> welcome to "our world" wi black pi'm your hoi'm yoi . this week tavis smiley reaches a milestone. plus our pachbl looks at men, women and the issue of justice. we found a teacher who makes math and science fun. that's what's going on in our world starting now. captions made possible by the u.s. department of education and central city productions, inc.

journalist tavis smiley is celebrating 20 years of interviewing some of the world's most influential people. i sat down with him at the studio museum in harlem to discuss his life, his new book and his thoughts on the first black president. >> first of all, brother, let me congratulate you. media. t celebrated your 20th >> hard to imagine i've been doing this 20 years. i started out for the late great mayor of the city of los angeles tom bradley. never thought i would be in the media, much less 20 years. i feel good about the fact that we get a chance every day on our tv and radio shows to try to get people to reexamine the assumption they hold, help people expand their inventory of ideaing. i'm having a lot of fun. >> over the 20 years you've had a range of successes, media empire, spaces for black folk to convene and debate ideas. you wrote a book called "fail

up." >> i think the more you succeed, the more you know about failure. anyone including yourself who is being honest with you will admit they've learned from their failures than they ever learned from their successes. >> one of the stories you told, you were fired as an intern for mayor for cheating on your time card, billing more hours than you got. >> that's right. i was a college student. young and dumb, although i didn't think so at the time. i was padding my time card. long story short, i was doing an intern for the mayor of the city of bloomington, indiana. the deputy mayor, a white male caught me, found out i had been padding, cheating on my time card. i'd work three hours, write down four. i'm making four or five bucks an hour. i'm the first person on either side of my family to go to college, trying to make whatever money i can. i didn't see it as cheating.

i should have but i didn't. he caught me, called me into his office, red me the riot act t white, male deputy mayor. he picked up the phone to call the police department to come and arrest me. blessedly the mayor who is a white female walked in and said what's going on. i'm boo hooing and begging him. i'm caught. the mayor walks in and say what's going on? she says put the phone down, tavis come into my office. she looked at me as only a woman can, one who is a mother can who has that kind of sensitivity, he wanted to throw me under the jail. she says to me very simply, you let me down. you're not just stealing, tavis, you're stealing from the people. this is the people's money. that hit me like a dagger in my heart. from that day forward, i've always taken seriously the public trust. >> how do you feel when the

public says taif vis is not offering a criticism of the president, he's just hating on him. >> with regard to barack obama, we have to respect him, we have to protect him and at times we have to correct him. he ain't god, he don't walk on water. we have to protect him from the vicious and racist attacks but correct him when he's wrong. the irony of the drama was i wasn't doing anything i hadn't always done. i believe it's the telling of truth that allows the suffering to speak. if i took clinton on u, you know i had something to say about george bush. how all of a sudden am i supposed to not talk about holding this man accountable? 400 years black folk waited for this moment. they wanted to see barack obama elected by any means necessary. i ain't stuck on stupid. i get that. his job is to get elected. my job was, is and will always be as i have a voice in love and respectfully to hold him

accountable to the best interest of black people. there's a lot of stuff he's done right. there's other things we've got to hold him accountable for. these wars are wrong. not addressing poverty is wrong. when the auto calls, you respond. black folk are double, triple, quadruple the national average on unemployment, and your answer is a rising tied with lift all boats. i want to see him become a great president. i don't believe the great presidents are born. they're made. you've got to push them into their greatness. in other words, there is no abraham lincoln if there is no frederick douglas pushing him. i don't want barack obama just to become another garden variety politician. i don't want to see him start this clinton triangulation. >> might be too late for that. >> it may be too late for that. this nonsense of me hating on the president, that's ridiculous. >> did you ever want to quit?

when you're at the bottom moment demanding the things from the president and the world is screaming back at you, be quiet taif vis? >> the short answer is this, if you ever see me in a fight with a bear, help the bear. as a matter of fact, you can pour honey all over me and you still better help the bear. i'm not acquitter. it's not part of my constitution. i think part of this obama-tavis journey had to do with teaching me a lesson. and the lesson was simply this. i know you love black people when they love you back. can you love black people when they don't love you back? >> that's a test. >> can you stand with them when they don't stand with you? when obama as president is subject to racist attacks, are you going to hold it against him that he hasn't invited you to the white house? are you going to hold that against him or defend him anyway because what's happening to him is wrong and racist. all this has been a learning experience for me.

in this process even i'm learning, i'm growing, developing, becoming stronger as a result of what many perceive to be a failure. that's why i can write this book now that i could have written years ago, putting all this out there, i know i'm a witness. i'm a witness. you can fail your way to the top. i'm still doing it every day. >> at the beginning of your book, you talk about this book emerging out of a conversation you had with cornell west. >> my dear friend. >> what did that friendship mean to you? >> thank you for acknowledging that and thank you for even noticing that. we don't do it for people to notice. we just love each other in a deep bond and deep brotherhood. in that regard i'm honored to be on the radio with him, honored to be his friend, his little brother, honored to hang out with him. he has been such a rock for me. i don't know what i've done in my life to be blessed enough to be exposed to him. it's a beautiful thing and i thank god for it every day.

>> what's next? you've had 20 years of failures, where will tavis smiley be? you know you're going to be president. >> i ain't running. i don't want to be. i do know where ever i am 20 years from now, i want to be doing then what i hope to be doing now, that's the best i can with whatever i have wherever i am. every day i wake up, the first thing i do is brush my teeth and wash my face. the second thing i do is take my big boy pill because i don't know what that day is going to bring me. the third thing i do is to pray the prayer before i walk out the door. lord, i pray in this day i will do something that i can present to you before i go to bed tonight that might not make me feel so ashamed. >> up next, will men and women ever be equal? >> women don't fair the same as men in workplace, whether it's the jobs women have or women's work is considered less

valuable, women are just seen as lesser in our society.

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welcome back to "our world" with black enterprise. are men and equal in our society? where do we stand on gender justice. here to talk about is assistant professor of english from the university of pennsylvania and co-founder of "a long walk home." byron hurt, gender activist and

akiba solomon, colorlines.com columnist. >> there's so much conversation about race, talking about poverty, economics. one thing that rarely gets talked about are issues of gender. what's going on? why is that? >> i think the basic answer to the question is that men and women, like you said, the question is are they valued the same? men and women aren't valued the same as our society. it's not unique to the united states. you can see this on so many different level where it's equal pay, and women don't fair the same as men in the workplace, whether it's the jobs women have and whether it's women's bodies, and reproductive justice or sexual violence, women are seen as lesser than men in our society. >> why don't people care? there's racial inequality, there's an outcry. this gender stuff seems to get hidden. >> i think women care but i think a lot of men don't care. i think that's the big issue. i think more men have to become more invested in the issues.

i think more men have to see how things like gender violence, for example and gender inequality really effects us as men as well, particularly gender violence because a lot of men grow up with women in their lives who are abused in some way, whether rape or sexual assault or sex violence or any sort of battering, and they don't know it. they don't understand it. they don't believe that it happens. and they don't really associate it with the women in our lives. i think if we associate it more with the women in our lives, we would care more about the issue. >> akiba, that's interesting. you would think as black people who have had an history of oppression, that we would respond differently to gender injustice. why is it that black people don't deal with the gender issues in the way we probably could? >> i think there's a particular dynamic among black people where we really want to be unified. we want to present a unified front at all times. there's a lot of discussion around the endangerment of black

men through the lens of things like police brutality, mass incarceration, lack of employment. i think a lot of the conventional wisdom around that is we need to handle black men's problems first because black men are a lot more challenged than we are. and the process of trying to repair black men, quote, unquote, we're getting lost in the sauce essentially. in a way it seems as if we erace traitors if we bring up our own concern. >> other things you listed are issues that also affect black women, mass incarceration, education, police brutality. the problem is you have all these things affecting black women and another list of things on top of that so it's a failed strategy not to address the different ways in which these things impact black women, primarily because we're the ones who have been on the front lines of social justice movements as

well. if we don't deal in the way racial and gender trauma affects them, we're creating a further crisis in our community. >> byron, you talk about how these things are dealt with, but how men respond to it. how is this playing out in popular culture? >> i do a lot of work with boys and men around the country. i've spoken to thousands of men in high schools, fraternities, community settings, sports settings, all over the country. there's a lot of defensiveness. a lot of guys are very defensive when talking about the issues and a lot of deflection, pushing the issue back onto the woman as if the woman is the source of the problem and that we can't be self-critical. we can't think about our own attitudes, our own behaviors. that deflection does not allow us to be self-critical, does not allow us to really look inside ourselves to examine our attitudes and examine our

behavior. i see a lot of defensiveness and deflection. however, i will say, once you engage men in a conversation, once you have an open, honest, sincere conversation about oush attitudes, ow behaviors and the way we've been raised to see women, you begin to see a shift. that's been my experience. >> one of the things i saw in the last year has been the response to this chris brown thing. as you all know, chris brown physically assaulted, he's admitted to it -- physically assaulted rihanna. the first thing they said is she must have done something to cause it. the collective response for men and women was something other than holding him accountable. why does something like that happen? >> i think with issues of domestic violence or sexual violence, the only two crimes in which the victim is blamed for the attack against them, right? so with chris brown, we're all sort of conditioned to have this knee jerk response to blame the victim. a couple reasons why that's true. one, a lot of women may feel --

if they identify with rihanna, they may feel powerless, that they don't want to overidentify with the victim, there must be something about her behavior, whether sexual or social, that warrants him beating her. but also, i think with the chris brown-rihanna scenario, another element to it which is also race in which chris brown recently critiqued the media's response to charlie sheen. he's a well-known batterer. yet with white men, there's a sense in which they can get away with more stuff than black men. >> that conversation still becomes about -- >> race. >> race instead of gender. even though we're talking about a gender issue, ray trumps it. what is something we can do to think about it in a different way? >> from a man's perspective, we need to have more men who are willing to educate boys and men around gender issues. we have to redefine what it means to be a man. we have to have men to redefine masculinity and we need a lot

more gender violence education at early ages so young boys can see what some of the dynamic is and what we need to shift the power dynamic and make things more fair and equitable for women. >> is it possible to have a world where there's gender justice? do you see that as a possibility in the near future? >> i think it's possibility. i think we have to really invest in that idea and imagine what the future looks like and we have to have honest conversations, whether they're formal or informal, about what's really happening. once we have those conversations we'll be good. >> i appreciate you all. thanks so much for being here. if you have a topic you'd like us to cover, e-mail us at ourworld@blackenterprise.com. ♪ like a good neighbor, state farm is there ♪ oh hey jake! my car got jacked. i got it. ladies! [ chuckles ] guess you're walking.

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personal pricing now on brakes. what's this option? that's new. tell us what you want to pay. we do our best to makthat work. deal! my money. my choice. my meineke. welcome back. with u.s. schools lagging behind most countries in math, science and technology, one teacher says the key to catching up is adding fun to the equation. these kids sitting in this classroom in washington, d.c. are decades ahead of us,

grasping the principles of mathematics, understanding the science of geometry, developing mobile apps and building robots. michelle hatly created youth lab, a non-profit after school program to give third through 12th graders an education in s.t.e.m., science, technology, engineering and math. >> since i was 12 i knew i wanted to establish an after-school program. i didn't know it would be about technology or about science, but i knew it would provide a place for children to come after school in a safe environment. >> over the last 15 years, her after school program has won numerous awards in robotic competitions as well as the macarthur grant to fund her efforts. >> the program i won with is designed to each african-american and latino high school students about how to make smart phone applications. >> we had built an app for the android platform to control it

to drive forward, backward, turn right and turn left. all of us pitched in to build the robot. >> getting students interested in s.t.e.m. courses is no easy feat, considering americans rank 19th in the world in science and 26th in mat mat tick, congresswoman eddie johnson, the highest ranking african-american on the science and space technology committee understands how far we lag behind in s.t.e.m. education. >> we know nationwide 70% of our public school teachers are teaching courses they have not majored in. we have to do something about that. >> president obama agrees that stem education is vital to america's leadership. >> our future e depends on reaffirming america's role as the world's engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation. that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today. >> for a few hours every day, she and her small staff are part of a grassroots effort to make a

big difference. >> i think lacelle's program is dynamic, it has the potential to be scaled at a larger size. she's pretty much building a model that any organization in any community can run with to help expose students to s.t.e.m., especially in the minority community. >> in our community, students feel being a learner about computers you're considered a geek. i wanted to show them that's not true. you can be cool and be a geek and learn how to program. >> kids are brilliant. they don't really get an opportunity to realize that for themselves or to shine and allow others to see they're brilliant in whatever they try to do. the s.t.e.m. focus is really my focus and my passion. so i just kind of put the two together. >> thanks to lachelle and her program, mary ka has a chance to be a world leader in science

technology once again. we'll be right back. you've got to try this, honey. oh! you're... not my honey. it's so good. whole grain oats with crisp apples, grade-a eggs with lean canadian bacon, or tasty fruit with low-fat yogurt. each just 300 calories or less. it's the simple joy of a wholesome breakfast. it's actually how we met. ♪ but nobody ever listens to me. noooo, no, no, no. i mean, who does that? backs a car into another car? you know what? you make my head numb. i can't even. ughhh! my head is numb. ♪ like a good neighbor, state farm is there ♪ i'll take care of this. with a new boyfriend! hot -- with a new girlfriend! oh. this is what you like? yes it is! mmhm. i was perfect the way i was. okkk... [ male announcer ] state farm agents are there when you need them.

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that wraps it up for us. don't forget to visit our website. you fan us on facebook at "our world with black enterprise" and follow us on twitter at marc lamont hill. thanks for watching. see you next week. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com