is provided in part by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation. and hilco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy. and by klru's producers circle, ensuring local programming that reflects the character and interests of the greater austin, texas community. - i'm evan smith, he's a civil rights activist and educator whose work on behalf of the black lives matter movement has made him one of the country's most celebrated and consequential advocates for social justice. he's deray mckesson. this is overheard. let's be honest, is this about the ability to learn or is this about the experience of not having been taught properly? how have you avoided what has befallen other nations in africa? you could say that he made his own bed, but you caused him to sleep in it. you saw a problem, and over time took it on. let's start with the sizzle, before we get to the steak. are you gonna run for president? i think i just got an f from you actually.

this is overheard. (audience applauding) deray mckesson, welcome. - it's good to be here. - thank you very much for being here. so, we sit here today on january the 13th, one week from the trump presidency beginning officially. how are you feeling? - you know, it is sad in so many ways, and so much of the energy of the next four years will be spent withstanding an administration and trying to maintain the progress that we have made so far. i'm hopeful that over the next four years that we don't lose our sense of promise and hope whene think about what resistance looks like. - in my profession, the journalism business, the saying that has become commonplace is, give him a chance, but hold him accountable. are you prepared to give him a chance? - i don't know what a chance looks like when he is so openly racist and bigoted and islamophobic. i don't know what giving him a chance looks like. i do know that there are people who are ready to hold him accountable and ready to withstand the administration and hold congress people accountable, and i think people are gearing up for that. but it's sad, if hillary was president we would be pushing

for reform to just happen at a different pace, but this is withstanding somebody who's willing to just dismantle so many things that benefit people of color and marginalize people across the country. - so you've enumerated a bunch of things about hi and peace. it is said though about him that the problem with how everybody regarded him during the campaign was he was taken literally but not seriously, when he should've been taken seriously but not literally. you take him literally and everything you heard during the campaign, so that when you move from the smack talk phase, i'm trying to win an election, to the governing phase, that that stuff will not be forgotten and should not be forgotten. - yeah, i was hopeful that he wouldn't govern in the way that he campaigned. that we'd see some pendulum shift, but we have not seen that. - well, he isn't governing yet, technically. - yeah, but i push and say that the people that he's nominated to be in the cabinet, and actually the first step of governing. and making the ambassadors all end before his presidency, is a governing act and i think that we're seeing the same sort of intensity in the negative way that we saw during the campaign. again, i'm hopeful the activists and organizers

across the country will be ready to withstand this administration. but it is sad that this will take so much of people's energy that could have been directed towards really positive work over the next four years. - but rather than the general notion, he's racist or he's islamophobic or whatever else. are there specific things that worry you? - there's so many specific things. - okay, but this is pbs, all we have is time. - yeah. (audience laughing) - enumerate for me things that concern you, specific things. - so, we think about what does it meant to have a national stop and frisk strategy, that we know disproportionately impacts people of color. he is being heralded by the police, and you think about the doj report that just came out in chicago, that noted that there's a deep pattern of practice of discrimination. and we would say that that is endemic of police departments all across the country. - of course, that's a city run by a democratic mayor, one rahm emanuel. you put that on him, or on the federal administration, whoever administration it is? - yeah, well we've seen with the police that the uprising in ferguson started under president obama being president, - indeed. - which doesn't-- - well, in fact so much of what black lives matter

has come into existence to respond to what happened during the obama years. - yeah, but we know that obama didn't make the 18,000 police departments, that the legacy of racism that is in the police departments was long before president obama and long before rahm emanuel, which is not an excuse for either of them but it is real. he said he wants to build a wall, there are so many things. we think about even undoing the affordable care act as the first step of it happened at the 11th hour not too long ago. that would disproportionately impact people of color, women, and marginalize people in ways just that are unheard of. i think he's pressing forward really aggressively, so i'm worried about that. again, i'm hopeful that people have the energy to withstand it, and that is a good thing i guess. - i take you at your word, and i take it seriously, what is withstanding it mean? as a practical matter. what do we anticipate withstanding it means, or resistance means? - some of it is just know what the what is. so when people look at the affordable care act and they say, what does it mean that preexisting conditions won't be covered, or what does it mean that contraceptives won't be covered, or defunding planned parenthood,

is that actually a real thing or not? empowering people in communities so that they don't think that policy is this abstract thing that they actually can't impact. - put a human face on it. - yeah, and just make it accessible for people. that one of the things that i think is really damaging about the organizing community in the past is that policy becomes this thing that is mythical and magical. and there are these people who know policy and then there's everybody else. and i think what people are trying to do, especially over the last two years is demystify it, and say, you can actually have a voice in how you hold your congress people accountable for, preexisting conditions being apart of the aca, or covering contraceptives or any of those things. so, i think that's one part. the second though is building community and i think about what we did so powerfully in ferguson and cities across the country was bring a different type of coalition together to say, we're going to build power and harness power. so we think about in the last couple days thousands of people have called their congress people to push them to vote a certain way, or to not vote for jeff sessions, who's an avowed racist. ben carson barely knows what hud is, so pushing people to not support ben carson

as the hud secretary, which is wild. and i think that we're seeing people understand their role in this democracy differently. and i think about president obama, i was in chicago for the last speech and i take him seriously when he says that the most important role in this country is citizen. and i think that is about how do we build power differently. how do we help people harness the power they have because trauma does two things to people, whether the trauma is racism, police violence, any other systemic thing. trauma either actually takes your power away, or makes you feel powerless when you have power. and part of our work as organizers is either to help people reclaim their power, or for systems to restore power to people, and that is so much of the work that comes next. - the consequences you alluded to and the reference to what president obama said about citizenship makes me want to ask you about the vote. so, one very practical civics book form of consequences is that somebody's in power, they do something you don't like you vote them out. we have a system in which it's actually pretty hard to get incumbents out. and a lot of people around the country, not just communities of color, but everybody has come to believe to some degree that the system is rigged.

that change is made impossible by the structural or endemic barriers in the electoral system. so, how do you get around that? - yeah, so the system is rigged in many ways, what we call gerrymandering, when we think about the voter id laws that that is legitimate rigging that is disenfranchising millions of people all across the country. what happens when you have voter id laws and then you close all the places that give people ids. that is a way to disenfranchise people. that not withstanding, i do think one of the things the democrats did poorly this go around was that they didn't take seriously that an opposition strategy wasn't enough. they're saying, don't vote for trump because he's crazy wasn't actually an affirmative, that people needed something to vote for. and i think that hillary, and i was at the javits center on election day and it was quite sad. and i met with hillary for the second time about two weeks before election day and i think that she actually got it much more than people gave her credit for, i'm not convinced that that actually made the mainstream. so you think about the surrogates is that killer mike, was out there paving the pound,

- pounding the pavement. - pounding the pavement, that was rough, woo. (audience laughing) - i wasn't gonna let you go too long with it, that's okay. - pounding the pavement? pounding the pavement for bernie and that was really powerful. katrina pierson, whether we like her or not, she was delivering the talking points for trump. it's like, who was actually doing that for hillary? hillary had some amazing things in her platform, and i think that that was a real loss. i think the messaging in the campaign just wasn't really refined. - so, that begs a larger, more existential question that could take up all the time we have. it won't, but did he win or did she lose in your mind? - i think it's a combination. i think that we can't downplay the impact of comey and the fbi and the emails and all that stuff. i think that that had a huge impact, but i do think there was a little bit of taking for granted the fact that people are deeply disillusioned with the system in this moment. and i think that there are people, and it was one of my frustrations. i came out and publicly supported her, - like the washington post editorial. - the washington post editorial. and one of the things that i was trying to push within the activist community is that there are many ways to build power. that we sit in streets, that we disrupted people's

commission hearings and all these other things is a way to push power, but voting is another way to build power. and we have to have every tool in the toolkit. and i think that one of the things that president obama and so many other democratic leaders did, i think that was unproductive, especially with younger people was to say, voting is the way. if you don't vote you don't care about the country. and there are a lot of people like me who are like, i voted my entire life and i got tear gassed in cities all across the country. - it's both and, not either or. - right, that voting was not the end all, but we understand voting to be one important tool in the toolkit. but you keep setting up - what's interesting about that, i want to come trump all these other topics i want to talk about. is the question of whether as black lives matter as a movement has evolved if working more within the system, in quotes, has made it less of the movement that you imagined it to be. there's been a discussion, i know internal to the movement about protests and marches on the one hand, like when campaign zero was launched, there was a lot of question about whether, you guys have gotten so professional and formal and you have a 10-point plan and everything else. where is the movement that i knew, it's become this thing.

you don't want to become the thing you despise. - i would say a couple of things. one is that i think the first part of the movement was about awareness, right? two years ago people though there was a problem in ferguson, they didn't think there was a problem in america. it took two years of seeing this is actually close to you, this is your neighborhood too. the police killed three people a day in this country, this is very close to you. if you get killed in america and the newspaper doesn't write about it, you're not in the data set, that is wild. so, we pushed people for two years. i think we successfully got them on the other side of the awareness battle. people generally, whether you like us or not, whether you like the movement-- - everybody knows you, there's no question about that. - people get it. and i think that's huge and i think this is the moment though where movements die, is that they change the language and then you're like, what happens next? there's this false idea of what it means to work inside and outside the system. i think that what is real is that systems break in pieces. and part of our work is to think about what are the pieces that we take down and how do we rebuild them. that there's this idea, you know king said it, baldwin said it, this notion of, why would you integrate into a burning house. as in the system is broke, why don't you start over.

i think what is real is that you never start from nothing. so, you burn the house down, it's not like you start from the garden of eden. you start from the ashes. and what we're saying is that the house is ours too, that this is not the abdication of the system. that marginalized people help build this, that the wealth that we know in this world comes off of the unpaid labor of the enslaved. and that means that this is ours and we have a responsibility to make this the best system. this is not about abdicating our role in this moment. - right, so back to clinton for a second. so i was very interested to go back and reread, i read it when you published it, the endorsement that you made of secretary clinton during the campaign. you took trump out, you made very predictably, you're a supporter of clinton, you're not for him. but you were for her, you'd come around. more recently, this week as we see here again, ta-nehisi coates of the atlantic did an exchange with his readers and he was actually quite critical of secretary clinton. he said, look you know, she may not have been the messenger that we wanted, that we can't simply put the responsibility

for this on, oh these people who turned out to vote for trump, they ultimately won this election. really, she sort of failed us as the candidate. and i remember the days of the superpredator, you know. i remember the long history of the clintons and i'm just really not buying this idea that somehow she was a great candidate and he just won. that somehow she has to own, and the campaign has to own the outcome here. are you there with that? - i think democracy is about choice and compromise in that when we think about this campaign that there was one candidate that was far superior to the other candidate. i think that this will also be a lesson of false equivalencies, that people who did the, well, she's just as bad as him. i think that they are living the consequences of that now and are seeing that that's going to-- - all the bad things that happened with him, but then people went, yes but the emails. - yeah, you're like, are you kidding? this is wild, right. so i think the spirit that ta-nehisi coates is saying is right in the sense that the campaign made some errors. i think that it is a real fault of the campaign that when people think about hillary they think about, she didn't support a $15 minimum wage at the national level, she doesn't support ending the death penalty. that people only think about these negative things, they don't talk about the hundred billion dollar

economic stimulus for poor communities. they don't talk about her plan to peel back the '98 crime bill, that those were not the talking points. and i think that they thought that the threat of trump was so wild, - who's gonna vote for this guy? - i think what they didn't take into account, and we said this to her when we first met with her a year ago. we said we don't think people are gonna vote. forget the people that voted him, we don't think people are gonna vote for him. we think people are not gonna vote in this one because they are so disillusioned in the system and i think that we were right in many ways. - look back on the eight years, speaking of ta-nehisi coates, the president obama question. what kind of an eight years did we just have? do you feel like the eight years produced the results that you thought they would, that you hoped for? do you leave the eight years with any regret or remorse? - i've met with president obama twice and our last meeting was four hours and the first one was very long. at the end you're like, i'm ready to go. (laughing) very good meeting. - yeah, you start yawning. - i was like, it's so long. are there snacks, what's going on?

- he does like to talk. - and he likes to listen. - oh, he's great at that. - to his credit. i think that the reality is that the context, the landscape of hope is so different than it was in 2008. obama not only sort of introduced us to the beauty of hope but i think he became a vessel of people's hope, and i think that that will always be a set up. - is that a burden for him? - yeah, i think that he could never have been as great as people wanted him to be, so that is the context in which i think about him. i do think that more could have in the beginning years, when the democrats had congress, and i think that some of that is what happens when, his whole team, it was a new team. it wasn't the clinton apparatus, they were a new, the obama world was forming. at the end i think that he got much more aggressive about criminal justice and these issues, it was just the end and when i think about all the meetings i was in at the white house and with white house staffers, i think that they were setting up for the hillary years. that they were going to put all this stuff in place, - hand the baton off. - hand the baton, right. so you think about the president's 21st century task force on policing, great recommendations.

- all the commutations. - yeah, incredible stuff. - he was commuting people at an unbelievable clip there by the end. he has commuted more people i think than how many presidents combined? - yeah, it's incredible. but i do think they were like, let us set it up and she'll just implement it. and then that all fell apart which is why we see the doj actually being aggressive in the final days. the baltimore consent decree the other day. - we're gonna get it in under the last day. - we see chicago trying to go out with the intensity that i think he believes in. - yeah well, definitely that last speech reminded everybody of the last eight years and the way that maybe over the last couple years, we've just taken for granted. - and the last speech was such a reminder of obama the organizer, right. it was not the soaring rhetoric, there weren't these deep metaphors. it was like, if you think people shouldn't be in power, get a clipboard and go do it. this idea that people power is what democracy is built on and that the government only works on the consent of the governed, and i think about us in the street. when we were standing in streets shutting things down, it was about withdrawing our consent. it was about saying we no longer will participate in ways

that you have deemed worthy, we will participate in ways that show you that this isn't fair. and i think that what we'll see, again i think it's unfortunate that so much energy will be spent buttressing the actions of donald trump. but i think we will see unlikely coalitions emerge. - let's talk about the movement for a little bit. do people fully understand what black lives matter is about? i know it started as a hashtag, it went from being a hashtag to a movement. but it's also become this thing that i think, it's almost like a blank screen onto which people project whatever they think it is. what do you think it is? - and i don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. i think that we were out in the street in ferguson and everybody saw what was happening and the protests spread all across the country and that became what we now call black lives matter. and i think the beauty of it is that there's no central organizing committee, that people get to own the movement where they are. and i think that's a beautiful thing. i think what we saw in the 60s was this idea that there was a leadership class of people who were then leading everybody and the consequence of that was you kill the leaders, you kill the movement.

i think what we're saying in this moment is that there are leaders everywhere. that this is about building-- - so is black lives matter in chicago, or is black lives matter in boston, or black lives matter in charlotte the same? - yeah, so there's an organization-- - there's common dna. - i think there's a commitment to equity and justice that runs through everybody who thinks about the movement. - but this is not top-down. - this is not a top-down space. and again, there's this misunderstanding that there's a movement that happens to have the same name, but nobody started the movement. if anything the people in saint louis came outside they were like, we're not going home, and that was the beginning of this periodf resistance that we're still in and so many people joined. i think about myself, i got in the car and drove down on august 16th and so many other people across the country joined in. but it is supposed to be a space that evolves as people grow, it grows as people grow. and we think about the work differently. i do think that this shift is happening, not just focusing on the police in this moment, but under the threat of trump, so many other issues become very important. - it's going to extend out from just the focus on criminal justice, or policing to other things. - i mean, i think it already has in different cities across the country.

we have to talk about the affordable care act, we have to talk about the racial, the wealth gap. all of these things come into play. - can you talk about the relationship between the african american community and the police in this country? the presumption of black lives matter is that there's a problem that needs to be solved. you know that there are people who push back and say, well, cops are important, cops do a great job, cops protect all of us, cops risk their lives. is there any place where you all, the movement and the people who push back on the movement have any common perspective or overlap? it's very simple to say, black lives matter, no blue lives matter. why is it so binary? - i'm mindful that we only took to the streets because of the violence of the police. - [evan] that was the catalyst. - the police killed people and that was the reason why we went to the street and that is not new to this moment. that has been part of resistant struggles for decades. and the data shows that the police disproportionately impact

communities of color, and you think about chicago, which is another great data point that just came out. baltimore, not only the consent decree but the findings, at ferguson, we've seen this, we know this to be true. i think the police-- - although the court system hasn't returned a conventional form of justice in all those cases the way some expected it would. - correct, well partly because the federal threshold is just so high and the police have an incredible set of protections set up. so, the police play on a very different justice system. so we created the first public database of police shooting contracts and in police shooting contracts across the country they just have protections that no private citizen has. so, when freddie gray got killed in baltimore, the police officers had until 10 days after being charged to make a statement, no private citizen has a 10 day window to think about their story, get it all together. there are places across the country that says that officers have to be disciplined in the least embarrassing way. and you're like, i don't wven know what that means. what does that, - it's like preschool. - well, what does that look like. officers can bring their own recording devices to interrogations, regular citizens can't. there are restrictions on how long they can be interrogated, like 30 minute chunks, hour chunks. nobody else has those protections, so it's not shocking

any longer to us that the police officer is never held accountable because they have a set of protections that almost guarantee that they won't. and what we're saying is that we just believe that people should be treated, that justice should be applied fairly across the board. that just because you have a public service function doesn't give you the the wonton right to inflict damage or pain to people. - so if someone who opposes the work that the movement does says to you, you have no empathy for the difficulties, strain, stress, risk that police find themselves in the middle of in the course of protecting all of us. your response to that is what? - this is not about individual people, it's about a system of policing that's broken. i think that anybody who goes to work, i want them to be able to come home at night. i believe that, i think that people should be safe. - regardless of profession by the way. - yeah, i want you to come home, i'm not wishing ill. the movement began as a call to end violence and that call remains the call today. so, i don't wish ill on anybody. i do think that sort of core principles about equity and fairness and justice should be applied regardless of what job you have. - i want to know about the people, ask you about the people specifically who turn this around

and say, in fact by encouraging people to resist law enforcement, black lives matter is actually responsible, directly or indirectly for some of the violence we've seen. in fact, the chicago police superintendent earlier this week before this report came out-- - the former superintendent. - former superintendent, said specifically, i put this on black lives matter, that black lives matter is responsible for a lot of this violence because they're encouraging people to not cooperate with the police. - kevin mccarthy should spend more time thinking about effective police tactics, and less time criticizing us. he was the police chief when many of these horrendous things came out in the doj. - indeed, indeed. - so, he has no credibility in this space. - he's not the only one that suggests a version of this, as you know. - yeah, i think that we've seen this profession more than almost any other public service profession be unwilling to accept any feedback and critique. and i think that that is a real challenge, i think that that the last meeting with president obama, which was four hours, is that of the people in the room, and there were a lot of police representatives in the room. the only police representatives who were unwilling to move

were the fop, they were sort of like, dog-headed about that they were just right. and your'e like, you're literally killing people, there are videos, i'm not making this up. - no willingness to talk. - just like an unwillingness to acknowledge there's room for growth, that something is awry. and that's just unacceptable, no other profession gets that sort of pass. and we don't think that public safety requires that the police can just kill people with impunity. - we have just a couple minutes left, i want to toggle over to education because in fact, your day job. - for now. - for now, but it is for now an educator. you were a teach for america veteran, you've taught in new york, you've been involved with the baltimore and minneapolis schools, back in baltimore. this is another big topic of conversation in this country right now and the thought is that with betsy devos as the new incoming secretary of education that we're gonna now be talking about choice and it's going to be put on the country. what do you have against communities of color? if you want communities of color to have opportunity, you have to support school chioce. you're a public school person, do you believe there's a legitamate conversation to be had about education and choice within the realm of the kinds of things

you'd like to see done in this country? - what i worry about with the education conversation is that we have flattened it so much in that one of the beautiful and frustrating things about education is that because had a teacher, everybody's an expert on education. - i went to school. - i had a teacher, and they're like, i know. you're like, (groans), so that is the premise. one of the really unfortunate things about the devos nomination is that people have conflated choice, charters, vouchers, like all of a sudden it all means the same thing. - it's all one thing. - so, vouchers are when we take public money and give kids money to go to private or parochial schools, not in the public school system. - and usually without accountability. - or with a different form of accountability. so that is what vouchers are, and i think the consensus is that that is not producing results for kids. that is not the same thing, so in places like baltimore and other cities, we have choice, which means that you get to choose your middle school, choose your high school. and we believe that parents and kids should be able to,

of the public schools, they should be able to choose what school is the best for them. that the school that is a block away from you, might not be the best fit for you. - and you're for that? - yeah, yeah. i think that many people are for that. that if your kid plays the violin and there's a really good violin program somewhere, that your kid should probably be able to go to that. which hass nothing to do with the funding formula, it's not moving money around. - by the way, it's done only by communities of color. white kid violin players should be able to go to the white kid violin program. - yeah, yeah. so i think that people confuse choice to mean a host of things. and i do think this question about charters schools is one that's gotten a lot of conversation, and i've seen people play both sides. people will say, we believe in community control of schools, and then they'll say we hate charter schools. but i thought you said that you think that people should be able to open up their own schools in communities and that we should have closer. but the only way that happens is a charter school model, that is the only way. i think that what is real is that there should be real accountability and more stringent accountability for charter schools. i think that the way that charter schools use buildings, the way that we fund the buildings a charter school gets

is a racket in some places and we should look at that more. but we also have to make a real commitment to public education in terms of funding. so you think about cities like baltimore and other cities, is that when the funding formula is predicated on the tax space and it's cities of poor, black people, then it will be an underfunded public education system and we have to make up for that. we have to remember that these cities are not poor because black people just didn't work. the legacy of enslavement and institutional racism has a real consquence. - so this may become part of your, maybe it already is, part of your portfolio of things that you're going to be fighting against. - yes. - i believe that, good okay. i would tell you to keep working but i don't think you could be stopped. that's my sense. (audience laughing) we're out of time, deray mckesson, thanks very much and good luck to you. - thank you. - alright, thank you so much. (audience applauding) - [announcer] we'd love to have you join us in the studio. visit our website at klru.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, q & as with our audience and guests and an archive of past episodes.

- i'm gay, which is also not a secret, and i think about that in the sense that people ask all the time, what comes first? the gay fights around gay issues, or black issues. and what i say to people is this, something i heard my friend myles say is this idea that me being gay and me being black are intimately apart of me, that they do not mix in me like oil and water, that it is like a core part of who i am. - [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation. and hilco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy. and by klru's producers circle, ensuring local programming that reflects the character and interests of the greater austin texas community.

ensuring local programming tha[ mid-tempo music plays ] steves: riding this gondola, you soar, landing in the sleepy, unpromoted village of gimmelwald. in 30 years of researching guidebooks, i've found hidden gems like this in every country. gimmelwald would have been developed to the hilt, like neighboring towns, but the village had its real estate declared an avalanche zone, so no one could get new building permits.

the result? a real mountain community -- families, farms, and traditional ways. choosing places like gimmelwald and then meeting the people, you become part of the party rather than just part of the economy. this is a realistic goal for any good traveler. eins, zwei, drei. man: [ chuckles ] steves: take a moment to appreciate the alpine cheese. so, older is better? man: oh, yes. -woman: i don't know. -man: oh, yes. woman: for me, it's the younger one. steves: once you're off the tourist track, make a point to connect with the living culture. pitch in, even if that means getting dirty. here, farmer peter is making hay while the sun shines.