A conversation about race

ANNOUNCER:  From MSNBC, "A Conversation about Race" from Crampton Auditorium at Howard University in Washington, DC.

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LYNDON JOHNSON, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT:  This graduating class at Howard University is witnessed to the indomitable determination of the negro America to win his way in American life.

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BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS ANCHOR:  President Lyndon Johnson here at Howard University 43 years ago addressing the graduating class of 1965.That summer, Johnson signed the historic Voting Rights Act into law but the president's message here that day was simply passing laws was not enough.  He said the time had come to ensure real opportunity for African Americans and to end racial Americans once and for all.It seems like such a long time ago.

This is Howard University today.  Founded just after the Civil War to educate freed slaves, Howard is now one of the leading universities in the country with a student body of 11,000, Howard not only produces more African American PhDs than anywhere else in this country, it proudly sends hundreds of volunteers every year to help situations like what happened in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

We've seen a powerful film tonight.  It deserves a powerful conversation coming out of it and to all our guests, let's make this a free fire zone, shall we, where we can go ahead and some things may be uncomfortable.  Some things people aren't used to hearing or saying. 

But we'll give it a shot.  It's time to introduce the panel that joins us onstage.

Tom Joyner a lot of you know, of course, as the host of the "Tom Joyner Show", founder of the Tom Joyner Foundation.  Mike Barnicle has been a journalist for several decades.  We won't say how many.  He is an MSNBC analyst and "Boston Herald" columnist.  Malaak Compton-Rock, founder and director of the Angel Rock Project.  More important, she is a citizen and a mom and I have a feeling we're going to hear from that side of her tonight.  Michael Eric Dyson, a noted author, of course, Georgetown University professor.  We'll talk about his latest book along the way tonight.

A lot of you know Tim Wise from his lectures, from his writings.  He is an educator on antiracism in this country and we'll hear a lot about that I imagine tonight.

Mike Barnicle, you're a white guy.

MIKE BARNICLE, MSNBC ANALYST:  I am.

WILLIAMS:  What do you think should change about the conversation?  In the spirit of the movie we've just witnessed, what should change?

BARNICLE:  Well, I think the biggest thing that ought to change and it's been discussed for years and it never changes.  When we use the word "conversation" it always ends up in an argument.  And there should be an extended conversation about the most important aspect of life in America, race.  Something that really hasn't been addressed as a conversation, I feel, for my lifetime.

WILLIAMS:  Tom Joyner, there is such wisdom buried along the way in that film that we pick up as we watch it.  From Daisy.  To David's uncle.  To David having the presence of mind standing in the slave quarters to say, "I am what they were praying for at the end of the day."  What is your takeaway from it that you leave this hall with tonight?  What do you think it ought to prompt?

TOM JOYNER, "THE TOM JOYNER SHOW":  I think that what we're doing right now is the first step and more of this.  We talk about things like this on my show and other black media services like the "Tom Joyner Morning Show" and Black America Web and black newspapers.  We have this conversation all the time but we're talking to ourselves and we need to have a conversation like this with mainstream media like MSNBC so that it opens - you serve mainstream.  I serve black America.  If we can get a conversation from black America on mainstream I think it helps all of America.

WILLIAMS:  Michael, the quote from Martin Luther King about the grandsons of slave owners and the grandsons of slaves, this is the film that he never knew would be made.  This is the story since we have just commemorated the 40th anniversary of his assassination, this is the story that came from the speech.

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY:  Well, there is no question.  I think that Martin Luther King Jr., 34 years old, invoked a vision of America that he said was deeply rooted in the American dream and what he did is narrate that dream against the backdrop of the nightmare and I think film interrogates some very serious issues that are resonant in not only African American life as Tom has indicated, but should be taken seriously as Brother Barnicle said in the mainstream.

And I think that it's incumbent upon us to deal seriously and honestly and openly with the issue with race.  But let's be honest.  Most of us can't.  When we saw the rift, for instance, with the Jeremiah Wright comments, a Howard University graduate and a brilliant preacher, when he made those comments, it ripped the veil from many white Americans who had no idea that they had kicked out in politics the black church so that they subordinated their theology to their politics, began a black church which then became preoccupied with the conditions under which black people could be free, using their religion as a prism through which to view the landscape.

And finally, what's interesting, I find that Brother Wilson's film and the question the ended with especially provocative, because I want to flip the script a little bit.  Dubois said this, "People come to me all the time and ask what does it feel like to be a problem?"  He said, "We have two warring ideals, two unreconciled strivings locked in one dark body whose dogged strength alone kept it from being torn asunder."

So I don't want to just simply ask the question, "What's wrong with black people?"  We can look at the history of white supremacy, social injustice economic inequality and see that the hostility of American culture in one sense in terms of race has worked against the flourishing and proliferation of good social, stable societies for African American people.

The question we have to ask, what's wrong with the pathology of a people that would demonize human beings who otherwise have no other interest but living in existence and I think that's right.

TIM WISE, ANTIRACIST ACTIVIST:  If I may.

When the producers did the pre-interview with me, probably like many of us up here, they asked me the question, what's wrong with black folks?  And I thought what in the world are you asking me that question for.  The question for me as a white man is exactly the one that Mike just brought up, which is what is wrong with the dominant culture?

My answer, sort of tongue and cheek to what's wrong with black folks to the producers was nothing that the end of white supremacy won't stop.  And what I meant by that is that the system of white supremacy is at the root of both the internalized oppression and internalized inferiority complexes that some black and brown folks manifest.

But it is also, and this is important, at the heart of the internalized superiority that many of - I've been white a long time, you and Mike, a little bit longer, and in that period of time, what we all know is that we, those of us in the white community, exceptions duly noted, have been the ones who haven't wanted to have this conversation.

It's like having a book club with people, some of whom have read 400 pages and the rest of us have read the preface and now we're supposed to get together and have a conversation.  And that conversation ends up sounding like this.  Why can't we have white history month?  Right?  Which is absurd because we have several.  They go by the tricky names of May, June, July, August, September and any other month that we haven't designated and so this is the problem.

Now, we as white folks have if we are willing to go back to it.  A tradition of allied ship (ph) with black and brown peoples.  We have a tradition of resistance in the abolitionist struggle, in the civil rights struggle.  It is time for those of who are white to decide we're going to be in this skin, and we have no control over that, or whether we're going to be of this skin.  We are in it, we are not of it, we are made of more than that and better than that and the question is can we stand shoulder to shoulder with black and brown folks, have this conversation, take ownership of our piece of it as they take ownership of theirs.

BARNICLE:  ... on this panel and one of the themes of this documentary has to do with education, the lack of education, public school education in the United States of America, but there is an educational component in the documentary that if you were not to watch it, if you were to listen to it and you were to hear the description of families being separated in cells, of fathers crying out for their children in other cells, of wives being separated from their husbands and never seeing each other again, if you were not to see it, if you were to hear it, you would immediately think it was the Holocaust.

And does it occur to anyone here in this panel or in this audience that one of the basic components of this problem for us, all of us might be that white people simply don't know black people in this country.  We don't know each other.  It strikes me as having lived almost all of my misspent life in the North, that when the two David’s meet there is an ease to their greeting and their relationship that occurs in North Carolina that does not occur in the North.

In the North, it's, Tom go ahead in front of me, please, and I feel good about myself.  I let you in traffic on the way to work in the morning so I'm not a racist.

JOYNER:  Right.

BARNICLE:  But in the South, in the South, with all of its component parts, with all of its history, there is an ease to the relationship that does not exist in places like Cleveland, Boston, New York.  It's an odd thing.

MALAAK COMPTON-ROCK, ANGEL ROCK PROJECT:  That has to do with manners, though.  The Southern people really have good manners.  My husband's folk are from South Carolina and I spend a lot of time down there and the manners are absolutely beautiful but we don't know what's going on behind the manners.  I'm so happy ...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  Do you know in the North?

COMPTON-ROCK:  I think we - we don't have the manners.  We allow it to show.  But what you said in terms of education is so important because this is a piece that needs to go into schools and they need to go into inner city schools and they need to go into black schools, but you know what, they need to go into white private schools as well.

Every child needs to see this done.

WILLIAMS:  I was going to ask you as a fellow parent of two children.  Joe Klein in "Time Magazine" just wrote that our kids' generation is the first - I want to get this right - "blissfully colorblind American generation in the history of the public."  Do you buy it?  Do you agree with that?  What does that get us ...

COMPTON-ROCK:  No, I don't buy that.  But I will tell you this. 

Because of the anniversary of Dr. King's death, they're speaking about it in my children's school.  They're three and five.  One of the parents got very upset about telling the truth and thought that at five years old they were too young and so she wrote a very long e-mail and I wrote her back and I said, "My daughter, who is African American, is best friends with an Israeli child and your child who is an Italian America.

If it wasn't for Dr. King they wouldn't be in school together.  So let's talk about that first."

My children live in a society where they have friends of all colors and races but they do ask about it.  Today Zara (ph), three years old, asked me why her hair wasn't as long as Naya's (ph) hair.  Her best friend, whose hair is probably down to here.  And I said, well, you do have long hair and she said, but no, mine is puffy.

Now this is a child who, I have told her how beautiful she is how gorgeous her skin color is.  From the day she was born, how beautiful her puffs were, that mommy couldn't wait to have a child with Afro puffs and at three years old has been to Africa three times and played with little African children who look just like her.

But still, today, she asked me why wasn't her hair the length of Naya's (ph) and I want it to be.

WILLIAMS:  What do you attribute that to?  Is there something to credit or blame and to Joe Klein's point, you've watched it change at least in your lifetime.

COMTPON-ROCK:  I credit it to the media and what our children see on television and in still magazines and billboards and everything around that what is white is beautiful and I know that David Wilson did the black doll test again ...

WILLIAMS:  We're going to get to that.

COMPTON-ROCK:  Are you? OK.  And it's astonishing that even today when children look at black dolls they don't think positive thoughts, they think negative thoughts.  In my household I have dolls of all colors and races and always have and nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see my children make believe with an Asian doll and a black doll and white doll and they're all family.

But absolutely it's the media, it's the images that they see, it's the lack of discussion, it's the lack of films like these in school, and it's the lack of that parent who is friend of mine but being uncomfortable that Dr. King was talked about to five year olds.

BARNICLE:  You know, Brian, to your question posed from Joe Klein's question or his assertion that our kids belong to the most colorblind generation ever.  Our kids do but there is a component out there, a large number of kids, don't.  And you also have to mix the issue of race now with the issue of class.

And you have in too many schools in this great country of ours, public schools that are disgraceful for poor whites and poor blacks, forced to fight for the same small share of a meager and inefficient and ineffective educational pie that when they get out of school guarantees them no shot of the larger economic pie that our kids have a big slice of because they're our kid.

DYSON:  What's interesting when Joe Klein talks about the blissful colorblindness of society, there are certainly moments in the evolution of American consciousness around race where we talk about transcending race. I think we've got three options.  We can translate race into the idiom of color and be obsessed with it.  We can think we're transcending race by denying the lethal intensity of a history that is uncomfortable but the mother can't approach or we can try to transform race which means we acknowledge the brutal history, the bloodshed in the racial trenches and the warfare and try to come to a conclusion of the matter by saying, let's be honest and open about it.

I think the myth of neutrality and objectivity is just that.  It is a myth.  Nobody sees colorblindness.  When people think they are doing you a favor to say, you know, I looked at you and I think you're articulate and insightful and you have a PhD from Princeton and I don't see your color.  Dang, I do.

But what's interesting is that the pretense that we mustn't see color is a difference between not seeing blackness and not seeing race. I don't want you to transcend my blackness.  I want you to transcend the bigotry you have about blackness, the blindness that you have about whiteness and what that might mean.

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