I worked hard to keep the conversation because obviously there is a lot of seriousness and also the human side, not just me, but what i saw you learned as i traveled around the world. Next, from this years baltimore book festival, a Panel Discussion on the future of the maryland city. The baltimore book festival is presented by Stephen Janis and the art of [inaudible] Film Commission especially that agency and please note after you enjoyed the presentation, volunteers are on hand and they are happy to accept donations and thank you for helping to keep the baltimore book festival free. We have an incredible panel assembled and i will start with introductions. D. Watkins, living and dial dying while latin america. A columnist and his work has been published in the new york times, huffington post, the guardian and other magazines. He holds a masters in education from john hopkins university. He is a College Professor and has also been a recipient of numerous awards including a beanie fellowship, Baltimore Magazine best writer awarded for 2015, and Baltimore Business Journal 40 and under list. Tim watts, he is author of six books including his highly acclaimed memoir, white like me and reflections on race from as well as dear White America and colorblind. His next book, under the affluence, shaming the poor, reprising their rich and jeopardizing the future of america will be released in early 2015 and he has contributed essays to over 25 additional books. His essays have appeared huffington post, counterpunch, the root, black commentator and see magazine among others. Stephen janis, why do we kill. Stephen janis is an awardwinning investor journalists. His worked as a senior and must get a reporter for the now defunct baltimore examiner. He has won a work for his work on solved murders in baltimore and he has won three muppercaseletter hes the best investigative series and currently investigative journalist for the real news network, a nonprofit news Service Based in baltimore. Sherry parks, fierce angels, the strong black woman in American Life of culture. Sheri Parks Research hoaxes on concern for Popular Culture and its effect upon individuals, family and minority culture and is an active intellectual peer in in national and local media. Doctor parks is active in the university of maryland engagements. Class also includes projects that benefit nonprofit associations. In 2008, she is recognized by the campus as outstanding woman of color as faculty of the year and University Honors program. Lester spence is associate professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins university and specialize in the study of black racial and urban politics. On awardwinning scholar. Teacher who received an excellent Teaching Award in 2009 and he can be regularly heard on National Public radio. His net next book will be out of me and of october please welcome all their esteemed panelists. [applause]. [applause]. What im going to do is start with letting the panelists begin with the Lester Spence kind of describe what their individual books are about. Lester. Thank you very much. Thank you to the baltimore book festival. I knew i was in the right place when i saw that they had a book festival because it meant baltimore was actually literate and i wanted to be a place where reading matter. Im really interested kind of the brief reduction in the quality within black spaces. If you look at inequality across time may beat 9029 or so to the present, it takes the shape of a up read hell is a 1929, low levels in 1950 or so and really high levels now. In fact, we have high levels of inequality now. Why does it take the shape of a u . Largely because of politics, so from the 30s to the 60s or so you had the new deal, Great Society that gave workers the right to organize. It gave us a social safety net and it made a number of types of segregation or Racial Discrimination illegal. Those policies were kind of gradually peeled back starting in 1970 or so and that has in effect if you look into racially between racial groups, but also has an effect within black communities. If you look at black communities and take kind of a black politic approach as opposed to a racial politics approach, that is if you look within black communities solely as opposed to comparing them to white communities, what you see is you have some black people with a lot of loot, some with a little bit and some lack people with no and what you see consistently the two clearly in the modern moment are blackie leads kind of justifying why that loop is distributed the way it is. Thats why poor black people are where they are, why black people in the working class are where they are and what im interested in doing with my next book coming out at the end of october is kind of seeing how that dynamic plays out in black churches. Talk about the rise of prosperity gospel and how that plays out in cities that are run by black mayors where you have cities increasingly forced to be looking at Downtown Development as opposed to other forms of development and how people resist that in black spaces. Basically that is what my book is about. Doctor sheri parks. Thank you. Might area is how ordinary people in their everyday lives capture duty in truth and meaning. Right now im starting to write on art, culture and strategy because the work i am doing in and around the city that we will talk about later, fierce angels argues that black women have already perfected on organic leadership model that they practice every day that is often unrecognized. Is that close enough . Okay. What i do is start at the beginning as a first recorded Creation Stories and argue that the sacred feminine in the stock strong black woman is the same model. Shes the mother of herself, the darkness before the assumedly male died. The darkness does anything, so i often get in trouble with people for sameness as you can imagine and then i trace her through both african and european history because i argue by the time slave owners enslave women arrived, they already had the narrative and over and over again you see black women placed in trust, in places where they are assumed to be brilliant, strong and interested in other peoples problems and so she plays that role in black culture the best way to explain this in baltimore, is look around at the high number of security guards in the city who are black women. I asked someone who hired a lot of them white and he said well, they can do everything because she does everything. How many times that you heard those lyrics about im a natural woman, im everywhere and can do everything and he said they are Strong Enough that no one will go up against them, fierce angels, the title of my book. They are highly nutri nurturing. Is that of hiring to people, you are hiring one. The most controversial thing i say though is that that very revered, strong, wise figure is on lock down sometimes and often they position themselves behind men and often when im in an allblack situation saying this someone raises their hand and says, arent we supposed to. D. Watkins. This will be two Different Things for two different types of people. If you are a report black person, its a collection of love stories, a love story to anyone going through some type of health care disparity, education disparity. To the people who have been stepped on by our militarized Police Forces to your if you are a rich white person, then this is 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 can be a black person in a, you know, Housing Project or be like a top ranking clue club member; right . Either way both of those guys probably like ice cream. The soldier understand why america are Mainstream Media is looking at black people the way they do, but if you are a black person, what it does is shows you that you are important and loved and that your story is relevant and if you have a place in this society that does so much to try to force you out, so thats what i had in mind when i wrote this book and hopefully, we can talk about some of those things tonight. Tim watts. So, most of my work as some of you know deals with eradicating White Supremacy, addressing White Privilege and does that sort of singly focuses on that under the affluence is connected to that. But, it also is an attempt to examine the connection between economic disparity is a general class based phenomenon and White Supremacy as a specific aspect of that. Essentially because when you look around there are a lot of people talking about inequality, occupied talk about inequality every now and then and neither occupy white dominated leftist movement with very little acknowledgment of White Supremacy, very little acknowledgment of the role of privilege even within their own space. Not just with the larger analysis. A lot of people are talking about that, but not making that connection to White Supremacy and i argue in the book and document as many others have done the way in which the class system in the United States cannot be understood absolute of understanding why supremacy. It does not exist without it. It would not exist as strong but for it, but for the manipulation of white workers and white workers racism and adherence to White Supremacy but for the manipulation of what w edu two boys called the Psychological Association whiteness, which is a way of saying why people that its okay at least in a black. Without that, the class system in this country would not be nearly as strong, so the purpose of the book is to explore these connections and explore how inequality gets rationalized and , you know, as you heard its happening within black space, internal to black space, its also happening within white space and all this in this country because we have all been conditioned to believe that where you end up is about you. We always have this ideological mechanisms for justifying inequality. In the old european system if you were a peasant, you damn well knew you were a peasant and would not be royalty. You are out, done. The communist country we have an ideology that says no, you are poor today, but you will run this tomorrow. He could be president , ceo, millionaire, billionaire. Poor folk in england would not have believed that. But, in this country everyone thinks they will be the next bill gates, the next donald trump, god for bid, everyone thinks because we havent ideology that says that. So, if you made it, good on you and you you didnt make it, shame on you. We dont have to think about each other and our relationship, we just had to double down and work 60 hours a week, 80 hours a week, not take vacation and we have a system that justifies all of this disparity using racism as a way to bash poor folk by associating poverty and need with black and brown this, which ironically means once i get associated with blackness and brown this white folks are struggling and your social benefits just got cut to. Your labor unions are being weakened, all of the stuff that actually provides subsidence for working people is being kicked out from the system because of the way in which all of that was racialized in the stuff we do for those people on that side of the town, but we will never need and what do you know the economy goes to the toilet and people are looking around like wheres my healthcare, is my housing. Of the racial is a should of need led to a situation where poor workingclass white folk are feeling the pinch and unless we understand that, talk about that and address that we will all be at the mercy of that one 10th of 1 , 1100 that owns the disproportionate amount of wealth in this country, the city, the state. Hello, how are you doing . I was a reporter, so my books deal specifically with crime, pain and the violence seen through the eyes of specifically homicide detective, africanamerican homicide detective. I was trying to think how my book would be relevant at all and i was thinking about some of the things that people that i witnessed as a reporter covering crime and policing in the city, which i guess in a lot of ways i examined as some of the spit specifics of people of already talked about in that i did the fast board is a profound idea because in the world that i lived in an observed and wrote about, there is no path for it, the psychology of his idea of limitations. Limitations of space and limitations of people and i wrote a lot about the zero tolerance policy in the city where 100,000 people were arrested year over year and it is a difficult topic to get to the individual, sometimes because its such a profound effect on the psychology of the city, the psychology of the people who work in a corrupt Police Department or the psychology of the people executing these policies and how it affects their lives. I did some before the uprising of things that happened we did a lot of writing about it and it certainly is something i think that hangs over the head of the city, still. The toll of what we had done in the past. We are city, to me, as a person who writes about the people here that a lot of times the way forward is certainly not the main focus. A lot of times we deal with things that happened in the past and the pain of those policies and how they were afflicted things in the neighborhood and change the psychology of the city. So, the name or the title for this discussion is called baltimore the path forward and what it takes to unify city. I would offer this to kind of start the conversation. May 15, 1911, Baltimore Mayor signed into effect the first law in the nation that directly created segregated housing of a black and white homeowners, so basically baltimore invented housing segregation amongst the other great things we have done we invented segregation. Many of those lines that weusine other great things we have done we invented segregation. Many of those lines that were made distinct in somewhat immovable has remained in place, i think. My question to the panel is, how we ever in the history of this city really ever been truly unified as we look forward trying to seek that type of unity . Have we ever really been unified . I would say the most i have seen as a reporter was during uprisings. There was something i think a lot of us who covered baltimore did nothing was possible. But, certainly during that period of time that was the most unified i have ever seen the city in terms of having trying to solve a problem or overcome something. I would say that is the closest, but generally in covering the city that is fractured, small neighborhood dallas little villages that are sometimes interconnected. Its difficult to cross those lines. We are unified when the ravens win the super bowl and when the orioles win the world series. So, outside of euphoria on that end of the spectrum and catastrophe, the uprising in april, i guess the point is has the city have we ever been in that kind of place where there was really unity to speak up . Im having difficulty kind of remembering a time when that was true. Definitely the super bowl, but what i think of uprising because it got so much Media Coverage i think that so many people who didnt believe these types of things happen or want aware are almost forced to read about it and see it, so they felt energized and wanted to do something. I have never seen that many white people on north avenue in my life. It was like someone put a smoothie stand up. All of these different wild things were going on and one thing i took away from that was, what do we do with this unity now, now that these people are aware these situations because with camera phones a lot of people did not believe this was real or existed. Now that we know, the bigger question was how to move forward because baltimore is super segregated and i felt like i had been living into baltimores on my life. I know why people and i know black people who will never meet each other under any circumstances because of the structure of the city, so the bigger question for me is to go along with what you asked is how do we now that we have this moment had we capitalize on it and set up something for the next generation of young people here. I went to piggyback on that because i think most to have privilege in this city jump in i think thats the social reality most of our white friends did not know about. After ferguson, but before pretty gray, a church north of baltimore asked me what people of faith could do and one of the things i said in passing was that it was baltimore. This could be baltimore and they were shocked. I was shocked they were shocked. They were absolutely shocked and went around asking other black people, and they were like sherry parks says this. Then, this is the difference. Post freddy gray know it is asking that question. I think besides sports its important we talk about entertainment that baltimore is unified more than any other spaces within art and culture and i think thats important and i could its really important that art and culture spectrum has been working very hard post uprising to take advantage of that. Im going to take a different approach. Im not interested in unity. I dont really care all that much about unity. I care about black and workingclass population to have power and if you look at that wealth dissertation, when is it should mushed there were moments when it was more schmo must and there was a moment where we had more workingclass power than what we have now, so heres a way to think about a. 1990, and i mentioned this fact a lot and ever, mentioned that it kills people. 1890, the city of baltimore spaz 145 24 dean. We rest more citizens then there are people in baltimor