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 so