All right, let's give Professor Kinshaw another round of applause for the excellent students we do.
If any of you are interested in addressing a question or a comment,
please line up at the microphone here at the center of the room.
My name is Josh Fadela Cruz. I'm a student in the television and film program.
I had one question that deals with my future in that industry.
I guess, sorry, I'm a little nervous.
It was that in light of the power of the mainstream media to perpetuate this racist discourse under the guise of post-racialism,
how do my fellow students and I prepare to try to change that in the future?
That's a great question.
So let me give a quote at this point from now on for the rest of the evening.
All I can do is basically have a chat with you.
I don't have answers to these things.
I have hunches, I have questions that I might say, amen, I agree, what is the answer to that?
So let's frame these as conversations.
And if you have ideas that respond to some of the questions, let's hear those.
So I actually will share that concern and say I think that the media are the least responsive of all the institutions we've had
to the aspirations of racial and gender justice.
I think it is even more problematic because it's not just an industry in terms of having access to those jobs,
but it actually shapes the consciousness, the ideologies, what is possible, what's normal for the entire society.
And the kicker of it is unlike any other institution that at least is under a legal obligation to pretend that they are equal opportunity,
the entertainment industry has an argument supported largely by the First Amendment that they're creative enterprise.
So they can go about discriminating because if it's not in the image of the writer that the character be black and brown or Native American,
then they can't be forced to make that character.
Now it turns out that 100% of their character is far away.
In any other industry that disparity would be a prima facie case of discrimination except for the entertainment industry.
So it's a profound problem that one of the institutions that's most important is also the one that we have the least access to
in terms of trying to counter its deleterious effects.
Now having said that, there are questions about how we consume media.
There is question about whether we can vote with our pocketbooks.
There is the question of whether all this new media is going to provide other fora for us to create other's expectations and to create a new way of consuming media.
I think as young people who have been raised in a context in which there are all these new media possibilities, it really is the task of this generation
to think about ways of using some of this new technology and the fact that there are so many options to create a demand for different kinds of media.
Personally, what I don't go to stuff that I think represents the same kind of stereotypes, it means that there's not a lot of TV that I can actually watch.
And every now and then when I really get up the gumption, I write the letters which they say one letter counts for a thousand.
Now who knows, that's like a little drop in the ocean, but at least it makes me feel like I'm doing something other than complaining about seeing the same stuff over and over again.
I'm not thinking that there's an aggregate way in which all of us can make that a more powerful message.
My name is Susie, I'm a school social worker and clinical therapist in San Juanica.
And what I've been trying to do is use your work among many others in looking at social work through a critical race lens.
And it's been very interesting feedback that I get and it being accepted or challenged a lot at the agency and at the school.
And I guess I was just wondering about your thoughts, insight.
I feel like what is complex for me and what I am still trying to make sense of is that in social work and in therapy and mental health,
it is very pathologizing, it has been from the inception of it and that I am sitting with a person and that it's very easy that in the conversations that we have,
the agency and the trainings, it becomes about the individual inherent in the way that they live.
And it's hard to bring in the structural and the legacy of it into the individual and try to do both.
And I know I ran over, but I wanted to know some of your insight and thoughts about how to continue to do that.
And so I can just affirm the question as well.
Being that I'm not a therapist and don't do that work, I will say that I think that the challenge that you face in moving people,
in moving beyond an individual frame for pathology or even I would say correct adjustment to the reality is something that we face in almost every other institution.
So what are the ways in which the civil rights project has been narrowed, has been to take it out of the structural institutional and make it just about individual.
So I think if we look across all of these disciplines and all these practice areas, we probably see a very similar kind of move.
One that naturalizes and normalizes the structure in which we live and identifies individual choice, individual pathology, individual lack of responsibility as the site of all pathology, all problems.
So I think there's a collective project that we're all undergoing to try to come up with language and imagery and discourse that takes the individual and puts it in a societal historical structural context.
That's part of what was behind the animation.
Trying to take what we understand to be problems that are experienced on an individual level and tell a historical structural story about it.
So that was specifically designed to tell a story about structural racism.
And to tell a story about if you understand correctly structural racism, you will understand that efforts to intervene are not reverse discrimination or not preferential.
I think that that framework can be used across a lot of different disciplines in a lot of different practice areas.
It wouldn't necessarily look the same, but it is about trying to take the problem and broaden the lens so you can see it within a scene, see it within a frame where you can actually draw people's attention to the institutional consequences that they are facing.
It doesn't mean that that's going to provide the solution, but it's going to provide them a way of understanding the problem other than there's something wrong with you, the individual.
There is a problem in society in which you are situated and there are various responses that you can make to it.
And we're not going to say all the responses are equally valid, but it does make sense to draw a broader picture so people can understand what is structural and what their agency is within that structure.
Good evening. I'm Markville Worley and I'm from the School of Social Work here and I'm actually here with some of my students and I loved your presentation, loved the animation and it fit so well.
I should have had it earlier in my classroom because we talked about empowerment theory and how in social work we need to use the theory as well as the practice techniques to empower our clients who are largely from ethnic minority groups and oppressed.
And we talked about this idea of promise and possibility and how when you start out and you come from a privileged background, you already understand that promise and possibility are there.
You don't have aspirations, you have a sense of confidence and confidence. These are the things that we need to build in our clients because of structural arrangements of society that have oppressed our clients and that we don't have an even playing field.
And so when we see the private troubles that our clients have, very often they come from the public factors such as oppression.
Amen. Hi. Hi. My name is Janet. I'm from Pasadena City College and I'm taking sociology 14 ethnic studies with my professor, Jujie.
And one of the things that we pretty much finished off was color blindness and learning about post racialism. And one thing that just came out from the line when you started your presentation was Tim Morris.
He basically talked about how he was privileged because he's a white male who has been doing very well for himself. And one thing is he believes that people that are privileged should probably help others understand about racism and also acknowledge other people's racism.
Do you think that's probably another tactic that we can use? Certainly. And, you know, we can go all the way back to Malcolm X who, you know, in response to white students claim how can we help the civil rights movement.
Yeah, I'll be, I'll state it a little more calmly. You can work in your own communities. And it is important. I mentioned in the talk what happened in Ohio and Pennsylvania was that actually union workers for the first time had to talk to other union workers about the significance of race.
They had to talk about the difference between one agenda and the other agenda and the fact that the person who at that time people thought had policies that were more worker friendly might not be the one that looks like you.
This was not work that I could have done door to door in Ohio, even though I'm from Ohio. I knew that that was work that white people had to do with other white people, which is not to say that's the only thing. But it's important to be able to have frank conversations about the way that racial consciousness has so deeply
installed itself into the DNA of people's consciousness that it takes other people to say I was there to here's how I got out of it. Here are the things that I think about when I think about my future. And it does mean that I might have to close my eyes when I listen to Barack Obama speak and listen to what he's saying rather than who I think he is.
So that was important work. It was groundwork. You weren't going to get it covered in the New York Times. But if you went locally and saw what people were doing, there was a ground war on the question of racial consciousness and it made a huge difference in those battleground states.
Now the unfortunate thing is that because we've told ourselves a story that he ran a post-racial campaign, we haven't built on the capacity and the infrastructure that was developed there. We haven't shared the knowledge. We haven't gotten the ground ground.
What did you do? How did you say? How did you come to this moment so it could be replicated? So we have a few. We have Tim Wise's of the world. We have the George Lipsitz of the world who write about it and tell us about it. But we don't have the kind of traction and popular culture that can reproduce this in a way that's necessary to actually make a more permanent consciousness change rather than one that was necessary to win an election.
So I think the real challenge now is building a cultural sort of transformative discourse that isn't about an election that does have some kind of movement potential and frankly why people are going to have to be front and center in that effort.
Hello, my name is Alex and I'm from the UC Riverside Department of Ethics Studies and my question is how do we mobilize around, I mean it's easy to mobilize around issues of police brutality when the subject is like an Oscar grant that's kind of legible and acceptable, the acceptable black subject.
How do we mobilize around the victims of police brutality who aren't exactly the perfect father, the one who works, the homeboy or the thug or whatever the perceived thug in light of these histories of hyper-criminalization, the pathogenization of violence and men of color and women of color.
It's a profoundly important question and what I will share with you are people who are thinking about just that question.
I also call UCLA Devin Carbado, also a critical race theorist, writes about precisely this question so he looks at the ACLU campaign on racial profiling which is all about taking the stereotype of who people think the drug profile represents and laying it alongside of the people who have been arrested.
And basically the capital that they're seeking to develop in order to raise consciousness and awareness against this process is to show the difference.
You think you're getting this person but actually it's the person who has a family at home and is writing an SUV not because he's got drugs in the back but because he's got three kids.
And so the whole point is to say effectively if it's this person it's probably okay but the problem is mistaken identity.
That's really hard to wrap a reformist campaign around because for the most part almost every kind of traditional sort of civil rights anti-crime intervention is kind of like that, right?
You think you're doing this but you're actually doing this. It's part of what's behind the war on drugs.
I can tell you some of the directions the conversation has gone in.
Part of the direction that it's gone in is not just talking about the problems of criminal procedure but the problems of substantive criminal law in the first place.
You move from, you know, yes we have to have a war on drugs and we have to really come down hard on it but we have to be more careful not to racial profile too.
Well what and how has race played a role in actually defining the entire carcerative enterprise particularly as it affects questions of drugs, right?
How has the criminalization of drugs itself been a racial project? How do racial patterns of who uses what actually become formalized by law so you have these huge disparities?
So part of the question is moving from a modest reformist agenda to actually a greater abolitionist agenda.
And recognizing that along the way these tendencies to try to get political capital out of saying, well whatever you do with these folks, you shouldn't mix them up with these other folks.
Recognizing that that's a reformist move that sometimes people have to make for the individuals but it does not advance the overall challenge of carcerative justice.
So as a lawyer I often have to think about and measure today I'm probably going to say something that legitimizes a bigger project that I'm having trouble with.
Tomorrow my work is also going to go back to the broader project not to be stuck in the reformist agenda because in the end you end up reinforcing that broader problem.
On the other hand there are real clients and real people that you're actually trying to get real sort of interventions for.
So occasionally those reformist arguments have to be made.
Thanks for coming. I really appreciate the lecture.
My question was about how would you recommend or what do you think we can do to create a kind of unity between the black community and the Latin community for I think the struggles and activism in each of those communities may seem very different though they might not necessarily be.
But I feel like there's a big distance between the two.
And I was just wondering what you would say about that.
And let me broaden that to other kinds of community like conflicts or inabilities to actually find points of intersection that can advance effective coalition.
So there are tensions not only between black and brown between black brown and Asians there are tensions between race based communities and gender defined communities and after proposition eight what can I tell you about the tensions between African American communities and the LGBT community.
So across the board our ability to develop coalition politics has been hampered.
And one of the questions is what is it hampered by and what are the mechanisms that we might be able to dream up to help us deal with that hampering.
Now on one hand there are real material realities that are largely created by the recognition that as long as the pies are constrained in such a way that forces groups to compete over small pieces of what in fact is a huge pie.
As long as our frame of vision is on the very few things that are available to us as working people as people of color as women as LGBT and not the huge amount in what some I think call a plutocracy and I agree with.
As long as all of our discourse is internal and not based on the broader huge upward distribution of wealth over the last 10 years as long as our conversations don't start there we're bound to have the conflict that number one.
So we need to start having visions viewpoints discourse is that focus on the fact that you know 4% own something like 60% of the wealth.
That's right.
That's huge huge when we think about development index United States is not nowhere close to the top in terms of equal distribution right.
So that's number one number two and I'll share this partly because I had the good fortune of spending two years with a multiracial group of both Americans and people from Latin America when we were engaging the World Conference on racism and part of the challenge was how can we be there and really be
multi lingual in the kinds of advocacy that we were doing at the world stage so on one hand I would have expected some of my Native American colleagues to push reparations they were expecting me to support issues of sovereignty.
We had to figure out how to build this coalition not just in terms of you scratch my back I scratch yours but in terms of totally immersing ourselves in each other's histories in each other's priorities and in asking some hard questions like assuming I'm a good friend of yours and you're
taking me into your home and let's say the home is sort of a metaphor for your political community. What are the kind of things that I might do in your home that are just deal breakers your people say don't ever bring that person back up in here again.
Let's be honest what are some of the kind of things that get said and we were honest with each other about some of these things so you know with some of my friends who are Native Americans they say you know what really pisses us off is in labor conflicts
when some of our Latino brothers don't recognize our sovereignty sovereignty sovereignty you need to pay us a minimum wage that really is a deal breaker so can we figure out ways of advocating for minimum wage that don't undermine what to us is sacred.
On the other hand you know there were tensions with African Americans who were saying you know on one hand we're told that you know we sort of came over here we are colonizers that is like a deal breaker for a lot of African Americans slaves colonizers.
And so we took a lot of wine for us to get here but we were really honest about like let me think the last time a coalition fell apart and let's talk about what it was that made it fall apart and let's talk about what we each think that we really want any
coalition partner to know about our history before we go hand in hand with each other anywhere so there's a lot of I think expectation that we know stuff because we're all oppressed that we don't know I mean where's it going to happen
it's definitely not in the schools so it's our responsibilities we want to build effective coalition to build effective learning which then becomes a predicate for greater trust it's not going to happen just because we're all in the same sandbox.
So these are little things they're not big but I think they have to start and they have to start with people who are coalition minded whose basic support comes not from being in lockstep with the entire community
but in cohort with the most progressive forces in their community the ones that are interested in coalition these are just some observations from the coalition of work that I've done.
Hi my name is Brandon and I want to first thank you for coming and to also say that you're truly a source of information as well.
I have a question that's both personal and preliminary the question is I've become disillusioned with one of the personal legal education I'm supposedly applying to law school in the fall but based on the research that I've been doing and listening to your speech
I've become disillusioned but nevertheless I want to know what ways could I be an effective let's say civil rights trial attorney given this system given the contradictions in this system how can I be most effective.
Alright thank you for giving me a chance to clean it up.
So let me say wow the terrain is thorny to be sure and it doesn't look like it did when I went to law school.
When I went to law school it was like yay we're going to carry on the tradition of Thurgood Marshall we're going to continue to deliver victories to people of color we're going to break down institutional discrimination
we're going to move the civil rights movement forward and exactly when we were entering law school was the time that the backlash was starting to happen.
I went to law school when Ronald Reagan was elected.
I was in law school when people like Scalia and Clarence Thomas eventually became on the court so just living through that backlash you have post traumatic stress right.
Like oh my god all the possibilities that were here yesterday that now have been taken off the table.
So some part of what you hear from me is trying to keep the broader vision of the possibility alive so that the cost of these losses is not a complete mind wipe of all those possibilities.
So I bemoan what has been lost with a hope that I'm carrying a torch forward so that people have a sense of there's something more that we were fighting for than just the right not to be called an African-American.
So having said that I don't want to give the impression that we can abandon law abandon that discourse because either institutions have a right to do something or they don't either an individual can do something with impunity or not.
These are all determined by relevant legal rules. The debate over legal rules happens not just at the Supreme Court but everywhere and lawyers are needed everywhere to push forward this ground war against the retrenchment right.
So just because the nine folks sitting in DC are people that we kind of don't want these conflicts to get to doesn't mean that there aren't lots of things that can happen and that do happen all along the lines of the legal system.
So we need people and we need people who have a consciousness about social justice and who understand that the image of social justice or the definition doesn't come through the law.
Law is a tool for it but you have to have it from somewhere else first.
So that is our challenge having a consciousness about social justice that isn't determined by nine people sitting in Washington DC but that is actually an expression of your lives, your communities, aspirations, the history that we come out of being able to carry that forward with the skill of being a lawyer.
That's what we need nowadays so I hope that nothing I said would have disillusioned you from joining us in this campaign because we need good people.
Thank you so much for your talk. Your work has helped me make sense of what it needs to be a black woman in the United States.
I have two small questions. You brought up reverse discrimination and I'm a teacher's assistant and some of my students have used reverse discrimination and I would like to know what do you think about reverse discrimination?
Is it legitimate? My second question is about the tea party and post-racialism and the relationship between the tea party and post-racialism. Does post-racialism afford tea party like the voice that it has right now?
Okay, great question. On the first question, I'll refer back to the animation because what I hope the animation does is provide at least a predicate for the answer of reverse discrimination.
A lot of people would see I have the tractor coming in at the end which is meant to remove the effects of those obstacles that litter the lanes that some of the people are running in.
That is a stand-in for race conscious programs, whether they're outreach programs, whether they're differential criteria, whether they're mentoring programs, all that have the effect of minimizing the effect of those particular obstacles.
Those are the things that people tend to see as reverse discrimination.
So part of putting it on the track is to say, okay, what is reverse about removing this that is affecting this group that isn't affecting the group in the other lanes?
It's not to say that if you come up with an obstacle that shows how other groups are being affected, that shouldn't be removed. Of course, it should be.
So there's a difference between saying, well, let's expand our attentiveness to the kind of obstacles that face a variety of groups versus saying the race as it is is fair and any attempt to alter some of its consequences is reverse discrimination.
So I'm hoping that the tool can be used to have a conversation about what is reverse. Tell me what do you see in this that would be reverse discrimination.
On the Tea Party question, oh my God, so what can I say about that that's short and quick?
The Tea Party, I think, represents precisely that contradiction that I was talking about, which is you can't talk about racism, but you surely can talk about race.
You can be offended about being called a racist, but you sure can say racist things.
So the embargo is on the protest. It's not against the action, right?
So this contradiction is huge and growing. My concern is less that the Tea Party exists and is doing it than that they are allowed to do it without significant critique.
That the voices of resistance have been cowed into silence by the basic charge of you being racial.
And we haven't come up with enough of a response to say, no, you're being racist and my calling racism out is not being racist, right?
Once we can crack that nut, I think we're in good shape.
But right now it seems that we don't know what to say. We don't have a lot of leadership on how to do this from the White House on down.
And so rather than waiting for them to tell us what's okay to say, we're just going to have to start saying some stuff.
We can't let this continue with us basically, you know, signing on to it by our silence.
I'll just end on this note by saying we've been here before, so part of what happened in the first reconstruction is not just that the redeemers took over.
It's that our advocates just stepped back and said, you want to solve, you can have it.
You want to figure out how to handle race, it's all yours.
And I worry that there's something like that going on now.
People are just saying, that's not a battle that's worth it to us, we're stepping away.
And because some of those people might look like us, we're slow on the uptake.
And we've got to be on this.
We've got to be as prepared to be critical of stepping away from racial justice, whether it's a Democrat doing it or a Republican.
Thank you for this lecture and this presentation, it was amazing.
But you brought up property earlier, so I had to ask a question on it.
And you kind of answered it with your last comment, but I'm going to ask anyway.
What are your opinions on the property situation and the blaming of the African American community in this post-racial society that we are all fortunate to be part of?
It was unfortunate in so many different ways.
So let's start by just reminding ourselves a few facts.
The percentage of blacks in the population, in the voting population is such that we cannot make or break anything.
That's just real. Let's talk about the church.
You've got the black church and there were other churches involved.
When we talk about the resourcing, the use of fundamentalist religious ideas to bankroll this and push it forward,
even when we think about the radio messages that were on black radio, it's like, yeah, they were on black radio,
but black people didn't pay for them to be on black radio.
So people confuse what were racially coded performances with who paid for the racially coded performances.
So there are just some problems in being able to trace and talk about where things actually came from.
Now, that's certainly not to say that the black community does not have its own heterosexism and homophobia to deal with, which is real.
It's also not to say that there aren't better ways of finding indigenous organizations within the black community
to carry that message forward rather than seeking to organize it from the outside.
So the organizations that I work with, people that I support, were all very frustrated about the fact that the campaign
didn't lift up and recognize that there are people inside the black community with expertise and with legitimacy
who are better able and positioned to do the hard work of dealing with heterosexism in racially specific terms.
So that's the unfortunate piece of it.
I think that just as the black community has to deal with heterosexism and homophobia,
the LGBT community has to deal with racism.
And the same way that African American LGBT communities are pivotal in dealing with heterosexism and homophobia in the black community,
they're also pivotal to deal with racism in the LGBT community.
So it's a classic intersectional problem.
It requires intersectional sensibilities, but importantly,
it requires organizations who have the independent resources to be able to set agendas
without having to bow to or in other ways be seen as legitimate by those who have the resources
to determine what the agenda is going to look like.
I'm hoping that this was the nader, that it will never be that bad again,
but the lessons about how to do political organizing in an intersectional way
are always going to go back to what we can't have the Proposition 8 thing happen again.
Thank you very much.
