A conversation about race

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WILLIAMS: We are back and our conversation is going to take yet another turn. We're going to bring in some perhaps preconceived notions and some media portraits of the conversation we've been having. And we have some new members. Reverend Soaries is here, First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens. A man known to many of the people in this room, as is Kriss Turner, a screenwriter and we're going to see a little bit of her work in a second.

A few years ago, Kriss saw a report that 42 percent of African American women, shall we say, of age, are unmarried, most with no hope of marrying an African American male. It has, you could say, affected her work, the major motion picture, "Something New."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

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

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

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

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, even if 42.4 percent of us never get married, that still means 57.6 percent of us will. That's a substantial greater percentage.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you, Miss Numbers Queen. However, those odds are completely against us. It says the phenomenon is most acute among African American women who are educated professionals. Judge, accountant, bankers, pediatricians, that'd be us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAMS: You ask the question where are the men and you do it through your art form. The question came up in the last segment. We're glad to have you. Take a whack at the answer.

KRISS TURNER, FILMMAKER: I don't have an answer. The answer that I came up with was we may have to look outside of our race and we may have to focus on the person and love and take the dream that we might marry this black man that looks just like our fathers and just open our hearts to love and pray that God brings us something fabulous.

WILLIAMS: Well, Reverend Soaries, that brings God into it. That brings it into your wheelhouse and the film depiction of course is one thing but behind it is that very, very serious question and who do we see about that?

REV. DEFOREST SOARIES, FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF LINCOLN GARDENS: Well, I think the question that I heard being asked by Dave when he asked what's wrong with black America was really what happened to black America. See, this film suggests that we were prisoners of war but we won, we're here, we fought back, we resisted. And I think the question we have to answer while we're waiting for our apology, while we're seeking reparations, we've got to answer the question, what happened to the black people that worked all day in the fields but still raised their children? What happened to the black church that taught freed slaves how to read? What happened to the black community that had capacity and courage and faith and persevered?

The reality is in spite of all the systemic problems that we still face, things are still better now than they were then which means that we should have the capacity now to resist and fight and build like we did then. If Frederick Douglass could learn to read at midnight by candle, then even in inferior schools we can learn to read. So we need to do both ends (ph). We have to fight the system but we have to continue to build ourselves. What you heard on the last panel was a representation along with Brother Powell of people who understand the systemic problems but aren't waiting for the system to solve our problems.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let me say a lot of the work I do now is around black male development. This is I'm passionate about and we challenge ourselves as black males, we're clear about the fact that we go to Howard University, go to schools all around the country, be it a black school or white school is seven to one, 10 to one ratios so I understood why the sister made the film but by the same token we need to also take into account that coming out of the civil rights movement there is certain economic opportunities that existed for black females that didn't exist for a lot of black males. That's not to get into a battle of sexes. We want to leave that in the 20th century. But that's the reality.

We've got to talk about the reality. We've got to talk about the reality of heroin in our communities in the 1970s, crack cocaine in the 1980s, the explosion of the prison-industrial complex that began in the Reagan era, that accelerated through the years of Bill Clinton as president of this country and you see in 2008 there is this incredible discrepancy between professional black women who may not see comparable mates out there.

So to me the issue that is what has happened over the last 40 years, and then on top of that, the fact when you look at a lot of our leadership, there hasn't really been a lot of development of black males around our communities with a few exceptions. And so that's why this conversation is being had on a different level, not just well, who are these women going to marry?

I don't have a problem with a sister marrying a white brother, Latino brother, Asian brother, that's your prerogative. Love is love. But let's not act as if there's something that hasn't happened to black males over the last 40 years in our country, not that it's worse than black females but it's certainly something distinctive that's happened at least to the fact that even in this audience at Howard, there's mostly black women out there now.

WILLIAMS: Mike Barnicle, you - we're going to get to another educational point in a moment and you touched on this earlier. As long as we have a two tier conversation in this country, Tom Joyner was right. This gets talked about on Tom Joyner's radio show every day. What matters is who's listening. Is that not correct?

BARNICLE: Well, that is correct. Tom Joyner talks about it each and every day. We do programs like these and yet the conversation doesn't take place on the crosstown bus in Philadelphia next week on the way to work, the day before the primary. The conversation doesn't take place really in the offices of this country. The conversation doesn't take place on the factory floors in this country because there's a tension between the races in this country. That has existed as long as my white life has existed.

I pray that it would lessen, I think it has lessened a bit over the last 15 to 20 years but certainly not enough to give people the degree of comfort to talk about the issue the way we've been talking about it here this evening.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And the reason is because the people who have the power only need to know themselves. The people who don't have power must know people in power just to survive the people in power.

The analogy is, we sit on real estate, none of us know anything about the indigenous people who occupy this land before we came here. We don't know their religion, we don't know their names, we don't know their social structures and to the extent that we are so arrogant that we think we can occupy land that belonged to other people and not know who they were, the analogy is that people who are powerless, in this case, African Americans, we study white people, we understand white people, we know white people, we are bilingual. We speak us and them.

But white people can survive and prosper without knowing us at all. And as long as that's true there will be no conversation.

WILLIAMS: Mike?

BARNICLE: I think part of the difficulty is within the last 10 years, certainly, the effects of being so politically conscious in this country has rendered the media rather neutered the media in terms of pushing this discussion further. Our editors, our producers, our news chiefs.

WILLIAMS: Ooh. Can't say that. Don't say that.

BARNICLE: You'll piss them off, and it's them.

WILLIAMS: And it's easier not to say it.

BARNICLE: Right. Let's move on to the fire (ph).

CONTINUED

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