Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose 20240622

What has changed is that in recent years the eyes of more americans have been opened to this truth. Partly because of cameras. Partly because of tragedy. Partly because the statistics cannot be ignored. We cant close our eyes anymore. And the good news and this is truly good news, is that people of all political persuasions are starting to think we need to do something about this. Charlie Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive of a Nonprofit Organization that represents prisoners whose trials are marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct. He has won relief from death row for prisoners and secured life sentences for parole with juveniles. His efforts have been recognized by numerous awards, including the macarthur genius grant and 21 honorary degrees. Archbishop desmond tutu has called him americas young nelson mandela. His memoir just mercy a story of redemption, was named among the 100 most notable books of 2014 by the New York Times book review. It is now out in paperback. I am pleased to have Brian Stephenson at this table for the first time. Welcome. Its great to see you. Tell me what it is you think is the most important question for this country as it considers race. Bryan race and justice, how are we going to recover from our legacy of racial inequality . This history of Racial Injustice that has infected all of us, that has compromised all of our abilities to see one another fairly. I think that is the question we have never taken on. We have never really tried to to confront the legacy of slavery. I think we need to talk about slavery. People look at me hard when i say that. I dont think we have ever dealt with that legacy. Slavery was really horrific in this country. For me to great evil wasnt involuntary servitude, it wasnt forced labor, the great evil of american slavery was the narrative of racial difference we created the legitimated the ideology of white supremacy. And that consciousness, that narrative was never addressed by the 13th amendment. That is why i argued to say we didnt say any we didnt change anything. Charlie what we think about race and color. Bryan there is a dangerous assumption of guilt assigned to black and brown people we have never freed ourselves from. We lynched people in the first half of the 20th century because ofthat presumption dangerousness and guilt. We separated ourselves and we still do. Now on the streets, when people see colors there is this presumption that they are dangerous. Or guilty. We are not going to make progress until we free ourselves. I think we need truth and reconciliation in america. And we have never had that. Charlie this is exactly understanding by understanding the theme he is writing to as well. He is reaching back to slavery and its implications. As well. He is reaching back to slavery. Bryan the fact my friend was gunned down can not be treated to the fact he was mistaken for another black person that was a suspected criminal. Certain presumptions were made about that. It doesnt matter at the end of the day. It is a broad systemic thing. Charlie you believe this is the forward projection of history from slavery. Bryan very much so. Unless there is a serious reckoning with this we are going to keep going over and over again on the same thing. I dont mean to harp on this, this question of what race, i think it is one of those sort of distractions. I think we did damage by creating a culture that tolerated the ideology of white supremacy. We have black people in los angeles and cleveland and new york and boston and minneapolis, and those people didnt go to those communities because they were immigrants looking for opportunities. They were refugees from terror. They fled the deep south. If you knew anything about refugee communities they had to do with the trauma these refugees bring with them. I dont think we have been talking about the civil rights we havent. I dont think we have been talking about the Civil Rights Movement the right way. We should reflect on the damage it has been done in ive heard people talk about the Civil Rights Movement and it sounds like a threeday carnival. On day one rose parks didnt change seats on a bus, on day two Martin Luther king marched on washington and on day three we changed the law. A lot of people went back to d. C. End refused to vote for a reinforcement of the voting right because they do not see that connection. We humiliated black people on a daily basis. We battered and beat and excluded. We told black people they werent smart enough to go to school, they werent good enough to vote. Charlie we did the same thing to women. Bryan we did. In ways that made it difficult for many men to see women as capable, and we have been pushing against that narrative. And that narrative has shifted somewhat by allowing women to present themselves in these ways. We need to do the same thing in regards to race. I think we congratulate ourselves to quickly. We ended racial terror when we did. We ended racial segregation when we did not and we are now seeing manifestations of that same thinking in the air of mass incarceration. I think we have to repair all the damage that this legacy has done. Im not focused on money. That is not the kind of frustration that will ultimately get us to a better place. There are generations that are white that were taught quickly or indirectly that theyre better than other people. I want to help the Community Free itself from that life. You cannot from that lie. The recreational work i would like to see, i would like us to mark the spaces where the slave trade was made evident. We should be marking every lynching that took place in this country. Charlie how . Bryan monuments and memorials, and force this country to engage in the sober reflection we need to engage in so that no one can be proud of a Confederate Heritage that actually defended and sustained slavery, so that no one is confused about the fact that it wasnt the good old days in the beginning of the 20th century, so no one can be indifferent to the demise asian of black people, because we thought about what that the demise nation represents. In south africa there was a recognition you couldnt recover from without truth and reconciliation. In rwanda there is a recognition there will not be peace. You go to germany and you cant go 100 meters in berlin without seeing markers and stones placed in front of homes where jewish families were abducted. The germans want you to go to the camps and reflective soberly on the history of the holocaust. Postunification. They did an effort to deal with the legacy of the holocaust more than we have done in 160 years since the end of slavery. Charlie in germany and other places in europe there is a nazi sympathy. Charlie even though it is a collectors thing, the big thing about nazi uniforms and all that, should we feel the same way in your judgment about heritage, anything to do with the confederacy . Bryan i do. We should be more sober than we are. Alabamas confederate memorial day is a state holiday in alabama. We dont even have Martin Luther king day. It is Martin Luther king day robert e lee day. It is not even that we are neutral or silent about those sinks. We are celebrating those things. And you cannot celebrate those things and move forward with reconciliation. Charlie you have suggested the confederacy was only about protecting slavery. Bryan it was primarily about slavery. Charlie so anyone who fought on the side of the confederates was in fact giving his approval to slavery . Bryan i dont think there is any doubt that had the south one won the war, slavery would have continued. We try to make these arguments but we recognize that slavery was bad. It is a false way of thinking about identity. There were white people in the south in the 19th century who were against slavery. And nobody knows their names. There were white people against lynching, against segregation. We should know their names and we should honor them. If you want to have a state holiday, have it after them. But to engage in this false narrative that demonizes those victims by not recognizing it absolutely does. It would be insulting to say that people in germany were still execute people in gas chambers. I think it is a human rights crisis, a human rights oppression that crushed millions of lives. It devastated the aspirations of an entire race of people, and it did something destructive to our moral consciousness. We have tried to make peace with our enslavement of other human beings and it has left us not as morally evolved as it needs to be. It made us in vulnerable to tolerating lynching and tolerating segregation. One in three black male babies is going to go to prison. Charlie barack obama, when he had assumed office, had gone in front of congress and said what you said at this table today. Should he have done that and would that have begotten a National Dialogue . Or that have prevented any conversation about anything else . Bryan i think it would have done the latter. There arent any shortcuts on this. I dont think we can elect a president and make the president responsible for facilitating this conversation. Charlie why cant we look at him as a catalyst to this conversation . Bryan it can and should be a catalyst. What i dont think we can expect these problems to be solved from the top down. These need to begin in communities. That doesnt mean i dont have expectations for the president for our elected leaders. There are things we can and should be doing. The challenge this president had is because of this perception that he is black and the racial narrative is so intense, we have to worry he is only going to be the president for the black people. So he had to engage in posturing that made it harder for him to talk about race issues than it would have been were he white. I think there was this fear in many parts of this country that if we somehow elect a black president he is going to prioritize the needs of the black people in ways that the rest of us should be afraid. It is that thinking that is rooted in this very narrative. Charlie none of that was set in in the campaign. None of the democratic primaries or general election come of it to prioritize bryan no, but you saw it in a way that he reacted in every thing that there was a racial component too. Im not suggesting that doesnt mean you cant do things, because you cant should. But it does mean we have to deal with this problem in a much broader way. Bryan there was this hypersensitivity to any act or gesture that was responsive to the problems of racial violence. We talked about the outrage of trayvon martin. I think that speaks to the immaturity of our countrys capacity to talk honestly about race. You say Racial Justice they start looking for the exit. What are we afraid of . I think if we actually understood the history more clearly and understood there is liberation on the other side of this issue we can actually get to a place where we all feel liberation. We are all burdened by this history. We keep making mistakes, white people say things and create tension with black people, black people are put in positions when we dont feel comfortable. We can run, but we cant hide. Charlie who is deserving of any of the responsibility . Bryan we all have responsibility. It gets assigned to young black boys notches by white people but by young black men too. We have all been affected by the way this narrative has evolved. I think it is time for us to move forward by continuing to see these manifestations come up Police Officer shooting unarmed black kids in the street, declining opportunities and the stations, a Police Officer shooting these manifestations, a Police Officer shooting an unarmed black kids in the streets, declining opportunities. They are suffering from trauma by the time they are five years of age. Largely because they are black and poor. Charlie the lingering pervasive impact of slavery in terms of how we see each other. You are suggesting we need a dialogue. If you were in charge of the dialogue, where would you take it and how would you engage it . Bryan i would begin by getting everyone in this country to be more attentive to how this narrative of racial difference has been created. Why we feel this way, why it is we are so indifferent to the plight of people who we have massacred. The indigenous population in this country. We havent understood the way in which many of our current policies replicate this idea that we could come in and claim something and displace other people without implicating our own moral compass. We had asians on the west coast not that long ago in concentration camps because we feared people. Because of their ancestry. We allowed that policy to allow a something brutal and cruel. If we are not careful in our hysteria around terrorism we will do the same thing. It is that consciousness that we need to build on. Hysteria will cause us to do incredibly misguided inhumane things. Essential ingredients to oppression are fear and anger. If you want to understand oppression, want to understand genocide, want to understand the holocaust, there is always a narrative of fear and anger behind it. It could be a whole range of things. We preach it and make people afraid. That is what allowed the south to violently overtake the politicians. That is what they used to put 2. 3 Million People in jail and 70 Million People on the roster of folks of criminal arrests. I dont think any of us have done enough. There is tremendous suffering in this country. There has never been a time in america where there are more innocent people in jails and prisons. Charlie there has never been a time where there are more innocent people in jails then bryan we went to 2. 3 Million People in prisons today. Charlie , to go to your personal experiences any moment as a lawyer. There are those that would argue it is not about race, it is not economics. It is poverty, lack of opportunity, those things. Bryan those are very powerful forces. You cannot deny poverty is the element that aggravates all of these issues. Wealth shapes outcomes. There no question that poverty is a big part of it. But we are kidding ourselves if we think race is not also an issue. If we think our consciousness about race is simply irrelevant in dealing with the social problems, it is not honest to say about poverty and race. Of course it is about poverty but it also has to do with race. I want to deal with poverty, i really do. This generational poverty. It doesnt mean im going to be silent about race. In my view it is a more honest , way of engaging with our history. I believe in rights. I believe you have to protect the people who will never have political power. Who will never be the political majority. I grew up in a region where if it was left to the political process there would still be segregation. You would never get a majority of the people in alabama to end segregation. It took the right framework to create all my opportunities, my ability to go to school, my ability to practice law. I believe we need to have people in that space protecting the rights of people who are disfavored. The marginalized, the people who will never have enough votes to achieve their basic protection through the political process. Charlie you believe you can change law but not change politics. Bryan when you see this play you begin to change the culture, and then it becomes possible to imagine a political system that could be responsive to people who historically have been discredited, marginalized. I think we have made progress in the space. We have an africanamerican president. But we are a long way away from expecting people to do the right things to protect the most vulnerable through the political process. Charlie has alabama changed . Bryan i think every place has changed, but no place has changed enough. On the streets of new york and the streets of massachusetts you still see a presumption of danger and guilt assigned to people of culture. Two people of color. I was in a courtroom in the midwest getting ready to do a hearing a couple of years ago. I had my suit on, my shirt on, my tie on, and the judge walked in and he saw me sitting there. He said you get back there in the hallway, wait until you lawyer gets here, i dont want any defendants in the courtroom. I stood up and said, my name is Brian Stephenson, i am the lawyer. The judge started laughing, the prosecutor started laughing, i made myself laugh. My client came in, a young white kid. We did the hearing and i thought what is it when this judge sees a middleaged black man at the counselor table it didnt even occur to him he was a lawyer. What that is is a way to his history there to has shaped these events. That is true all over this country. Charlie lets assume we do everything better. How long do you think it will take to get it out of our dna . Bryan we are at a disadvantage because we have let a lot of valuable time go by. I think it can come sooner than most people expect. Truly our dna is really not programmed with this kind of division, this kind of otherness, this kind of tension, this kind of racial thinking area that is something we have had to learn. I think if we push people to free themselves from it we will see some amazing things, we just havent seen enough. Charlie some of that in balkans. Where you think a country has faced up to its responsibilities in a way that has cleansed itself of the implications and the consequences . Bryan i think the nation that comes the closest is germany. If you think about how horrific the holocaust was and how horrifying the nazi era was, it is shocking to imagine we now have this regard for germany, we now have this respect for germany we would not have expected to have. This soon after world war ii. Charlie at the same time the Prime Minister in part apologizing for all of the atrocities of the japanese government. Not just against american soldiers but against the chinese population. So here is a Prime Minister who cannot say im sorry because of the politics. Bryan that is because nationalism and our National Identities are too much wrapped around never saying sorry we have a songbook that is big and beauty when it comes to success and pride and accomplishment, but we dont have a pretty good song for when it comes to how we apologize. Charlie im apologizing suggests weakness. Or lack of respect. Bryan you and i know that if we are going to have a healthy relationship i dont know any healthy couples that never say im sorry to each other. I dont think you can be a longterm healthy loving couple unless you learn to say im sorry. You cannot have good friendships unless you are prepared to say that was my mistake. It is our ability to apologize. It makes us human and redeemed. That is how we get to mercy. To compassion get and greatness. If we dont practice that as a nation we will fail to be the Great Society we claim to be. Learning to say im sorry is something we are going to have to do. It is some thing we are going to have to do if we want to be great. Charlie that goes to the heart of some relationships, period. Marriage, the relationship between nationality. The capacity to say im sorry and saying it without fear that you will be acted against because you do it. Taken advantage of. Ostracized. Bryan absolutely. Because i represent people on death row, i have learned something about it. I believe for every human being, if someone tells a lie, they are not just a liar. Charlie each of us is better than the worst thing we have done. Bryan if you kill somebody you are not just a killer. And a nation that lynched isnt a lynching nation, a nation that but we have to own up to the ings we have done. And i think there is a freedom on the other side of that and we cant be afraid to acknowledge the things. It is like every relationship. When the church makes mistakes and puts children at risk, they have to apologize. When the military doesnt treat women appropriately, they need to apologize. Charlie and institutions allow discrimination of any kind, gender, race, they have to apologize. Bryan when you are trying to to create a brand in business, you make mistakes and there is accountability. Our mistake shouldnt put that faulty part in that car. Were sorry. There is a conscience, you cannot be respected without that. Charlie who pushes back against what you say . Bryan not direct, but kind of indirect. This habit of just never doing uncomfortable things that we have all inherited. You know trying to own up to our , history of slavery, that is uncomfortable. So nobody is going to take that on or exercise leadership. Dealing with the fact that we have marginalized people unfairly that is hard. Look i got a man off of death , row who spent 30 years on death row for a crime he didnt commit. 30 years. Solitary confinement, locked down 23 years a day, witnessed 53 execution. Complained about flesh burning. We got him released in april of 2015 and not a Single Person in the Prosecutors Office said im sorry. They are silent. Charlie how many supported his release . Bryan when we were working on the case, very few. Charlie didnt want to acknowledge their own mistakes. Prosecutorial misconduct. Bryan you have prosecutors and some judges possibly executing a innocent person rather than acknowledging that the system failed. That speaks to the larger problem and dealing with that honestly. Charlie vanity fair did a profile on you and speaks to your values. Your eloquence, your conviction what made you the way you are . Yan my grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved and my grandmother had this wisdom that was profound and impactful. My grandmother would squeeze me so tightly that i could barely believe and she would say, do you feel me hugging you . And she talked about her father who learned to read as a slave and how brave that was and risky and dangerous that was and how necessary it was for him to be free. And didnt have formal schooling. And she told me you have to fight, fight, fight, but fight with integrity and heart and mind. That made a huge impact. I have been shaped a lot of people. I didnt meet a lawyer until i went to Harvard Law School and immediately decided i didnt want to be one. [laughter] charlie why was that . Bryan i wanted to deal with racial inequality and nobody was talking about that. I found a community of lawyers who were doing that and energized me and afffirmed me. But being around people like my grandmother, a poor, segregated black community and people were hardworking and wanted things to get better and understood the power of taking care of the people you love. I have been moved by this community of people who are incarcerated and the people i serve, the poor people, the poor people we are trying to educate in the deep south and hard for me to see people struggling with these burdens if we engage in a different way. Thats what motivates me. The kind of see this as an opportunity. Charlie was there a movement, if your grandmothers hug was a moment, was there a moment in which you said, i cant take the easy way out . Bryan when i was in law school, i was trying to persuade myself to accept a career as a lawyer. And i had the opportunity to work with the human rights in atlanta, georgia and they provided Legal Services to people in death row and sent me down to meet a man on the row who had not been met yet. Him he has a year and doesnt have to worry about being executed in the next year. I was so nervous and that i thought i would be a disappointment to him. But when i met him and he told me i was the first person he had met. That was not a prisoner or guard. He was excited because he was going to see his wife and children. We fell into this conversation and kept talking and talking and the guards were angry and very rough with him and pushing him out of the room, he looked at me and said dont you worry about this and he said just come back. And then he did something i have never forgotten. He closed his eyes and threw his head back and starting started singing. And then he said, lord, plant my feet on Higher Ground. And hearing that man sing and hearing him being pushed down the hall and you could hear him singing, i knew i wanted to help condemned people get to Higher Ground. My journey to Higher Ground was tied to his journey. If he doesnt get there, im not going to get there. And that consciousness for me wasnt overwhelming or burdensome or scary, it was liberating. It was energizing. It was affirming. Charlie you knew what you had to do. Bryan i did. Charlie that is wonderful. to know what you have to do. Everything just else clears the way. I know where i have to go and i know where i have to do. And if i dont do that, i wont believe that my life didnt matter as much as it might. Bryan positioning yourselves in places where there is some difficulty. When you get approximate to the things you care about. And when you choose to do what is convenient and comfortable all the time, you have those moments. They dont happen quite as readily. I think they happen, force ourselves to do inconvenient things. Charlie what does solitary confinement and death row do to the humanity . Bryan it is an assault on all of your senses and its hard to hold on to your dignity when you are locked down like that. A man i represented who just got released from death row charlie what does he say this . Bryan remarkable sense of humor, smart, committed, but he has been traumatized and hurt by what we did to him for 0 years 30 years and will take a long time to recover from that and he wont fully recover ever. No one does. I have a client in florida, 13 years of age sentenced to life without parole and he was so small. Either put him in general population where he will be sexually assaulted and put him in solitary confinement. The rule is you have to go six months without speaking loudly or talking back or doing anything wrong or we will not let you out. For a 13yearold boy isolated from human beings, no touch, no opportunities to get outside your cell, that was torture. He could never go six months without doing something wrong without cutting himself or , getting mad. He spent 18 years in solitary confinement. Charlie what did it do to him . Bryan broke him. Undermined his ability to be a good decisionmaker. And we are working with him and he is making slow progress but it is something we didnt have to do. You cant be in that experience wiout experiencing all of the trauma and the disability that comes with a traumatic experience. And it is tragic. The combat veterans coming back, you could make the argument that we had to fight the war, i dont know if i believe that. You dont have to isolate people in this way where we make them less human and torture them or traumatize them. Where we injure them. That is gratuitous. Charlie thats a hard question in terms of asking if you knew that bit of information could somehow save a larger group of people. Bryan in the american prison system, there is no debate. We arent imagining anything. Thats right, absolutely right. This is a completely misguided policy that we tolerate because we havent really we talk so much about victims rights and im sensitive. We have horrific crimes, my grandfather was murdered when i was 16. I dont want to be indifferent to that. That consciousness of victimization is important but we have limited it. We arent mature in how we think about helping people recover from being victimized and because of that we end up victimizing other people. Charlie how do we recover . Thinking yourself as a victim isnt healthy either. Bryan we commit ourselves for getting people healthy to recover. We dont say, if you victimize me, i get to victimize you. That is not a strategy of getting to a healthier place. Charlie thats the same thing about torture. Bryan because you victimize that person we get to victimize you. That creates another kind of victimization. What is interesting about the Death Penalty and race, it is biased. Not in the race of the offender but in the race of the victim. You are 22 times more likely to get the Death Penalty if the victim is white than black. Take alabama charlie 22. Bryan 11 times more likely and went to the United States supreme court, 11 times more likely to get the Death Penalty if the victim is white than black. 22 times more likely if the defendant is black and the victim is white. And that was subjected to all kinds of varied analysis. White victim cases typically did and black cases did not. My state of alabama, 65 of all murder victims are black, but 80 of the people on death row are there for victims who are white. That consciousness of whose lives matter has shaped our ability to do justice and we dont think the lives of people who are arrested matter. We dont think the lives of people, young black and brown boys matter. We dont think the lives of women who have used drugs matter. And our consciousness about how to protect and help them and serve them charlie no matter what you have done, your life matters. Bryan absolutely. In a just society, that has to be true for everyone. The germans didnt think jewish lives mattered. Lives didfrica, black not matter. In rwanda, you had the notion that some tribes dont matter and that leads to horror, to genocide, to oppression and inequality. Charlie and the balkans, too. Bryan we have a way of saying their suffering doesnt matter. And whenever that exists in society you will see all the , problems. Charlie interesting in bill gates has said a number of times at this table and especially in , conjunction with his wife melinda gates. The initial beginning that sort of caused them to make the commitment to the resources they made was the notion that all lives matter, equally. And they were doing it not on race or economic circumstances, even though they contributed, they were doing it in the con text of global health. We have to wake up that all lives have equal value. Bryan im trying to make that argument. Actually when you get to that , place, its a better place to be. Rather than constantly trying to defend and justify why those people deserve that, why these people cant be for the other things. Charlie if all the victims families, people who suffered enormous pain and loss, you can make the easy examples, someone who in their home were brutally raped, tortured and killed and you say all those people that do that, their lives have value, thats what you are saying. And until we get there, we cant deal with these issues. Matter. Ll lives when my grandfather was murdered, the question we were asking, why, what would make it possible for these young kids to do this act of violence. Charlie what did they do . Bryan broke into my grandfathers home in south philadelphia and tried to steal a tv and stabbed him to death. But we wanted to understand what can we do to stop that happening . There were all kinds of things shaping choices and behaviors. I work with 12 and 13yearolds who dont expect to be. I dont want to victimize other human beings, but i care about their futures. That is why, yes all lives , matter. I think our capacity to take care of people who have been injured, assaulted, who have been victimized, is going to be enhanced. When we have a deeper appreciation. Charlie theres a difference in all lives matter, that all lives have equal value. Is there a difference in that . Bryan i dont think so. I mean when it comes to whether , we treat you with respect, whether we care about your opportunities, whether we give you equal access to the things that are basic, all lives have equal value. Obviously, somebody who can generate a lot of attention or generate a lot of money, people have enormous musical talent. There are going to be these characteristics, but when it comes to your basic obligation to treat people with respect and dignity and recognize their humanity, no, all lives have equal value. Charlie in the end when you analyze every possible reason for taking anothers life and you reject all of them, is it primarily because the system makes mistakes . Bryan uhhuh. Charlie or is it because no society has the right to take somebodys life because they are at their best, better than the worst thing they did, so therefore, no matter how atrocious, hitler, you wouldnt take his life, even though the state took a lot of nazi lives after the war. After trial. Bryan for me, its both of them. I start with the first point. Because i dont need to persuade people of that second point. It is what i believe. I dont think we actually advance our commitment to the rule of law to show that killing is wrong. Shownt rape people to rape is wrong. I dont think we should torture to show that it is wrong. We compromise our own dignity. We can people in a way that doesnt implicate us in a way that raping people would. And we allow that to happen. Charlie you know a lot of people on death row. Bryan yeah. Charlie if none of them, im saying, all the people you have known on death row, whether they were there because they did an act or not, committed a crime or not, and maybe there is a difference between the two, if any of them had known they would likely be executed, would they have committed the crime still . There is no deterrence . Bryan we have poor kids, poor people in the margins, people in really horrific states that expect to die. They dont expect to live a long life, they are preoccupied of when their end is going to come. It is not a fear of death that is going to change their behaviors. Some hope, some possibility that things can get better. Some Life Experience gives value. But on the Death Penalty question, i dont have to make that moral argument. I really do think that the threshold argument is not whether people deserve to die for the crimes they committed, but do we have the system to kill. And if it is undermined by and all of this bias and bigotry because of your poverty or wealth, that makes as many mistakes charlie should we apologize to the nazi leaders we killed . Bryan you dont have to apologize. What you have to do is apologize to the other people that you have failed by not creating a just system, a system that actually responds to the injuries that are still alive. You know, i think it would be misguided to think about apology in that space when we have so many living victims of inequality. Charlie do you have people that love you totally that say you have a bigger soul, a bigger heart, a bigger comprehension than i do . Bryan no. Charlie you are a special person. There are exceptions to my compassion . Bryan what amazes me, i have people who dont even know me that well and who dont claim to love me, but who feel exactly as i do about this need to get to a better place, this need to kind of affirm our humanity and affirm. Charlie other than what you are doing exactly at this moment and other than doing what you are doing in a courtroom and other than doing what you are doing in lobbying congress and make sure we adhere to these values, owner of that, what else is necessary to accelerate change . Bryan i think we need to change the landscape and we have a new project we are interested in the visual landscape and visual history. So we are putting up these markers. I think there is something important. I think because thats how you cope with collective trauma. Thats how you manage it to create spaces. Where you can begin to rethink. Charlie i believe in part the idea that you have to have, you have to clearly show this is where our values are. You can see it here and see it here. And this is what we do and at the same time, we have to reward moral courage. Bryan absolutely. But i think there is something important for society. I go to the vietnam war memorial in d. C. And it is powerful and makes you understand something about yourself that you will not understand until you are in that space. And i think we need to do more of that and create pathways for people to get out of this racial indifference and animosity and into a little more helpful. And a little more responsive to our history. Charlie what promises have you made to yourself and your grandmother and what promises have you made to a Larger Community . That you are going to do. Bryan im going to keep fighting. Thats the promise i made to the community. You know i think justice is a , constant struggle. It is not a burden but a privilege. I feel its a privilege doing what i do. Charlie thanks for coming. This paperback is called just mercy. A story of justice and redemption. The new york review said ever bit as moving to kill a mocking bird. And salvation that fighting for the vulnerable. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. Emily it all started with a line of code written on a bus traveling from boston to new york. That code is now the foundation for dropbox, a cloudbased File Sharing Service that allows you to share and store and access any file from any device anywhere. Today, dropbox is valued at 10 billion with 400 million users in 200 countries around the world. Joining me today, cofounder and ceo of dropbox, drew houston. Very good to have you, thank you for joining us