Good evening, everyone. Good evening. Welcome to the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics.
My name is Anais Killian, and I'm a first year at the college concentrating in government and... and molecular and cellular biology. I'm a member of the JFK Junior Forum. Before we begin, please note the exit doors, which are located on both the park side, over there, and JFK Street, over there. In the event of an emergency, walk to the exit closest to you and congregate in the JFK Park.
Please also take a moment now to silence your cell phones. Please join me in welcoming Anushka Chander, 25. Hi everyone, it is great to see you all here for this amazing forum that we have coming up. I'm sure you guys are going to really enjoy hearing from our speaker, Maya Wiley, this evening. So my name is Anushka. I'm a sophomore at the college and I'm concentrating in social studies and African and African-American studies and I'm also a member of the forum committee.
So as a young woman of color I know firsthand how critical it is to bring conversations about anti-racism onto college campuses. My peers of color and I have shared lamentations about the micro and macro aggressions that we have faced because of our identities at the hands of both individuals and institutions and particularly Harvard, the university itself recently released a detailed report on its ties to enslavement and they've committed a hundred million to implement the committee's recommendations including increasing partnerships with HBCUs and constructing a public memorial to those enslaved on Harvard's campus. Nationwide, demands for racial justice have been met with some success but little transformative action. I'm honored therefore to introduce Maya Wiley, a phenomenal leader in the ongoing fight for civil rights.
to share her vision for leading the nation through a national backlash against racial injustice and unprecedented threats to American democracy. Maya Wiley is the president of the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights which advocates for civil rights advancement at all levels of government. During her career she has worked on racial justice issues at the ACLU and the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and she served on the Civil Division for the US Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York City. She's an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and from 2014 to 2016, she was the first black woman to serve as counsel for Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City.
In 2021, she ran an exciting campaign to be mayor of New York City as well. Our discussion today will also be moderated by Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project and the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The Institutional Anti-racism Accountability Project works to advance the core value of anti-racism in institutions through policy and research. So please join me in a round of applause and welcome to our speakers.
Thank you so much for joining us. This is a real... Honor and treat for me especially because I got to know President Wiley during my time running a cultural and research institute in New York City.
The cultural and research institute in New York City. So, thank you very much. She reminded me that her invitation to come here was greeted enthusiastically in spite of a very busy schedule as a newly.
installed president of this organization at a time that could not be more difficult for the kind of work that you do, have done for your entire career. So since we are joined tonight by a number of students, some my own, undergraduates, etc., and many people watching on livestream, tell us a little bit more about your journey to this point in your career, the choice you made to be a public servant, to do public service, to do work for the common good. It's obviously an important theme for students. students affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School. Yeah, well thank you and it's a pleasure to be here.
And one of the reasons I said yes is because it was Khalil. And then I could talk about him for leaving us in New York City. And the other reason is because students asked.
And I say that because we're leaving you with a mess. So we're doing our best, but also because the work we all do is the work you're doing and the work you're studying. studying to do, so thank you. Oh, my journey. So this is, I was always gonna do public service in some form.
And I say that not as, I say that because I grew up with parents who were activists. So it wasn't that we were told, my brother's been in the public sector, he works for Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, that it wasn't that our parents said, you have to. continue in the tradition. It's just that you were in it.
And there was something, you know, I'm sitting here now as my own two daughters are college students, thinking about the fact that, you know, my generation is a unique one because I was literally born at the feet of the civil rights movement. I mean, literally. Like, our family activities were protest demonstrations, you know, and that literally was, if you wanted to see Dad, you know, you had to go to the sit-in. And that, and it was the tail end, it was the beginning of the economic justice movement. But still heavy organizing, direct action.
And in a context where the country was not okay, but there had been tremendous gains, so that sense of possibility and hope in making more change was significant. And so I, it's very hard to describe that energy of movement in that time, and I was just a little kid in it. But it was infectious and there was just nothing else you wanted to do but to continue that and to be a part of something That had so much meaning for so many people and in my own situation Because of who my parents were even though my parents were highly educated You know we live in the hood and they were aware that we were talking. Oh, we're talking about DC.
I grew up in DC my father had been An organic chemistry professor at the University of Syracuse, this black man who got a degree in chemistry at a time when that was a rare thing. And my mother was also at the university as a graduate student, not in chemistry, don't get it twisted, in the English department, but also an activist, and that's how they kind of connected. But we moved to D.C.
because he wanted to, after being an organizer on... Urban renewal and school segregation and housing segregation decided he really wanted to work at the intersection of race and poverty and decided that meant organizing black women on welfare. And so we moved to D.C.
when I was just two years old so that he could do that. And he founded the National Welfare Rights Organization. But this, in part I say that because I went to the neighborhood public school, which was black.
It was segregated. It was overcrowded. And it was not fun.
and I was at the top of my class and by the second grade I was two years behind grade level and at the top of my class. Now think about this. I had two parents who between them had eight graduate institutions.
My parents left me before I went to kindergarten. I had the privilege of being in an experimental, in a nursery school program because my mother was working just like my dad so she had to stick me somewhere but it was this as a result it was this like National Child Research Center it was like this cutting-edge early childhood education in other words I my parents did everything parents are told they're supposed to do to ensure that you're ready to be successful in school and by all measures I was successful because I was at the top of my class Except by second grade, I was two years behind. So my own personal experience because of the choices my parents made, because of who I was friends with, who I was surrounded by, which were these powerful women who scared the hell out of me. And we're on welfare, and we're organizing as women on welfare.
All of that, even from a very, very, very young age, it was, my parents weren't saying, we have systemic racism, dear. They were saying, they weren't saying anything. I was just living it.
Right. And I was living it in privilege. And so once you have that experience, and when I, and my mother switched me to private school because at this point she figured I can't sacrifice your education now for our principals. But I felt so much guilt for then ending up in Walter Mondale's daughter's school.
When all my other classmates were not. And it was in, it was, um, and when my best friend disappeared because her mother was evicted. I mean literally disappeared, like I went to meet her on the street corner one day and she didn't show up. And it was because she, her mom was, and her mom was a cashier at the grocery store down the block. And so when you, when those are your formative experiences, But and you see your parents fighting, you're just like, I don't know what that is.
I don't know what that job is. It's just like there's no choice. So what or how I didn't know that I figured out years later but it was just always gonna happen. Well that's inspiring and I know for a lot of students here the personal is the political.
A lot of the lived experiences do inform the choices that they make for careers and we certainly heard in in your bio some of the big decisions you've made. So let's talk about the most recent one to accept this leadership role. This is an organization that is 72 years old. It was founded in 1950. But without going too far out on the limb, if we took a poll, I would venture to guess that less than half the people in the room would say, I know what they do. Are we going to do a test now?
No, we're not going to do a test. We're not going to do a pop quiz. We're not going to put your organization on the spot like that.
No, no, no. Let's raise your hand. If you know what the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights does, raise your hand. It's okay.
No judgment. Okay, see it's not even half. Not even half. Not even close.
Fraction. Yeah. So tell us about this organization.
Give us a little bit of its origin story and why it's so important right now. I'm happy to. So the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is literally the nation's oldest civil rights coalition. and its largest.
We are 230 organizations strong. It was founded in 1950, I'll say a little bit more about what it is today, but it was founded in 1950 by Roy Wilkins who headed the NAACP, by A. Philip Randolph, sleeping car porters, and Arne Aronson who was a very important progressive Jewish leader.
And the idea and the behind it was, and remember 1950, so we haven't had one Brown v. Board, you know, think about this, Montgomery bus boycott. It was, but it was this recognition that the civil rights movement, which remember did not start in the 50s. I just want to say this, it did not start in the 1950s. It started with abolition of slavery. That was the, that this is the continuation of the Civil Rights Movement, but it was a recognition that we must have a presence inside Washington to win federal legislation and to support multiracial coalition building to win it.
And at that time, multiracial pretty much meant black and Jewish. And also because it could be a platform for also dealing with some of the tensions between blacks and Jews. Which was also very real even as the Jewish community were very important parts of allies in the civil rights movement.
So it was always meant to be a bridge builder but also a convener that would fundamentally be pushing and mobilizing legislation and it really started with the first call was a mobilization that brought together 4,000 leaders from across the country to talk about winning voting rights and fighting employment discrimination and it helped organize the March on Washington in 1963. So every time you talk about voting rights, that was a leadership conference. And when I say the leadership conference, I mean a coalition of groups working with the leadership conferences, the organizational platform. So today, 230 organizations were labor unions, as well as the traditional civil rights groups, civil liberties, religious.
organizations, we've got Sikh, Muslim, Jewish. We do not have Catholics, they left us over abortion. That's okay, because to be a member, you should be on principle.
I don't mean we don't welcome you back, but you know, we do have principles and we need members to adhere to the principles, but otherwise we're very, very diverse racially, we're very diverse on issues, we're multi-sectoral, and we still form the platform. For every single major piece, including Americans with Disabilities Act, if you think of every major piece of civil rights legislation we've had, old or new, the Leadership Conference has been the platform for winning them. But it's not the only thing we do, and I'm just going to add this because it's the best. Even if you knew the leadership, okay, so the four of you who raised your hands, how many of you know that we do capacity and field building out in the community?
And maybe unpack that a little bit. What does that mean precisely? So what it means precisely is because we have, so we have a field team, right? So we are a platform, we work through our members, we convene, we coalition build.
But take voting rights. We could do this on whether it's census, voting rights, getting the citizenship question off of the census form. We actually work with community based and state based partners, not just on what's happening inside the Beltway cuz we wanna make sure everybody knows even if they're not a member organization.
But we also want people to win locally and in their states. And so we'll do trainings and capacity building on issues, whether it's education, criminal justice. We actually do some field grants.
We've supported building some of the black women's voter. GOTV efforts in places like Alabama. We'll help do organizational capacity building if it's how to set up a 501c3.
So the reality is if you look at our footprint, it's not only our 230 members, it's actually the work we do. Anybody, any organization that has any contact with us, we make sure they get all of the materials we have to share. And so we make sure we're trying to build the civil rights infrastructure in this country wherever we can. So I put together just a little list to give a little bit of texture to these 230 organizations.
So they include Amnesty International, Alaska Federation of Natives, the ACLU, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which is a historically black sorority, the Arab American Institute Foundation. and the Asian Pacific Islander Labor Alliance. And that's just a few with the letter A. You didn't say AFT? No, no, there's plenty more.
Yeah, we go down the union list too. But, I mean, in a way that probably most people don't really appreciate, this is an embodiment of precisely this multiracial, cross-class, cross-intersectional coalition building that often people pine for, but actually has. been in play and I guess it begs the question to what degree does the Leadership Conference not seek a lot of public facing attention in order to be effective. Yeah I would say you know traditionally it's in the tradition of the Leadership Conference that you not know who we are. In other words you know the fact that only four you raise your hands is not actually a surprise because we've been the platform right and so the point is The work of the members is the work of the body.
So we're like the spine, in a way, of just this massive group. I will also say this, I am shy of raising our profile. And she accepted this invitation.
But the reason I think it's important for us to raise our profile, it's not about credit. See, this is the, we have been intentionally, and I say we because I've been a part of the Leadership Conference in different ways for years. Because I was a young lawyer at the ACLU, which was a member, I was a young lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, I got sent to D.C.
to work through the Leadership Conference on access to health care issues when Clinton was president and said he was going to do massive health care reform. And I was like, why am I litigating if we could change the system so we don't have to litigate? So I was sent to work through the Leadership Conference to help be part of the organizing of how to get racial justice into healthcare reform back in the day. So for me, it's a homecoming because it's always been part of the the apparatus of our collective work.
What I would say, though, about this moment, and it's not a moment, it's really it's an era that we're in right now where it's not it's this is not a blip on a radar. This is not Trump was in office and now he's not. What we're facing in terms of the absolute unapologetic attack on democracy and on pluralism and on inclusion and on justice and on fundamental rights is actually something that's been constructed over the past 20 or some odd years, at least a decade.
No one can argue with me about a decade. I would argue it's been longer, but I say that because people are actually demoralized. And the reason it's important for us not to be in the shadows, it's just important for folks to recognize how much power we actually have when we're together, and the fact that we are the majority.
And when I say we, I mean all of that. Right, right. But we who believe in justice, we who believe in freedom, we who believe in inclusion, we who believe that folks should be able to Go to college and not be bankrupt. We who believe in all these things and collective bargaining, we believe that you should be able to decide what your gender identity is and who you are. love and who you marry, or whether you start a family or not.
Like that is, this is the majority. And so unless we start to make that felt and known, I fear, I fear that too many will give up and let this this era become the future. And that we cannot do. Yeah, you transitioned nicely into how we, thank you, yeah. Transition nicely to this conversation about the health of American democracy.
My setup, which I'm going to share although my moment has passed, but my setup was that we had we had Vladimir Zelensky here virtually. just this week, a sitting war president. I've asked people how often has that happened here at the Kennedy School, maybe a lot, I'm not sure. But it's-A sitting war comedian president.
Right, yes. Top that. Maybe that's a first. but in many ways you could say the position you hold is a position of a war president, as a metaphor for precisely what you just described in terms of the stakes. And I spend a lot of time engaging with my students around this question of can you understand the existential threat to American democracy or democracy, liberal democracy in many parts of the world right now without understanding the role of race or racism or colonialism?
And so I put the question to you. If you want to put the question to me, put me at a job today that's fine but but otherwise you should answer truthfully yes no but let's unpack this because I oftentimes people think of these as we should we could do racial justice like let's opt into that when it seems relevant when there's a police shooting for example or we could work on democracy because that's really important right and I'm wondering how you explain to people that these things are inseparable so let's Let's start by saying what is democracy for? What's the purpose of democracy? Oh, you're supposed to answer that. No, really, what's the, what, yes?
Everyone has a say, right? I mean that's, I think that is pretty much well understood as democracy. I will take it one step further.
Everyone has a say no matter what they look like, no matter how they got there, no matter what their heritage is. that the fundamental problem democracy is trying to solve is how to be a pluralist society. Because from the inception, and not just of this country, I mean, I think we, you know, this is not just the United States of America. I lived and worked in South Africa for two years, you know, and it's not, it ain't just South Africa either, right? Like we, that's what colonialism represents.
Like we have, but the truth of this country is this has been the fundamental struggle from the inception, right, from the inception. And you can't even understand, I was teasing Khalil when I heard what the course he's teaching. And I was like, I mean. I forgot the title, but it's basically race all up in here. That's basically how I interpreted the title of the class.
But it's like, okay. I'm going to summarize race all up in here. But yeah, but whether it's native and look, you know, we're not only talking about chattel slavery, right? We are talking about indigenous population and the effort to enslave them. I'll tell you one other thing I bet you may not know.
This is always a danger to do with a historian. So did Britain have slavery before the colonizing North America? Yes, it did.
Had the law of the extractor in 1583 where it tried to impoverish, and it tried to make basically a form of forced servitude on those who were poor. And it didn't work. I mean, their backlash worked for a while. And by the way, who do you think were the biggest victims? Women, single women.
Because they were the most vulnerable to being essentially enslaved for being penniless. But essentially, if you didn't have a job, if you didn't have a place to live, a landowner could force you into service, legally. Okay, I just call that slavery. I don't know what you call it, but I call that slavery. But it backfired because it was too morally reprehensible, even to the landed gentry at a certain point.
But then, and this is also the the story of colonization of places like South Africa is part of the problem was excess population. So it's like, let's get rid of some. Let's send them off to, you know, let's send them off.
We can get rid of our poor rather than just having them. So there is an origin stories of Australia, New Zealand. I mean, look, we could go across the map on colonization and it happened in the United States too in its own.
And there was an assumption they were gonna enslave indigenous people. Except that didn't work out so well, right? I'm covered a lot. You covered a lot of that. You covered a lot of that.
But the reason I say this, even as we come to understand gender and class did not form in the absence of developing a concept of race. And it really, so if I, this is such an important point because when we are looking today at the overruling of Roe v. Wade, right, and we, I was just having, I was at a civil rights conference that Legal Defense Fund has, training institute every year, and we were talking about this this morning, but Dobbs, so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna jump over then all that, because you know, race all up in here, is if you fast forward to Dobbs, you know, the The reproductive freedom community was raising alarm bells for years about Roe being overweight, right? Years! And the reason they could was because of Casey, which was also overruled, because the truth is, the truth is, you could take away the right without overruling Roe because you could just make it so dang hard, particularly for low-income women, women of color, to just get the abortion. But because the miners canary, right, was race and poverty, because people were privileged could still get it, it was kind of like, hmm.
So now we're here, now we're here with everybody done, like now got to see it's maybe gone, and marking out what else is coming. Kind of like, you know, that Little pesky problem of seven decades of fascism called the Jim Crow South. Yeah, which we're just going back to.
Right, but now it's coming home to roost for bigger swaths of America and not just black southerners who could be kept from the polls. Well, and what's so important, yes, and what's so important about recognizing this in this time for is how do we get here? How do we get here?
We got here in 2010 by saying voter fraud. You know the big lie is the big old lie. Trump didn't make it up.
He may have perfected its implementation and took it to national policy but this has been... but the fear of who, who is it who was stealing democracy by voting when they were unlawfully allowed to, not allowed to. Who? Mexicans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, right? It was this influx of demographic shift.
It was people of color from down south. It was a little farther to the south than our down south. A little farther south, yeah.
Right? South-south. South-south. We saw it in healthcare reform under Obama in 08. Why was it that we were supposed to be so worried about healthcare reform? It's all these undocumented immigrants that were going to get it.
I mean I'm saying this to you because I can go and find the ads for you. I can go and play for you tape from religious radio, right-wing radio, that started by the way two years before Obama even won office, pairing illegal immigration and healthcare. I was listening to it driving from Biloxi to New Orleans after Katrina. So these things are in The race baiting around why we should unravel democracy, why we should unravel people having a say. The wrong people having a say.
It's the wrong people having a say. I never told this story here at the school, but when I moved to Indiana, it was summer of 2005. Hey, Magda. And, you know, my family, black family moving into a. overwhelmingly white community. It's a college town, about 90% white, 4% black, 4% Latino, and the rest Asian and other.
Anyway, within a week of moving into our subdivision, our driveway was leafleted. Pick up the leaf, the pamphlet, and it was a KKK rally flyer, except in the interest of inclusion, it was a KKK flyer. To protest Mexican immigration.
So you know that was 2005 in the heartland before Obama was president. So speaking of South-South, Florida may be the most southern place in America these days and I'm wondering aside from the state legislative activity and Ron DeSantis as governor and and potentially a 2024 presidential candidate. I am struck, and maybe some of you are, by the absence of a visible movement of advocates and activists on the ground in Florida that we can read about, that we can see with our own eyes, that are occupying the. steps of the state capitol. So what is or isn't actually happening in Florida given that one could reasonably argue that it is ground zero for the next massive attack on American democracy?
You know so I want to I want to preface this by saying I am not going to pretend to be an expert on Florida. We actually do have, it is actually one of our states, and we do have field team presence and others doing work in Florida, I mean through our coalition. But I want, I think one of the things that we, because this isn't just Florida, like a couple things are happening.
One, there's work and it doesn't get covered. So you know if it's not in the media it's not happening, and of course there's stuff happening and it's not getting... covered in the media because unless it's the right kind of things and often right now particularly in election cycles it's so focused on electoral politics that it can miss the other kinds of organizing that have been happening but you know I think the other reality now that I've said that is also people are overwhelmed with the range of issues they have to contend with and this isn't just because of a governor DeSantis it's also because Of, you know, four years of Donald Trump and all that that portended and then has continued in the form of Trumpism.
By the way, I'm not being partisan here. I mean Trumpism is a thing and it is not by definition Republican, even while we see so many people who are Republicans. In elective office embracing it, but it is not by definition Republican and there are lots of Republicans who are anti Trumpism, right?
Not enough that are being vocal in office, but that that is true and real. But Trumpisms, but the exhaustion of the constant fighting, I mean you see what Ron DeSantis is doing with refugees. I mean that's exhausting to be constantly trying to meet the needs of people. who desperately need their needs met or trying to intervene legally or trying to understand how you can respond to making meaningful progress on criminal justice reform when you have a governor who's literally entrapping people into felony convictions by trying to vote when they should by all rights be able to lawfully vote right so you you have all of these I mean so part of the the evil brilliance Of what has been this Trumpism is its multi-pronged, very highly financed attack on multiple, multiple fronts. So we got reproductive freedom, we got don't say gay, we've got the attack even on just refugees, put us out on other immigrants, refugees.
We've got voting rights and the attack on voting rights. We've got adding police and adding criminalization categories on things that should never have been criminalized in the first place. And all of that with billions of dollars, billions, billions of dollars being put into trying to literally capture the courts, literally 1.6 billion and trying to make sure the corpse are captured by ideologues, billions of dollars funneled into promulgating and then expanding the big lie, disinformation that is funded by wealthy corporate interests. Right? So when you, so people are exhausted and we don't have nearly the resources and the media tends to go to the show.
And the show is so often not these pieces of work unless we make it a show. And we don't make people's pain a show. That's not what we do. I want to push a little bit on this because, I mean, one frame of reference for me, and by the way, we're going to move to Q&A in about five minutes, so if you have a question, this is a good time to stand up in the queue for the mics. We have four in each corner.
Every question ends with a question mark, and so we'll open up in just a moment. But I wanted to push on this for a moment because this is troubling, and I do appreciate the very thorough way in which you defined what is happening and recognize. How exhausting it is for people.
I mean one marker of where we are is say a decade ago in Florida when Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford Florida, young people at a number of colleges in the state including Florida A&M, a historically black college, started an organization called Dream Defenders and they occupied Rick Scott's office. Very prominent coverage of this. They weren't successful. in repealing the Stand Your Ground law, which ultimately became the defense that Zimmerman used to be acquitted for murder, although technically the state doesn't recognize it as murder. So, all that being said, ten years later, here we are ten years later, and we only have young people attempting to just use, I mean, in the tradition of a civil rights movement, the media as a mechanism.
To inspire people that we are here, that we aren't losing, that we are fighting. Well so I think, so one I think you're pointing to an important problem which is part of why I said at the beginning like the folks like the leadership we just have to be more prominent not because we're more important just because you know it has to be clear we have to elevate the hope and the possibility of so much work and so much collaboration coalition and partnership. But I want to also challenge you back, because I think you're both right, and I also think you're skipping over 2020. You're skipping over George Floyd. You're skipping over the activism that was unparalleled and I haven't seen since Trayvon, but it was even bigger than Trayvon. And I will tell you that even though the dominant message machine has become, folks don't like that anymore.
Crime went up because of COVID and now people don't. It is true crime went up and it is true that meant certain things about how people responded to, you know, whether more funding should go into police or not go into police. Nobody backed away from accountability and half of folks polled still thought police didn't need more money. And we lose that and we also lose how much activism and that activism was incredible. It was incredible.
So, and it was not 10 years ago. Now, but I say this cuz it's important context is everything. We can't underestimate the context of COVID.
We can't, I mean even that like imagine that people, New York City was ground zero for COVID, y'all. I mean the psychological impact and trauma of COVID when 36,000 of your people die in a year. And sirens are going every day and night and it's all ambulances. And there are trucks of refrigerated bodies outside of every hospital. Like that, we can't just say, why isn't organizing happening more in the context of a pandemic that we just had?
And in the context also of the, so I'm only saying that not to say you're not wrong, but this is real. And unless we actually really take note. of trauma, of exhaustion, of a lack of resources, and the fact that it's every front that I fear we're going to be too hard on ourselves, too hard on ourselves, rather than saying, and I'm challenging my own staff to do it, rather than say, we can't do it all, y'all.
It all needs to be done. It's all important, and we can't do it all. We've got to make some smart, strategic goals.
focal point investments because we're exhausted, we don't have the resources, and it's on. This is, it is saving democracy, and part of the problem has been it's been everything. So I don't mean there shouldn't be people working on all of it in some way, but we can't all be working on all of it.
And the thing about activism, activists, and I saw this with my parents, I saw my father like literally exhausted because you're trying to respond to everything. And you know what the right does? It picks three things.
It's gonna screw us in the courts, it's gonna lie and get folks elected, and it's gonna make sure it takes a picked abortion. I just want to say one last thing about abortion is to illustrate this point. The Southern Baptist Convention sanctioned abortion during Roe. Sanctioned it.
Evangelicals, largest evangelical convention, sanctioned it for years. It wasn't until like six or eight years later, I forgot the exact number, but years later that it said, oh, abortion, that's a sin against God. When before it, it said abortion is, there's nothing the Bible says you can't.
The reason, going back to it's all race all up in here. That's gonna be the new title of my course. I vote for that.
It's because the civil rights community was winning on desegregating schools and Southern Baptist universities and it became the wedge. But I'm just saying they picked one and ran with it and were willing to run with it for decades and look where it got them. That's my argument. That's a fair one. I mean, I think what I struggle with is everything that DeSantis has put in place has been post-George Floyd.
And the metastasization of Trumpism has intensified since George Floyd. And so, if we're tired and traumatized, so be it. But if the subject of tonight's conversation is a faltering democracy and the crisis of racial justice, then...
you know we better get on it. Did you get on a plane? What do you mean?
Did you go to Florida? No I but I'm thinking about it I might be taking leave next semester. So you know it's a fair question because to me I keep asking I'm not getting good answers and I'm thinking well I'm just gonna who was I with today? I had Isaiah what did I say at lunch?
I said if I could have two months what did I tell you finish the sentence out loud I said if I could have two months free time I Come on. Two months free time. What did I tell you at lunch today I would do with it?
Speak up. Speak up. Say, I would go where? To Florida. Exactly.
Isaiah. Isaiah. I happen to have a day job right now.
Isaiah. Isaiah. Is anything keeping him from taking two months?
All right. Question and answer time. Here we go.
I'm just saying, all right, literally, Stevie Wonder had a song. And it had a line and it said, you can't form a line if you're too afraid to stand alone. All right, all right.
The challenge has been issued. We'll be going, I'm going to be taking Kennedy School students on a summer trip to Florida. We're heading to Florida, folks.
Okay. Yes, sir. Hi, my name's Tenzin.
I'm a first year at the college from New York City. First of all, thank you so much for joining us today. It's an honor to have you here answering student questions. And my question is, right now with the sort of mass galvanization of student organizers online on social media and more recently in virtual spaces because of COVID, what is your advice for students trying to keep longevity in their messaging and hoping to feel the change in the world when media, social media in particular, can feel like an echo chamber? and when justice can feel almost regressive in past years?
Woo, 10 minutes. That's such a good question. I don't have a complete answer, because I think we're all struggling with that, just to be honest.
But let me just say this. Students have a tremendous amount of power. and a tremendous amount of power to get attention. And I do think this is the two clue, because I actually agree with Khalil, we can and should be trying to support more of that, even though I'm going to give him a hard time. But but I think that means really choosing.
I mean, if you because this did happen around George Floyd, this did happen around the citizenship question on the census. So this happened on student debt, right? That that finding what I would say, though, to anything the students is. pick, pick and focus.
It doesn't have to be just one issue, but it shouldn't be like everything. And the truth is, you know, to me, I would say voting, criminal justice, and something that is an economic, you know, like I loved, I love student debt for all the reasons that are obvious. It was such a critical issue.
I would love it to be about free college because student debt cancellation wasn't enough, but whatever it is. whatever it is, just recognize that if you're, to be very, very sharp around messaging, right? So that it's a simple message and that you organize around that message and then take that into whatever you're doing in direct action because the ability to do it and to get the attention is very strong and powerful. And the only, and I think it's true for all of us, we just have to get much more focused. Thank you.
Next question, please. Please. Hello. My name is Michael. I'm a sophomore at the college from Westchester, New York.
And I wanted to talk a little bit more about that coalition. It's very interesting to me. It sounds incredible, bringing 230 groups together.
I feel like any time you get good people in a room, good things happen. But I'm very curious to hear more about, tangibly, this idea of a coalition. What is it actually adding?
What is that added value? And I think a good way to think about that is through the counterfactual. What wouldn't be happening? without this coalition. So this, it's a really good question and look, first of all let me just say you don't bring, just bring together 230 groups because it's too many.
So we organize through task forces. So because some groups are going to, because not every group doesn't work on every issue. So you know we have a task force that works on voting, we have a task force that works on criminal justice, we have a task force on immigration, you know we have task force structure.
Now we share information with the entire coalition about all issues. And coalition members will get involved in other issues even if they're not in the task force. But it creates the ability for multiple groups to have leadership, you know, in issue areas where they have more expertise, time, and attention.
So the difference is sometimes it's stopping bad stuff from happening, to be quite frank. In the Trump years, it was like getting, it was a task, that coalition structure is what got the citizen question off the census. In the context of voting rights, It's exactly why Freedom to Vote and John Lewis got through the House twice. That's what coalition does. Because let me just tell you what happens.
You know, lawmakers don't all agree, even if they're in the same party. So you have to be able to organize constituency, not just experts, but constituency. And that's what that membership coalition, membership allows you to leverage.
And trust and believe when a politician sees a hundred groups signed on to a letter saying no you better not or we need you to do X, we can show you the proof points of that legislation advancing or stopping. Now you don't always win. Sometimes it takes us ten years to win.
There's legislation we've won that's taken ten years. There's like we're not going to go away on Freedom to Vote Act and and and John Lewis. We're not going to go away on George Floyd.
But here's the other thing. It also empowers and builds the work out in the field. So my example on voting rights, Alabama, we were able, as a result of having a coalitional platform, we can leverage some resources and do a memorandum of understanding and get resources to black organizers in South Carolina and Alabama who are four people, not because there's some mass...
Who are now going and knocking on doors, explaining, and we're giving the educational resources. And when necessary, we can pull in the election protection and the lawyers who can bring the litigate, because we've got the legal groups in the coalition, we've got the election protection groups in the coalition. So we can pull on the expertise and the work and the resources of this coalition to bear in places, as we also build up the capacity of people to do the work.
I've got a field organizer doing work with formerly incarcerated people in criminal justice reform in Savannah, Georgia, and in a southern city in California. But we can't do that without coalition because we also can't leverage the other resources that need to be brought to bear when necessary. Thank you. Hi, my name's Ben.
Oops, sorry. Hi, my name's Ben. I'm a freshman in the college. Hi, I didn't see you. On the topic of racial justice, reparations have become increasingly prevalent in the national conversation.
I was wondering if you could speak to your organization's view on this. So, as you know, there's a bill in Congress to establish a commission to look at reparations. I know that's frustrating, but it's a step. We support that legislation and have worked on it. We're having a congresswoman...
Barbara Lee here at a conference on October 20th, virtually. Yep, and Shirley Jackson Lee has really been a champion of this. So we continue to support that.
Obviously, we think you need more than a commission, but, you know, it's a good starting point. But we actually look at reparations. So we were trying to get Medicaid gap expansion in the Inflation Reduction Act because there are 2.2 million people in this country who do not have health insurance because they... Can't afford the exchanges and they don't qualify for Medicaid.
2.2 million, 600,000 of them are people of color. And they're in the same states that are banning abortion. So then when you talk about women of color, we talk about black women, maternal deaths and childbirth, that's a racial justice issue.
So, but to me, that's also a form of how we're trying to change systems and get folks what they need. recognizing that you have to look at who's been excluded because of racism. So that's on in depth on reservations. I mean, in other words, that's not just about black folks. That's in a bunch of different contexts.
So we actually look at our economic justice platform from the vantage point of racial justice and where and how we get more and better systems change that creates more prosperity and opportunity and reverses some of that history. So that's not, obviously there's a lot more we're going to be figuring out to do but that is a particularly important lens that we use and we talk about race very explicitly. whether we're talking about canceling student debt, whether we're talking about Medicaid gap, whether we're talking about child tax credit, all of those things we also do with a broad race lens.
Thank you. My name is Bernice. I'm a first year at the college and I'm from Indiana, actually. So my question is that I know there is an issue of race in America and that's something that's very accessible to talk about in spaces of education.
in blue states or in major cities, but coming from Indiana, that's a place where, I mean, your experience is just one of many that shows that there is major problems there, and it's not even necessarily acknowledged by the majority that there is a problem. So how would you suggest making an impact in talking about these issues in those areas? So this is something I've actually done some work on in terms of both cognitive and social psychology, taking into message testing and actually working on messages. So the first is credible messengers matter.
So not just working on what's the message, but who's delivering it. because it matters a lot for people to, particularly if they're starting from a different framework, to be talking to someone who they see as someone who understands their experience. I say that because it really does matter.
It is not on people of color to be educating white people all the time. It's also not effective all the time. But what it does mean is two things. One, we have to actually talk in ways that invite the frame break, I would call it. You know, and so.
one thing that we have to do a lot more is break the frame. So the big individualism, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, right? Those are big American myth frames that take white hierarchy and suggest that it's merit-based rather than essentially generations of affirmative action for people who are white.
And yes, I did say that intentionally here at Harvard. That that is actually, right? But you don't start... but I'm not going to communicate to someone like that by saying it that way, right?
But I'm going to say a frame break example starting by saying, how did you get your college paid for? And then people start talking about their parents had a house, but they had equity in it, and they sacrificed, they refinanced. It's like, oh, your parents, I bet they had the GI Bill. Did you have a GI Bill? Oh, yeah, my grandfather had the GI Bill.
Talk about reparations. So going back to saying... Right, so actually you got all this help from the government. Socialized housing. Socialized housing.
But there is starting with the experience of the people you're talking to, where they're seeing themselves in it, but you're also laying bare the things that have been erased as the investment in their privilege. But rather than saying, you got white privilege because you got this from the government. 50 years ago or your parents or your grandparents. You just talk about what it is without the judgment of it, right?
It's like, yeah, that was great. Black folks weren't allowed to serve and Japanese couldn't serve or discriminate against the service of the military. Didn't get those benefits. My students have been really interested in this question about how do you talk to people.
Yeah. So that's, I mean we could talk more about it, but that's just an example. But it also matters that people like, who look like the people.
having that conversation. All right, so we've got just a few more minutes. We're going to try to get through maybe lightning round. OK.
All right. This is as nice as television. Thank you, Maya and Khalil, for this.
wonderful discussion. I am Chandradu from India. I am in MCMPA course. You have made a very pertinent comment.
Can we understand democracy without understanding race, racism and colonialism? I just want to add one more aspect to it. There is something called as caste and caste discrimination in India.
The oldest democracy, that is US, is struggling with racism and the most populous democracy. that is India, has afflicted with caste discrimination. Before the Nuremberg laws were made, or the Jim Crow laws were made, the caste rules were made and codified 2,000 years prior to all this were made. That is 200 BC. So, my question is...
At least racism here, which is casteism, is equally as important as racism, but very rarely it is acknowledged or even in India it is supported in the name of culture. I don't see anybody here openly subscribing to racism. How can Harvard make it caste system into a learning process here so that the future leaders can understand and see that that kind of discrimination is not practiced anyway.
And how can the people of color and the schedule castes of India, the discriminated people of India, Dalits, can work together for mutual emancipation? Thank you. That's a great question. Yeah, and thank you for raising that.
And it isn't just, I mean, Japan has the Barakhamin and they're... There are Uyghurs in China. These are very important issues. And Roma in Europe.
And one of the things that we used to do, and it makes a big difference. And we do some work on CERD as our way of also being more part of the international community. But I think we need a lot more exchanges. And some of that happened with the Roma and civil rights communities.
back in the 90s, Open Society Foundation did a lot of exchanges to kind of build both a sense of strategies, but also seeing the connections when we were working through the UN and in international spaces. So I think that's a really important thing. And I don't know how much of it Harvard does. I would have assumed it did more.
But it is really important to have those exchanges and bring actually activists and organizers together. And I have been in some of those and they're really powerful and they're also powerful for us who are doing organizing here. Because we we're I saw this in New York City in the context of education is missing the what folks were bringing from countries because we have such a big immigrant population how that was influencing even the conversations about what change we were making in our own communities.
So I think exchanges where we're bringing folks together to have that conversation. Yeah, that's a good question. I'll just say the IHRA project hosted one of the leading scholars of casteism, Siraj Yindi, who wrote a book called Caste Matters and has another book coming out soon. He's now at Oxford, but there have, there are people who do this work in and around and so we can support more of it. Alright, we're gonna close up with just hearing these questions simultaneously, one at a time.
One, two... And three, just get your question out and then she'll do the best she can to kind of take a common theme and that'll be the end of it. Okay, thank you. I'm going to try to wrap this up real quick. First of all, great respect for both of you.
My name is Philip Martin. I'm a Shorenstein fellow this year and an investigative reporter at GBH in Boston. I'm wondering about the role of Antifa and marginalized groups that are on the edge. If we're talking about an existential threat in the United States to democracy, and we are. If we're talking about groups on the ground, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, National NSA 131, so on and so forth, neo-nazis, and we're talking about real threats and people in real fear, I wonder what role these groups on the edge of society that fall within movements like Antifa, what role they play in terms of this pushback that you've described.
It's part of... study I'm working on, but I'm very curious as to how you see their role in this massive pushback of coalitions, if you will. I'll hold that one for you if you don't remember, yes.
Thank you for being here. Super exciting. Your name, quickly.
I'm Anthony. I'm one of Professor Muhammad's students. In races all up in here.
And, you know, there's a lot going on in the world. You mentioned COVID. Roe v. Wade, the backlash on CRT, etc. And we're seeing burnout in the movement, leader transitions, etc. I wanted to know what gives both of you hope today.
And our last question. Thank you again, as everyone has said, for joining us today. To keep it concise, so I'm the proud daughter of two immigrants, and I think a lot of the times in American discourse about justice movements, we kind of forget that immigrants aren't always the most avid participants in this movement, and my theory is that it's because of survival instincts that are really hard to unlearn, but my question to you was, how do we get immigrants more excited about ...about racial justice, especially when they're, you know, sort of dealing with a variety of issues in their own context.
How do we tell them that this is important too? Antifa, hope, and immigrant mobilization. I got this.
You got it, alright. Okay. I actually, I mean, on Antifa I come from the nonviolent organizing history of this country and I, and Antifa, while it is a very very very small part of it, anything that's happening right now.
It has been weaponized against progressive advocacy in a way that is not helpful, not true, and not helpful. So I would. I would argue that what it does is actually reinforce in a very negative way a narrative that we have to counter. What makes me hopeful is the fact that there is, particularly now, such recognition of just how bad it is. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, but no, all these years has been bad.
I started my civil rights career, and I went to college, college with Ronald Reagan being elected that was bad y'all he was our Trump and and and and watching civil rights be unraveled since the 80s which changes people now recognize it and it's hopeful because this is despite Khalil's important point about Florida there is a lot of activism and a lot of energy and a lot of commitment and so now we have to figure out how to effectively work together, giving that a much bigger platform. But I have a lot of hope about that. And on immigrants, I think similarly we're seeing it.
Right? I think similarly, but what it really requires, because I've also seen it go south and go badly, meaning because we don't do, we have not built up enough of a practice, and it's something we struggle with as a coalition, to understand the different cultural backgrounds that influence. how people see the issues of race.
Like in New York City when we were fighting to get rid of high stakes testing and a large chunk of the Asian community, immigrant community, total backlash against it. Even though it was horrible for everyone in a lot of ways, but we had to kind of step back and understand that coming from a different kind of expectation about what those tests represent. right and so not backing up and doing the hard work of actually recognizing these different experiences and assumptions and that come from a different context than the one we're in and it just it takes work but it's worth it when we put it in but I would argue we have to put it in in the right I was just on a panel that was multiracial where at K through 12 education became the argument for the place for that because of everyone's interest in it, but also the tensions around it that we could actually try to work through by understanding people's different vantage points because of their countries of origin. So I just, I have a lot of hope about it actually, but I think this is why coalitions... matters because it creates the space to have those conversations and understanding so we can move forward together well please join me in a rouse browsing applause for my a while