A conversation about race

WILLIAMS:  And here you are at home with your husband, better known to the folks watching us tonight as Chris Rock with two beautiful girls and you've told them as we've established, they're beautiful from the day they were born, as I imagine the parents of the children in the doll test have, too, and it turns out that's not enough for self esteem.

COMPTON-ROCK:  It's not enough but I am different kind of parent.  I don't shield my children from the world and obviously their father is a different kind of father so he doesn't either.

So these are two children that we are fortunate enough to have taken to Africa, who have played in shanty towns in South Africa with children who looked just like them.  I am working on a program called Journey for

Change right now where I'm bringing 30 children from Bushwick, Brooklyn in August to South Africa for numerous reasons.  A, I want them to volunteer and serve.  B, I want them to, instead of being on the receiving end of service, to be on the other end of giving, to travel because travel we know opens up your eyes.  To be on the continent.

I remember when I landed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast for the first time working for UNICEF and the feeling I felt as an adult to be on the continent and then also to understand that the children that we're actually going to be working with are so poverty stricken.  They are AIDS orphans.  And to come back here with hopefully a greater appreciation and understanding of your culture, where you're from, and have it manifest in your life even if you live in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Kids need to know where they're from and they need to know their history.  I do not shy away from talking to my three and five year old about slavery.  I think there is a way you can talk about it, obviously,

I won't talk about it like I would a 13 or a 14 year old but my childrenknow about slavery.  My children know - I've taken them to all the historic houses.  They've been in slave quarters.  They know what they look like and they understand the light skin, black skin issue.  I've talked about it.

Because if we don't talk about it in our culture, this is a really horrific thing that goes on in our own culture.  We put our own selves down because of the way we look.  So how in the world are we supposed to...

WILLIAMS:  Mike Barnicle and then I have to talk to Chief Lanier.

BARNICLE:  In terms of what you're discussing and you say kids need to know where they're from and I absolutely agree with you.  And with the chief on my right as you were speaking, as the three of you were speaking, I was thinking back to I don't know whether it was 1986, 1987, juvenile court, Boston Massachusetts, young kid, just about 16, assault and battery with a gun, weapon.  And the juvenile court judge says to the kid, you're just a couple of months from being 16 and you're going to walk out now because if you were here in four months it would be House of Corrections for you which is an adult prison.  So I'm not going to send you to the House of Corrections now because you're under 16.

The kid looked at the judge and he said I don't care where you send me, just don't send me home.  And the level of expectation among too many black kids of street level.  We wonder about the doll test, you wouldn't wonder about the doll test if you saw a sidewalk on a Saturday night, Southern Avenue in Anacostia, Blue Hill Avenue in Boston, parts of the Bushwick section in Brooklyn.  You wouldn't wonder for a second why they do that with the doll test because their level of expectation, their level of self-esteem is so low that they are a nation of the walking dead at nine, 10 years of age.

DYSON:  They're connected, right?  They're connected to the individual and institutional.

BARNICLE:  Yes.

DYSON:  The obvious problem is, the reason the internalization of the self-hatred comes is because they expect that they will become imprisoned because they are, they will be over-incarcerated ...

BARNICLE:  Their brothers are gone.

DYSON:  The point you were making about education.  If you give twice as much money to an institution in suburban America and twice as less, let's put it that way, to the post industrial urban centers, then the fact is you're giving $1,000 per student out there and $100 here, who is going to have a better education, better access and therefore self-esteem?

If you're hit on the back of the hand to go to jail if you're white - go to detention, but if you're black you're sent to jail, that's a huge structural disparity that reinforces the psychic self determination that leaves to self hatred.  So the both are related.

WILLIAMS:  Thirty seconds and then we have to involve Chief Lanier in this conversation.

POWELL:  I have got to jump into this.  I sat in the audience when the question was raised, what's wrong with black people?  And I understand the question was meant to be provocative but I had a huge problem with it because in the 1960s we kept saying the Negro problem.  That's the same thing.  It wasn't the Negro problem.  It is not black people today.  The problem is what is wrong with American society that we're having this conversation another generation that says you were talking, and I know you meant no harm, but for me it's offensive to talk about they and these young people.

I work with these kids every single day in Brooklyn. I am a community activist.  This is my fulltime work and I know what's going on in the school system, what's going on in the prison-industrial complex, where we see this pipeline from the schools to the prison system.  I know what's going on with HIV/AIDS in central Brooklyn which is the highest in the country for black America.

The reality is there are no resources there.  We understand those have been shifted off to the Iraq War and I think what ends up happening is we have these conversations about these black kids, these Latino kids, these black and brown kids but no one wants to take ownership for the fact that we have a nation that has completely abandoned the most vulnerable in the society.  That's the real issue.

COMPTON-ROCK:  That's what we need.  We need this money to come into the community.  Without - I worked with a particular organization, the Salvation Army, without this Bushwick Center I can't even imagine where these kids would be.  After 3:00 when they come out of school if this place wasn't open till midnight.

But we need more resources, it needs more funding, it needs computers, it needs ...

WILLIAMS:  Let's ask ...

COMPTON-ROCK:  I'm sorry.

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