Transcripts For CSPAN2 Panel Discussion On Race Power And Po

You once again good afternoon and we want to welcome you to the National Black writers conference and thank you for so much for being a part of this great conference. Again lets get the organizes a big hand for organizing and putting this together. [applause] they always do such a great job. This panel is part of the great job that they are doing today. Race ,com,com ma power and politics is the title of our panel. Our moderator is marcus ford. William jelani cobb Obery Hendricks Michele Wallace. Thank you and good afternoon. Good afternoon. Hello. We would like to first of all thank you for coming to the 14th annual black writers conference. My name is wallace ford. Im the chairman of the Public Administration department at Medgar Evers School at inappropriate business and the other is the commentary blog soon to be in book form called love and hate the time of obama and a host of inclusion showed which can be seen in various parts of the country. The introduction has to do with the topic race, power and politics. Race and racism has been described as americas original sin beginning with the particularly odious form of racialbased lavery which began in this country the 1600s which is carried forward in its many iterations to this day. The issue of power has a threepart context. Because it is a very important part of the concept of power it is one of the reasons why it was forbidden for black slaves to learn how to read and write. It certainly was also a reason why it black slaves were forget and for big didnt forbidden to own property and you see that in the 21st century but after emancipation emancipation the red line if you will was drawn at a different point. That had to do with access to political power and the battle with respect to access to political power has been going on i would submit to you pearly sends emancipation and we have had the laws and restrictions and the terrorism to keep alive people from voting over many years and here we are in the 21st century talking about Voter Suppression strategies and the legislation being advocated by one major party here in the United States. We do have of course this notion of race and power. On the political side there has been a progression of politics going from of course emancipation politics to dealing with issues that we have seen articulated for so many years in the Civil Rights Era and i would suggest to you again that the Civil Rights Era and the struggle for several rights certainly is not and it is into a new phase. Certainly we had an era of political activity where there was the first black governor in the first black senator and so on in the modern era and we have had the africanamerican president as well. One of the things that the panels will be discussing is where are we in this modern era of politics in terms of black people and certainly you know the election of barack obama has brought about such terms as postracial politics for example. We have got to examine them to see what it really means in terms of political activity in the political discourse and the political direction we see for the black community here in this part, the first part of the 21st century. And so im going to do my job which is a very pleasant one and one im honored to do which is to introduce our guests. As was indicated our guests are jelani cobb mr. Marc lamont hill Obery Hendricks and Michele Wallace and we will ask our speakers to speak in that order. We will then open the discussion up to all of you because this is meant to be an interactive event im i am sure her colleagues have much to the say of interest and value and of course odu so we want to make sure we have an inclusionary process here today. With that and im going to read from mr. Copps dyre associate professor of history and record the institute of africanamerican studies. Those are copp is the author of substance of hope barack obama and the paradox of and to to the break of dawn the freestyle and the hiphop aesthetic on the hiphop aesthetic which was a finalist for the National Award for arts writing radius of book coming out called antidote to revolution africanamerican anticommunism in the struggle for civil rights. Mr. Cobb has been the featured commentator on msnbc National Public radio cnn aljazeera cbs news and the number of broadcast outlets and you have his twitter lying there in the program and you are urged to follow him as well. With that its as my pleasure indeed to introduce mr. William jelani cobb. [applause] i would like to begin by saying thank you for inviting me. Its an honor to be here. Especially someone who has been attending this conference for a very long time and from the point where i was a fledgling writer just trying to learn the ropes and find out how this undertaking this artistic undertaking really worked. So this conference has been key to me and lots of ways over long period of time so im happy to be here to talk with you today. The subject of this panel, i was somewhat apprehensive because i think its impossible to have this conversation without talking about the Obama Presidency but its also a very fraught subject in that we have these dissonant impulses that determine in many ways the way that we respond to obama and the wave will we respond to the criticism of barack obama. That was most evident to me recently when i made an oblique criticism of my brothers keeper and we will come back to that in a minute, to my brothers Keeper Program and its obvious shortcomings and failings and the difficulties implicit within trying to address issues specifically to africanamerican men while we have a black presidency. So as i was saying, i think the fundamental point here and i will say this, we are in and pointed progression while we appear to be in a point of progress. This is not atypical. If we have any knowledge of the history of black people in this country but to see there are strains of regression implicit within something that appears to be progress is not uncommon. In 2008 we saw the election of the first africanamerican president something we saw that none of us ever thought would happen. In 2012 resolve the reelection of an africanamerican president these two things have gone handinhand with the movement to eviscerate the Voting Rights act which is people have seen has been significantly successful, the ongoing move to make it more difficult for people to have access to the ballots, the ongoing unchecked excesses of the Prison Industrial Complex the ongoing issues of income inequality, the black communities which are still reeling from failure to redress the disproportionate racial impact of the housing crisis and so on so all these dynamics have happened the same time in which we have seen a black presidency and talking about those dynamics it is often taken as a criticism or referendum on the barack Obama Presidency. I dont think we should understand it as anything of the story sort. Very briefly about my brothers keeper the concerned with that program for 300 million that was raised via the Obama Administration through private philanthropic efforts to support initiatives relating specifically to young men of color and their particular neede a lot of money but its actually less than the new york city budget for the Parks Department for one year. 300 million which is spread over five years over young men of color across the United States very this is less than what the Parks Department spends on its annual operating budget for one city, for new york city. Thats the first thing. The second thing that is of particular concern here is it says and you know in 1896 when booker t. Washington, 1895 the booker t. Washington gave the atlanta address said politics could not get black people where we wanted to be the where we displaced our faith and politics. That statement galvanize what became the Niagara Movement and led to the naacp and became a century long effort to push the political envelope culminating in the Civil Rights Movement the attempts to gain Political Rights and to see where we could come up with cuties the political system to better our condition. In looking at an africanamerican president who sees disproportionate lack male unemployment sees the circumstances of jordan davis sees the circumstacircumsta nces of Trayvon Martin and the best response we can anticipate is that from brad philanthropic money. What it says is we perhaps reach the ceiling that booker t. Washington was talking about nearly 120 years ago that if this is the farthest you can go the highest pinnacle of political expression of political power is to place someone in the white house and if that person is incapable of addressing your needs on a specifically public and federal policy level and this is perhaps we need to revisit what a gritty washington was saying. What i do think if nothing else as we look toward the end of the barack obama at the strangeness we have to have the difficult conversatconversat ions about the limitations of politics and one of the new strategic directiondirection s we have to come up with if this is incapable of producing more than the anemic racial returns of the Obama Administration thus far and i will stop there. Thank you professor cobb. Next up we have besser lemont hill and Marc Lemont Hill is one of the leading hiphop generation intellectuals in the country. His work covers topics such as culture politics in education is appeared in numerous journals magazine books and anthologies. He is the author of beats and rhymes in the classroom of life hiphop pedagogy in the politics of identity. Schooling hiphop hiphop expanding the popbased education across the curriculum in the classroom and the cell conversations on black life in america and a collection of conversations between professor hill. Professor hill lectures while widely for commentary media like npr and the politicals contributor for cnn and he currently holds an affiliated faculty appointment in africanamerican studies at the institute for research in africanamerican studies at Columbia University. Please join me in welcoming professor Marc Lamont Hill. [applause] thank you everybody. I want to echo gillanis sentiment that this conference means so much and to share some time with everybody especially dr. Greenhut is done so much organizing work to make this conference possible and does so much work every day. [applause] i hated to go second because i had a sense he was going to cover a lot of interesting stuff that i agree with wholeheartedly im equally curious about what this political moment means been struggling to make sense of it. In a way that is productive for us because i could spend an hour critiquing the Obama Administrations policies as such. Im not sure if wed would get to other things. This moment is so bizarre to me for so many reasons and i will be rob reef reif but there are few things i find frustrating. One, i wonder if over the last years we have yielded a level of moral authority and Political Authority in deference to the Obama Administration symbolic track created are we excited, so excited to have a black person that we are willing to to no longer engaging treat critique . I remember and know for particularly in d. C. Being in an antiwar march. It mightve been over three or 04 and there were black people and brown people there. There is so much activism and curiosity about the invasion of iraq in conversation and critiques of empire. There was all sorts of stuff happening and then when i fastforward to now or two september i remember when we were talking about strikes and libya. I remember black people defending potential strikes in libya, defending preemptive strikes in libya. Not retaliatory strikes but the idea that we could engage in preemptive war as a means of advancing a foreignpolicy and that is the quintessential bush doctrine. An idea that black people for the first time ive known in American History to be the advocates of war to the war hawks in support of a president ial administration. That to me was puzzling and it made me wonder where center was or where center was going. That was curious to me. We know there are predator drones in yemen and afghanistan. We know what happened in libya. Its a hawkish foreignpolicy and quintessentially bush and reagan foreignpolicy and yet we have not had a critique of it. Jelani just talked about my brothers keeper initiative. I cant imagine any other moment who would be celebrating an intervention through Corporate Philanthropy as opposed to public policy. That just seems bizarre to me. All these moments where the stars bizarre stuff is happening and i dont hear or see a critique. Some of it isnt uniquely obama. I dont know of any president ial administration of last 50 years of this talk about poverty in this substantive way. This is about obamas and outliers but the expectation was that he would be an interruption in a failing consistent set of presidency art by an indifference to poverty were hawkishness etc. Etc. I think that might be the limitations of this form of politics. What im curious about and most saddened about because i dont want to just talk about obama is this intersection between race power and politics and heavily tied to late capitalism. Im wondering if we as a community can have a different kind of conversation about the state of late capitalism about the role the marketplace right now in our everyday life from the way in which education continues to be privatized. Actually everything is being privatized. [applause] this is part of the issue of race power and politics as we have become assessed with privatization and normalize privatization and we have raced privatization such as the general public has an appetite for privatization because we imagine the private to be good in the public to be bad in the public is bad because its often marked in race terms. Public education Public Housing Public Transportation Public Schooling public options. Public anything is marked as black or brown and therefore disposable innocent consequence we buy into it ourselves. We want our kids in private schools. We think of Public Housing not as subsidies but as the Taylor Holmes or Cabrini Green or were martial projects or what have you. There ways are ways in which an economic agendas being embraced economic politics and one of the things that concerns me the most is we are possessed with destroying the public good and im not sure we have a language to do that. When president obama comes to race to the top which is a marketbased response education might be better than no child left behind in a certain way but in other ways governed by the same logic. When we see mars mass incarceration over the last 50 years we see it as a crisis but not just a crisis of crime. Very little of it is a crisis of crime and not just a crisis of criminalization although that is important to think about the way the law structure but its also an economic crisis. Theres a way which we have greater market values that not only normalize mass incarceration but incentivize Companies Governments and individuals to support laws that expand mass incarceration. We have to have a conversation about the market and the economy and a conversation about the role capitalism is playing at a cutting across the sectors of our allies. We need to do that in order to have a conversation on race, power and politics and i will stop there. Thank you professor hill. Appreciate that. We now have to zerneck speaker professor Obery Hendricks who has been hailed by cornel west is one of the last few grand prophetic scholars and you were speaking before the program began. He is the former wall Street Investment executive and past president of Theological Seminary the oldest Theological Institution in the United States. President hendricks is a visiting scholar at Columbia University professor of typical interpretation at new york Theological Seminary. He is a kundra to msnbc enough to post an affiliate scholar at the center for American Progress and a trustee for the Public Religion Research institute of washington d. C. And a member of the u. S. State departments religion Foreign Policy working group. He is the author of living water the novel and its most recent book praised by governor howard dean is it Tour De Force as universe bends towards justice radical reflections on the bible the church in the body politic. Please chime in welcoming professor Obery Hendricks. [applause] thank you. Im also glad to be her. Im also a longtime participant and supporter and beneficiary of this black literature conference even before i published in before a thought about publishing any books. Im really glad to be here. I would like to shift just a little to talk a little bit mo