so we're gonna do QA for 20 minutes dr. Weiss thank you for coming here my name is fabulous Alice I'm a faculty member here at San Jose City College and one of the questions I want to I really want to ask you is um I'm pretty sure there's a number of people who have come to you and tell you why are you preaching so much hate through your speech and everything you go around saying but you're not alone there's many of us that feel that way you feel but I wanted to ask you from a perspective of a person of color with a higher degree in grad graduate and so forth how do you continue preaching this kind of momentum and trying to develop a shift in paradigm so that folks can begin to understand that this has nothing to do with color this has everything to do with survival of our own society yeah yeah well I mean the thing that keeps me doing it of course is contrary to those who accuse me and you and others who do this work of hate right it's it's really in and I don't mean this to sound corny at all but it's really about really intense love you know love for other people love for the society in spite of its flaws so what's always ironic to me about people that accuse those of us who talk about the flaws of America as being unpatriotic or hating the country if I hated the country I wouldn't even waste my breath I would just let it collapse right if I hated the country I mean in spite of my love-hate relationship with it which I think most awake people have I still love the potential of the country and the people of the country and so that keeps me doing it that keeps me energized to do it my children keep me energized to do it because I know that the world they're going to inherit is going to be ever more dangerous even than the one that we're living in right now and and a recognition of the fact that so many people who have faced so much more than I will ever face for sure as a white person have stood up and done the work if people of color can risk everything for justise everything for justice then Who am I not to do that Who am I not to put my life on the line Who am I not to you know take whatever [ __ ] I gotta take from people well you know Who am I not to get death threats or whatever the hell you know I mean that happens but you know people of color their lives are endangered every day they walk out the door so why do I think why would I think that I'm entitled to any greater safety than they right so what keeps me going is a recognition that we got a really short period of time on this planet each of us we could live 50 more years or 50 more minutes and in the brief period of time that you're even if you live to be a hundred the odds are against that by the way but even if you live to be a hundred right that is a blip in the history of the world that is so tiny you can't even you couldn't even physically represent it it's meaningless in the larger scheme of things so if you've got such a short period of time you've got to do something to justify your time here you got to do something to to justify all the oxygen that you took up right and all the resources that you use because if the only meaning of life is you you just get born and you get an education you get a job you're retiring you die then what the hell man we should just all do opiates and just check out if that's all there is my god sign me up for some heroin there's got to be more to it than that right there's got to be something about us as human beings that compels us to do right by our communities and by our brothers and sisters and folks all across a much more complicated gender-fluid spectrum than that I should point out and we have to be prepared to make those decisions because that's what it means to be alive right and so even when you get down and you get discouraged and you get cynical you have to keep doing the work and and it may be that we do the work and nothing changes but I do know this if we don't do the work nothing changes that is certain and so between the possibility of change in justice and the guarantee of defeat and injustice imma choose hope and do the work thank you for the question yes thank you for continuing to speak about justice and speaking on right issues I want to touch bases on Bill O'Reilly who for years and years and years denied anything remotely associated with white privilege yeah I don't know if he ever were on his show or not oh no never but as you know he just was released by Fox News yesterday yes do you anticipate backlash for that or how could somebody who was in such a high state of denial for decades and decades have gotten the high ratings I guess I already know the answer but I want you to speak to that right well he got those ratings and he has that support because the people who love and support him are also in denial in the very same way there's a lot of people who don't know the truth of the history of this country and deliberately so and and purposefully so Bill O'Reilly is an interesting example of it and and you know here's a guy that's keeping in mind and I you know I don't like to kick a person when he's down but let's just do it um you know cuz he would he would or he would sexually harass a woman when she was down I suppose so you know what I'm gonna do is pretty mild by comparison Bill O'Reilly four years as you said denied that there was any such thing as white privilege and this he denied even as I should point out even as he grew up in a place called Levittown on Long Island now I don't know if you know the history of Levittown but Levittown was a planned community that was created by a builder last name of Levitt thus the name and at the time right Levitt was asked if he would allow blacks to live in his planned homes you know there are these sort of simple cookie cutter homes nothing fancy just basic starter homes and he said look I can either solve the race problem or I can solve the housing problem I choose to solve the housing problem and what ended up happening was no person of color was allowed to live in Levittown there was one ultimately also built in Pennsylvania and there was but the main the first one was on Long Island so Bill O'Reilly literally grows up in a community where black people cannot live and says he's never had white privilege I don't know how to deal with that level of denial I don't I I how do you say you never had white prayer and you grew up in a place that only people like you could live because you were white right so his denial is quite profound other people's maybe not as profound as his but I think there will be a backlash I'm sure because people dearly love Bill O'Reilly in spite of his idiocy they dearly love the Rush Limbaugh's of the world despite theirs they used to love Glenn Beck I guess maybe not so much anymore they're people that sort of do fall from grace I'm sure there will be a backlash and Bill O'Reilly will write a new book called killing O'Reilly because that's what he does he writes books about killing pee killing Lincoln killing Patton killing whoever killing Jesus and now he'll write one called killing O'Reilly and play the victim of political correctness but the man is a serial sexual predator period and we actually know this it was a sin not only had there been a number of suits settled in that regard there's actually recordings of him you know back in the day in the in the earlier 2000s you know sexually harassing a woman on the phone right and talking and like talking about having sex with her with a loofah which is that thing you use in the in the shower to like scrub the dead but he couldn't remember the word loofah so he called it a falafel like like like honest to god like the man is a sick sexual predator but you know look the good news for Bill O'Reilly is you can be a sexual predator and you can actually go on to a job considerably higher up and more powerful than a commentator on Fox News you can be someone who regularly sexually pre-dates against women and ultimately become President of the United States so I suppose we'll have to look out for Bill O'Reilly at some point and having a political career because I guess sexually harassing and even abusing women is no disqualifier from the presidency so there you have it next question please the Department of Health and Human Services released a statement yesterday the Trump administration Awards Awards grants to States to combat opioid crisis yep so the HHS will minister grants totaling 480 five million dollars to all 50 states basically to combat all the opiate crisis lots of states and territories right so I found it interesting that you mentioned about the opiates about people being addicted and I read this this morning actually yeah well hopefully that money will come through I think it'll be interesting to see if that really happens of course that money will have to be released by Congress and so the attention of the HHS may be to make that money available to deal with the opioid crisis that doesn't mean the money will come through I hope it does the second point worth making though is that if they succeed in repealing the ACA and actually getting rid of the Affordable Care Act it's gonna be harder for people to get health care who have addiction problems because part of the ACA is requirement standards of care is that things like addiction treatment have to be covered and there are a lot of people in Congress the president I don't think has weighed in on it so much but but on that part but there are a lot of people in Congress who have said that they want to get rid of that they don't want insurance companies to have to cover that they don't want insurance companies to have to cover pregnancy even let alone drug addiction or mental health counseling and so the downside is even if the HHS puts that money forward which I hope they will do I'm not sure that'll be a sufficient amount for it but it's a decent start and I hope it happens it could be undermined on the other side by repealing or significantly altering the ACA and of course the opioid crisis isn't really just like drugs in general the drug problem of usage and addiction doesn't go away unless you deal with the root causes of what's provoking it and in this case it's the hopelessness that exists in an economy that was not created for the benefit of working people and nobody in Congress who's pushing for the policies that this president talks about nobody is pushing for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and doing very little to actually create jobs they're not renegotiating NAFTA that's completely gone now nobody's talking about that they're not talking about you know getting tougher on trade deals anymore that's gone they're not really talking about an infrastructure bill to put people back to work because even though Trump says he wants it the Congress certainly doesn't right and so all this stuff that might actually have provided some hope to people isn't likely to come through that's meaning and that's gonna mean that people are gonna continue to use and become addicted so we got to have a prevention not just the treatment treatment is what you do after the fact we got to have a prevention strategy and you have an Attorney General of the United States who has said in his own words we just need to get back to what Nancy Reagan said about drugs just say no that didn't work y'all like if you were alive in the 80s that did not work so if that's gonna be their strategy dear God 400 million or whatever it is is not going to be enough to solve the problem it would certainly be great if it happens I just don't anticipate that it's going to be sufficient is my fear but anyway thank you yes ideology that we have Indian state that people who if you don't have something it it's his fault not the fault of society or photo particles it may be dangerous for people and what do you mean we need to get rid of this ideology but this is George is what make America best country in the world this is what make America so reach it what make America country people came and they even they won't immigrate here well I think that there's a lot of yes relative to the world there's a lot of relative freedom and opportunity here and I'm not denying that at all that's been true for a long time but the problem with that is it's one thing to say that there's relative freedom and opportunity here which is true it's quite another to say that that freedom and opportunity is at the level we claim it to be and I'm worried about the gap between where we are and what we ought to be not where we are and where some other country is I'm not interested in saying well you know people are better off here than they would be in Sri Lanka and therefore da-da-da-da-da or people are better off here than they would be in the countries that they came from and therefore whatever all bets are off and we don't have to make it any better now because it's already better than that to me that's a really low bar that's a really low standard right we have a constitution and we have principles that say that people are created equal endowed with certain inalienable rights among these life liberty and the pursuit of happiness we have an equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and we violated everyday I'm interested in living up to our standards I'm interested in living up to the standards that we have created and not taken seriously enough so the danger is not it's not about saying that the entirety of American theory and philosophy is a lie I'm saying it is a significant myth that's why I called it the myth of meritocracy not the lie of course there are people who go from the very bottom to the top but it's very rare mobility and I talked about this in my book mobility is incredibly limited the vast majority of people who were born in the bottom fifth of the income strata will stay in the bottom fifth or the bottom two-fifths of the income strata and the vast majority of the people who are born at the top will stay in the top and that's because intergenerational advantage gets passed down it's not because the children of the rich are just better it's because they're the children of the rich and they're going to have opportunities that other people won't right now in this country there are 38 people who have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the population of the country which is 165 million so you have 38 people over here 165 million people over here anyone who thinks that's about merit is on drugs is absolutely high as a kite because there's no way that 38 people can be as smart as 165 million or as hard-working as 165 million it's not about merit that's about power and dynamics that keep these people in a position of power and keep these people not on the globe as a whole there are 52 people I think now who have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the world's population 52 people and three and a half billion anyone who thinks 52 people are just that much smarter or harder working than three and a half billion again doesn't have any sense whatsoever so it's not that hard work isn't a good thing it's not that there isn't opportunity it's that hard work is not sufficient it has never been sufficient keep in mind we said that stuff about hard work is all it takes and you can be anything you want if you just work hard we said that during segregation it obviously was a lie because we had a system that was intended to keep people down and we still told them you can be anything but not really because we have these other policies in place women weren't even able to get loans from banks in their own names until the early 1970s in many places in this country so to tell women they could have been anything was clearly alive right so yes there's opportunity and that's wonderful but we should be judging ourselves relative to the promises we make not looking at other countries and saying well at least we're better off than we would be over there that's just not a standard for justice or logic in my estimation yes first of all my name is Maile de bono I teach ethnic study here at San Jose City College seeing so many of our students are here I want to thank you so much for coming to our humble College to have someone of your statue it's heartwarming and thank you dr. Whelan and Jason for really pushing this event forward now I love your book and I use it in my class I love Douglas Blackmon book yeah on the slavery by another name yeah but this is something that I struggle with is that both of these are white men who become the leaders and become the forefront person people to speak about ways if it was a person of color preaching your message criticizing white men and rich man and powerful man a person of color were in this book and speak about this what they had the same credibility would they had the same how they embrace you I'd like to hear your comment on that right well it's a great question and it's an important point to consider because I think it's pretty obvious that when people of color say the same kinds of things as they have always done for generations they are usually routinely ignored or they are attacked and they are criticized and they do not in fact get listened to now having said that there of course are many many scholars of color who are the real leaders in this work and in fact do write books that are used in classes and are influential and so you can think of people like Michelle Alexander and Carol Anderson's new book white rage at Emory and you can think about Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West and bell hooks and others so there are people of color who say these things thankfully and lead the work and people that I've learned from and you know and thankful to call friends in many cases but absolutely on average right it is certainly the case that when white folks challenge other white folks it is far more likely to be heard than when black and brown folks challenge white folks just like when men challenge other men around sexism I have no doubt that there are men who can hear that more easily from another man than they can from a woman and I think that's true with any issue and so and so that's a real problem and I want to take the opportunity now that you've asked that question to to ask the audience to sit with it for a second and to think you know how would your body have felt today particularly for the white folks in the room but maybe even for some folks of color because you know everybody's been conditioned to take the white man more seriously everyone has been conditioned to do that so ask yourself how your body may have felt differently you don't have to answer it I just want you to think about it how might your body have felt differently if a person of color had been up here saying those things would it have been as easy to hear would it have been as you know as well receive not just in general but by you and and before you answer well of course because truth is truth I really want you to sit with it because we've all been conditioned to have a different reaction when I get up and say the things I say people can assume that it's not hateful because after all why would I be hating on my own group but if a person of color does it there's an assumption that well you hate white people and you're anti white and so I really want us to think about that and I want all of you who came today and I very much appreciate it and I certainly want you to buy my books that's why I brought them but I want you to also buy the book white rage by Carol Anderson recent book brilliant scholar at Emory I want you to buy you know bell hooks work I want you to buy the works of w eb de bois I want you to the works of Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence I want you to buy the books of Ron takaki I want you to buy the books of scholars of color who have done so much of this work and usually been ignored for it thank you you bet thank you yes I just start we got him in there and we finally got revenge and that's just a personal note right and then we got in there and I didn't see any movements I didn't see any marches I didn't see anything is like you answered you know the fighting of black and white will finally be over but it's not over we have to know the past we know the past you're surprising there's a future what does the future look like what what picture does it have we have young people coming up and we say oh just get them long black lives matter but how do we break that machine everyone's been trying to break that cycle of power and it's not going anywhere it seems like it's not budging right well I think that you know again if we're gonna have a silver lining in the cloud of trumpism it's that I think it has disabused us finally of any notion that the election of Barack Obama was going to be this revolutionary thing you know and and and I want us to also remember it's not just and this isn't Barack Obama's fault this is the fault of a system that frankly is on autopilot no matter who the president is you understand we have a system that is very hard to change it's very slow to change the founders set it up that way on purpose the Constitution is a very conservative document in the sense of what it structurally what it makes the American government look like and how it functions so it's really hard to get things done that said we have a history of getting things done and I want to tell you that even though the problem of white supremacy is with us still as it has been all of these generations you know we've learned some lessons about how to at least chip away at that and if you ever get a chance to go the most inspiring thing that I've experienced in a very long time I went to DC in December got a chance to go to the new Museum of african-american history and culture which is an amazing Museum and when you walk through that museum and you see the images of enslavement and segregation you see you know NAT Turner's Bible is on display there emit tills casket is on display there there's a statue of thomas jefferson behind which are bricks with the names of the people that he enslaved that is their their pictures and video of Bull Connor in Birmingham and Jim Clark the sheriff and Selma beating the hell out of protesters that day during the summit of Montgomery March and when you see those images and yet you remember that people of color in that particular case black folks but more broadly that people of color have survived all of that you know people of color they survived Thomas Jefferson they survived Bull Connor they survived Jim Clark they survived Lester Maddox they survived the men that killed Emmett Till they are still here when you think about indigenous people who are still standing strong at Standing Rock and demanding their water and land rights and you see that they are not gone right and they want us to know that they are not gone then you realize that if folks of color could overcome all of that [ __ ] right Donald Trump is not going to be the one who actually puts the nail in that coffin if we have beaten those folks before we can beat them again what it takes is determination and a willingness to lose and to lose and to lose and to lose until you win yes hello my name is Jackie Gamboa and I teach in ethnic studies one of the things that I always bring up in our classes is this question right is ethnic studies for people of color and what I've found is of course it has been very beneficial for students of color but also even our white students it's important to hear the stories our history from the perspective of people of color right and so my question is what advice do you have for students who want to continue fighting for social justice in particular racial justice well I think the most important advice that I can give you is to start with yourself you know the way we're gonna build this movement sometimes we think it's about you know having all the facts at your disposal and then convincing someone of the problem with a bunch of facts but I got to tell you I think stories and personal narrative are just as important and the one thing we all have control over is our narrative we have the ability to tell our stories the reason that we're the way that we're gonna be able to get people to turn against these ice deportations for instance the way that we're gonna get people to embrace the dreamers the way that we're gonna get people to embrace you know black folks in the city who were under the gun literally but from law enforcement is people have got to start to hear the the lived experience of the folks in question it's the same thing if you think about LGBTQ liberation as a movement the reason that things have moved quickly in the last 15 or 20 years thankfully not quickly enough but more quickly than before is because folks got to know and realize that in their lives in their family in their friends circle in their community where plenty of gay lesbian bisexual and transgendered folks that maybe they didn't know where LGBTQ and now they do and once you know somebody once you have that relationship once you hear their story right it becomes harder to continue to pursue inequality and injustice so we got to start telling our stories and we can do that with new media we can do that with film we can do that with podcasting we can do that online we can do that with social media we can share our stories and make sure that they get out there in a number of different ways it can be through art it can be through music you can be through poetry right and I just want people to start where they are sometimes we think real big picture and we need to start where we are at and where we're at is with our story and when we tell our story that's when things begin to open up I think for movement space so I would start there thank you yes hi but I also don't know how to start breaking more barriers when it comes to racial inequality so how do we get started on changing the way that races are viewed among each other and what can we do to continue fighting well I think the answer to that is similar to the one I just offered I think the way that we're going to break through some of the barriers particularly the way in which people view each other and treat one another is going to be through the sharing of personal narrative and story and that might mean you know talking about when you talk about breaking barriers right talking about what that was like what what the struggles are that you've overcome to get where you are in life and by the way we all ought to do that at the same time we got to tell the truth about all the help we've had because every one of us who's overcome any obstacle has had some help whether that's you or whether that's me now the difference is folks of color usually know they had help right and and poor folks of all color they generally know they had help it's middle class and above folks and particularly white folks who tend to think I did it all on my own but actually we've all had help that help might have been about white privilege it might have been about male privilege it might have been about luck it might have just been that mentor that we had in third grade or that teacher that believed in us when nobody else did so part of how we're gonna break down these walls is by telling the truth about how we got from point A to point a for what or wherever we're at on our trajectory and making sure people understand that all of us had help because if I know that you had help and you know that I had help and we know that they had help then it becomes easier to actually give help and to assist other people and to be there for them rather than saying we'll just go get it on your own once you're clear that you didn't get it on your own and I didn't get it on my own then I don't look at you and say well you need to get it on your own then we are actually working together rather than against one another yes real quick all right this is I'm being told this is it I'm sorry about that yeah well you said something really profound changing race in 2011 with Van Jones and Maurice a theresa kumar you were you were answering the question and what angers you most about the right and you decided to answer what angers you most about the liberal left is that we all have our little niches and in order to fight for a better healthcare better jobs better education these all have to become anti-racist organizing yeah can you please expand on that yeah the point I was making was that you know when you look at the left broadly defined and that means anything from maybe Liberal Democrats over to much more radical and revolutionary voices most of the time not always most of the time the left and progressive folks are in their little silo so you've got the people who were working on progressive education reform and you've got people who are working on health