The mass incarceration of poor people of color in the United States is tantamount to a new castelike system, one that shuttles our young people from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand new hightech prisons. It is a system that blocks poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color, into a permanent second class status nearly as effectively as earlier systems of racial and social control once did. It is, in my view, the moral equivalent of jim crow. Get ready, booktvs first Online Book Club meets at the end of the month. Watch video of Michelle Alexander at booktv. Org and read the new jim crow. And then on tuesday, march 26th at 9 p. M. Eastern, join us live online at twitter and facebook with your questions and comments on the new jim crow. And now, karen elliot house provides an inside look at the history, culture and politics of saudi arabia which shes covered for 30 years. This is about an hour. Thank you very much, dr. Wilburn. Its a real pleasure to be here. I appreciate im honored by being invited to deliver this lecture. Dr. Wilburn graciously said my latest book. Ive got to confess, its my only book. [laughter] but i spent 30 years, as he said, going to saudi arabia mostly as a reporter or Foreign Editor talking to saudi officials about oil, iraq iran, arab israeli, so geopolitical issues. And when i retired from the journal in 2006, the one thing i was really interested in doing with my newfound time was trying to understand Saudi Society. How did saudis look at each other, what was the society like, how did they look at their rulers, how did they look at us. And as i speak about saudi arabia, everyone constantly asks me why did you do that, why did you spend five years month after month going there dressed in my long, black clothes . My editor asked me that, actually, when i turned in the manuscript. She said, you know, why did you do this . And i said because its interesting, and she said paris is interesting. [laughter] so why did you do this . You know, make me understand. That was her only editing point on the book. So i will try to make you understand why i found it both fascinating and important. Saudi arabia is probably the strangest country you will never see. It is so different from our own. A woman there never reaches the age of maturity. She is always under the control of some man. She cannot go to her sons school, she cannot even see her son graduate. She, obviously, doesnt drive. We all know that. She doesnt appear many in public without being covered. And, you know, in the worst situations she is simply chattel for a man to do as he wishes with. Thats not the norm, i hasten to add, but it does happen. Its a very religiouslydominated society in which men obey allah and women obey men. And allah is distant and men are at hand. It is probably less strange to me than it is to most visitors because of my own background. Like matthew here whos from a little up to a little town in alabama, im from a little town in texas. 900 people with four churches, one blinking stoplight and no Movie Theaters. So religion was what people did. Everyone went to church. And my father was far more conservative than the average person in the town. We were not permitted the to wear pants, shorts, no alcohol, no dancing, no Musical Instruments in our church of christ. So in lots of ways i was quite at home in saudi arabia. [laughter] i devoted my time to trying to figure this country out precisely because i think it is the one arab country that is truly strategic not only because it is the Worlds Largest exporter of oil which sustains the western way of life, but because saudi arabia, i am convinced, will be critical in the ultimate resolution of what is the proper islam which is going on now between the radical jihadists, if you will, and the more modernizing muslims. And that very battle also goes on inside saudi arabia. To try to understand the society, i knew that its like someone coming here to write a book about america. You wouldnt be able to go to washington and and claim to understand america. So i had to be confident that i could get outside of riyadh, their washington, and jeta, their new york. And i was permitted to over those five years. I went all over the country, and i saw all kinds of people, a lot of the royal family but also very poor people, men, women, young people, old people. And it was an advantage, frankly, to be a woman because you could talk to both men and women. A western woman in saudi arabia is basically an honorary man. So men are, most men are prepared to talk to you, even some of the senior religious officials who, of course, believe it is wrong to be in the presence of a woman whos not your relative. In the beginning i had a one month, oneentry cease ya. Then i got a three month visa, and then i was given a fiveyear multiple entry visa. And at that point i came and went as i chose. I did not have to deal with a government minder. I would use a cell phone and a hired car from the hotel and call friends and get them to pass me to other people. So my goal was not to prescribe what saudi arabia ought to be like, but to try to understand and describe, um, what it was like. So i want to talk today, first, about some ox vegases about saudi observations about Saudi Society and then, second, what those observations might portend about its stability or vulnerability and then, lastly, about scenarios that u. S. Policymakers which may someday include some of you in the audience might facement face. Saudi society, this probably should not have surprised me, but it did, um, it is much more diverse than we in the west think. There are people who live quite western lives inside their homes, and there are, obviously, people who seek to live a seventh century life. It is also much more divided than i realized and much more dependent on government, because most people work for the government. Um, the divisions are quite deep, so its not, in my view, really a country as much as it is a collection of tribes with a flag. And it is divided by region, by religious sect. The majority are sunni, but there are shia, sufis. Divided by gender, and people have a deep distrust of each other, so they dont really mix much outside of their family. So im going to show you my rergs of how i think version of how i think the society functions. This is a saudi, this little figure here who is inside a family, who is inside a tribe which is inside a country ruled by the religious establishment, and all of that is ruled by the royal family. And so its a quite constricted, if you will, society. The religious establishment legitimizes the rule of the el saud by giving them the Good Housekeeping prize for religiosity, otherwise theyd be just another tribe. But 250 years ago one of the el sauds met up with a wahab, and he wanted to conquer arabia for the one true god feeling that the area had strayed from the teaching of the prophet. And mohamed saud wanted to conquer it for himself. So together they did conquer arabia because it was of more productive to fight in the name of god than in the name of the el saud. And so that symbiotic relationship has existed ever since. Um, people live literally behind walls, so most peoples homes are surrounded by walls 10 or 12 feet high, and they live inside even higher walls figuratively. They are bound, if you will, by like a mummy in the bindings of tradition and religion so that theres a rigidity that keeps people from having much independence or individualism. But the internet and social media and satellite tv are penetrating those walls now in a big way. So that young people, 60 of the population of saudi arabia is under 20 years of age, so those young people have grown up without knowing an impoverished saudi arabia, only knowing a, if you will, a declining one. The development was dope in the 70s development was done in the 70s and 80s, and as the population has exploded, many of the services have actually deteriorated. So young people do not have a lot of gratitude to the royal family for what they did for them. They say why havent you done, why havent you done more. They are harding through these they are hearing through these media other versions of islam besides the wahabi version. So they are also learning to question as well as communicate which is a very new thing in saudi arabia. The country exists basically on three pillars of stability, and in my view all of those are cracking. Religion is, obviously, one of them. And in a Secular Society like our own, its almost impossible to imagine the omni presence of religion in sabia. Saudi arabia. Every University Like this, every shopping mall, ever airport has rows of prayer rugs with the direction of mecca properly pointed so that people pray in the break at the proper times during the day. They leave class, shopping malls close. Everyone goes to pray. And i went one day, one weekend which there would be thursday and friday with a saudi family. The participants had been educated in the the parents had been educated in the u. S. , and they took me on a picnic out in the december earth. Desert. And at the end of the evening, the family was praying the final prayer of the day, and i was sitting on a rug. And at the end of that, their 6yearold l son came to me, and he said i need to teach you something. And i said, sure. And he said do you know what to say when the angel of death comes . And he could tell i did not. [laughter] so he proceeded, and he said, he said who is your god . And you say allah. And then he says who is your prophet . And you say mohamed. What is your faith . And you say islam. What are your works . And you say i heard and i believed. And muslims apparently believe that this grave interview occurs immediately after youre buried. And if you have been a good muslim and properly answer these questions, youre born aloft and shown a window on heaven and then put back in your grave to await judgment day. And if you have not been a good muslim and cannot properly answer these questions, you are pulverized and put back together and pulverized and put back together for eternity until the judgment day. So this little boy who had learned this in school, not from his parents actually, wanted to save me that dreadful fate. I also lived to try to understand the very conservative religious mentality with a woman who, very conservative woman. She would have made my father look liberal. And she had translated for me at several dinners with an imams mother and sisters and wife. So i asked her if i could live with her for a week, and she said, yes. So behind the walls she opened the gate, and as we walked in she said thats where she lives, meaning the first wife with. And we went upstairs where this lady named lulu lived. And when her husband came up, as he did every 24 hours, i had to go and hide in my room because, obviously, he was not supposed to encounter a he knew i was there, but to encounter a woman who was not a relative. She had a tv, but they got only the religious channel which does not allow any women on, because the saudi state tv now does have women with their heads covered but their faces uncovered. And she regarded that as totally unproper. And im convinced that she allowed me to do this because she wanted to convert me. And she spent a lot of time. Actually, the first thing she made me do, he took out the family computer and dialed up a youtube video, six episodes, six 10minute episodes by a fundamentalist teacher in texas. She had dope her homework she had done her homework. [laughter] a fundamentalist teacher in texas who had converted to islam. When that didnt work, she called her brother over. I read the quran three times during this fiveyear period because it was great fun to discuss religion with people. But all of this new information that young people and old people if they choose have access to is eroding the credibility of the religious establishment which increasingly is seen by really religious people like her as doing the will of King Abdullah rather than the will of allah. And they point to things like mixing is wrong, and yet the king has built a big, new university called the King Abdullah university of science and technology which not only mixes saudi men and women, but mixes them with infidel men and women from all over the world. And when one of the 20 senior religious scholars was asked about the appropriateness of this on tv, he said its wrong, and the king fired him. Because the king appointments these 20 people. Appointments these 20 appoints these 20 people. And not surprising any many of the other senior [inaudible] began to discover that the prophet had had his hair washed by women and other things that made okay. So people see this, if you will, double standard. And it has undermined the credibility of the religious establishment, obviously, with the deeply religious but also with those who dont mind the mixing at all but just think its, if the king can get the religious to approve this, why cant he make them approve more things like women driving or or whatever . The second pillar of stability in the kingdom is, obviously, the oil wealth that buys throos acquiescence at least acquiescence b if not loyalty anymore for the government and royal family. 90 of the treasury in saudi arabia comes from oil wealth. Its a country that does not tax people because theres a saying there, you know, that here we have no taxation without representation and there its no representation without taxation. And the royal family doesnt tax, therefore, you dont get the representation. But oil wealth, obviously, funds the jobs of saudis, and most all saudis work for the government. 90 of the workers in the private sector are foreigners. So there are 19 roughly million saudis and 89 million foreigners in the kingdom. Because energy is subsidized and cheap, people waste it. And it has now become, again, a subject in the saudi press and discussed among saudis that whats going to happen if we continue to use more, and we have less to export, and its exports of oil that fund our lifestyle. Now, it is possible that the government will find a way to tell people were going to cut the subsidies, but in this arab, postarab spring environment theyre not inclined to take this things from people. And the country has 500 billion in foreign reserves, so its hardly broke. But there are saudi Financial Institutions who estimate that the Government Spending will exceed government revenues by 2014 because after the arab spring when King Abdullah came home from back surgery, he passed out 130 billion to the society on top of 180 billion annual budget. So more money for student stipends, more money to the religious establishment, more money to everyone and created a minimum wage for the first time for saudis. Obviously, not for foreigners. And lastly, is the royal family itself, the third pillar of stability which i think is weakening. The biggest interim issue in the internal issue in the kingdom, i think, is the aged and infirm leadership. This latest saudi state was declared in 1932 by abdullah saud, and when he died in 1953, the crown has passed from one of his first, to his eldest son and then from brother to half brother to half brother. So King Abdullah is the fifth of those boys. And the old man had 44 sons by 22 wives, and 36 of them live today adulthood. But they are all now rather elderly. The king is 90, and he has already outlived, in only seven years, two of his brothers as crown prince. Hes on his third crown prince. So its very reminiscence of the Old Soviet Union in the 90s when brezhnev, halfdead brezhnev died and was replaced by elderly andropov who died quickly and was remaced by elderly children yen coe who died quickly and was finally replaced by gorbachev, but by then it was too late to save the system. So as Ronald Reagan said at that time when there were basically three soviet leaders in a little over three years time, they keep dying on me. [laughter] and thats, thats what i think president obama and future american president s are going to be dealing with certainly here in the next four years. They have no ability to agree yet on the son of one of these brothers. Because the 36 branches each fear that if my son gets it, your son, your whole branch of is disend franchised disenfranchised because well pass it down in our branch because theres not i moon, it was easy to pass it from brother to brother, but how do you decide if youre going to pass it from cousin to cousin . Which cousin when there are hundreds of them . The king tried to get around that by having an Allegiance Council with one person from every branch of the family that would decide, but when his first crown prince died, that group apparently met, and one of the brothers said i should be the next crown prince, and the king said, no, im picking another brother. And that was the end of one man, one vote within the royal family. They never, they never had the vote. There was an expression and a decision. So young saudis do worry just normal, ordinary saudis about what will happen. Will these cousins, if you will, quarrel with each other when the time comes . Because there are three basic units in the kingdom; a defense ministry, a National Guard and a huge interior operation that watches people and guards the oil facilities. So a lot of saudis fear that somehow each of these is run by a prince, three cousins, that they will perhaps fight with each other which has happened in the past among the royal family. Its what brought down the second saudi state in the late 1880s. So if youre just a normal saudi, you talk about what is my plan b. And most people dont know what their plan b is. So theres a lot of nervousness, a lot of frustration. And because this is a country that has no experience whatsoever with selfgovernance or even individual responsibility or civil society, they dont most of them, a few talk about democracy, but most of of them simply want what they describe as justice and what hay say they mean they say they mean by that is a government that is more transparent, more accountable, more rule of law. Where there are clear rules, and they are enforced equally, not are not enforced which is often the case, but are enforced based on who you are. I think this brings me to the what could happen. Obviously, one scenario is a continuation of the status quo which i tend to think is the most likely, certainly in the short run, because the family i think, a, cant bring itself to agree on a younger leader yet and, b, even though many of them say there has to be change, they dont agree on what that change is.