- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Idea Stream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.
(upbeat music) (bell ringing) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.
It's Tuesday, June 6th, and I'm Ayesha Bell Hardaway associate Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University, co-director of the Social Justice Institute and Director of the Criminal Clinic, and the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic.
It is my pleasure to introduce Shaker Heights native Wesley Lowery, journalist and author of "American Whitelash, A Changing Nation, and The Cost of Progress."
This is Wesley Lowery's second visit to the City Club.
He was with us back in 2017 for his brook book, "They Can't Kill Us All," which covers police shootings of black people across the country.
He reminded us that there are no voiceless people, there are people who are unheard.
Then in 2020, millions witnessed the murder of George Floyd.
Voices were heard, and a once in generation movement toward racial equality took hold.
Many promises were made by elected officials, organizations, and corporations to end racism in this country.
But these days it feels like progress is facing increased threats with Bills banning diversity education appearing in state houses, anti-LGBTIQ+ efforts and more.
In his new book, Wesley Lowery explains this backlash.
He uncovers the rise of white supremacy and it's often violent consequences in the face of progress towards racial equity, utilizing his backgrounds and skills as a journalist that he learned from Shaker Heights High School, my alma mater, and welcome to all the other fellow Red Raiders in the room, Wes analyzes the effects of white supremacy through a historical and present day lens, all while searching for a way forward, which we will hear more about today.
Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who previously worked for the Washington Post.
He is currently a contributing editor at the Marshall Project and a journalist in residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
You guys know the drill.
If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 330 541 5794.
That's 330 541 5794.
You can also tweet your question to @thecityclub, and the City Club staff will work it into the second half of our program.
Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Wes Lowery.
(people clapping) - Oh, so I'm glad that this got readjusted.
When I saw Marlin went up, I was worried I was gonna have to pull the mic back down.
It's so nice to be here.
It's so nice to be back in Cleveland in a room with so many friends, folks I've known for years and so I wanted to take a moment initially just to acknowledge some of that and some of the history of what it's like to be here.
For those who don't know, and Dan did an excellent introduction, The City Club really is a unique space here in Cleveland.
My first experiences with it were back when I was a high school student and we would come here and have forums and conversations and events where we would sit at tables like these and talk to students from all over the area.
And it was such a unique space filled with people from different walks of life, different backgrounds, from different parts of Cleveland, which at the time felt like, different parts of the world, right?
As someone from Shaker to hang out with someone from Parma was a very, it was very, felt very different, very big, but it also fostered this idea that we can sit and through shared vocabulary, shared dialogue to a commitment to understanding, that we can talk through and work through some of the serious urgent issues facing our society and each of us personally in our lives.
And so it's always an honor to be back here.
I wanted to, when you're home, you get to take a few privileges.
And so first I wanted to acknowledge my parents who are here and I appreciate them coming out.
And then I wanted also mention two organizations that are here, the first being the Marshall Project, which if you are not familiar, I know that we've been pushing 'em heavy this morning, but we're gonna keep doing that.
If you're not familiar with the Marshall Project, they really are on the cutting edge of doing journalism and reporting on our criminal legal system in ways that are understanding, that are empathetic and that look at systems and structures.
We know that for so often, the media as an institution has contributed sometimes to the mistakes that we as a society have made in terms of how we navigate ideas of safety, justice, law, incarceration.
And I think it's important for the media as an institution to own that history, but also to forge a new pathway forward.
We can talk about difficult and hard things that have nuance, that have complication, but we can do that without erasing the humanity of any of the people in the store.
And my colleagues of the Marshall Project do that every day.
I was so excited when they chose Cleveland as the first place to do one of their local expansions.
And it's just been an honor that tiny percent that I've helped the one or 2% that I've contributed to make up for my big title.
It's been an honor to watch the deliberateness with which the leadership and the staff has worked to make sure that we're not just gonna be another organization parachuting into someone's town and telling them how they live their lives and what they should be doing, but rather forming a team of some of the best journalists in the city, some of the most respected journalists in the city, collaborating not just with journalists, but with community organizations and really devoted and committed to providing Cleveland the type of world-class journalism that this world class city deserves.
And so I really would urge you folks to, if you haven't been reading, to be reading, or if you read and you don't like something to reach out and let them know, right?
'Cause I think our responsibility as readers and viewers is to be participatory in our journalistic processes, right?
And to create community around that.
But this is such an exciting moment for journalism in Cleveland, whether it be what the Marshall Project's doing, what Signal Cleveland's doing.
There's so many organizations that have stepped up into this moment to make sure that our city receives the accountability, the storytelling, and the community bonding the good journalism can provide.
And so I'm just really excited to have my colleagues of the Marshall Project in the room and excited for this moment back here in Cleveland.
Second, I wanna acknowledge some of the students in the room.
There's some from Shaker Heights, but there are also some, some from Shaker Heights and then also some from the program Beat The Streets of Cleveland, which is a program that my younger brother, Reggie, is heavily involved in.
If you guys aren't aware, Beat The Streets Cleveland is a wrestling program that helps provide students from across the city up to 800 students a year from all types of different public schools in our area, providing them with coaching, with mentorship, and with opportunities to learn the discipline, the responsibility, the commitment, and the friendship that comes from wrestling, which is not something I did.
But if you see my younger brother, he is the one who looks like me only in shape.
And so he will, the work that they do each year with these students and the heart that these coaches have to take, young men and women in Cleveland, who in many cases want community, want space, want investment, and to give it to them, to give them something to strive for and to work for.
These are students, young people who are going on to wrestle in club tournaments.
Some of them are getting out into nationals.
And these are in schools that didn't have teams just a year or two before.
That they're partnering with Beat the Streets programs across the country, going on trips to Chicago and meeting kids from all types of different places.
And then even last year they went to Israel.
Later this year they're going to Kenya and to Egypt.
And so opportunities to take our young people here and give them the type of global and national experiences that we know help us learn, shape, and understand our world.
And so I just wanted to acknowledge the students from Beat the Streets as well.
Maybe let's give them a round of applause.
(people clapping) All right, now I gotta say stuff.
The thing about coming home is that you get to spend some time remembering where you came from, people who you knew and who knew you, in some cases knew a different you.
And you get to remember kind of the arc of the work that you've done over all these years.
I was really honored when Shaker Heights reached out to me this year to ask if I'd be willing to give the commencement address, which would be later tonight.
And once we locked that in, I knew that I wanted to try to come back here and appear back at the City Club.
This is technically the first stop of what will be my book tour.
And so it's always nice to be able to start back at home, right?
At the very least, there'll be one friendly audience.
And so because of that, and I think this was the case in the last time, because of that, I wanna talk without notes a little bit about this project, about the work that we've been doing and about what's to come.
I published my first book, "They Can't Kill Us All" back in November, 2016, the second week of November, 2016.
And I remember as I was preparing that book, I had covered, I'd spent two or three years covering the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
I had spent months in Ferguson, I'd come back here to Cleveland after Tamir Rice's death, been in New York after Eric Gardner's death.
And then 2014 turned to 2015 where we had Walter Scott and Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, 2016, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, the officers who were killed in Dallas.
And I wrote that book, I remember I finished the book, I was here in Cleveland.
I wrote the last sentence of the afterward in a hotel room while I was here covering the RNC that year.
And I wrote that book thinking that we had been leaving a chapter.
There had been this rise of what felt like a new civil rights movement.
And here we were leaving an era that gave rise to it, the administration of a Black president.
And we were very likely to be entering a new era.
I was very interested in what would happen as the movement continued to mature, I was fascinated to see how the first female president might interact with them, and how that might be different than the first Black president had.
And then in November, 2016, the election went differently than the conventional wisdom suggested it might have.
And so here I had written this book that I thought in many ways was going to look at and think about or foreshadow what might happen with another democratic administration, that there might be more progress, that these years might lead to increased power for this movement.
And instead, we'd seen an election of someone who had ran as part of his campaign, as a repudiation of the very movement that I had covered.
Initially, I was a little worried that that might harm me in terms of book sales and marketing, but as it turned out, having a massive protest movement in the streets, that turned out to be an okay thing for someone who's just written a book about a protest movement in the streets.
And so, but I remember, so the book published, and when you publish a book, everyone immediately begins asking you what the next book is.
And so here we were in this moment in November, 2016, and I'm traveling, I'm giving talks like this, and people are saying, so what's the next book?
What are you gonna do?
What are you working on?
What's the next story?
And I'm sitting at my desk at the Washington Post and different places around the country, and I'm sitting and I'm thinking, what is the next story?
What's the next chapter in this story?
It's not what I thought the next chapter would be clearly, but what is it?
My job, or my beat at the time was to cover issues of race and justice.
And so for years, I had been primarily focused on these issues of policing.
But as the Obama administration gave way to the Trump administration, I couldn't help but notice and be moved by this series of headlines, a group of white supremacists giving Nazi salutes outside the inauguration, a Muslim woman attacked on a subway in Portland, an immigrant beat up and attacked in Boston that it felt, and it seemed very clear to me that the next chapter in this story, and that much of the story of this era was gonna be about the interpersonal violence that arose in light of the political movement that had led President Trump into office.
And so, as 2017 turned to 2018, I began really closely paying attention to what was happening, understanding pretty clearly that this was gonna be a moment of backlash.
And that that moment of backlash was not gonna be a philosophical political debate, but that there were gonna be real human lives that were lost because of it.
And so I think about my role as a journalist, first and foremost, as being someone whose job it is to write down true things, right?
And I really try to ground myself in that.
I think that in the post-Watergate world, a lot of us got into this industry to try to change things, right?
But I think even more vital than that.
That's not to say that we don't wanna change things, and I'm very proud of some of the work that I've been able to be a part of that has led to some changes.
But most importantly, I think, and I think there's a rich tradition in Black journalism of this, is an understanding that if we don't write down and record accurately our objective reality, that people who come after us are not gonna be able to understand and to know and grapple with what occurred.
We're in a moment where we're talking so much about the importance of knowing and understanding our history, and the reason we're able to have those conversations, the reason we're able to engage in that grappling is because people in real time record and wrote these things down, and in many cases, did so at great personal cost to themselves, did so at times when it was unpopular, when they were called liars, when they were called charlatans, when they were run out.
And so I remember thinking, well, if I'm gonna write another book and I'm gonna write a book in the Trump era, what do I want that artifact to be that I leave behind?
And it became clear to me very quickly that I wanted to, to the extent that I could, contribute a small kernel to the historical record of the people whose lives were lost because of this rise in interpersonal violence and white supremacist violence.
Now, when I talk about white supremacist violence in this context, I'm not talking about white supremacy colloquially.
I'm not talking about AP tests being racially discriminatory.
I'm not talking about how the highways were built through.
I'm talking about actual avowed, white supremacists, Nazis, klansmen, those who would seek a race war or to exterminate another set of people.
And that's not me disputing that the term can be used in the other ways to be clear.
But I just wanna be clear about kind of what I'm talking about.
And so what I began doing was looking at different cases and different incidents where someone had attacked or harmed people in our era espousing this type of ideology.
Initially, I was looking just at the Trump years, and then my friend Ibram Kendi suggested, he said, "Well, you really should push that back to the Obama years."
And obviously this had begun, that if we're looking at an era, there isn't a Trump era.
That Trump is in many ways, to understand Trump you have to understand Obama, because one leads to the other in so many ways.
And so I began looking at, at these various cases and began looking at the intersections of different identities of those who had been victimized.
We talk very often about anti-immigrant and anti-refugee violence.
We talk about anti-Islamic violence.
We talk about anti-black violence or anti-Semitic violence.
And there's something very important about understanding the unique contours of these types of hate, right?
It's important to understand the history of anti-blackness or antisemitism, but it's also important in our moment to understand the intersections.
How in so many cases, the person who shoots up the tree of life synagogue would just as happily have shot up a mosque.
The person who shoots up the supermarket in Buffalo, would just as happily have targeted immigrants at the border, right?
That many of the threat being, much of the threat being presented to our most vulnerable populations is a threat that is bigger and broader even than just to their own individualized population.
Even as we acknowledge and respect those unique and specific histories, that what we see in this moment is a movement of people who believe a coherent conspiracy theory.
And I get push back when I say that sometimes, right?
But American white supremacy is a coherent set ideology, right?
That sometimes in the light or the face of these attacks, we say, how could anyone have done this?
This just must be hate.
There's nothing we can do, we never could have known.
And what I would suggest is that these folks have been telling us for a very long time, and telling us sense emancipation, what they want, what they fear, and what they're willing to do about it.
That they believe a coherent conspiracy theory that threatens all of us.
That if I am moved, if I'm horrified, if I'm upset about the murders in Charleston, the murders in Buffalo, I have to understand antisemitism.
Because the hatred towards those Black victims came in part because of a disgusting conspiracy theory that that is rooted in antisemitism, right?
And so, as I began looking at these cases, what I noticed and I saw was these intersections and how too often we don't take seriously enough this threat being presented by this coherent ideology.
Secondarily, it became troubling, and I knew this, but to really sit and look at it, it became troubling to really sit and grapple with the extent to which our mainstream political rhetoric fans the flames of this type of hatred.
That when we look at the history of American white supremacy, what we see is a history that is foundationally about a demonization and demagoguing of immigrants and refugees, a backlash, a cultural and societal backlash against urbanization.
People who live in cities, technological advances, the rights of, first women, and then gay and lesbian people, and now trans people.
We see a nativist political movement that has at times in our majority white country, seized the levers of power.
First in the 1920s, and now again in the 2020s.
And then what we also see are politicians, political figures and media figures who openly traffic in the exact type of rhetoric and language that drives people into the arms of these most extreme and dangerous ideologies.
And so what that requires in this moment is a willingness in our politics and in our public square, to be responsible.
And I know that an appeal to responsibility is in our moment of hyper cynical hyperpartisan politics, isn't something that seems particularly likely to have the result that it needs to have, but I do think it's important to not become so cynical that we stop acknowledging that that is a big part of the issue here.
History shows us and has taught us that the way we talk about people who are different than us, the way we discuss immigration, the way we discuss crime, has a real impact and can really imperil the lives of people who live around us.
The first story in this book is a story of Joselo Lucero.
Joselo is an Ecuadorian immigrant.
And just days after Barack Obama was elected, his brother Marcelo, was beaten and killed by a group of high school students on Long Island.
Those students were out doing what they call beaner hunting, where they were seeking what they would've called Mexicans, but Hispanic Americans to attack.
Now, this was a world well before Donald Trump.
This was a world technically before Barack Obama.
He wasn't in office yet.
But this was at a time, and it's one of the reasons I start with this, because I do think sometimes of our analysis, we can be a little over simple, right?
His history is a wheel, it's always going.
You can't actually divide it up into these clear, this thing started on this day and something else.
But at the time, they lived in a place that had seen pretty rapid demographic change.
They had lived in a place where their politicians, their school boards, their parents were hyper concerned about what this meant.
They were concerned about was crime going to go up?
Was the quality of education gonna go down?
Were school sports being cut because now they had to offer ESL programs.
There was, were their property values going to go down because these different types of people were moving into the place where they lived, acquiring different types of housing, or standing on the corner waiting as day laborers, that there were these tensions and these frustrations tensions and frustrations, mind you, that are human, that are not unlike communities across the country at the time, long before that, and today, questions about who we live around, what our quality of life is, how changes may threaten what we have and what we've worked hard for.
But what we saw in Patchogue New York, where Lucero's lived, was we saw the demonization of these immigrants become a sport.
It became the way people got elected, it became the air that was breathed in the local politics.
And the result was that young people ingested that and began acting out.
One of the things that's most dangerous about demonizing rhetoric from powerful people is not that everyone will take them literary, but that anyone will.
We live in a country of millions, tens of millions.
And all it takes is one person to believe that there's an invasion on the border, or that the refugees are coming to harm you or your wife or your daughter.
That crime in the city is gonna spill into where you live.
And it's caused by these types of people.
It takes one such person to imperil the life of not just one, but we've seen in so many cases of many, and it's why those of us who have platforms, have to, one, be responsible in our rhetoric, but two, demand that responsibility of our political figures and public figures.
Secondarily, though, I think we have to create space, be aware of and cognizant of the difficulties that come in moments like this.
We are in a time of disruption.
We are in a time of anxiety, of difficulty.
We're in a time in a lot of ways, like the 1920s, where we have deepening income inequality, where many Americans fear their own means, even as some of our friends, and I mean not our family members, but some of the other people we know or live around, become some of the richest men who've ever lived.
Technology is upending the economy in fundamental ways, where immigration is changing the face of the nation at a rate and in a way that we haven't seen in a century.
And as that happens, as we all deal with that anxiety and that frustration, what we know is that it means that our fellow citizens, our fellow residents are in many cases going to be seeking a scapegoat, are gonna be looking for someone to blame or some way to explain it.
And so we know that if we don't traffic in unifying messages and nuance and context and facts, we know that that demonizing and demagoguing language will harm people.
I remember going back after finishing the book or pretty close to finishing the book and visiting with Joselo Lucero.
I'd interviewed him at the very beginning.
I mean, I talked to him prior to the proposal, the very first call I made.
And then he was also the last person I talked to.
And I went out and visited with him.
And we sat in his car on a dock in Long Island, listening to the waves hit the pier.
And so much had changed.
He remembered the last conversations he'd had with his brother, as the country was getting ready to usher in a Black president.
He remembered the promise, he remembered the excitement, the sense that maybe this country was going to be able to take these massive steps forward for good.
And I think unquestionably, that in that time, it's been a decade and a half, we've seen many steps forward.
I think we can ever deny the progress that we've collectively made.
But what we also have to remember is that in our history, progress is never inevitable.
It can be too easy for us to believe that history and justice and progress just bend towards righteousness, right?
Bend towards equality and equity.
It's much harder for us to sit with the reality that across our history, at each moment when there have been significant steps towards progress, significant steps towards multiracial democracy, significant steps towards a society that's actually equal and equitable, what we have seen time and time again is a massive resistance and backlash.
And that backlash, again, is not philosophical, but it's real.
It's a backlash that's cost people their lives and their livelihoods.
As you can tell, this is a beach read and a very uplifting book.
And I get asked a lot of times, and I'll get asked a lot more as I tour.
So what's the solution?
What do we do?
And I have a friend, a friend Julia, who's a another journalist, and she used a line once where she said, "As a journalist, her job is to document in excruciating detail a problem, not actually to come up with any of the solutions for it."
And I do like that line.
I have certainly used it before.
But I think that we are at a moment, not unlike other moments in our history, where the choice we have is whether or not we're willing to tell ourselves the truth about ourselves, the truth about our history, and to take that truth seriously, that we know, as we were a nation founded on inequality and inequity.
We know that even as we've taken massive steps forward, there are still pieces of our infrastructure and our foundation that have yet to be upended.
We know that we are not some special class of humans who are immune to base prejudices about people who are different than us, who are immune to a selfishness where we want for ourselves and maybe not for those people over there.
And so I think that for us, like every generation before us, we face a question of how true do we want our founding ideals to be?
Our country has been inlawed on multiracial democracy now, since the sixties.
And it's unsurprising that we would now see such backlash to that.
And that multiracial democracy earned and fought for over the course of centuries, is not something we can take for granted.
It's something that could be taken away from us.
And I think that it's our job in this moment to remember that and to be willing to fight just as hard for it as those who are trying to take it away are.
And so I really appreciate you guys having me today.
Hopefully we can talk about some stuff that's a little more uplifting than that.
But I appreciate you being here.
I appreciate the work you all are doing, 'cause just by being in this room, your folks who are willing to have these conversations, to talk about difficult things, and as I always, and as I said, I think that our job, when we see something difficult, when we see something hard, is not to look away from it, but to take it seriously enough to look at it, to interrogate it and to vow to vanquish it.
And so thank you guys.
I appreciate you having me today.
(people clapping) - We are about to begin the audience Q & A. I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programming here at the City Club of Cleveland.
And for our livestream audience, we are joined by Wesley Lowery, journalist and author of "American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and The Cost of Progress."
We welcome questions from everyone, City Club's members, guests, students, and those joining via our livestream@cityclub.org.
If you'd like to tweet a question for our speaker, please tweet it @thecityclub.
You can also text your question to 330 541 5794.
That's 330 541 5794.
And our City Club staff will work, try to work it into the second half of the program.
May we have the first question, please?
- We're gonna start with one of those text questions that was sent to us.
So here you go.
There seems to be a stark divide between those who believe the US is a Christian nation, and those who believe our job is to create a truly multicultural, multiracial democracy.
Is it possible to bridge that divide?
Is it possible to bring more people into sharing a multicultural vision?
- I think it is possible.
I think that there is, there's a lot of difficulty.
I think that we talk about and we think about in the divide in our politics in this moment, in the divide in our ideologies in this moment, the fact that we do have deeply different ideas, very often about what our nation should be and what our nation can be.
That there is a non insignificant portion of our population that wants a nation and a country of people who look like them and who believe like them.
That there is an open question about whether or not diversity is our strength, or if it's something that undermines and threatens the strength of our democracy.
Now, I certainly have my beliefs about that, but I think that there is a, I think that in this moment, all that has made worse, even, by the physical and spatial polarization that we face, that we live in a post big sort world where we live around people who believe like us, who look like us, who come from the places that we come from.
We worship with people with our same politics, which wasn't always true.
That so much of what we do and the decisions we make, which fast food restaurant we go to, can be based in our politics and expressions of our politics, right?
Now, to be clear, that's not a critique of making such decisions.
I think it's important for us to live our values, right?
But one thing that's been hard is, as our institutions have faced the difficulties they've faced, as there's been such disruption and change because of the internet and cellular phones and broadband, is that increasingly we're living in our own world, separate of the worlds that other people live in.
And when we live in different world's, it's very hard for us to create not only a shared reality, but a shared vision of the future.
I think that, I mean, this is gonna sound a little pandering, but I think that's one of the reasons why community institutions like this are important.
Because I think we have to find ways to organize ourselves in community, together again.
When someone is in your community, when they're your family, you're able to lessen the disagreements, you're able to hear the best version of what they're saying, you're able to, even if you don't understand them, except when they say, hey, this thing is hurting me, can you not do it?
And I think as we become people who are less and less tethered to each other and less tethered to shared community, it becomes much harder for us to navigate these real issues of life and death, because it becomes much harder for us to get over our own intellect and say, "Well, but if you say so, I believe you, and let's just do that."
And so I certainly think that there's a possibility, and I also think that no matter what the outcome is, I think those of us who believe in a multiracial democracy and a multicultural society have to fight for this, whether we win the fight or not.
- Thank you for being here today.
My name is Merle Johnson, I'm on the State Board of Education, and our general assembly has created a very toxic environment for people who fight for the rights of all.
I think the best, one of the best examples of that is we have a governor who kicked two people off of the state board because they would not vote to rescind an anti-racism, anti hate resolution that I have created along with three others.
And so the point of what I'm saying is that filters down to our students.
So what would you say to students who want to do something good in their school, the Princeton Prize for Student Relations Award, students who do events around race, what would you say to students who are afraid to step up and say, let's do something about the racism in the school?
- I really appreciate that question and the work that you do.
In moments of historical disruption, certainly in our country, the young people have almost always been the ones who've led the way.
That there's been no significant social movement in our country's history that has not been led by people at the oldest in their twenties.
So I'm already out the game.
This is your, this is again, and that in this moment, there's more opportunity if you care about something, if you're passionate about it, one, to find the resources than ever before, and two, to find like-minded co-laborers than ever before.
That in a lot of ways, it's never been easier to change the world.
And I say that as someone who's covered the stories of young people around the country who have seen something that they were upset by, that they believed was unacceptable, that did not look like what they wanted their world to look like, and they spoke up and did something.
And the world we live in today is different because of some of those young people, whether that is Darnella Frazier, who takes the video of George Floyd's death, whether that is Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, who in Parkland say, this is unacceptable, that there's been a shooting in our school.
And I remember sitting there in Parkland watching them give their first press conferences and their first speeches, and knowing in the moment, okay, this is gonna, something's happening here.
We live in a time of disruption.
But so much of that disruption comes because people are seeing things they don't like and are saying no more.
And so what I would say to young people is that there's nothing stopping you big, small or otherwise, from seeing something in your school, in your community, in your state, in our country, and saying, I'm gonna do something about that.
- Hey, I'm really fascinated and impressed by your decision to go way back to see the rekindling of some of these noxious historical trends in the United States.
And I'm curious because one interpretation of recent history is it was that President Obama's election kind of intensified and made concrete gains that then prompted a lot of hate.
But I'm just curious, looking back, what do you see as the triggering factors and what does that teach us about how to combat them in in the coming years?
- That's a really good question.
So I think about it in a few different ways.
I think that what we see, so I like to to ask or suggest what if Barack Obama is not the beginning of a chapter, but the end of one, right?
That in many ways that when you see the gains and the victories of the civil rights movement, when you see the gains of enfranchisement for Black Americans, right?
This begins a chapter of Black Americans.
It begins a chapter of us having a true multiracial democracy, right?
We're no longer an apartheid nation.
That is not to say we don't have all types of voter restrictions and issues, but in the letter of the law, we are now a democracy where everyone can participate.
And at least in a symbolic way, there is no bigger outcome that would come from such a thing, than a Black man becoming the president of the United States, right?
And so in some ways it becomes the end of an era, as opposed to the launch of a new one.
What I would note, and again, I say this having spent too much of my time reading and now, in researching the white supremacist movement, right?
They certainly see it as the beginning.
There's a Klan historian David Chalmers, he writes the definitive histories of the Klan.
And he writes that until the sixties, the Klan had been a dispositionally conservative movement.
They were trying to keep America the way it was.
That this is a white supremacist nation.
We have more rights than other people.
So we're just trying to intimidate you folks from trying to change stuff.
The moment that flips, they become a dispositionally revolutionary movement that their job now is to upend the society the way it is working and the way and the place it's going.
And when you become revolutionary, the trade offs start to change.
The idea of is it okay to harm "innocent civilians" changes when you are revolutionary as opposed to conservative.
The idea of what is okay in terms of public attack, your tactics all shift and they all change.
It begins to create a, it begins to create what are oddly strange bedfellows across this community.
You have Klansmen who are hanging out who many, many of whom fought in World War II, who were hanging out with Nazis, right?
Groups that, I mean, while they all share some beliefs, they hate some of the same people, wouldn't have been caught dead around each other prior, right?
And so we see this coalition that has been built among the forest of our racialized politics, because they all believe that they are soldiers in what is a fight to save their biological race and to save a white nation.
Now, we know that race is biologically not real, but we know that race socially is real, and racism is deadly real, right?
And it's why we have to grapple with how we talk about these issues and deal with them.
But I think that the other thing I would add though is two things happened in 2007, Barack Obama announces he's running, but also the census projection, the first census projection that we will be a "majority minority" country by 2050 comes out to much fanfare, much attention.
And if you were someone who had been nursing an ideology of racial, biological differences, the idea that a white America is being lost, you could not have been handed two greater proselytizing tools in this moment.
On the night that Barack Obama's elected, the message boards of all the white supremacist sites go down because they're so overwhelmed with traffic, right?
That in these moments, we see an increasingly radicalized movement, now becoming increasingly mobilized.
And then as we see other factors just of our lived life, economic calamity, terror attacks, technological disruption, economies teetering on recessions at times, and not returning war veterans from ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What we start to see is people who, and big conversation in the media about race and police and crime, and you see a lot of people googling things.
And what these racist movements have done is very shrewdly made themselves the depository of such information.
We forget too often that Dylan Roof finds himself in mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston after following coverage of the Trayvon Martin case and Googling Black on white crime statistics where he finds himself on a white supremacist website and not long later, is writing a manifesto about the Jewish problem and shooting up Black worshipers, right?
And that's, again, part of what I try to grapple with is this idea of we as journalists, as members of the public square, we've gotta grapple with these hard issues, but we have to understand that there are stakes in how we talk about them and how we discuss them because there are people out there who are attempting and waiting to weaponize them, to indoctrinate people into ways that have real consequences.
- Good afternoon, Dr. Natoya Walker Minor.
And so based on all that you just indicated, do you project that regress and progress will consistently compete over time as we consistently see watering down of what was in just a few years ago, diversity, equity, and inclusion and the uplift of that, but now it's completely watered down and questioning and changing.
And so my question is around will progress and regress coexist or are they coexisting now?
- Yeah, I, and I think they constantly coexist.
I think that we, I think we exist in a world that is in a constant tug of war between these ideas in the biggest ways, right?
Our country has always been in this tug of war between those who would have this be a white supremacist nation, and those who would have this be a multiracial democracy, right?
But that trickles down into any number of things that we grapple with and that we consider as we think about other groups who are underrepresented or who have not been represented.
As we think about what is the role of corporations, what is the role of businesses, what are the role of our institutions?
We see this within our institutions, right?
American media has had like three reckonings, and each one of them has resulted in some backlash right afterwards, right?
And so there's always push and pull in this way.
And so again, it's the sense that I think that the Obama years, for some of us, at least briefly, people figured it out pretty quickly, but the Obama years at least briefly convinced a lot of people that that positive change was inevitable, right?
That things were just rolling in one direction, well, we're gonna do this and then it'll be a woman, and then it'll be, and then, and I think that, and we look at our history and that can lead us to believe that too, right?
Well, things are way better today for me than they might've been for my father or my grandfather or my great-grandfather.
But what we can't forget is that in each of those steps, there are people who would hopefully have us take two steps backwards, and they are fighting to do that, right?
They're not sitting around hoping it happens.
They are active.
And so it speaks to, I think, a need for us to be fervent and consistent, because in those moments when we sit back, there are other people who are waiting to rise into those spaces.
And so, I think that's a big part of it.
- Hello, my name is Kenise Williams.
I just wanted to give a shout.
I'm a CUNY alumna.
I'm graduated from Baruch College.
So it's celebrity to engage with somebody else from the CUNY system.
My question is kind of a twofold thing.
Feel free to answer either/or, one of them is more hopeful.
My first question is, what do you think is the importance of youth and people in general trying to bridge the gaps in communication and how we engage with the media in terms of the opposing sides of you that we see published?
Because I think that's one of the, well, not that is one of the biggest ways we've been divided as a nation is the media that we're engaging with.
And like you said, people are able to to create their own worlds.
And so it's pulling us apart, but I do feel like it can be helped, it can pull people together.
And then my second question is, what is your greatest hope for one, writing this book, and two, as we look to the future and think about the historical context and what we know now and what's important for the future, what is our greatest hope to achieve?
And how can we do that, especially as young people engaging in our society?
Thank you.
- Thank you for those questions.
I think my greatest hope is that we empower ourselves.
I think that, I think that sometimes we misunderstand criticism or even, and mislabel it as cynicism or negativity.
I truly believe, and this is reflected in a lot of my work, is that I believe that one of the ways we make a better world is by looking at the things that don't work and looking squarely at them, not lying at ourselves or lying to ourselves about what is true, seeing the world as it actually is, not as we wish it would be.
And so the hope is that, and the optimism in that, right?
Is that when you look in the mirror, it allows you to say, okay, I need to make these two or three changes.
And so my hope for this book is that, and through the conversation that comes with it, right?
Because a book is like a product.
It's a document, right?
But it becomes an excuse to be in a room like this and talk, right?
The hope is that it allows us to create space to grapple with and talk about some things that are harder for us to talk about or difficult for us to talk about or unpleasant, look ugly.
But that through doing that, that more empowers us to actually address them and get rid of that ugliness.
I think that young people, it's extremely important in this moment, not just for young people, for all people to be active news consumers.
I do think, and obviously being in the media, I'm very concerned about our information ecosystem, the access to quality information per capita versus nonsense per capita, right?
And I think that sometimes my friends and colleagues in the media, we base this conversation so much around trust.
But one of the things I like to say is that one of the reasons a lot of people don't trust the media is because much of the media they're consuming is not trustworthy.
Now, that's not a critique of the best of us, but it's the reality of if I open my Facebook page right now and click on the first 10 links, how many of them will be trustworthy?
The average piece of media someone is consuming is not trustworthy.
So they should not trust the media in that context.
And so I think in this moment, one, I think it falls on those of us who've taken up this job professionally to do everything in our power to create the most trustworthy journalism we can create, and get it in front of as many people as possible.
Find sustainable models for it, and not hope that someone else solves it and fixes it.
'Cause that has not worked very well for us.
But second, I think it falls on all of us to be responsible news consumers as well.
That in a moment when there is so much bad information out there, how do I make sure the link that I'm resharing and engaging with is accurate and is real?
How do I make sure I'm not spreading disinformation or misinformation?
How do I make sure that my news literacy is where it should be?
How do I make sure I'm an informed citizen?
And that means taking some time to read the article or watch the documentary, right?
There's some work, there's some labor in what it means to be an informed and media literate citizen in this moment.
I think in this moment, as important as anything else, I think that I'm really encouraged by the young people and the students who do that.
'Cause think a lot of them do.
You go on TikTok or on social media other places, and you see young people engaging with the news, with information around them, right?
And I think it's our job in the media to find those people where they are, that if there is a public square forming somewhere, we should be there throwing facts into it, right?
But what's also true is you all are creating those public squares.
You have access to your colleagues, to your friends, to your neighbors, in a way I never will.
You are a speaker in a public square that I'll never be invited to, right?
And so, so much of it, I think is about equipping yourself that when it's your turn with the microphone in that, that you have the news, you have the information, and you can be a trusted resource as much as anything else.
We know this about community.
We all are part of communities where we all, we all have a group text where we trust that one friend to tell us what's really going on about X, Y, and Z, right?
A trusted source of information.
That one family from church that really knows all the, so if we need to know, we ask them.
And so I think that there's something important for us to be that as it relates to the world we live in and what's going on.
Thank you.
(people clapping) - All right.
Thank you Wes, for joining us at the City Club today.
I know we had a lot of questions in the queue and I think both sides of the auditorium, so if you did not get a chance to ask Wes your question, good news.
He is going to be at this table outside in the lobby signing book plates.
So make sure to check out Third Space Reading Room and grab a book and ask Wes your question.
Today's forum is part of the City Club's authors in conversation series, in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the John P. Murphy Foundation and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.
The City Club is grateful for your continued support.
We'd also like to welcome guests at tables hosted by Beat the Streets Cleveland, SAGE CHN Housing Partners, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, MC2 Squared STEM High School, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, the Marshall Project Cleveland and Shaker Heights High School.
Thank you all for being here today.
Tomorrow, June 7th, Dr. Howard Fleeter will join the City Club for a conversation about Ohio's biennial budget and the state of education funding.
I know it's the budget, but it's very important.
We have a lot of schools here today that I'm sure we're dying to hear the state of our budget.
Then on Friday, June 9th, Chasten Buttigieg, author, teacher, and yes, that Buttigieg, husband of Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg.
He will join WKYC reporter Emma Henderson for a discussion about the young adult adaptation of his memoir, "I Have Something to Tell You."
You can learn more about these and other forums at cityclub.org.
And that brings us to the end of today's forum.
Thank you members and friends of the City Club.
I'm Cynthia Connolly, forum is now adjourned.
(people clapping) - [Narrator] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.
(soft music) - [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Idea Stream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.
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