A conversation about race

WILLIAMS:  Let's ask the chief, and what a unique job as the head of the Metropolitan Police Department in this city.  As you sit here, you're kind of halfway watching your city and the officers. Do you have - and there's any number of ways to go in this conversation, an operating thesis where race is concerned, what all that means, the fear of your officers.  The fear among your officers.  We can come at this any number of ways.  How do you approach your job?

CATHY LANIER, D.C. METRO POLICE CHIEF:  I think all of the discussion here tonight has been absolutely on cue.  I think talking about strategically what needs to be done in the country about education and where funding needs to go has all been exactly where it needs to go.  But it's really a lot more messy than that. 

And what I deal with is a lot more in the weeds and what the reality is, and I think it was alluded to a little bit earlier is, is that there are two big issues here.  When I walk into a community the first thing that people see in a neighborhood where I police is not my race.  They see my uniform.  And it symbolizes something to everybody right off the bat.  To some people it symbolizes fear and oppression and to some people it symbolizes hope and help.

And when I walk into that community I've got about 30 seconds to define what this uniform means to somebody or to change whatever their perception is and the reality is it's not just the education.  That's a critical piece of what's missing.  But we are lacking social services, economic equality, human services, mental health services.  There is so much lacking and the real tension in our communities right now between one community and the next is economic.

We right now in Washington, DC, development is just unbelievable how the city has turned around.  You have a public housing complex that now has a 340 unit multimillion dollar condominium put up next to it, there are rich black and rich white people moving into that condominium.  And those people in those condominiums have a different culture that they're used to.

So they're going to complain about you and your public housing complex because it's still there next door and you're going to complain about them and there's a tension.

What I liked about what David said is David said as a kid, just as a very young child he said, I looked around and I saw my environment and I knew that I didn't want to be there.  And all you need to do is find the right ways and the right people to reach and find one David.  Find one David and give him that hope.

And once David comes out and becomes what he is today, that creates the self-esteem for the next David.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  But the problem is there are many less Davids that are being created and many more white Davids that are being presumed.  You can look at the president of the United States and see that mediocrity may be the characteristic of a young person ascending without an enormous amount of talent whereas it takes an exceptional black child to achieve what an average white child might achieve.  And that has to do with the things you talked.  Structural disparity, structural inequality.

And furthermore, the Pew Report did come out to suggest what you say is true.  Many black people are now feeling what you say is true.  More black people are saying they feel more in common with their white peers economically then they do this devastated inner city.  But here's my problem with the black elite.

The black elite has internalized the pathology of self-hatred by demonizing the poor, putting the colossal foots on the necks of vulnerable poor people without reaching out to help them.  I think that's an issue we have to deal with.

Chris Rock, her husband said being black in America is like this.  Your uncle sent you to college but he molested you.  I mean, that's the tension between acknowledging the greatness of this country, the grand design of opportunity that is open to all if you fit in a certain narrow vision of what is appropriate.

You get a great education, you're still being in one sense dissed.  So the question is how do we overcome with incredible education, loving each other, I think love is very critical, but also challenging a system that distributes wealth, that distributes resources and you talk about public policies and social resources that segment America, segregate

America.  We've seen the re-segregation of America at schools where black and Latino kids go to schools now that are predominantly black and brown which means they are starting off poor.

They are concentrated poverty.  White kids by and large don't experience concentrated poverty which means you have a poor house, you have a poor neighborhood and you have a poor school.  They usually live in a much more mixed neighborhood.  Black people don't have that.  I think if we get rid of that, then we begin to have an opportunity that opens up for everybody.

BARNICLE:  Let's throw the real thing, the real hand grenade on the table.  How many young black men arrested this evening, say, or tomorrow evening by the DC police have fathers that they know?

LANIER:  I'd say on average, and I say this publicly all the time.  Our communities are run, and particularly our most poverty, crime-ridden communities are held together by mothers and grandmothers, period.  The majority, I would say, 75 to 80 percent of the children that are involved in criminal activity don't have a father or a man at all, a father figure at all.

BARNICLE:  We were talking about resources and money.  Sorry, Brian, don't mean to do this, but how much money do you throw at that problem? What is money going to do to that problem?

WILLIAMS:  Where does the change come from?

DYSON:  I have a response to that but the point is the reason the fathers are not there - we can look at it say father absence which is critical, fatherlessness which is critical, but you ask the question a patriarchal society where men are told that you should be able to take care of your families and if you don't you're not a real man and yet if you do a study by Diva Pager (ph), a sociologist at Princeton.  She said you could be a white guy with a prison record in New York and have a better chance of getting a job than a black man with a college education.

And I'm telling you that devastates - I'm not saying that black men shouldn't be responsible.  I work with this young man right here who has every year on Father's Day an enormous challenge to African American men to step up to the plate so we do that internally.

BARNICLE:  If the three of us go into the Apple Store, they're going to follow you, not me.

DYSON:  And it makes a difference how fathers can show up and be responsible.

WILLIAMS:  If you were king how would you go about fixing the problem that gives the chief the statistics you quote?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  Real basic for me is someone who comes from an inner city environment, grew up without a father, single mother, welfare, food stamps, that's my life growing off, and seeing many people, as David was talking about in the film, disappear, is an overemphasis on locking these young people up.  There are good police officers out there, I will say that, but there is an overemphasis all across the country on locking these people up.  It is a failure of the public school system.  There needs to be funding there.

There is a funding of social programs.  If you come to Eastern Brooklyn tonight young people out on the streets will say to you, there is nothing for us to do other than be out here in the streets.  That's Anacostia, that's South Central L.A., that's East Oakland, that's all over this country.

And what we end up getting caught up in is this notion that we're policing the community.  The reality is I even think when we saw that doll test, that doll test should be applied to police officers, white ones and black and Latino ones because Shawn Bell was shot at 15 times by the police. 

One of the police officers was white, but one was black and one was Latino so even black and Latino people internalize the notion that a black man or a Latino man is dangerous so it all goes back to the history of racism in this country and that's never dealing with it.  What we're doing is talking about tangents, what social programs we need to put in place where the root of it all to me is the history of systemic racism that manifests itself in all these pathologies that we're talking about.

LANIER:  Let me just correct one thing.  I don't want to make the assumption that because there's not a child present that a child cannot be successful no matter what the obstacles.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  (Inaudible)

LANIER:  I had a single parent myself, raised by a single parent.  I think what is critical in our communities is when you have a single parent raising children, one, you have to have one person that loves you, cares about you and tells you will make it.  And we do have it but that single parent has to work, has to provide and has to take care of everything else and that leaves a void of leadership and guardianship in that child's life which is fine in the beginning but when they're teenagers and they come home from school and there is no guardian and they are in those communities, it's exactly that issue.

COMPTON-ROCK:  Putting money into neighborhood resources.  Putting money into the neighborhoods you work in, into resources that those children can take advantage of when their parents are working other than sports or rapping.  Give them computers, give  them books, put money into the schools.

WILLIAMS:  Now that we have injected gender.  We have race, of course, here, we have entertainment media, we have talked about crime and education.  Take another one of our breaks.  We're going to change out some people, change the subject a little bit.  Among other things, does Hollywood, does the popular media get the roles right?  Men and women, when our conversation from Howard continues.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE:  Forty-two point four percent of black women have never been married.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE:  I read that article.  It didn't say we're never going to get married.  It just said we haven't yet to.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE:  OK.  So when is it going to happen?  In the afterlife?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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