Series if anybody would get on the bike with fuel injection it is one of the smoothest ride you will ever find most charlie people dont maya to be pulling up to ride with them. How often do you ride . This past sunday i got out with the bench of National Guard guys and we had a barbeque. Maybe every of the weekend. Host former congressman and auth held this t september 1 of the panels was on the future of the city and some of the issues. Prevent presented by the mayor and the office of promotion of the arts to serve from the arts Council Please note after you enjoy the presentation in volunteers are on hand to have be happy to except your ordinations bake you for helping to keep the of baltimore festival free. I will start with introductions. The east side. A columnist for someone in work was published to the habit to post commandeer times, the guardian and other magazines holding a masters from Johns Hopkins is a College Professor and also the recipient of numerous awards include a a fellowship in the best writer a word and the Business Journal 40 and under 40 and 40 west. The author of six books including a highly of kuwait acclaimed memoir white like me as well as White America but a new minority the rise opposed racial politics and his next book praises the rich will be released early 2015 and has contributed to 25 additional books his essays have appeared on Huffington Post and black commentator. Steve degeneres is an award with the best to give their journalist as a Senior Investigative reporter for his work, the unsolved murders in as the investigative reporters he has three successive emmys for the investigative series curve the investigative journalist for the Nonprofit Service in baltimore. The strong black woman in American Life and culture to focus on public aesthetics with lithology in the effect on individuals and on minority culture active as a public intellectual appearing with local media and is active at the university marylands Civic Engagement initiative and as an instructor is glasses include projects that benefit nonprofits and did 2008 recognized as an outstanding woman of color from the University Honors program and there in the darkness the limits of black hiphop and policy specializing in the study of black racial urban politics and Award Winning scholar he is the distinguished book award for his book in the darkness ended to a dozen ninth and excellence in teaching a word a word. His next book will be up the end of october. Please welcome the panelist. [applause] what i will do is start with the panel described their individual book and what it is about. Banks for the festival i knew i would write this i saw that they had festival that meant baltimore was literate and wanted to be in a place where they would like to read. And i am interested in the reproduction of an equality within the black space. Will again in a quality across times 1929 through the present it is the shape of the you highlevel slaty 29, low levels 50 now really high levels their higher now than even in during the Great Depression and. Why . It takes the shape because of politics between the 30s and 60s with the new deal and the Great Society that gave workers the right to organize into a social safety nets that made discrimination illegal with those policies were peeled back in 1970 interracial lee that has the effect with the black communities if you take that black politics approach to look what is is the black community solely as compiled as opposed to comparing them some people have a lot of loot or a little bit or nine and weighs the they justify why that is distributed the way it is my poor black people or were they are or what i am interested in doing with my next book. To see how that plays out. Argues that black women have already perfected an organic leadership model that they practice every day that is often unrecognized. And that is the endpoint. I start at the very beginning, the 1st recorded Creation Stories and argue the sacred dark feminine is the same model. Its on every continent, the mother, the darkness before the male god. The darkness is there. So i often get in trouble with people who are saying these things, as you can imagine. And then i trace her through both african and european history because i argue by the time slaveowners arrived they already had the narrative. Overnarrative. Over and over again you see black women placed in places where they are assumed to be brilliant, strong, and interest in other peoples problems. I asked to hired a lot of them why and he said, well, they can do everything because she is a figure. Strong enough that no one is going to go up against them. They can basically do everything all at once. Figure that often gets place. Thatvery revered, strong, wise figure is on lockdown. And often black women position themselves behind men and often when i am in an allblack situation talking, someone raises their hand and says, well, arent we supposed to . Two Different Things for two different types of people. If you are a poor black person than is a collection of love stories, going through some type of Health Healthcare disparity, education disparity to the people who face the horrors of the prison industrial complex. A rich white person, than is just a guide to help you understand why we are the way we are and to help you recognize the humanity exists within all of us. You could becan be a top ranking ku klux klan member. Either way, it helps you understand why america or Mainstream Media likes of black people the way they do. It shows you that you are important and love and your story is relevant and you have a place in society that does so much to try to force you out. That is what i had in mind when i wrote the book and hopefully we can talk about some of those things tonight. Most of my work deals with eradicating White Supremacy,supremacy, addressing white privilege, institutional racism and singularly focuses on that. Connected to that, but it also is an attempt to examine the connection between economic disparity as aa general class based phenomenon and White Supremacy as a specific aspect of that, essentially because when you look around there aretheir people talking about inequality. Occupy talks about inequality, but neither occupy, white dominated leftist movement with very little acknowledgment of White Supremacy, very little acknowledgment of the role of privilege iteven within there own space not just with the larger analysis, a lot of people are talking about that but not making the connection to White Supremacy. I argue the way in which the class system in the us cannot be understood absent an understanding. For the manipulation of white workers and white workers racism and adherence to White Supremacy but for the manipulation of what web du bois is called the psychological wage of whiteness, it is okay. At least youre not black. Without that the class system in this country would not be nearly as strong. The purpose of the book is to explore these connections and to explore how inequality gets rationalized , and it was, you know,was, you know, as you heard, happening within black space, internal to black space and is happening within white space and to all of us in the country because we have been conditioned to believe that where you end up is about you. We have this perfect ideological mechanism for justifying inequality. In the old european feudal systems if you are a peasant you damn well knew it. That was it. That was it. You are going to have to have a revolution to get a better deal. In this country we have an ideology. You are going to run this tomorrow. You can be president , ceo, millionaire, billionaire, nobody. Poor folkpoor folk in england would not have believed that. That is crap. You are lying to me, but everyone thinks they will be the next bill gates, donald trump, everyone thinks because we have an ideology that says that. If you made it, good on you, and if you didnt, shame on you. We dont have to have solidarity, collectivity, think about each other and our relationship. We just have to double down and work 60 hours a week, 80 down and work 60 hours a week, 80 hours a week, not take vacations, and we have a system that justifies all of the disparities using racism as a way to bash poor folks by associating poverty and need with black and brown this which then ironically means that once they get associated white folks who were struggling just got cut two. Your safety net doesnt exist. Your labor unions are being weakened. All the stuff that provides subsidence for working people is being kicked out from the system because of the way in which all of that was racialized asked if we do for those people over there on that side of town, but we will never needed. Then the economy goes into the toilet. Exactly. The racial is issue of need has led to a situation where white folks are feeling the pinch. Unless we understand, talk about, and address that we will all be at the mercy of that 1 10 of 1 that owns the disproportionate amount of the wealth in this country and city and state. Hello. I was a reporter. Crime, pain, violence seen through the eyes of specifically homicide detective. Some of the things a people eyewitnesses reporter, covering crime and policing and that city. The specifics, a lot of what has already been talked about. The idea is profound because an away i lived and wrote about it, there is no path forward. Thethe psychology of this idea limitations, limitations of space and limitations of people. I wrote a lot about the zerotolerance policy where hundred thousand people were arrested yearoveryear. Difficult topic to get to the individual sometimes because it is such a profound effect mens i think i did some before the uprising. It certainly is something that i think hangs over the head of the city still. What we have done in the past. As a city he writes about the people here, a lot of times the way forward is not the main focus. A lot of signs are dealing with things that happened in the past and the pain of those policies and now they have inflicted things and neighborhoods. The name or the title for this discussion is baltimore, the path pathbaltimore, the path forward, the future of baltimores Diverse Communities and what it takes to unify cities. Baltimore mayor the 1st law in the nation that directly created segregated housing a black and white homeowners. Basically baltimore invented housing segregation. Many of those lines that were made distinct and someone in movable. Have we ever has ever been truly unified. Have we ever really been unified . Well, i would say what i have seen as reporters during the uprising it was something that i think ai think a lot of us who cover baltimore did not think was possible. Certainly during that time i was the most unifying i have ever seen the city in terms of trying to solve a problem or overcome something. Generally and covering the city is fractious, small neighborhoods, small little villages, a collection of 250. Sometimes they are connecting and it is very difficult. We are unified when the raiders win the super bowl and when the orioles win the world series. Outside of euphoria on that end of the spectrum and catastrophe, the uprising in april, i guess the point is, have we ever been in that kind of place where there was really unity to speak of . I am having difficulty remembering a time when that was true . Definitely the super bowl, but what i think the uprise did because he got so much media coverage, so many people who did not believe these type of things happen but were not aware were almost forced to read about it and see it. I have never seen that many white people on north ave. , pennsylvania avenue in my life. Someone put a smoothie stand up. One thing that i took away from that was what to do with this energy now. So now that we know, there question for me of nonwhite people and black people will never meet each other under any circumstances just because of the structure of the city. You know,city. You know, the bigger question for me is to go along with what you asked, now that we have this moment how we capitalize on it. I want to piggyback on that because most black people wont have any privilege in the city and jump back and forth. After ferguson a very affluent church north of baltimore asked me and what people of faith to do. And one of the things i said in passing, it was baltimore. This could be baltimore, had been baltimore, been baltimore, and they were shocked. I was shocked that they were shocked. They went around asking other black people. Sherry parks said this. And then this is the difference. No one is asking that question. I do think that besides sports it is important we are talking about entertainment, unified more than any other space for art and culture which is important and has been important that the art and culture sector has been working hard post the uprising to take advantage of that. I am goingi am going to take a different approach. I am not interested in unity. What i care about is the degree to which black and workingclass populations have power, and if you look at the wealth distribution, when is its most and when is a broad . There are moments where it was more smudged with more wealth the quality than what we have now, moments where we have more workingclass power and what we have now. Now. Here is a way to think about it. 1990. 1990, the city of baltimore spends 145 million on policing. 2014 we spent 445 million. In the brief two or three years we arrest more citizens and there are people in baltimore. We can say objectively that that is a bad look and we can points to moments where did not happen. So what is it that differentiates those moments from this moment or from this brief ready great moment . Argue that what differentiates those moments where we have more equality from this moment is the presence of a unity. We have a presence up until freddy gray it was pretty unified amongst black and white elite. They arethey are saying that poor people are poor people because of there own actions that is unity. The solution to the citys problem was downtown development. He did not matter whether you talked about this mayor, the last mayor, the mayor before that. Black, black, white. They gave the same answer. The question that is unity now. Who wants that . So the way forward is actually unpacking what that looks like and then how we deconstruct that through political organizing and storytelling. All i am going to add is that right there. Exactly that. Lets remember that just two years ago the city approved a hundred and 50 million tax break. You can walk out the sidewalk and see harbor point which is dedicating 250 million of future tax from. Corporate giant command this was done without much deliberation. Everyone seems to think it was aa good idea, and it was one of the six sessions. Meanwhile, policing is not just the 450 million. We spent two or 300 million on postretirement benefits. Technically it pretty much just covers public safety. And then you talk about giving away tax breaks and recently passed a tax break for people who build apartment buildings and not pay taxes for ten years. The longterm commitment is going to cost every person who lives in the city pretty much most of our resources. The turn that around would be difficult, but that convergence of policing and spending on policing pretty much defines the plan that we all live with right now. There will be an historic election in april for the mayor. That will be crucial. Whether you agree or not, that will be on the ballot. Lets drill down on policing. We have constantly heard from our leaders in the city , specifically conversations with the mayor where she said over and over, we know how to deal with bikes and homicide. Talk about the miniaturization or the police state and baltimore and how it contributes to keeping groups and people separate and apart. I can just say this. Really quickly, we as a city arrested hundred thousand people a year for seven years. Ii dont think that anyone can understand the trauma of that type of policy. I think Civic Engagement that humans from that, i dont eveni dont even think that you can quantify that. I was witnessing it as a reporter. Said nothing. It changed the landscape of the city. A city where van to drive into a neighborhood, open up and what would call the jump out boys would come out and what people into the van. They were arresting so many people. It did not get a lot of coverage and was not in the wire, but it was real. We have to talk about the importance of surveillance. It is very clear and you can see in peoples houses. I made was somebody thought on the radio was an outrageous statement. Apartheid in south africa. By the time i was done with incarceration rates, you do not leave the house without your id. You dont. That is a past law. Daytoday ordinary life, it may have sounded like an outrageous statement, but if you look from the top down it does not work like that. We know what that does to people. We should talk about dramatic trauma. There is a type of traumatization that happens for chronic daytoday surveillance, and it does not need to people who are bold and bright and the idea that if you are a young black man in baltimore and to some degree young black women, and it really does hit the men harder, the idea that you are being told to survive is to submit, that is what it means to live in a policea police state. The Current System needs to be get it. If you are a black person, with an certain parts of western is baltimore they are not there to protect and serve come help you change flats, honestly, excuse my language, they are there to fark you up and put you in whatever type of situation they want un. Even if you talk about the officers who were charged, yes, lock them up, fire them, get rid of the. Three or 400 more just like them being trained right now we will face the same thing over and over again. This is the function of Law Enforcement that has always and forever been only one thing, to control the havenots for the benefit of the halves. There is no other purpose for police. The idea that police are there to protect against the greatest harm to society is obviously crap because they would be profiling bankers and l