Good afternoon, everyone, I'm very pleased to welcome you all to today's event, healing our divided society, the Kerner Commission at 50.
My name is Mitch Robertson. I'm the politics graduate scholar here at the RFI.
It's wonderful to see so many of you here today and very excited to hear from our two very distinguished speakers,
as well as all of you in the question and answer. Now, just a few housekeeping notes before we begin.
As you have seen on the Eventbrite, we're recording this lecture,
so we would just ask you to turn off your camera and audio just to save having to do a lot of commissions for the question and answer section.
If you could please put your questions in the chat function, which you'll see down the bottom on Zoom, and I'll read them out to our two speakers.
So our first speaker this afternoon is Gary Young. Gary is no doubt known to most of you here, but for those of you who don't know him,
he's an Award-Winning author, broadcaster and academic, formerly the editor at large of The Guardian.
Gary was recently taken up a position as professor of sociology at Manchester University between 2003 and 2015.
It was The Guardian's US correspondent and as the author of five books, including No Place Like Home,
A Black Britons Journey Through the American South and Stranger in a Strange Land encounters in the United States.
It was described by the editor, The Guardian, as one of the leading thinkers and writers on politics and society working in Britain today.
So we're very, very pleased to welcome Gary here today. Thanks, guy.
Thank you. Thank you, man. So what I'm going to do is give version of the chapter that I wrote for the book Hearing Our Visions,
but it's been updated to take in more recent events.
Over the past few months, much of the Western world has been blighted by two separate but overlapping pandemics.
First, coronavirus has been of physiological nature,
and second racist violence has been a political major one since the first laid bare our common humanity that we are more alike than we are analysed.
The virus struck the world over. The routes that connect us also made us vulnerable.
There was no wall you could build now, acts you could pass.
That would stop it. But it's also shown us that the way we analyse matters.
We have not all been equally vulnerable to this virus. Of course, the old and the infirm was susceptible, but so are the poor.
And since minorities are, for the most part, disproportionately concentrated amongst the poor.
They've been disproportionately stricken. In Britain, black people are more than four times more likely to die from COVID 19 than whites,
Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and more than three times as likely Indians more than twice as likely.
And there are similar disparities in the United States.
In Michigan, African-Americans comprise 14 percent of the population, but 33 percent of the reported infections and 40 percent of the best.
In Kansas, African-Americans are seven times more likely to die from COVID than whites in New York City.
In the state of Illinois, Latinos have higher death rates than African-Americans.
In Arizona, New Mexico, Native Americans are becoming infected at a far greater rate than Latinos.
African-Americans, Native Americans, black Britons, Latinos and British, both people of Pakistan in Bangladeshi origin.
What do they have in common? Well, they don't share genetic material as such or anything ethically specific or cultured,
but they do share is a common experience of impoverishment,
low pay, poor housing and all the things that go with the dirty, ill health that makes them susceptible to COVID.
For example, Bangladeshi families were 15 times more likely to experience overcrowding than white British households.
Pakistanis were eight times more likely black Britons, six times more likely.
All these groups are more likely to live in deprived neighbourhoods,
experience higher unemployment, higher poverty, lower incomes and whites in the US.
A black man in Washington, D.C., has a lower life expectancy than the man on the Gaza Strip.
While black infant mortality in Chicago is on a par with the West Bank.
So being a racial minority, for the most part, both sides of the Atlantic is a pre-existing condition.
And it was these inequalities that helped usher in the second pandemic.
For these conduct, conditions did not bring people out into the streets over the last few weeks.
The brutal murder of George Floyd provided that spark.
But COVID 19 has demonstrated how racism can kill in far less dramatic ways and in far
greater numbers without offering a morality play that might be shared on social media.
So there is the connexion between the daily drumbeat of systemic racism and the episodic flare up of anti-racist rebellion.
And I want to spend the next 25 minutes exploring the way that the media does and doesn't help with that connexion.
History. It was once said in a line most famously attributed to Mark Twain doesn't repeat itself, but at best it sometimes rhymes.
And so it is that just over half a century after the Kerner report,
we are here again for the riots of the kind that prompted the kind of report were deemed newsworthy.
The brutal reality is that it took riots of that scale for the media and the
political classes to pay attention to the conditions highlighted in the report.
Again, this is not one issue limited to the United States in Britain.
Whenever major Inner-City uprisings in the early 80s, a conservative cabinet minister, Michael Heseltine,
produced a paper laying out what he believed to be the root causes of the disturbances it was called.
It took a right. The Kerner report could hardly have been more straightforward in drawing a link
between the social and economic violence of daily life and the violence of the riots.
I mean, pointing out that both had to be understood within the context of America's racial inequality.
It said, and I quote. Violence and destruction must be ended in the streets as it gets out in the lives of people.
Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.
What white Americans have never fully understood what the Negro can never forget is the white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto.
What institutions white institutions created it? Why institutions maintain it?
A white society condones it. So, said the report.
But if the riots were news. The segregation and poverty that made them possible were not.
The report sold two million copies and was reportedly the bestselling federal report in American history,
suggesting there was no lack of public interest. But as long as news was framed as things people did now, as opposed to things that shouldn't be,
the megaphone was never going to make the news just by being there. The ghettos presence did not shock, its pain was not contagious.
Its problems were understood to be contained.
America had established a moral, political and economic threshold that had made almost all of its opinion formers and lawmakers,
none of whom lived in the ghetto, inured to unaware of the absurdity of its existence.
While the nature of both poverty and segregation have changed a great deal over the last 50 years,
the question of this dislocation between what we have will become used to and what's nonetheless,
a scandal remains in a period in which approximately three people are killed by police every day.
What is outrageous may also be understood through the jaded lens of privilege to be banal.
And this dichotomy brings to mind the widely known aphorism taught in most journalism schools about what constitutes a news story.
Attributed to both Alfred Handsworth, early 19th century British newspaper magnate and the New York senator,
John Bogart in the same period, the aphorism states simply when a dog bites a man, that is not news.
If a man bites a dog, that is news, and the logic is clear.
Occurrences that are both commonplace and expected cannot be considered news.
Which is a category four events that are relatively rare and unexpected.
But increasingly, as one covers America, as a foreign correspondent or even Britain,
though, of course, the situations for different people of different races is different.
Racism operates in both, even if it does differently. You're compelled to provide an addendum to that adage,
a qualifying footnote to what seems like the obvious for sometimes events derive that potential news value precisely because they happen so often.
Indeed, there are things that happen with such regularity and predictability.
The Germans have simply ceased to recognise the news value, and politicians have ceased to acknowledge the input,
not least if those things are least likely to happen to the people most likely to be journalists and politicians, ultimately to pursue the metaphor.
There is often value in asking why the dogs keep biting people.
Who owns these dogs and why do the same people keep getting bitten?
Now, the first time this occurred to me was in 2007, when I was writing a magazine article about children and teens who was shot dead on a random day.
And I was particularly perplexed by one child story where I kept reaching a dead end.
I knew he'd been shot in Detroit. I was six years old, but the two cities two newspapers never even saw fit to mention his name.
When I described how he'd been shot dead outside National Wholesale Liquidators after a tussle with the security.
When I contacted the police about this, it was clear that the newspapers barely re-read the press release.
It was amusing, brief and both. Eventually, I found out that the boy's name was Brandon Mitchelmore, Brandon,
who was African-American, was in the store with his cousins and an uncle.
The store had a policy that children should be accompanied by an adult.
But when the uncle went to pay, the kid stayed to look at some video games.
A security guard told him to get out. They told him, though, with the uncle, the guard ignored them and got physical.
Brandon's older brother fought back when they saw the guard's gun fly in his pocket.
They all started to run. Then he picked it up. This is how Brandon's older brother, John Henry, recalled it.
Put one arm on top of the other arm and started aiming at us.
Brandon wasn't involved in anything. He was just the last one to take off running, I guess.
Now that in itself, I thought, was worth more than a paragraph. But then what could what came, what should have made banner headlines?
The God, it turned out, was an off duty cop.
In 1971, he was sacked from the Air Force after he was involved in a fatal hit and run accident while under the influence of alcohol.
He was reinstated on appeal in 74. Five years later, he shot dead, an armed and drunk 31 year old involved in a neighbourhood dispute.
Five years after that, he shot his wife. In the side, during a domestic dispute in which he claimed she loves to handle a pair of scissors.
This was the man who killed Brandon. This was a story not worth telling.
The problem wasn't that the papers ignored it.
It never even bothered to look because the facts were black teen being shot in the city prompted no questions.
It didn't challenge how they understood to get out to work. We confirmed it with no public scrutiny.
There was no public pressure. The security guard policeman was assigned to a traffic unit pending an investigation.
The investigation eventually judged the shooting of a 14 year old boy in the back justifiable homicide.
This is the kind of thing that has made the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement under Obama's presidency,
under Thomas presidency so resonant. Buries moments,
particularly when there were clashes with police or looting the limits of what constitutes success in the post-civil rights era were laid bare.
There was the first black president appealing for calm on one side of a split screen when the
other side was a side of alienated black youths smashing store windows or demonstrating.
Particularly revealing that as far as anyone could make out,
Black Lives Matter was prompted not by an increase in the number of black people being killed by police.
Amazingly, no official nationwide statistics exist on recent police shootings,
but rather by growing political awareness that had forced a reckoning with a pre-existing condition.
So these shootings of unarmed people were not news in the conventional sense any more than the violence of the ghetto had been in 1967.
They are neither ran or surprising. They were made to be news.
We were forced to recognise them, not because of the overwhelming statistical evidence suggesting wrongdoing,
not by the testimony of thousands to ill treatment and not by historical precedent of how certain inequities and injustices work.
Forced to recognise them in no small part, because new technology enabled people with cell phones to do the job the established media failed to do.
The world had not changed. What have changed was our ability to pass off the grotesque as unremarkable, simply because it was also commonplace.
The media episodically discovers this daily reality in much the same way that teenagers discover sex urgently,
endlessly, voraciously and carelessly with great self-indulgence for precious little self-awareness.
They've always known that, but somehow when confronted with it, then nonetheless taken by surprise and their surprise becomes the news.
Crikey, look what I found out instead of the news itself.
Goodness. Look what's been going on? Well, I've been looking elsewhere.
But those who live there do not have the luxury of discovering. When I interviewed the late Maya Angelou in 2002,
she told me that the September 11th attacks of the previous year were understood differently by African-Americans.
Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, she said.
But black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.
Now, at the time, I thought it was an interesting thing to say, but it would take more than a decade before I really understood it.
Only after I had reported for America for 10 years and decided to repeat the exercise I had undertaken when I discovered Brandon's case,
did I really understand what she said? So once again, I picked today at random this time, November 23rd, 2013,
and I set about to write profiles of all the children and teens who were shot dead that day.
Only this time for a book thought about the day in the death of America.
Over the next two years, I saw everyone who knew these kids, from their parents to their pastors and basketball coaches.
Ten kids were shot dead that day in the US. The youngest was nine.
The eldest, just a few days shy of his 20th birthday. Several black two were Latino.
One was white. And one of the first things I noticed.
Was that when I called, the reporters had written the original stories? I found that very rarely had that news organisations follow those stories up.
Clearly, I was the only one who called to seek more information,
and they would generously rifle through their mouth and tell me what they knew and if they had been to the crime scene and what they'd seen.
And invariably when I asked if they made any contact, if they have any contact details,
family members I could speak to or if there'd been any developments in the investigation,
they would explain some of the matter of factly why they had moved on.
Unfortunately, homicides are not uncommon in that area, said one.
Unless something unexpected happened, it just wouldn't be the kind of story would follow up on September.
These were, in other words, dog bites, man stories. What soon became apparent, however, was how traumatised the building had become.
Every single parent of a black teen I spoke to said they had essentially long factored in the possibility that their child might die in this way.
Audrey Smith, the mother of a 16 year old Samuel Bodman, who was shot dead that day in Dallas just while walking down the road with his friend,
the fragile sweet 16 year old kid who didn't even know anybody in the area.
She told me that she didn't think it would be him. She thought it would be his brother.
Gary Anderson, he's 18 year old son of the same name, was shot dead in Newark just an hour after Samuel told me,
You're not doing your job as a black parent if you don't think it could happen.
And in between ceremonial shooting galleries, another 18 year old boy,
Christian Anderson, was shot dead in the stairwell on the south side of Chicago,
and a mother who lived in the same building told a reporter the next day that she was happy that her 14
year old was locked up because it was safer for him to be incarcerated than to live in the neighbourhood.
It was only after hearing these stories told so consistently amongst such a
random cohort that it dawned on me what was the nature of the state of terror,
to which Maya Angelou had referred a statement of parents in constant fear that we have to bury their children and children,
assuming they might never live to be adults? This is a condition of Jesmyn Ward writes about in her book Men We Reaped in what she tells about
the deaths in just four years of five young men who were close to her by all official records,
she wrote Here with the confluence of history, racism, poverty, economic power.
This is what our lives are worth. Nothing. Diane Miller, a primary care physician in Chicago,
told me about a kind of learnt helplessness that so many young people she saw have after living so close to so many deaths,
and that prompts them to ask themselves existential questions, even if not always articulated the most sophisticated way.
A few years ago, many told me she started seeing growing numbers of young patients with psychosomatic illnesses.
She also noticed that many of them had R.I.P. tattoos dedicated to deceased loved ones when she tried to talk to these young people about all of this.
They clammed up. She told me they think, what's the point?
I don't care. There's nothing you can do about this.
Many people I know at the age of 25 have passed on in my community and the same thing might happen to me.
And so in that late adolescent mindframe in which you tend to be to do more risk
taking and tend not to think about the consequences of your behaviour on your future,
you think, she said. What the heck? I'm not going to be here anyway.
I might as well live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse.
This, then,
is the white noise so sufficiently loud as to allow the country to go about its business undisturbed while entire communities live in constant fear?
This is where we find the connective tissue in this moment between the map,
between the manifestation of racism at its most brazen and at its most banal in the slogan I can't breathe.
We see the line between Floyd's last words as the police knelt on his neck and
the respiratory tribulations of the ailing pandemic patient on a ventilator.
Indeed, for all the commonalities in race and class of the young people who were killed that November the 23rd.
It was Newark where the riots of 1967 were in some ways most fierce that stood out as being particularly impoverished still.
The area in America around the Kretschmer complex on Frelinghuysen Avenue,
where Gary Anderson Junior was shot dead was a warren of high-rise social housing not far from the airport.
A short walk away. Another whole apartment complex stood uninhabited windows that once offered a view of the cranes and the freight in Newark Bay.
Now stuffed with hastily cemented breeze blocks.
According to the census tract for that general area, it was by far the poorest place where any young person was shot dead that day.
Median income in that census tract was just ten thousand three hundred seven dollars.
That's less than half the next most poor area where a child or teen was killed,
more than three quarters of the people who live in that census tract and less than $30000 a year.
The pathos in this vulnerability is summed up in a poem written two generations after the kind of report by a high school freshman named Tyler,
a Central High School in Newark.
The teacher had written hope on the blackboard and given the old boy class a little while to think about it before penning their verses,
Tyler wrote, We hope to live. Live long enough to have kids, we hope to make your home every day.
We hope we're not the next target to get sprayed. We hope never to wind up in new Deadpool.
I hope you hope. We all hope. In ways of seeing John Badger, Rudd, the way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe,
the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.
And what's truly unsettling to me is that more than 50 years after the kind of report, we cannot legitimately claim that we do not know what we see.
We've been told every time we see it again, there was a collective pretence that we have no idea where it came from.
After the suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, went up in flames a little over two years ago following the shooting of Michael Brown.
Department of Justice conducted a study into how the city was being run.
That report,
I believe any enterprising journalist could have produced if he or she had not become inured to the kind of systemic discrimination that exists,
amongst other things, the Department of Justice found that between 2007 and 2014, one black woman was arrested twice,
spent six days in jail and had to pay a total of five hundred and fifty dollars as a result of one instance of illegal parking.
Which had originally been fined $151. She tried to pay in smaller instalments.
The court refused to accept anything less than a full payment. She couldn't afford it.
Seven years after the original infraction, she still owed five hundred forty one dollars.
This was how the town raised its revenue. This was not a glitch in the system.
It was the system. And then there was the Ferguson case of the 14 year old boy found in an abandoned building had been
chased down by a police dog that had bitten his ankle and his left arm as he tried to protect his face.
The boy said the officers kicked him in the head and then laughed about it afterwards.
The officers said they thought he was armed, but he wasn't.
Department of Justice Department of Justice investigators found that every time a police dog had bitten someone, the victim was black.
So it turns out that sometimes dog bites man really is the story.
But the media keep missing it. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Garrett, is that wonderful and is gut wrenching now, I think we have been having some technical difficulties with Alan,
so we may if he is not here, we may just start by the question and answer a little early.
So if people wouldn't mind typing their questions into the chat?
And I will I will write them out. I'm coming to.
I suppose I can start off as we come in just wanting video thoughts on this.
Second, if I can say, does that incarnation of the Black Lives Matter movement, what is what has come in the wake of George Floyd?
How you see, it's different if it's what's new and.
What we're with my head. I think you're.
Yeah, if it feels. I mean, it's coming off the same thing.
You mean it's kind of in that sense, it's no different, but the way these.
Movements matter that kind of operates the kind of like floating signifiers, really, so.
In my experience, I lived in Chicago, it's not like there was a Black Lives Matter office, there was, you know, there's not regular.
So it's the kind of. And that was true before.
It wasn't current, it certainly wasn't global before in a way that it's become now the kind of place adopting its kind of.
Some version of it, so in Europe, it seems to have concentrated on statues in historical memory, issues of colonialism and so on.
Whereas in in in America.
The Defund the police. Thing is really kind of has really taken off in a way that.
Certainly wasn't true with with Ferguson, Ferguson highlighted a general a general problem to which there wasn't really a specific.
It wasn't really a specific demand, whereas more specific demands are coming out of this and there's greater public sympathy for them,
which is interesting because they have been more riotous, they have been moved and some of their responses have been more violent.
So I think it's quite different. I mean, I do. It's rhyming.
It's not repeating. But I see there are similarities, but there's quite a lot of differences.
Ireland's ban. Is Alan back, Alan, are you?
You know, Alan, we've got one more question in the chat we can go to, Oh, Ellen is back.
I am back. Yes. Wonderful. Thank you. Well, I'll give the introductions.
A second speaker is Alan Curtis, the president and CEO of the Eisenhower Foundation,
which the private sector continuation of the 1967 68 commission that we've been talking about today.
Ellen is a social scientist and public policy adviser.
There's extensive government experience, having served in the Johnson and Carter administrations,
is the author of over a dozen books, including most recently Healing Our Divided Society, which I have a copy of.
But it is unfortunately locked, locked in my office and co-edited with Senator Fred Harris, which has a terrific chapter by Gary Young.
Previous, as well as many other fantastic, fantastic chapters in there.
And I'd also like to thank Ellen for all these help in setting up today.
So thank you all. Thank you, Reg, and good afternoon, everyone.
Years ago, in a deadly conference after the protests in Brixton Lords,
Garmin scolded me for saying that there was no institutional racism in the United Kingdom.
I later spoke on the American Dilemma at an Oxford Forum of Souls and was sponsored by the Centre for Criminology.
So I'm honoured to be with Professor Young today to continue the narrative with
you at this perilous moment for Western democracy after disorders and Detroit,
Newark and 150 other American cities in the 1960s.
President Lyndon Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.
It was called the Kerner Commission after the governor of Illinois, who was chairman White, tended to call the disorders riots.
People of colour call them protests.
Most of the members of the original Kerner Commission, where white men who bore the imprimatur of the political establishment.
Nonetheless, the commission concluded that America in 1968 had made little progress in reducing poverty, inequality and racial injustice.
The commission said America was to society's black and white, separate and unequal.
In 2018, there is no foundation released giving our divided society, which is our update of the Kerner Commission,
and it included the really insightful and very literary chapter by Professor Young Dog Bites Man,
which so eloquently summarised the situation with the media and the problems we face.
With your indulgence this afternoon for just a few minutes, I want to briefly share our overall conclusions on this update.
I want to set those conclusions within the context of the pandemic and the protests
against police violence that resulted in the mayor of Washington where I live,
painting the words Black Lives Matter on the street in front of the White House.
I want to talk about trends, evidence of new will and talk about how the word normal is the problem.
And I want to talk about seising the day in terms of trends since the current commission in 68.
America has, of course, twice elected an African-American president.
The African-American and Latino middle classes expanded greatly.
The African-American and Latino population in elected office has expanded considerably in those 50 years.
Yet at the same time, there have been so many negative trends.
neo-Nazis have made their statements and caused deaths in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in so many other places across the U.S.
White nationalist movements operate online. Some white Americans speak openly of nostalgia for a time when their dominance could be taken for granted.
Nationally, American public school segregation has increased since the Kerner Commission,
beginning with the backward looking federal policies of the 1980s.
Black Lives Matter revealed what Americans did not want to see in Ferguson, Missouri,
and the movement has matured over the last seven years into the prominent role it
has played in the national protests against police violence that are ongoing.
Zero tolerance, stop and frisk policing against people of colour has failed over the time since the criminal conviction.
American sentencing laws remain racially biased at the time of the current commission in the late sixties,
there are about two hundred thousand people in prison in jail in the United States today, thanks to crime legislation of the 1980s and the 1990s.
The American prison industrial complex now has 2.2 million people, and they are disproportionately people of colour.
Mass incarceration is really the current iteration of slavery and Jim Crow.
Yet while the United States has the highest rates of incarceration amongst all industrialised democracies,
it also has the highest rates of recorded homicide and when in many ways,
mass incarceration also has become part of American housing policy for the poor.
That housing policy has included conscious, purposeful government created segregation.
As Richard Roth has eloquently documented in his book The Colour of Law, We Need as Well to connect the dots.
In America, between mass incarceration and mass deportation, America began as a nation of immigrants.
My late Polish Boucher was a teenager when she arrived at Ellis Island in New York.
But today immigration has been criminalised, especially for people of colour.
Income inequality and wealth inequality have dramatically increased since the Kerner Commission.
Income inequality was greatly accelerated by the supply side.
Created the Great Recession of twenty eight.
The speed at which the rich in America are pulling away from the rest of us has been remarkable since the Kerner Commission,
and so the narrative today needs to be about both race and class.
In the last 50 years, most of the economic gains from rising productivity have gone to the wealthiest one percent and to corporate profits in America.
In the 1950s, top American CEOs made about 20 times as much as their average workers.
Today, they make over 300 times as much. Slaves were, of course, not allowed labour unions.
And today, much of corporate America has attacked unions, even though a majority of American Americans favoured unions and.
The ratio of African-American to white unemployment has remained two to one overall 50 years since the current commission.
White corporate financiers on Wall Street brought us the Great Recession 20 08.
Yet they have not been punished. They have not been adjudicated into the prison industrial complex, which of course, is a source of corporate profit.
Since the Kerner Commission, the deep poverty rate has increased, in part because of what the late,
insightful journalist Molly Ivins accurately called the American welfare reform legislation of the 1990s.
That legislation has failed based on evaluations, for example, by the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.
The richest country in history continues to produce the highest rates of overall child poverty amongst all industrialised democracies.
The pandemic has made inequality, poverty, racial injustice worse.
The resulting frustration amongst people of colour and the resulting awareness amongst at least
some white Americans has helped generate the national protests against continuing police violence.
After George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
Yet in spite of the trends and the data over the last 50 years,
our update suggests that the American experiment in democracy may still have the potential for progress in reducing poverty,
inequality and racial injustice. The potential to begin to heal our divided society.
We need to accelerate the movement to base policy on evidence and science, not conjecture and dogma.
Today, few American national, state and local public sector programmes are Evidence-Based.
All that public money and so little evidence on what works, the evidence based movement as a long way to go.
One of the first steps is to assemble the evidence on policies that have proven to work.
We have done that in healing provided society. Well, just a few examples of what works.
The current commission's recommendations led with economic and education policy.
Today, that means a Keynesian demand side investments in human capital,
job training and placement combined with living wages and secure health insurance.
Employment with upward mobility is especially needed in America for jobs,
repairing the crumbling infrastructure here and for jobs expanding technologies to reverse climate change.
As Pulitzer prise winning author Steven Pearlstein has reminded us, reducing economic inequality won't make us poor.
The Scandinavian countries, for example, have much lower inequality than in America.
The per capita income levels that are almost as high as what it's evidence based policy mean an education in America.
We need housing and therefore a school integration combined with much more equitable financing of public schools,
greatly improved training of public schools,
teacher teachers and significant expansion of public community schools and all eligible children made head start pre-school.
What is the evidence based policy meaning criminal justice? Well aware of the astronomical cost, the racist prison building states like New Jersey,
California and New York have reduced their prison populations by about 25
percent over recent years without any discernible increase in reported crime.
We need to accelerate such reductions as at the same time we shut down modern day better prisons in America,
and we need to encourage the incipient movement to transform American prosecution into a system based on fairness.
We must reform the status quo where prosecutors advance their careers by posturing on law and order.
I encourage you to read Emily Bazelon as well-received new book title charge what evidence based and play space policy can
be targeted to specific geographic locations with truly disadvantaged populations instead of public relations rhetoric?
We need an America genuine, evidence based community policing neighbourhood.
NGOs need to take the lead and should receive considerably more funding from the public sector.
Specially trained police need to respond to community priorities at town hall meetings if neighbourhood residents approve.
Police can even assist in re-entering neighbourhood use.
I know that because we are our foundation have successfully replicated such evidence.
Evidence based community policing in a wide diversity of locations from San Juan, Puerto Rico to New Hampshire to South Carolina to San Francisco.
Real evidence based community policing can be designed by creative mayors in
America to encourage community based banking and small business development,
as well as construction of integrated housing by community development corporations.
The integrated housing can facilitate integrated schools and generate good jobs for both community residents and returning ex-offenders.
For ex-offenders reintegration, there are a number of excellent evidence based models like Minnesota Comprehensive Re-entry Plan.
In other words, economic education, housing and criminal justice policy can be these siloed,
evidence based and place based policy that works and code target multiple solutions to multiple problems.
Evidence based policy can be complementary and interdependent.
Evidence based policy need not be separate and unequal.
The scaling up of what works needs to be financed, in part by the scaling down of what doesn't work.
What doesn't work includes wilful indifference to the unequal distribution of prosperity.
What doesn't work is the present concentration of wealth.
What doesn't work includes supply side, trickle down, economic policy and tax breaks for the rich.
What doesn't work includes. Milton Friedman and neo liberalism, what doesn't work includes global symposia.
In places like Davos and in Silicon Valley boardrooms where so-called thought leaders talk down to us,
avoid how to reduce inequality, avoid how to change fundamental power equations and avoid how to reform the rules of the game.
Instead, the current fashion in America has been to recite ineffective corporate buzzwords like win win,
market driven solutions and social impact investing.
What doesn't work encompasses racist and massively expensive prison building for the poor.
Zero tolerance, policing, supply side. School vouchers, privatisation of schools and failed welfare reform legislation.
Most of all, what doesn't work in America includes false 1980s rhetoric on government being the problem.
In fact, the problem is dishonest government and corporate greed.
The solution includes good government regulation of greed,
well-managed white space policy and significant expansion of funding to NGOs to the scaling down of what doesn't work in the scaling up.
What does the Evidence-Based Healing Strategy that sufficiently invest in human capital can make a difference?
Progress in achieving these goals also is potentially significant as an international strategy for America.
At a time when a majority of Americans disapprove of our foreign policy,
authoritarian dictatorships have routinely and easily deflected our criticisms, pointing to America's own human rights and civil rights abuses.
That is what China's propaganda ministries have been doing with the street protests against American police violence.
What does the United States can finally make progress on current priorities.
America can gain new soft power in dealing with China and Russia and can repair alliances
with our traditional partners alliances that have been weakened by present policy.
Yet a new American soft power, a new American Evidence-Based Policy,
cannot emerge without the new will that the original Kerner Commission said was necessary for progress.
What is the use of data driven evidence in our presently threatened democracy?
If there is no will to take action? More than 50 years after the Kerner Commission, the creation of new will may be harder to achieve than ever.
But Black Lives Matter has been making progress, and so we need to remember George Bernard Shaw.
Some see things as they are and ask why we must dream of things that never were and ask Why not?
In that devastating year of 1968 for America, Dr. Martin Luther King asked, Why not?
As he endorsed the Kerner Commission, it was advocating a multiracial coalition for economic justice amongst the poor,
the working class and the middle class. And then he was assassinated while supporting sanitation workers in Memphis,
the creation of the King Economic Justice Coalition, which embraced and moved beyond the civil rights movement.
It used to be one point of departure for the generation of new will in America in the 21st century.
The way has been led by people like MacArthur Foundation Genius Award winner Bishop William Barber and
his continuation of Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign against the Morality of Poverty and Inequality.
The maturing success of Black Lives Matter suggests how current constituencies need to converge.
And Reverend Al Sharpton, another national leader, now is organising a new march on Washington for August, for example.
But what other Kerner constituencies need to converge and support one another in the months and years ahead?
Those current constituencies include most of the 99 percent of Americans who have suffered the inequality, greed and malfeasance of Wall Street.
Those current constituencies include re empowered organised labour.
Those current constituencies potentially include the 17 million white Americans who live in poverty and who need to unite with poor people of colour.
Those core constituencies include millennials who are participating in greater numbers,
and I have even greater hopes for my daughter and her Generation Z Z.
Those current constituencies include public school teachers who have walked out of schools demanding higher salaries and new textbooks.
Those Kerner constituencies include the leaders of newly emerging initiatives
trying to integrate public schools that remain profoundly segregated in America,
beginning with New York City. Those current constituencies include the high school students from Parkland, Florida,
who have impressively led the Never Again movement against firearms, violence and who have begun to partner with Sandy Hook promise.
The Bradley Camp Brady Campaign, the Giffords Centre against the American Addiction to Guns.
Those current constituencies include citizens who, like members of the original Kerner Commission,
will not give up on trying to find at least some common ground in support of all the current constituencies that need to coordinate.
I believe the academy needs to do much more.
For example, there are excellent professional schools in America for learning how to make money and for healing the human body.
But what about healing our divided society?
New master's degree programmes and related curricula, I believe, need to skilfully integrate courses in economic education,
public health and criminal justice policy with courses and evaluation.
The rules of evidence NGO management, public administration, communications and advocacy.
I challenge Oxford and this institute to help lead a new debate on how the Academy
can play a more significant and less ivory tower role in reducing poverty,
inequality and racial injustice.
The coordinated advocacy essential in America needs to reject calls to return back to normal in the post pandemic world.
Normal is the problem in America. History may be of help in getting beyond normal.
Over the last hundred years in America, there have been at least three points in time when the rules have been rewritten.
The first consisted of the trust busting and related inequality, reducing actions of President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century.
The second consisted of the workers rights protections, Social Security legislation and the bloodless revolution of the New Deal in the 1930s.
The third consisted of Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Rights Act of the 1960s in America.
Now, the pandemic and the protests against police violence provide a fresh opportunity to seise the day to rewrite the rules,
to reframe the public discourse and to renegotiate the social contract.
Crucially, the generation of new will must be facilitated by the creation of a fair or responsive
American democracy if the votes of all Americans were actually given equal weight,
a new economic justice movement would have a better chance. That is why we must intensify the fight for voter rights reform,
intensify the fight campaign finance reform and intensify the fight to ban gerrymandering.
Equally important, the generation of new will must be facilitated by the reform of the media.
As Professor Young has subscribed with his usual eloquence,
the media were criticised as much as the police by the original Kerner Commission in the late 60s.
In addition to hiring more people of colour and so including much more coverage on what works,
the media need to listen to Professor Young when he says that the real story is dog bites man.
And we must take regulatory action against social media feedback loops that push addicted users
deeper and deeper into their own hermetically sealed bubbles that intensify division and hatred.
To be sure, a new economic justice alliance, a new will need to emerge in America at the grassroots outside of government.
But new legislation and funding must build on good government at the local, state and federal levels.
It is fashionable in America to advocate for what some call the new localism,
and we must encourage it, especially while American society remains so divided.
Yet Americans cannot give up on the notion of good federal government.
However long it may take to return,
new activist national government and leadership must then invest in Kirner priorities at a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem.
That activist national leadership finally would do well to continually remind Americans of how long the dream has been deferred.
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up?
Like a raisin in the Sun. Or fester like a sore.
And then run. Does it stink? Like rotten meat or sugar over like syrupy sweet, perhaps that grain just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it just explode? Thank you.
Thank you very much, Alan. I was fantastic. And now we have just over half an hour for some questions.
So thank you for the people who put them into the chat and please do keep them coming to.
Our first question is from Mehdi, who is asked Is American society as we know it susceptible to any meaningful reform and ads by the above question?
I mean, in short and medium term as it is inherently and systematically corrupt and racist.
To know which, if you would like to take that first. I want you to go first.
Go ahead. OK. I mean, yeah, I think it is, I think it is susceptible, but.
And I think it needs.
And a lot of people to put their shoulder to the wheel, I mean, we've seen if you look at the civil rights movement, you seen that.
Quite big things can change took a long time, but big things can change if you see kind of.
I tell you, quite a good example actually would be gay marriage, which when I arrived in America in 2003 was unthinkable.
And the Republicans used it to leverage labour. They would put gay marriage on the ballot in 2004 to make sure the evangelicals came out.
Now, it's the banal facts of life, I'm sure there are people who don't like the fact it exists, but Mitt Romney in 2012 wouldn't go there.
Because there was no way good for him to to go.
And, you know, that's change. I mean, one thing is doesn't cost any money.
So there is that.
But in the most intimate areas of people, people's lives, I think that one see, there are few serious barriers to meaningful change, in my view.
I like to hear Alan's view on this one is gerrymandering.
So the political system for the lower house and for state houses, the politicians get to choose their electorate.
And so you have more and more. Unwinnable and contested virtually seised.
Which is which, which is terrible, and then me and then the other thing is money.
The money in politics, which means that money chooses.
You get to vote on who money has accepted, but without money, you can't do it.
And those two things are the biggest obstacles to major or two of the biggest obstacles.
And then you have the Electoral College stuff like that as well, which the is more fluent in than I am.
But there are there are serious structural barriers and.
There is scope and space for reform. I would I would say this following up on Gary.
As I speak around the country in America on the negative trends increase in poverty,
inequality and mass incarceration as the contemporary iteration of slavery and Jim Crow.
People of colour audiences, of course, understand, but a lot of white audiences still don't understand.
And I have sort of dedicated myself in the next year to taking on white audiences and corporations.
I don't know if that's going to be a helpful process or not.
But Americans, many Americans, very many white Americans still don't understand the trends over the last 50 years, and that has to be changed.
Or at least we have to try. Also, many Americans don't understand that we do have the evidence.
We have a lot of evidence on what works, what can work.
We were told in the 1980s that government is the problem in a lot of government funded programmes have been successful.
So there's a lot of there's a lot of effort in terms of education that needs to be done.
So work on the trends, work on the evidence, but then the new will is still the key question.
And I see hope in the progress that Black Lives Matter is made.
Black Lives Matter started about seven years ago, and it was slowly building up its infrastructure and acceptance of Black Lives Matter,
as it has been so great over just the last few months.
I had tried to get police leaders who I thought were progressive to talk with Black Lives Matter people at several points in time in recent years,
and it just didn't didn't work out. So I look at the street in front of the White House, as I said, and the mayor of Washington,
who's an African-American woman, has painted Black Lives Matter. And I look at the continuing protest and I think there is some hope.
There were a hundred and fifty protests in the 60s when the current commission was formed.
There were there were over 750 protests on the police violence over recent weeks after George Floyd was killed by police.
So what? What will happen to that movement? Will there be more protests?
But how does that get converted into into action? That's the big question.
When we talk with non-profit organisations, NGOs now, we are encouraging them to to focus their attention on voter registration.
If the election goes one way in America in the fall, well,
maybe there was a process in which some change can can reach some critical mass in future years and months.
If the election goes in another direction, then it's going to be much more difficult to take.
The energy that has been generated by Black Lives Matter and by others like Reverend Barber, and convert it into something that goes beyond just hope.
On the topic of policing came up in the answer, The Ellen Show Schofield has asked in response to Gary Young, but the both of you.
The issue of defunding the police seems like a possible solution to the issue of police violence against communities of colour.
They ask. But the US is a big place with many, many models of policing and regrettable few have made significant progress.
All too many of violence, violent and overfunded. Can those progressive police service models apply a hopeful role going forward?
I mean, I would think so. I mean, I mean, these things, there are national demands and then there are local solutions.
And in those areas where you know, there were.
The were rebellions everywhere and some places you saw police engaged in, some places you didn't.
So, uh, yeah, and even defund the police.
I mean, in Minneapolis, they've been doing a lot of work on what that would look like.
I mean, it's fun. It's a slogan. You know, it works. It forces people to kind of reckon with what is and what might be.
But it's the start of the process. Yet you still have to work on issues of security and equity and all that kind of stuff.
So I guess I am. I'm agreeing with you.
Yes, it is. America is a big place, there's lots of different kind of police perform very differently and lots of areas.
The solution in rural Idaho or Arizona will be very different to this solution in downtown Detroit or New Orleans.
And so this is this is a really key question the the Kerner Commission essentially focussed on white racism as the cause
and the police traditionally are the institution that projects white racism to more people than almost any others.
So it's understanding it's understandable that there are the protests that are happening today facilitated by Black Lives Matter.
I think that the the police can have a reduced role in a number of ways.
I guess defunding now police are involved in and criminalising homelessness, for example.
Well, the solution to homelessness is build houses and police are involved in various mental health services.
They need not have to do that. If we have a public health policy, take over quite a bit of what criminal justice policy has been.
Will we eliminate policing? I don't think so.
And of course, police unions are very concerned about maintaining the status quo, and a number of us will be trying to engage in that narrative.
But I agree with Gary. I think I think there are possibilities.
There are seventeen thousand over seventy thousand police jurisdictions around the country and they all have their their
different ways and they have their ability to create what they think is most appropriate in their cultures and societies.
So some of them have the potential for undertaking.
I think change with with the police.
I presented on these issues last year at at Noble and obviously the National Organisation of Black Law Enforcement executives.
And it was it was a Sunday morning in New Orleans.
So I thought everyone and 9:00 a.m. and I thought everyone would be hung over from partying in New Orleans.
And it would be a sad, very boring session.
But everyone was dressed in their Sunday best. It was energy.
There was standing room only and the police, the African-American police chiefs and other senior executives.
Clearly said, yes, we have responsibility for all people in our city and in a racially diverse class,
diverse way, but we get it, we get the Kerner Commission and we want to do things.
So there are some police chiefs with whom we are trying to work.
It is not easy because this is so politicised.
But I would essentially agree with Gary that we can identify those police leaders who are willing to take some step and
undertake some new forms of policing that build on what evidence already exists and then try to scale up what works.
Excellent. Thank you. And on the topic of the media, Al has asked, is there capacity for reform in the American media?
How do we fix the system that prioritises the unusual and breaking news?
So I think that there are a few. First of all, the media.
Is in a state of crisis because its model has broken down in the state of.
And that does offer opportunities because we have to think of what they can do to be distinctive and to be relevant and that.
The proliferation of social media, the ways in which people share stories and actually create stories.
For example, it was a news journalist who recorded the death of.
George Floyd has forced a kind of reckoning amongst these organisations within news organisations about.
Who they're for, and I read of them now. And so you see some doing very well and that we may not like,
but in some way they speak to people and people are looking for whatever it is that they're looking for out of them.
In the case of, I don't know, Fox News or the Daily Mail, they're looking for an affirmation of who they are or who or what they do.
But then you also see a proliferation of independent, small, fast break outlets that really do pose a challenge every so many hours in a day.
It was having so much news anyone can watch, and if you read and if you're reading it on intercept.
Then you're probably not going to kind of, you know, that's less time that you'll be reading a New York Times, The Washington Post.
So, for example, I generally don't do punditry because I find.
The story's third line of questioning.
Too restrictive and the frames that you're set in, too limiting, and you have to get there in 30 seconds, preferably with a joke, you know,
and so I don't do, you know, I don't go on TV panel shows and things that generally don't panel shows, but, you know, news programmes.
But I did do a thing with a group called Double Down News,
talking about the the what's taking place in America at the moment and what I thought about it and how I would put it in a historical context.
As far as I know, it's got two and a half million views. Now that is really a story about double down.
It's not about me, it's that kind of there. This was a guy with his camera who came and did it in my backyard and got it together in two days.
And it was about the whole thing is about three minutes, but the thing that was about 11 minutes is a teaser.
You have to pay a bit more. Now, I don't know if that guy eats mean, I don't know how he ends up living,
but there are all sorts of challenges to mainstream media from other voices and other outlets.
And if anything is going to keep them honest, it will be the fact that they're broke and they are facing stiff competition.
I agree with what he says, I think this is a really difficult one.
Local news in America still is if it bleeds, it leads and local, though still doesn't talk about dog bites, man.
And local news still doesn't have enough people of colour,
and I find it difficult to try to leverage change in response to those continuing realities.
I guess I'm especially concerned about social media, but I don't have any bright ideas as to how to stop social media from creating so much hatred.
You can bring the founder of Facebook before a congressional committee, but whether [INAUDIBLE] do anything is another question.
And I think America has a long ways to go in terms of actually trying to get media to respond to the realities of the Kerner Commission.
And that's that's just a reality that we're facing.
So I I just have to commend Gary for being a role model for the brilliant coverage he did in America.
And I hope that at least we can continue the discussion.
There are many, many conferences now amongst world journalists of colour, media people going on, and we're trying to be part of that dialogue.
Excellent. So there's another question here from Myfanwy in terms of what works.
Are there signs of people changing their mind and accepting that they may have less privilege in order for other people to live with more fairness?
Or do we need to bypass the resistance to change and just win? Well, definitely, I think the second one is you can't do that.
You can't just win that you whenever people try and do that.
It can. It can work for five minutes. It can work for 50 years. But generally speaking, it doesn't work.
But you have to kind of bring people with you. And with America really going from what Alan said earlier about why Americans,
it's important to remember because America did a good job of projecting reinvention and of
liberty itself in some ways that it was 200 years a slave state and 100 years of apartheid.
Actually, non-racial democracy is very new. So that's five years.
And so in some sense, we shouldn't be too surprised that people are struggling with it.
But I think if you. There was a poll in the New York Times about people's attitudes to Black Lives Matter, and it showed a significant shift.
And I don't think that was because Black Lives Matter could one. I think that.
At a certain point. People either don't recognise their privilege as being privilege if you're a poor,
and while it can be very kind of abstract or even just kind of confusing antagonising to be told you have white privilege, even if you do.
But but those who do and understand, do you have a do you understand it?
I think that kind of is my privilege worth this.
Is it worth it? Are the things that I get from this with people? Kind of.
Quite often they say they want an easier life.
They want a better life, and this doesn't feel like it, a life where.
You feel complicit in the death of people where you feel anxious about raising things with workmates,
where you kind of this is supposed to be your country and it doesn't feel like
a place that you want to be a particularly interesting to me in America,
where soft power the Adam talked about earlier of kind of projection and the notion that many Americans have,
as they grew up, that this is the best country in the world. For all its faults, this is the best country in the world that.
That they're struggling to square that and what they're seeing. And and so when they think about whatever you know and whatever privileges do exist,
even when they're understood, that can't be understood in relation to kind of what.
And whenever I go abroad, I have to kind of feel a bit embarrassed and kind of them,
you know, half of my town is close to me and my uncle is a policeman.
You know what I think about? So I in all sorts of ways, I think that people are persuadable.
And I also think that the massive levels of inequality have done quite a good job with that too,
because Australia has not said, Well, let me look at him.
He's got like all of your privilege as well.
So there is that kind of way in which the kind of when you get to white privilege, sometimes that's all there is whiteness.
It's not actually a whole lot of stuff that goes with it.
I think that as long as I observe Black Lives Matter and as I walk some of the protest with my mask on,
I got a feeling that this is special, what's happening?
And so I at least hope that what's been occurring in recent weeks in America and what is combined with the work,
for example, of Reverend Barber, who just spoke eloquently in front of the White House this last weekend?
I think that in a general way suggests something is happening and whether it
can move on in the next six months to something that results in action by,
say, the government will depend in part on the election. So at least there's there's something going on and whether that is long run.
I just I just have prophesies. I do tell you this.
I approached the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and asked them to have a forum on the current or 50 years,
and I would approach the U.S. Business Roundtable, which is another national organisation.
And in each case that the corporations have said no.
In effect, we do. We don't want to have this discussion at the most.
When I deal with corporate America at panels of a corporation, a bank often will send someone and it'll be the vice,
the vice president for dealing with people like Alan Curtis, who will be very distinguished African-American, who will be very, very well-meaning.
But that's as far as it goes. So while I am hoping for the change that might be possible via the street protests now,
I don't know what to do about corporate America, which represents white privilege, and I'm still searching for answers there.
We have a question here from Kath. This is directed, Garrett says, Professor Gary Young, thank you for a powerful and brilliant talk.
Your research with bereaved families sounds very distressing and sensitive, and there's a sense that is a form of paying respect.
I was wondering about tangible or intangible ways you feel or hope this type of research can make a difference.
Is it a form of political action? And I want to.
I guess it is a form of political action is not necessarily essentially have a story, but that.
My hope was that in the book is another day the Death of America, and it's a portrait of 10 10 lives and the kids who were shot dead that day.
And what it does is it turns them into children, into human beings, it takes them out of a statistic and into real kids.
Doing real stuff which might be called a duty might be X-Box.
It might be weed. It might be, you know, a range of things that kids do.
And some of them. And certainly one of them, I wouldn't want to meet on a dark night, you know, he'd kind of killed other people.
He he was a tough, tough kid, but even then.
Societies, I understand that they have a collective responsibility for children.
That's why we have youth court and, you know, laws that relate to kids and social workers and so on.
And so even then you have to ask yourself about bad boy, how did he get that way?
How did we fail? To get to to, you know, sustain him.
And so. The aim was to vilify the lives of these people who are using briefs.
Someone died and there is there are a series of assumptions that people think they know about each one.
Just from. The picture the a black kid is 17, he died in that area.
OK, that's all I need to know. And actually nearly your waist to so much more to now.
And and one can do that without being in Belgium. It just kind of.
And so, yeah, it was a contribution to the discussion the next time you see Matt.
And that thing was blaming a leading on new local channel.
Think again before you think, you know. Who that is and what happened?
OK, we've got one more.
Quick question here. So is says from Suella says in the late 60s, the logo was Black Power.
Fifty years later, it's Black Lives Matter. How do you explain this transition?
I mean. I I wouldn't want to.
It's a good question, I wouldn't want to read too much into the struggling.
It's quite important to understand where Black Lives Matter came from, which was actually Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of George Zimmerman.
And that's why when I talk about it, being a floating signifier went from that to to Ferguson, Michael Brown and then to George Floyd.
The way I understand Black Power in the 60s was a period of massive turbulence around the world.
It changed with the anti-colonial project that was taking place around the world,
and it was an assertion of no black dominance but of control that we want to control.
We want to control our communities and our lives and so on.
And it chimed. With the demands that were being made, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, wherever you were.
These were the demands. BlackLivesMatter speaks to.
A precarious position in late stage capitalism where.
All sorts of other demands have been met. And we still haven't secured the sanctity of Black Life.
We can have a black president, you can have that in the 60s. But we still can't walk.
We still can't move down the street.
You can't imagine Black Power being the slogan in when Zimmerman was acquitted because there'd be a bunch of people who says You are president,
you're in power. I mean, that's not the kind of power they meant. But so that's how I read it.
Just just to add a footnote, I think Black Lives Matter has been sophisticated in building its infrastructure so
that when we do get an event that finally raised awareness in a significant way,
Black Lives Matter had the the folks in so many cities who or were able to participate and often lead the the marches in a peaceful way.
Excellent. Well, unfortunately, that's brought us to the end of our end of our time today, just for my own experience, I've learnt a lot.
But also importantly, come out, come away with a lot to think about.
So we can't do this with my clients. But at home, if you can put your hands together for our two wonderful speakers, Alan Curtis and Gary Young.
So thank you very much to both of you for coming today. Really?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Bye.