Ep. 40 – Black Lives Matter 2.0: A Conversation with Dr. Marc Lamont Hill

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race and Democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, Social justice and citizenship. Welcome to Race and Democracy. On our podcast this week we are talking about George Floyd and the George Floyd protest for racial justice that are happening globally around the world. And we are very pleased to welcome a very special guest, Marc Lamont Hill. Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is a professor at Temple University, the steve Charles chair in media cities and solutions and really one of the world’s most well known african american public intellectuals. It’s got a major media presence and as a prolific author, his latest book is Nobody: Casualties of America’s war on the Vulnerable from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond. And that was a book that was really present and really anticipated the moment that we’re in right now, even as it was written in 2016. So Professor Marc Lamont Hill, welcome to Race and Democracy

[0:01:14 Marc] Man, thank you. It’s such a pleasure. It’s such a pleasure.

[0:01:18 Peniel] Well I want to get right in it. Um I really want to dedicate this episode to the memory of George Floyd. Obviously 46 years old African american who was publicly executed by the Minneapolis Police Department on May 25th of this year. And what we’ve seen in the subsequent two weeks is really unprecedented outrage. But empathy and love and demonstrations and organizing around the United States, but also the entire world. We’re really at this watershed moment. Um and I think it’s honoring the memory of George Floyd Brianna Taylor, Ahmad Arbery, so many thousands gone by police violence and the violence of white supremacy. And so I I’m very happy to have you as one of the more profound voices on these topics to join us here today. What do you make of what’s happened over the last two weeks?

[0:02:17 Marc] The last two weeks have been the full gamut of emotion for me. Um, watching, I remember being in my house on Memorial Day and I was still recovering from the pain of Ahmad Arbery and you know, we had, we had had access now for a bit to the video of him being killed, uh, while jogging and Christian Cooper is stopped in Central Park while birdwatching. And we saw the kind of national response to Amy Cooper, the woman who threatened to sort of weaponize whiteness in a way, uh, to punish him for holding her accountable, for not having a dog on a leash. And then right as we’re talking about, that George Floyd is killed and it’s on video and all of the pain, all of the anxiety, all the trauma that we feel whenever these things happen in some ways was compounded for me because of this sort of almost near simultaneity of the events and then happening against the backdrop of covid 19 and our governments failed response to it. And so I was exhausted. I was emotionally and spiritually drained. And then I saw the protests and I was energized again. What we’ve seen over the last two weeks have has been one of the most beautiful examples of resistance of this generation. It’s been just a marvelous militancy. Uh, that has shown our ability to not just push back against power, not just to challenge unjust law and not just to to not let white supremacy have the last word, but also to deploy the radical imagination to imagine new futures, new possibilities. I’m saying young people on the street who aren’t just saying lock up these killer cops, they’re calling for abolition. And that can you,

[0:04:17 Peniel] can you explain that to our listeners to because I want to get into the granular details. What is prison abolition? What are protesters meaning by defund the police? Some people are finding this outlandish, but I think it’s these are concrete policy proposals that could really transform the country for the better. What do we mean?

[0:04:35 Marc] No, I think that’s right. You know, when when you think about prison abolition, I mean, there’s a long history of abolition. The language itself of abolition, of course, goes back to the times of slavery when obviously black folk and white white allies were calling for the abolition of the institution of slavery, um, as we moved into the 20th century. You know, you saw in places like europe, certainly in the UK, but very strongly in the United States, a movement to abolish prison drawing on the same logic that captivity and human confinement are themselves fundamentally unethical and problematic and not functional ways to solve our social challenges and our social problems. Uh and so you began to see the birth of a real prison abolition movement. You know, one of the key thinkers in this movement, of course, is Angela Davis, also ruth Gilmore, uh, and so many others. There was there’s a movement out of the bay critical resistance uh, which organized to try to dismantle the prison industrial complex along with that, of course, would include abolishing Police. And I’ll talk about what those things quite specifically mean. But the vision was undergirded by this belief that we’ve moved into a moment in history. Certainly american history or incarceration becomes the primary way that we resolve our social contradictions that we for to give you an example, You know, if you look in the seventies, when we when uh, first initially under carter but really under Reagan, we saw this happen in wide scale. The closing of the stripping away of funds for mental health supports and mental institutions. You saw many people who were in mental institutions put on the street. And then we had a bunch of laws that made it illegal to be on the street. And so suddenly, you’ve essentially criminalized mental illness, you know, when you have, when you put laws uh, that make public loitering and public camping and all these things which weren’t made for swiss family Robinson, you know, you’re in new york city and they have all these laws against public camping and all these things. There are laws that are designed essentially to punish the homeless and to incarcerate the homeless. So we’re criminalizing homelessness and, you know, we have drug addiction, which is a medical challenge and we essentially make it a legal challenge. Or we, as a lawyer would say, we becomes we moved from a socialized or medicalized state to a penalized state. So it so it becomes a prison problem. And so all of our problems, all of our contradictions, instead of investing in drug care or or more shelters or better public housing, the prison ultimately becomes the catch all for all of this stuff. And so we seem to believe that we can jail our way out of problems even with regard to broken windows models of policing. This idea that we could police are way out of out of out of troubles, troubled neighborhoods. All of this stuff becomes our way of resolving the problem. And so we have these bloated prisons and we have people who are who are who are harmed by that reality, and we have no real solutions. And so what we began to see was, wait a minute. The problem isn’t just that we’ve got going the wrong way with prison. The other problem is that there’s so much financial stake in it, that there’s an entire business or industry around the prison, that as long as a town makes money when there are prisoners in the town, then the town has no incentive to, to decriminalize the town has no incentive to reimagine what the law could look like. The state has privatized prisons in his private capital invested in prisons. Then there’s no reason for powerful people to say, hey, let’s get rid of prison. And so we had to re imagine what this thing could look like. We need to reimagine what a world could look like without prisons. Were we believe? Perhaps, uh, at that moment, at least wrestle with the belief or the possibility that the prison itself was the problem.

[0:08:15 Peniel] And I want to stop you. Want to stop you right there. Mark, right now, the Minneapolis city council has voted, we’re going to see if that vote holds up. It’s supposed to be veto proof to defund the police and reorganise public safety in Minneapolis and they have an 800 person force there. Um, might even be more, I want to ask you, what, what are the concrete policy innovations that can be institutionalized right now? Because the Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden has already just gone on record saying he’s not for defunding the police. What can be, what can be done right now? City like I’m in Austin. Um, there’s a young man who’s in a coma because he was hit by a rubber bullet. We’ve seen police violence nationally and police writing nationally. What can be done right now in a policy sense, in a concrete way before this political mobilization in this movement loses any momentum to strike while the fire is hot and transform policy right now.

[0:09:24 Marc] Yeah, I think that the first thing to do is to say what it’s not when Minneapolis says we’re going to defund the police, doesn’t mean that they’re cutting the budget to zero and firing all the cops. And suddenly it’s every person for themselves, which is sort of the popular narrative of it, which is why that’s an easy idea to shoot down. People say, wait a minute. What if I get shot? What if I what harm is done to me? You know, what about the threat of harm that will expand if there’s no one around to stop it? The idea is not that the idea of, of this, of defunding the police are ultimately the language I prefer is abolishing the police. Is to re imagine the role, purpose and function of the police in our society so that we can ultimately get to a point where they’re not needed at all, which is under great, which is a subset of the prison abolition, which is to say we want to ultimately live in a world where the prison is not needed to resolve all those contradictions that I just talked about. And so in the same way that I’m saying, we could use drug treatment as a way to empty the decarceration prison. So we don’t have everyone who’s addicted to drugs um there, and we can we can excarcerate and say, look, selling drugs maybe shouldn’t be illegal, even if we don’t think it’s a good choice. And and that will decarceration prison, and we can build homeless shelters, etcetera, so that we don’t need to criminalize homelessness. That we can, we can shrink the prison by investing in people. Similarly, we can defund the police, which means that the police no longer have the job of dealing with every social problem. Even police themselves will say, hey, our jobs have become so expansive in the last, you know, four decades that we have to do everything. We have to resolve an argument between neighbors. We have to, uh, there’s a drunk person sitting on my step. There’s someone who’s had a drug overdose and they’re laying in the bathroom. You know, the police are there to fix all of that. In the case of George Floyd is somebody who may or may not have gotten a counterfeit bill from a person who may or may not have intended to do so. We have the police dealing with that. So the police have this bloated response set of responsibilities that current, that deal with everything from social services to medical interventions, to conflict resolution. And the idea of, of disbanding the police is to say or excuse me, just defunding the police is to say that one, this is too much for one organization to do. Two, they’re not, they’re not qualified to do these things. They don’t have instead of sending the police. We should be sending psychologists, we should be setting social workers, we should be sending doctors. And third is that when we do send them things don’t get better. A lot of black folks don’t call the police because we know if the police come, it’s going to get…I’ll give you a perfect example. And this is under the Rizzo. Uh, it’s a long time ago, but it was under Frank Rizzo’s tenure in philadelphia as the police chief and, and, and for, and ultimately the mayor and really one of the most explicitly racist police chiefs in modern urban american history that says something. And I remember my aunt was having a problem with her son, my cousin, my first cousin. Uh, they were arguing and he didn’t want to, she was like, get out of the house and she didn’t want to leave. Um, and the police show up and they tell my cousin to leave. Uh, but they start screaming at my aunt and saying if you knew how to raise your son, this wouldn’t happen. And then my dad intervened, says, hey, we’re here. You know, we called you for help and you’re yelling and harming us. They then literally physically attacked my father, wow, He ran into the house. They chased him and beat him, beat him until he was unconscious, searched the house, found a legal gun that he had and then said that they had to attack him because he was standing at the top of the steps pointing a pistol at them. And of course it was so absurd even a judge at that time. So you’re telling me this black man was at the top of the six, pointed a gun at you all and you didn’t shoot him. He ran up the steps, disarmed him, grabbed him, beat him, and then took the gun that it was so implausible to even the judge dropped, dropped the charges, you know? But the idea was that interaction didn’t need law enforcement. What it needed was someone to help conflict resolution, someone who had conflict resolution skills. So those types of things. So if we could, by defunding the police, we can shrink the role purpose and function of police in our society and again invest in take that money and investing in people who could use it, right? Other agencies that could use it. And also, just because we may not have police doesn’t mean that we don’t have public safety. We just in the same way that even if we get rid of prisons, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have restraint of the few. But the key is to have restraint of the few were no longer locking up 25% of the world’s population. Right? We’re now saying yes, they’re drug, yes, there are rapists, Yes, there are child molesters. Yes, there are serial killers. And yes, they need some sort of restraint and yes, they do need some sort of intervention. But the prison model doesn’t work. And similarly, the police model of occupying our neighborhoods of having wide scale weaponry. Uh, in some cities, it’s literally like a military unit, the same cities that didn’t have dashboard cameras have grenade launchers, that this type of organization makes people feel less safe. It makes people it doesn’t resolve the problem and it takes money away from the things that actually do work. So to defund the police is to strip all that away. Now. Some abolitionists say we need no police at all. Others say we want to minimize it to a very, very specific and narrow role. And people say, well, how, what would that look like? How could that be go to the suburbs? You see, you see police abolition all the time and every, every, almost every white suburban America.

[0:14:51 Peniel] I want to move away from criminal justice to really all these inequities that are caused by, you know, racist capitalism or racial capitalism that are caused by white supremacy, institutional racism. Now, the criminal justice system is a gateway to panoramic systems of oppression, and people are marching in the streets and online on social media, there’s black academics who are writing about being in the ivory tower and the racism they face. Obviously you have faced, that I have faced, that people are talking about this in every single aspect and facet of their lives from poverty to residential segregation, in public school segregation. Now, we’ve seen a lot of white allies and I wanted to ask you one, what do you think the role of white allies should be here? Many people are talking about wanting to help books about anti racism are now bestsellers on the New York Times bestselling list. Um, you know, there’s so many different corporations, amazon has put down that Black lives Matter, the NFL Roger Goodell, after destroying Colin Kaepernick’s career for peacefully protesting by kneeling during the national anthem. Um, the players finally got together last thursday did a short video, and Roger Goodell basically articulated what they had said, basically word for word that black lives matter and that there is a problem of systemic racism. So right now, it seems all of us who are in this space, this racial justice space, there’s people who want to learn from us who want to invest in us what should one white allies be doing. But those of us who are in these spaces, these racial justice spaces as organizers, as intellectuals, as critical thinkers, activists, also, what should we be doing? So I’ll start with the with the with the white allies, what should white allies should be doing right now?

[0:16:50 Marc] A few things. One is listening, um, listen, ask questions, but also give space. And what I mean by that is one, uh, my experience as an activist, as an organizer over the years is that it’s not nearly as challenging to get white leftists white liberals to jump on some of our causes and to show up to our rallies. Um, but sometimes it’s a challenge to get them to listen. And two sort of respond to the needs that we have and when they fall short or make a mistake or do something, it’s not that we want to throw them away, but they have to be held accountable. And sometimes there’s a sense of, well, I’m on your side, why, why are you telling me about this? You should be worried about the racist white people. And it’s like, so there’s a need to listen to our pain, to listen to our strategies and to be willing to follow our lead. Um, rather than try to lead us. I think that there’s also space that needs to be given. You know, a whole bunch of black folks have been exhausted by the white allies asking can you explain to me why this is a thing, and can you help me understand that? Those questions aren’t legitimate, It’s just damn right now. And sometimes I just need a minute to breathe and to feel safe and feel unsafe and to process what I’m feeling or whatever the thing uh, might be. Um, the other thing, I think it’s important is to organize in your own areas and communities. Um, coming to my Black Lives Matter rally is dope, but I would love you to organize a Black Lives Matter in a white neighborhood. Cause if I get a bunch of white folk marching and screaming Black Lives Matter, which is actually the thing that’s been in question. Exactly. You know, um that for me is a far more bold and radical revolutionary a step. And and also use your privilege to end white supremacy. As they say, we don’t want allies, we want we want co conspirators. So I I need to know that you’re willing to sacrifice. I need to, I mean, I just watched yesterday, uh serena Williams husband stepped down from aboard from from from Reddit and say, look, I’m stepping down and I’m demanding that a black person we put in my place. Now, I’m gonna say every white person can quit their job to do that. That’s obviously a position of power and privilege. But my point is when you have power and privilege, whether it’s at a mass scale in terms of capital or whether it’s in it’s in a situational context, you’ve got to be willing and able to use it for the benefit of this. And it’s one thing to show up to the rally, but what you’re gonna do the next day and we’ve got to hold these companies accountable, right? Because it’s one, Yeah, it’s cool for Nike to say, you know, let’s do it or let’s not do it right. Which is what their campaign was A couple weeks ago, it’s sort of talking about, you know, don’t do it. Uh, in terms of white supremacy, anti black racism, they said all the right things in their campaign commercials. Now we got to make sure that they’re boardrooms and their and their labor forces reflect those same values. You know, I helped Ben and jerry’s accountable and some people got mad. But you know, Ben and jerry’s made an awesome statement for Black Lives Matter. But one of the big Black Lives Matter, uh in terms of the Movement for Black Lives policy statement was ending the occupation of Palestine. And Ben and jerry’s has business, does business inside of the illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank that matters. You can’t be a company that says Black Lives Matter, but try to destroy unions. You can’t be a company that has Black Lives Matter and exploit latin America. You can’t be a company has says Black Lives Matter and not have any black executives or any black employees making living wages. I mean we can go down the list. I’m not talking about any company in particular. I’m saying right now that they have to walk the walk and walk the talk because if not anybody can make a sign right now, it’s good for business to say black lives matter. Every chewing gum company, every snack, you know, every snack chip company, every auto dealer can come out right now and say, we love black people. But if it doesn’t show up in your practice and it doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. And then, lastly, uh, for black folks and really for awful. But I think black folks, as people who are leading this movement, we have to articulate what our freedom dream is. We have to be sort of thoughtful, um, and lucid about what we want this thing to be because, you know, it’s one thing for people to be in the streets marching for, to abolish prisons. But if the other half of the march really just wants warmer and fuzzier prisons, they just want cops that’ll shoot jump shots and do the cha cha slide with us and don’t really want to end policing, then what we end up selling for something. So, uh, short of what we could do. This is the moment for, uh, Robinson kindly talks about, you know, these sort of ambitious freedom dreams right to have the most, uh, ambitious and audacious freedom dreams. And I want to make sure that we’re articulating that. And then we have a clear vision of what that could be so that we don’t end up just trying to replace white cops with black cops because I don’t want to be beaten by black cops. I don’t want to die in safer looking or, or higher tech prisons, right? I don’t want to die in the first class jail. Rather, I want to re imagine the world sort of as a dumb content. She talks about, you know, world making after empire, right? I want to say, what could the great next be and instead of thinking about nation building or sort of replicating or taking over the reins of unchecked power, I want a World make panel, I want a world make, I want to reshape the world and reshape the relations of power and a dynamic so that everybody is more free than when they started.

[0:21:58 Peniel] And in that sense, you’re really echoing uh Malcolm, X and martin Luther King, jr what they were trying to do in the context of the 19 sixties. King’s beloved community. What Malcolm was trying to do with the human rights campaign as well. Um I want to ask you when we think about reimagining those freedom dreams, we see we have policy proposals from a movement for Black Lives that are really stunning in six sections. That includes reparations, that includes transformative mental health for young people, for trans people, for the cash, poor, mentally disabled, talks about immigration, but also West African and Caribbean immigrants, and not just spanish speakers, but inclusive of spanish speakers, transforms how we think about labor, how we think about capitalism, uh that has true voting rights for all people, where we register everyone to vote even when they were 17 years old, so that by the time they turned 18 they can vote automatically. Um what can we do right now to implement those things? You know, Sandy Darrity has a new book on reparations. I sort of think that we sort of have the blueprint and it becomes how can we execute the blueprint, especially since we have racial justice orgs and anti racist organisations that have been talking about this, that are active on the ground and globally right now, How can we seize this moment, Which seems to be really a generational opportunity to fundamentally reimagine the american nation state. And if we could successfully do that, it’s going to have such global reverberations and be a counter to the age of Brexit and a counter to the age of this current president and white supremacy.

[0:23:40 Marc] I mean, I think you’re right, I think this is a generational opportunity and my fear is that it will get co opted. I’m watching it be co opted. I’m watching a march in my city two days ago where and it was a divine nine march, it was, you know, all the black greek letter organizations there and they let it. And I love the show of support from folks who don’t normally come out there, but I’m watching people suddenly say, you know, we want the cops to be nicer to us and I’m watching them kneel what cops standing next time kneeling right? And I’m watching our movement go from radical to reform is reformist to whatever else, just in the course of a week. So I think at a moment where we see radical upheaval around the world, we see revolutions um in the north africa, in in the Middle East, we see radical political shifts, you mentioned Brexit, you know, in europe we have an opportunity to do something different, but what we need to do uh is be willing to release our imagination, our political imaginations and I’ll be prisoner to any sort of taken for granted framework. And of course there’s a short term mission of eliminating trump from office right of voting trump out because no deployment of the radical imagination is going to be aided by him in the White House. But we also have to keep political pressure on all elected officials, including joe biden, so that we don’t confuse our confuse electing him with progress as opposed to a return to of the norms of four years ago, which were themselves unsustainable for the vulnerable. Um And so I think it’s about really having and pushing a radical political, developing a radical political agenda. I would love to recreate a kind of indiana moment um where we could have a radical political conference that um creates room to articulate a political agenda that isn’t bound by market values. It’s not doesn’t it doesn’t presume the permanence of the prison. Um that allows us to recognize our needs and figure out the best way to achieve those needs without the kind of limitations that come from the year two year political negotiations that take place for elections. Um I think that’s the way that’s where we have to start

[0:26:07 Peniel] Now, as a black man seeing George Floyd, seeing Brianna taylor seeing Ahmad Arbery where are you at at this moment? Because really, I think about the memory of George Floyd and the memory of so many who have been killed unjustly by the police and all that grief and trauma for their families um uh but also for us to not on the same level as their families, but just watching this and those of us who love black people who really do believe intensely that black lives matter. How are you doing? And I want to close out, ask my last question, what, how does this impact you, just as your, your father, you’re unbelievably active citizen, social justice advocate who has deep empathy for black people for all people, but especially black people, how is this impacting you?

[0:27:00 Marc] Uh it’s, it’s draining, it’s terrifying. Um a week ago, my 16 year old daughter wanted to go to the rally in philadelphia, the protest rather. Um and of course, you know, as a, as a father, it’s like I’m excited, I’m proud um that you want to go, but as the son of a 92 year old parent and an 80 year old parents, I can’t afford to have her get sick and bring it to them or to me who could bring it to them. The idea that as a black person, I have to choose between staying home and not resisting the state that wants to actively kill me too often and going outside and risking death partly because that state has not properly managed this global crisis speaks to the type of ignoble paradox that black folks have to wrestle with at all times. I’m really choosing whether I’m gonna die fast or die slow. And that type of dynamic for me is profoundly taxing on the spirit on the psyche. And there’s also the trauma of turning on tv or are going to social media and having to repeatedly see black people beaten and black people killed. You know, white folks don’t have to deal with that. White folk can turn on tv just about every day and not have to watch one of their Children murdered in front of them on the news and the fact that we do it so often to the point of objectification of the body itself. Uh, for me, is another signpost of just how profoundly frustrating, uh taxing, uh, damaging traumatic, whatever word you want to use this moment is in this reality is uh for black folk, black men and women.

[0:28:57 Peniel] All right, we will close out our show on that. This is a show really in memorial and memoriam for George Floyd, Brianna taylor Ahmad are very and really all the thousands of black people who have been killed by the state by state sanctioned violence since time and Memorial. We are very, very optimistic and hopeful for what the future holds for racial justice, for social justice, for finally achieving black dignity and citizenship. We’ve been very, very honored to be joined by professor Marc Lamont Hill of Temple University who is professor and steve Charles chair in media cities and solutions and really one of the nation’s leading um proponents for black dignity and citizenship. He’s an amazing scholar, a brilliant public intellectual in his last book. Is nobody casualties of America’s war on the vulnerable from Ferguson to flint and beyond. Mark. Thank you for joining us.

[0:29:57 Marc] It’s my pleasure brother. Thank you.

[0:30:00 Peniel] Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on twitter at Peniel joseph. That’s Peniel Joseph and our website CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu. And the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development studio, at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of texas at Austin. Thank you.