at the table jelani cobb, ari berman, brittney cooper, and dale ho., president of the center for policing equity and professor of social psychology at ucla and the co-author of "seeing black report" that discussed his work with the officials at the department of justice. it's so nice to have you, professor. >> thanks for having me. >> i want to make this clear in relation to the conversation that we were having before about mr. sterling, your research does not show police officers are racist, right? it's something more complicated than that. help folks to understand what your research does tell us. >> well, basically what psychologists are interested in doing generally is showing basic psychological universals. so the research that we've been doing show it's not police that are particularly or peculiarly racially biased, it's everybody. rather than thinking about prejudice as the problem, we start thinking about situations as the solution. both within colleges and communities and within law enforcement as well. >> so part of -- so let's -- let me get

i want to echo jelanis comment that this conference is so exciting and i'm delighted to, and decider bren -- dr. brenda green who does so much work every day to make this conference possible happen. to go second after jelani because i had a sense he would cover a lot of interesting stuff i agree with wholeheartedly. i am equally curious about what this political moment means and am struggling to make sense of it. in a way that is productive for us. because i could -- we could just -- i could just spend an hour critiqueing the obama administration's policies but i'm not sure that will get us as far as other things might. this moment so bizarre to me for so many reasons. there's just a few things i find frustrating. one, i wonder if over the last six years, we have yielded a level of moral authority and political authority in deference to the obama administration's sort of symbolic triumphs. are we excited -- so excited to have a black president we're willing to no longer engage critique? you can argue we have -- we make -- i remember in '04 and in particular being in d.c., and being i

with that, it's my pleasure, indeed, to introduce professor jelani cobb. thank you. [applause] >> one, i'd like to begin by saying thank you for inviting me. it's an honor to be here. especially as someone who has been attending this conference for a very long time and from the point where i was a fledgling writer just trying to learn the ropes and find out, you know, how this undertaking, this artistic undertaking really worked. so this conference has been key to me in lots of ways over a long period of time, so i'm very happy to be here to talk with you today. i want -- when we saw the subject of this panel, i was somewhat apprehensive because i think it's impossible to have this conversation without talking about the obama presidency. but it's also a very fraught subject in that we have these dissonant impulses that determine in many ways the way that we respond to obama and the way that we respond to criticism of barack obama. you know, that was most evident to me recently when i made a to bleak criticism of the my brother's keeper. we'll come back to that in a m