everts -- efforts fall short. when they ignore class and white working-class people recognize that. one of the most astounding polls i have ever seen was one in votershite working-class now say that they are as likely to be discriminated against as african-americans. now, on one level, that is completely -- that is complete nonsense. we just know the names. all you have to say are the names of the people who have faced racism and suffered terrible consequences because of it to know that it is wrong for white working-class people to say that there is likely to be this created against. -- discriminated against. ourver, the fact that class-action -- our affirmative

action programs, are geared exclusively toward race. we are going to move forward, -- if we are going to move forward, we need to have programs that will integrate us by race and by class and pay special attention -- much more attention than we have in the past two issues of economic inequality. after all, that is where martin luther king was headed toward the end of his life, with the poor people's campaign. it is where reverend barber is now headed in trying to resurrect the poor people's campaign. and i just think that is where we need to go to become a truly united country in years to come. >> greetings, everyone. so what do i want this world to look like in 2050? i will tell you. i would like to be in the world and not be exhausted. isling with white supremacy taxing emotionally, mentally, physically. when you say the names to me or

rice, sandra bland, sterling brown, it is a visceral, sickening feeling. i would just like to be in the world, as complicated and as not goodor not put together or as any other person can be and that not be a reflection on my race or my community or say something about who i am. i want to not worried about the fact that i have a 14-year-old nephew that people might not acknowledge as this youthful boy who loves baseball and is a good student and a thoughtful kid, and he has a little sister at home and on older brother -- and an older brother. that keeps me up at night. that scares me, because the forh is he can die today doing nothing other than walking around, listening to his car hiso too loudly, listening earphones and not hearing someone tell him to freeze or to stop, right?

idea of thethis world that i want to live in -- black fears -- and i'm going to say black people in particular because that is the community that i come from and i care about. not that i don't care about others, but that is where i am speaking from and i have to be honest about that. black fears of white people are totally justified. white fears of black people are not. and it is merited that this black criminality is allowed to justify our murders, our detention, just the indignity of being pulled over and put on the curb, being pulled aside in the metro station, being accosted in a store for being accused of because followed around somebody think she might steal something -- and i got the talk from my parents. store, keepin the your hands out of your pockets. you have your money in your hand when you approached the counter. you don't put anything in a bag

that you do not have a receipt for. to bestnny when you go buy, they asked do you need a bag, do you need a receipt? he's that i'm a black man, i need a receipt stapled to the back. [laughter] acquire peers to certain extents over the way that poor whites in particular have been coddled, because part of what i think is going to get us through this better place is we have to end this investment in white supremacy. that is not a white people problem, that is in all of us problem. i think we all do various things to prop up white supremacy. part of that is the talk we had to give our children. that is the reality of life we live. but we should be able to tell people, you're going to the store, live your life. entitled ase as anybody else who has money to pay for that belt or that set of groceries or whatever you want. but we have to end that investment into white supremacy. this belief white people are superior, even for poor whites.

that investment in white walked thems away from policies that could have helped them, because they were invested in it. so i think we have to talk about this wealth gap that is growing -- it's not closing. it is getting bigger. blacks, latinos, asians, and that is a small -- not a small issue, but something like reparations is going to be something we need to talk about. and economic redistribution. it is not a pleasant topic for most because people think they will lose something. but, you have to lose something to get something. right? if you want racial harmony, you have to do exactly what this country has never done, try to remedy racial wrongs. we have to talk about the education gap closing. if you this idea that just go to school, if you just make the right choices, you do late -- delay marriage, pregnancy, invest in your careers, you'll be fine. but we look at student loan debt, for example, the nominee

for the democratic governor of georgia had to answer for why he still has 100,000 or more dollars in debt. part of that is education and also caring for parents. she comes from a not wealthy family. i think we have to have full voting rights for the first time. we have never had full voting rights in this country and i think that is a conversation we have to have. we have to talk about mass incarceration, and we do not have to talk about it, we we have to end it. some of the qualities that scare food equality and scarcity is something else we need to talk about along with housing. and that is my five minutes? seema: you are doing very well -- dr. etzioni: you're doing very well. [applause] >> this question is existential for me. for a couple of reasons. the first is what i do on a daily basis which was already alluded to is tackling fair housing issues.

so my job is to remedy the vestiges of racial segregation -- residential segregation in america which was something that was constructed, orchestrated, designed. we are more residentially segregated today than we were 100 years ago. and we are residentially segregated in many of our cities , many of the northern cities, most of them like chicago, detroit, milwaukee, etc.. we are segregated as a society many actresses and policies that were put into place that created separate and unequal societies. when i tell people that we are more segregated today than we were 100 years ago, people don't believe me. but, if you think about it, and go back and look at the history of america, and where

african-american people lived, where white people lived, where native americans lived, etc., in terms of our proximity to one another 200 years ago, 150 years ago, etc., you will see that that statement is true. so how do we come from being a society that was not hyper segregated but had a very much real class and caste system to a community that is hyper segregated? well, we did that because at the end of slavery, white people, because of white supremacy, felt well, if you are not beneath me, if i do not have this systemic caste system that designates you as being beneath me, then i can't have you living next door to me. we have got to separate you from me.

and so from federal policies down to a state policy and local policies, our governments put those policies in place to create separate and unequal societies. of that, because we are a residentially segregated society, it has made it so much easy for theean, perpetuation and the creation of all of the disparity that we just talked about. educational disparity, health -- wealths disparities, homeownership disparities, credit access disparities. all of that is made profoundly easier because of residential segregation, and that is because in the united states, taste is caste isbly -- inextricably linked with

opportunity. where you live matters. if you give me your address, i can tell you how long you are going to live, and if you tell me where you live, i can tell you your credit score, changes of being incarcerated, the chance of your children graduating from high school or going on to get a higher education. i can tell you what kind of diseases you are most susceptible to if you just give me your address. and that is something, in my aspiration, my 2050 aspiration, is completely undone. and unwound. we are living in my world by 2050, in communities that are open and fair, completely accessible, where all of the barriers of discrimination have been torn down. now, the second reason this is so existential for me is because i did my dna test, my son and i. and my son and i, like every other -- probably not every other, but most others overwhelmingly, the majority of

african-americans in this country are interracial people. we come from a global society. when i look at my ancestry map, it literally covered the globe. >> we will come back to this program in just a few minutes, but first, the houses gaveling in for what we expect will be a brief pro forma session. live coverage on c-span. the speaker pro tempore: the house will come to order. the chair lays before the house a communication from the speaker. the clerk: the speaker's rooms, washington, d.c. july 6, 2018. i hereby appoint the honorable patrick t. mchenry to act as strote on this day. signed, paul d. ryan, speaker of the house of representatives.