Legally Speaking: Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander welcome to our legally speaking series whoa thank you your book is called the new Jim Crow mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness this is I think a disturbing book it is a provocative book and it is certainly a book that has generated a lot of buzz and your thesis as I understand it is that for the last thirty years or so we have unlike any other country in the world engaged in an orgy of incarceration that has not in any coherent or consistent way served the cause of justice that rather than a war on drugs which supposedly this was all about or most of it was about this has on the ground been a war against poor african-american communities yes yes you know I argue that today even as we elect Barack Obama as our nation's first black president and even as we claim to have entered into the era of colorblindness we as a nation have managed to rebirth a caste like system in America through the war on drugs and the get tough movement we have targeted arrested and imprisoned millions of poor people of color primarily black men for predominantly nonviolent and drug-related crimes the various sorts of crimes that occur with roughly equal frequency and middle class white communities and on college campuses and universities and once they're swept into the system they're branded and trapped in a permanent second-class status not unlike the one that we supposedly left behind once you're branded a criminal or a felon all the old forms of discrimination denial of the right to vote exclusion from jury service legal discriminate and employment housing access to education public benefits are suddenly legal you know as a criminal you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in Alabama or Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow if there's one drug it seems to me that illustrates how skewed the enforcement has been it's marijuana there was one study conducted by the drug policy Alliance in California and it showed that in in that states 25 largest cities arrest rates for blacks for possessing marijuana were four to four to twelve times higher than it is for whites yet you know last November we had an election in California and one of the ballot measures was to in essence legalized the recreational use of marijuana and only 47 percent of black voters voted for it what do you make of that well you know I think it's complicated I think it's complicated you know african-americans have no doubt been the primary target of the drug war and have suffered the most as a result of the war on drugs but many people in the black community are also very concerned about the harms associated with illegal drugs and they see the harms associated with illegal drug activity and you know legalizing drugs and makes people nervous and makes people worry that there's a message being sent to their youngsters who are already struggling just to make it that it's okay to use drugs we surprised by the results of that election no actually I wasn't I mean I thought that it was it was you know I was hopeful that marijuana would be legalized in California very hopeful but it's a big step for people to take I mean mind you we've had decades now of the demonization of drug use and drug sales you know her wanna yeah but you know marijuana has a yeah we have gotten beyond reefer madness haven't we a little bit yeah yeah but I think we still have a longer way to go then than many people realize and I think there was also a lot of confusion in California about exactly what the ballot initiative would mean would it mean that marijuana would be sold in grocery stores would it mean that would just be available anywhere anytime people were uncertain about what the practical consequences would be and so you know I think in the future as we strive to decriminalize marijuana and potentially other drugs it's going to be very important to help people to understand that it is possible to put into place regulatory regimes that you know treat drugs as a public health problem rather than a crime but actually address you know the concerns of the legitimate concerns about people people about making drugs more readily available how do you how do you do that how do you begin to treat it as a less as a crime and more as a social problem without making it more available the organization law Enforcement Against Prohibition has done a tremendous amount of excellent work showing how drugs are actually more illegal drugs the drugs that we think of as being extra bad are actually more readily available to young people as long as they're criminalized because the control of the drug market rests entirely with the criminals themselves nobody's checking ID nobody's trying to ensure the quality of the product or make sure that it's not laced with anything or you know that your by having a black market for these drugs it that's totally unregulated you know all of the control and powers put in the hands of criminals and you know other countries have done a much better job you know embracing a public health model and ensuring that there are systems in place that you know make sure the drugs aren't readily available and that young people who are underage don't have easy access but at the same time you know don't have the criminal stigma attached to those who choose to use drugs and who may need help and feel unable even to get the help they need because funding isn't available for drug treatment but even for those folks who have a difficult time at this stage you know seriously entertaining the idea that we might end drug prohibition in the United States we can at least end the drug war you know we didn't always do things this way in the United States you know prior to you know Reagan's declaration of war in 1982 a declaration of war he made at the time at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline not on the rise you know most people assume that Ronald Reagan declared the war on drugs in response to the emergence of crack cocaine and the related violence but that's not true he declared the war on drugs in response to racial politics and did so at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline it was a couple years before crack hit the streets and before we declared the drug war drugs were illegal but we didn't pump billions of dollars into local and state law enforcement agencies for the purpose of the you know having these drug task forces that would sweep poor communities of color stopping and frisking and searching folks on the street while they're walking to the bus stop a returning home on this you know from the subway and you know authorizing these programs like operation pipeline which would stop people's cars and the stroke that they could you know go on a fishing expedition for drugs this all-out war that has been waged on the illegal drugs without any real benefit in terms of reducing drug addiction can be ended even without ending drug prohibition you mentioned Ronald Reagan but isn't it true that people like Bill Clinton he oversaw a massive increase in prison construction I'd point nine billion dollars a Mario Cuomo when he was governor of New York presided over a dramatic increase in prison construction I had read that when Ann Richards was governor of Texas the in rate of incarceration increased more quickly under her than it did under george w bush this is a conservative liberal thing is it well it certainly hasn't become one i'm you know i think you know to understand how he got to this place how he got to be the world's leader in imprisonment and how he managed to construct a penal system unparalleled in world history we have to kind of go back actually to the origins of this get tough movement and if you trace those origins back you could trace them all the way to the civil rights movement when segregationist and former segregationists were looking for formerly colorblind language that they could use to appeal to poor working-class white folks in the south who were angry about anxious about fearful of threatened by many of the gains of african-americans in the civil rights movement segregationist and former segregationist stop saying segregation forever and started saying law and order pollsters and political strategists found that you know thinly veiled promises to get tough on a group of people not so subtly defined by race could be enormous ly successful in persuading those poor and working-class whites in the south to defect from the democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party in droves it was part of what has become known as the Southern Strategy the grand Republican Party's strategy of trying to flip the South from blue to red and in the words of HR Haldeman President Richard Nixon's former chief of staff he described the strategy as quote the whole problem is really the blacks the key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to and while that sounds you know Machiavelli the reality is they were responding to a political reality which is that poor working-class whites and the South really had their world rocked by the civil rights movement you know wealthy whites could send their kids to private schools and give their kids all the advantages that wealth has to offer but poor and working-class whites who were struggling for survival were faced with a social demotion it was their kids who might be subject to busing orders it was their kids who they felt were being passed over through these affirmative action programs as african-american kids were like leapfrogging over them they thought on their way to Harvard and Yale and this created an enormous amount of anxiety and resentment and also an enormous political opportunity so when President Reagan declared the war on drugs he was attempting to make good on campaign promises to get tough on a group of people that had been defined by race and the success of that though the success of that effort is what persuaded Democrats to begin competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher than their Republican counterparts it seems to me there's another piece to this I mean certainly there's no shortage of politicians who make names for themselves by saying they're gonna get tough on crime and the argument of course is that criminals have too many rights and that liberal judges are making the United States a more dangerous place because they're giving them those rights or recognizing those rights but it seems to me too that the fear that these politicians were tapping into was not completely divorced from reality after all between 1960 and 1990 the violent crime rate in this country quadrupled the murder rate doubled there was a dip in the early 80s but there was you know a fear there it seems to me that you know that I mean it seems that this country for most of those years was a more dangerous place wasn't it well there's no doubt that you know violent crime rates did rise in the 60s and the and in fact there were some segregationist and former segregationist who were arguing that you know the rise of violence particularly in northern cities was evidence that you know segregation was needed in order to control the african-american community and so it wasn't as though you know problems of crime weren't real in in some communities they were and as you point out crime rates were fluctuating it wasn't as that they were you know on a constant upward trajectory and then it went up again yeah so crime crime problems of crime were real and what but the the motivation for using crime and get tough appeals was their political effectiveness in mobilizing a group of voters who you know were able to express racial resentment in a formally race-neutral way by you know being tough on welfare which went hand in hand with the tough-on-crime movement and you know many African American politicians called for get tough measures and there was you know a certain amount of panic that struck african-american communities particularly when crack hit the streets but the law and order and get tough rhetoric preceded the crack epidemic and helped to in many ways you know legitimate the overwhelmingly punitive response to the rhetoric as you point out in your book goes back at least Barry Goldwater in 64 it was certainly embraced by Richard Nixon and what makes this seems to me more more complicated is that the cities didn't blow up under Ronald Reagan or George W Bush they blew up under Lyndon Johnson at this very same time he was you know trying to push through his Great Society program so it seems to me the timing if not that nothing else made it easier for conservatives to discredit the liberal approach to dealing with these complex problems oh well I mean indeed I mean the fact that you know there was you know there were uprisings riots sweeping many cities in the wake of you know the assassination of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was creating a lot of anxiety and the response was we've got to get tough the response was lock him up got a crackdown yeah and the fear was not the voice from reality if it wasn't well it depends on which reality you're talking about because for example you know like I said to declare a war on drugs at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline and when public concern about drugs was actually right but it wasn't about drugs wasn't about drugs but there was there's your cry may have been there yeah but the war on drugs was declared as a way of providing a vehicle for channeling that anxiety when the perception was that drugs was generating much of this violence well at that time there wasn't much concern about drugs at the time President Reagan declared the war on drugs when crack hit the street a couple years later then the association between drugs and violence overtook the media for sure your book to a large extent focuses on nonviolent crimes and how blacks are punished much more severely than whites but to what extent does your critique extend to much more serious crimes crimes like murder assault armed robbery - I sent this this critique extent - those crimes well you know I focus my book to a large extent on the war on drugs and the arrest and prosecution of African Americans for nonviolent drug related offenses because most people assume that mass incarceration is driven by violent crime and it's not true so to a large extent the book is a rebuttal to the dominant conception of who is in prison and for you know what reasons you know mass incarceration hasn't been driven by violent crime rates it's just not true you know between 1985 and 2000 the period of the most dramatic expansion of our prison system 2/3 of the increase in the federal system were for drug convictions alone more than half of the increase in the state's and system was for drug convictions alone and by the year 2000 there were more people cycling in and out of prison just for probation and parole violations than had been incarcerated in 1980 for all reasons so the drug war created in the you know space of less than two decades this extraordinary population millions of people cycling in and out of prison for these relatively minor drug offenses and even as recently as 2005 four out of five all drug arrests were for simple possession only one out of five were for sales you know in the 1990s the period of the greatest escalation of the drug war nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests were for marijuana possession you know so I thought it was important for the public to understand that this explosion and imprisonment has not been driven by an explosion and violent crime over the last few decades but the critique of the book which you know at its core is you know rooted in concern about the overwhelming punitive nough stat for people of colors certainly applies as much to those who find themselves sitting in prison for life without the possibility of parole because of a violent offense as much as it does to a non-violent one you know in the United States because we embrace the death penalty anything less than death makes it seem as though someone's getting it off getting off light so when someone says oh you get only 30 years for an aggravated assault a sentence that's larger you know longer than murderers receive and most other Western democracies we think somehow that's being soft and I think our overwhelming punitive Ness is rooted in our racial anxieties and the stereotypes we have about who the real criminals are after 1990 violent crime rates in this country plummeted dramatically why do you think that happened oh well I mean there's a raging debate in the academic community about why no I'm sure there are some people who would credit our mass incarceration policies as unfair as they may be as on racist as they may be there are those who would say that simply throwing people behind bars has a counter for some of this precipitous decline we've seen well most of the estimates you know suggest that mass incarceration has reduced our crime rates somewhere between about five and twenty five percent yeah one you've got people like Steven Levitt co-author of the book Freakonomics he suggests that it accounts for one third of the decline yeah well he's definitely on he's on the one hand and then you have Bruce Western at Harvard at the other end it says like five percent yeah exactly even if it were true that as much as 30 percent of our crime reduction was due to mass incarceration even if that were true that would mean that you know 75 percent of the imprisonment that we're doing may not really be leading to any results in reduction crime rate and we have to ask ourselves how many millions of people are we willing to lock up in order to obtain a marginal decrease in crime rates and are we willing also to do it with respect to a particular you know racially defined population are we willing to throw away literally dispose of millions of poor people of color so that other people might feel a little more secure in their daily lives especially when sociologists like William Julius Wilson have you know shown in his book when work disappears that joblessness is the most important factor in violent crime and violent crime rates you know and he cites research in his book showing that if you control for joblessness in other words if you could compare white jobless men with black jobless men the racial disparities in violent crime virtually disappear that you know in inner-city communities today jobs cannot be found and this is the result of a major transformation in our national economy you know during the same period of time that a backlash against the civil rights movement was brewing and the war on drugs was kicking off our nation went through a period of deindustrialization and globalization you know hundreds of thousands of jobs literally vanished from inner cities in Chicago Detroit around the country and instead of responding to this economic crisis this economic depression in inner-city communities with a wave of compassion economic stimulus programs bailout packages job training to help you know young people of color in particular make the rough transition to a new service based economy instead of doing any of that we ended welfare as we knew it we declared the war on drugs you know no longer needed to pick cotton in the fields or labor in factories black men were rounded up in droves and disposed of it seems to me in this conversation there are two facts on the ground that are difficult to ignore one fact is that even though there's been a precipitous decline in violent crime in this country the the the the violent crime that does occur today a large percent of its percentage of it is committed by young black men and black men that's the first fact on the ground and the second fact on the ground is that a large percentage of that violent crime is committed against black people so in fact statistics I saw young black men are 20 times more likely to die from violence than a person in the general population how you respond to say a black parent who has lost a son to street violence and who would say to you you know the real injustice here is not that there aren't that there are too many cops in my neighborhood but that there are too few and and what do you say to that parent who would argue that the real racial injustice here is not that we're too tough on violent black men but rather that the crimes that happen to be committed against Blacks are not treated with nearly the same sense of urgency as those crimes that are committed against whites well what do you say to that parent I just say you're absolutely right basic security is a human right is a fundamental human right as important as the right to be treated fairly in the justice system that no one no child no one should be forced to live in a community in which they feel unsafe or unthreatened where they you know risk their lives just by walking to school it's it's an absolute you know tragedy that that exists in the United States today but we we don't solve that problem by waging a whar your your points well-taken but again going back to that parent who say has lost a son you know the when they catch someone when they when they find the person who's committed a violent crime should the punishment be as severe as the punishment is now should it be less severe me how in terms of where we are with violent crime are we over punishing people absolutely you know there's a there's an excellent body of research that has been done showing that the longer the punishment is doesn't deter people from engaging in violent crime people don't stop and think well I'm going to you know I would bash that guy over the head if I was gonna get five years but because I'm gonna get 25 I think I won't do it no actually you know to the extent penalties criminal penalties deter criminal activity at all it's the certainty of punishment not the amount of punishment one receives and so you know by ensuring that people who commit violent crimes are actually you know apprehended and punished to some degree - by ensuring that you know there is a corrective mechanism for those who commit you know violent offenses we are more likely to deter crime than adding on years and years also I am firm believer and restorative justice that the goal shouldn't just be to keep on shame and you know punishment on individual but to actually try to ensure that that person goes back into the community as an asset rather than someone who's likely to harm again do we know how to do that I think there's wonderful restorative justice programs around the country that have theirs yes there's wonderful models the Conservatives say we don't know how to do that we're not a lot but we don't know how to I think that that's not true there's wonderful restorative justice models that have actually become supported by many victims rights groups you know many people say well if you care about the victims then you're gonna want to punish these folks lock them up and throw away the key at that if you really care about the victims you're gonna want to harm to the greatest extent the offender but in reality many victims themselves feel that they're not treated well in the process in the criminal justice process many feel that they don't ever really get hurt or their harm considered in a meaningful way you know the prosecutors take over and it's up to the you know the court system to decide what happens and how and you know their suffering kind of falls by the wayside as all the attention is then placed on the offender and how much we're gonna hurt them as a result of the harm they have done but restorative justice comes from the approach that the victim matters as much as the offender and that they should have an opportunity to confront the offender if they choose have an opportunity to decide what kind of restoration might help to make them whole or to really remedy the harm that they have experienced and an emphasis is placed on ensuring that that kind of crime never happens again which should be I think from a societal perspective our utmost concern and the last thing I'll say about violent crime though and it's a fairly obvious point but you know it it bears emphasis which is that to the extent that the drug trade you know creates violence it's due entirely to drug prohibition you know if drugs were legal in the United States there would be no drug-related violence plaguing poor communities of color just as alcohol prohibition led to a tremendous amount of gang violence and mafia violence that ended once alcohol became legal and so for folks who are particularly concerned about violence in poor communities of color rethinking drug prohibition would be an important step to drastic you think you think all drugs should be legal not just I didn't I didn't say that my own views on this have been evolving over time I think for sure marijuana right that's easy heroin it's an easy one i I think we should have an open mind I think we should begin studying what other countries are doing you know I think we have made that a taboo in the United States but given that we've spent a trillion dollars now in a failed drug war and haven't managed to reduce drug addiction or drug abuse when I owed I think it's time for us to at least ask the question are there more effective ways of doing this of responding to the harms associated with drugs then flat-out prohibition and like I said in Portugal and you know a number of other countries now have shown that you can decriminalize drugs and reduce rates of drug abuse and drug addiction and ensure that young people aren't experimenting as as frequently with drugs and if that's the case then why are we then why continue doing what we're doing when it leads to so much violence and despair and the you know the waste of billions of dollars all right to change subjects just a little bit you have some rather negative things to say in your book about affirmative action in fact you raise the question whether affirmative action as it has been defended in the last 30 years as quote function more like a racial bribe than a tool for racial justice explain that yeah well you know in the book I acknowledged that many of the criticisms of affirmative action that have been made are unfounded that you know white people as a group have not been much harmed by affirmative action and that you know there have been real benefits associated with affirmative action without affirmative action programs many institutions like fire departments and police departments might not have ever been integrated or at least not to the degree that has been achieved to date so I don't it's not that I don't acknowledge any benefits of affirmative action I certainly do but I do have a concern about affirmative action and it's that you know at the time of Martin Luther King Jr's death he was committed to building poor people's movement he was committed to building a movement on behalf of poor people of all colors for basic human rights the right to work the right to housing the right to quality education for all he was firmly committed to the hard work of movement building across racial and ethnic lines for social and economic justice recognizing that civil rights alone was not going to result in justice true justice for all but after his death civil rights leaders largely abandoned his commitment to movement building for economic justice and began pursuing civil rights remedies largely through our courts and embracing with great zeal affirmative action programs which I believe you know amount to sort of a trickle-down theory of justice the idea if you sprinkle enough folks of color and elite institutions and places of power that somehow justice will trickle down to those at the bottom and that was an approach that you know dr. King had real questions about he never expressed opposition to affirmative action itself in fact you know many things that he said suggested that he would support affirmative action at least in some circumstances but dr. King was firmly committed to a bottom-up grassroots movement for social economics and my fear is that we have treated away that commitment to economic justice and human rights for all in exchange for the sprinkling of opportunity for a few at the top and it's not a fair trade and it's not a just one and I also worry that affirmative action has helped to mask the severity of racial inequality in the United States it's easy for people to say how could there possibly be anything like a racial caste system in the United States when you have Barack Obama as president the United States who entered into Harvard through an affirmative action program and achieved great you know power and fame and when you see you know Oprah Winfrey was the most powerful person in America well I don't all right Oprah Winfrey may well be but you know you see these highly visible you know African Americans doing very well and I think it creates the impression that far more progress has actually been made and it also helps us to rationalize the suffering of those at the bottom we can say to ourselves well if they just worked harder if they just made better choices they too you know might be Barack Obama but of course the irony is Barack Obama himself has admitted to violating drug laws you know numerous times use cocaine use marijuana and if he had been raised in the hood if he had not been insulated by being raised by white grandparents in Hawaii and attending predominantly white colleges and universities if he had been just an ordinary kid in the hood he would have been stopped he would have been searched he would have been caught and the odds are very high history would have been rewritten yeah he might not even have the right to vote today much less be President of the United States let me read to you a passage from your book which you which really struck me you say quote it may not be easy for the civil rights community to have a and conversation about any of this we're talking about affirmative action here civil rights organizations are populated with beneficiaries of affirmative action like myself and their friends and allies ending affirmative action arouses fear of annihilation the reality that so many of us would disappear overnight from colleges and universities nationwide if affirmative action were banned and that our children and grandchildren might not follow in our footsteps creates a kind of panic that is difficult to describe it may be analogous in some respects to the panic once experienced by poor and working-class whites faced with desegregation the fear of a sudden demotion in the nation's racial hierarchy those are really strong words and I'm just wondering since the book came out have you heard from any of those folks and those civil rights organizations that they expressed their displeasure to you toward you to do no have they and I hope they read the book no actually what's interesting is that you know I when I released that when the book was released I was you know somewhat concerned about the reaction I might receive from some civil rights groups from organizations not only because about my comments about affirmative action but also because in the introduction in the last chapter I have some real criticisms of the civil rights community for failing you know over the last thirty years to really speak up loudly against the war on drugs and the mass incarceration of African Americans and so I you know I was was hopeful that the civil rights community would be open to the message but also somewhat concerned about the reaction and you know I have to say I've been very pleasantly surprised the civil rights organizations have responded you know quite enthusiastically to the book you know the and if they said to you you know you're right on affirmative action I have to say I haven't had very many conversations with folks about the affirmative action piece and it's interesting even in the media interviews that I've done very rarely am I asked about it so you're one of the few gosh it just leaped out at me I can't help but notice in this passage that I read that you parenthetically refer to yourself and and I'm wondering time-it tell me a little bit about your background where did you grow up what was your childhood like well I was born in Chicago my mother is white my father is African American he died quite a while ago and my parents were interracially married at a time that was a big no-no in the city of Chicago and my mother was basically disowned by her family excommunicated from her church and not long after they were married at a wedding where virtually nobody attended from either side of the family they fled the city and we lived in a very small community out in the cornfields and Illinois of a small town populated by other people who had fled the racial conflict and in Chicago and were hoping to create a better world a better community and we lived there for a while before moving to California but you know growing up I was acutely aware of racial inequality I got to see how differently my mother was treated and my father was treated if we were looking for apartment it was my mother who would go looking and not tell them about the rest of her black family and you know I also got to see my father experiencing severe employment discrimination while at IBM and and yet I was aware of my privilege and you know I went to Vanderbilt University and volunteered at a school in Nashville that was under desegregation order and I saw that you know I was actually quite privileged as comparison to many folks who were stuck in urban ghetto schools in which you know attending a school like Vanderbilt or having many of the opportunities that I had you know taken for granted was you know a little more than a fantasy I know from reading your resume on the internet you went to Stanford Law School you clerked for United States Supreme Court justice I think it's fair to say you have a Tiffany resume and it just made me wonder you know a lot of folks with Tiffany resumes they join big law firms they work on fascinating things like mergers and acquisitions or intellectual property they make a bucket of money and then they maybe do a little pro bono work on the side were you ever tempted to trade on that Tiffany resumes oh I was tempted for sure yeah when I realized that I could make in one month what my father had earned in a year you know after you know clerking on the Supreme Court and graduating from a nice law school I was very tempted and I went to a large law firm Hogan and hearts and and I lasted 11 months there before I realized that you know this just wasn't for me that the reason I went to law school was because I was passionate about social justice and civil rights and I wanted to you know use my time and whatever skills or talents I might have in a way that might actually and a further the cause you know of the folks that I had so admired you know growing up you clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun interesting guy he went through this very interesting evolution over the time that he was a United States Supreme Court justice and in fact throughout his entire career he was a Nixon appointee when he started out he was viewed as a protege of Warren burgers over time he voted more and more frequently with the liberals with Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan and it seems to me that evolution is most dramatically illustrated by how he viewed the death penalty in her biography of Justice Blackmun Linda greenhouse notes that he expressed opposition to the death penalty as far back as 1967 but he always wrestled with the question whether as a judge he had the power to strike it down and I think he wrestled with it to almost the end of his career at the Supreme Court justice and it was punctuated I guess two months before his retirement by a dissent he filed in a case called Collins vs. Collins and that dissent said in part quote from this day forward I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death now I imagine those words are very familiar to you and and why are they so familiar yes well I helped to draft that opinion he wrote that right yes yes yeah and that was really you know the by far the highlight of my experience clerking for him was having the opportunity to work with him and writing that in writing that opinion in which he you know acknowledged that it was impossible to administer the death penalty in a manner that comported with the demands of the eighth amendment and you know I I was so proud of him for having the courage to take that stand before he left the bench well what took him over the hump well you know when you're a clerk for justice you know you you kind of owe them a certain level of confidentiality come on you know and I'm not going to characterize the conversations that we had during his his his final term but I can say no one will watch this program I guarantee it no but I you know I can't say that I think that he was as you is you acknowledge you know he was moving towards that position he was he was questioning and struggling with the death penalty for throughout his his time on the bench and you know by the time he reached the end of the road I think he felt compelled to admit that this experiment with the death penalty had failed and that there was no way to guarantee fairness and consistency in the administration of death while at the same time you know allowing real opportunity for mercy and compassion and attention to you know the circumstances of each individual life and each persons case and you know that mistakes are going to be made and when it comes to who should live and who should die we can't allow for racial bias and arbitrariness Caprice a mistake to end someone's life you mentioned Barack Obama and president in passing is it fair to say that he's really annoyed you from time to time especially when he talks about black men live not living up to their responsibilities I believe as a candidate back in 2008 he said that too many young black men act more like children than adults does that sort of rhetoric really piss you off yeah I didn't like that speech I didn't like that speech you know I have to say I was a fanatic Obama supporter when he was running for office you know I was a fanatic Obama supporter and you know in many ways I feel like I drank the kool-aid you know and like so many I think african-americans in particular really projected my deepest hopes and dreams on him and imagined that he would be more than he is or perhaps then he could be in in his role as as a president and so yeah I've been disappointed and somewhat disillusioned by some of the things that he has said and done and the excerpt that you just kind of quoted from my book refers to his speech he gave on Father's Day while on the campaign trail he's giving a speech on Father's Day in a black church well you know the media of course is is is they're in full force and you know use his Father's Day as an opportunity to chastise black men for acting like boys instead of men and being AWOL while never acknowledging of course that right there in Chicago where he was speaking there was a drug war raging and that you know hundreds of thousands of black men have been taken from their families and their children not voluntarily but because they were rounded up in a drug war for committing these nonviolent relatively minor drug offenses that go ignore it on the other side of town and you know these men cycling in and out of prison love their children and do their best and in fact as I note in the book research suggests that black men are more likely actually more likely to maintain maintain contact with their children following separation doing to do to divorce or imprisonment or anything else than men of any other racial or ethnic group so to bash black fathers as acting like boys rather than men when the research suggests otherwise and when a drug war has made it impossible for so many to be fathers as they would hope and desire I thought was a cheap political shot that was really was really designed think to placate mainstream white Americans and send the impression that he was you know a racial moderate or conservative on some matters in the wake of the reverend wright scandal where he felt it was necessary I think to send certain types of signals to the Maine sincerely yeah it could be said that he was pandering to a white audience when he made that speech but that said is there no element the truth to what he was saying at all well like I said the research suggests that black men actually do a better job of maintaining relationships with their children than men of any other racial or ethnic group after a separation so to say that black men are worse fathers or you know acting like boys rather than men and those kinds of generalities is just not supported by the evidence are some black men absent when they should be present absolutely are some black men making bad choices but soul are plenty of white men and the Dino men and Asian men as well I mean you know the challenges facing black families today are extraordinary particularly poor black families where often you know as a result of federal policy federal policy federal law when you're returning home from prison it has been federal policy that you're barred from public housing for a minimum of five years so now here you have you know your spouse or your partner in your children living in public housing they're poor you can't go home you're barred if you go home the family risks eviction so the idea that you know men just don't care acting like boys instead of men it was ignoring the extraordinary obstacles that face black families today in the midst of the war on drugs and you know these tactics of mass incarceration to hold families together and and to make it and so yes plenty of black men could be doing better but so could men of all other races you know there was a huge controversy that really flamed up back in nineteen that guess was 65 when daniel patrick moynihan he he was assistant secretary of labor at the time under Lyndon Johnson and he wrote this report called the Negro family that the case for national action and the reason why it generated so much controversy was that because he didn't just talk about the structural reasons why black blacks were doing this poorly as they were doing in the air city he also talked about a dysfunctional culture and he said you know at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the black family structure and he was accused back then of blaming the victim and it was an extraordinary controversy when he wrote that report twenty four percent of African American children were born as single mothers now it's up to 70 percent so I understand that joblessness and incarceration all the rest of it have a lot to do with that but was he wrong or would we be wrong to suggest that there's a dysfunctional cultural component there that makes a bad situation worse I think that anytime people struggle to adapt to really tragic circumstances like the one that has been wrought by the war on drugs and mass incarceration there's going to be you know positive adaptations and negative ones you know I strongly resist the idea that you know the disintegration of the black family is due to black men not caring enough about their children or not being not being willing to love in the same way that you know men of other races are willing to love and make commitments to their children or to their families I strongly resist that but it is true that there have been cultural adaptations that have not been helpful and you know I talked in the fourth chapter of the book about the fact that you know there are it's a young black men today who say oh I'm a gangster although as though that is something to be proud of and you know who join gangs and who you know there's a fair amount of glorification of gangster culture and of course the you know largest consumers of gangster rap are actually middle-class whites who buy those albums and the largest numbers it remains the case that there is a glorification among some segments of the african-american meaning of the gangster life and the gangster culture but that is an unhealthy adaptation you know it's not as though these kids just woke up one day and said what I'd really love to be in life is a gangster no these young kids grow up and in an early age find themselves toss frisk thrown to the pavement by the police told in countless ways you're nothing but a criminal you know I need to know who you are who your friends are one day you're gonna wind up in jail with the rest of them you're all no-good they're told that and countless wasted lis and not so subtly by teachers by police on the street by the community at large through the media that they're nobody one way or another they're going to jail and they look around and they see everybody go into jail now psychologists have for many many years described that when people who feel horribly stigmatized and feel they have no escape from a stigma when coping strategy is to embrace the stigma and try to make it good so my last two questions are all about about Barack Obama do you think that the election of Barack Obama has set back the cause of racial justice in this country only because it makes the illusion of dramatic progress so much more compelling well there have been some who have argued that the election of Obama could prove to be a net loss for the African American community given that Obama has not been inclined to you know talk about raise focus on issues of poverty and the black community in their zeal to protect him from political criticism has demobilized they're not you know organizing and demanding you know their fair share of the economic stimulus packages etc the way they might if you weren't the first black president and so some of argue that some are you one of those oh you know I say it's it's you know I'm reserving judgment on that one I wouldn't say today that it's a net loss I think there's risk that it could prove he could prove to be a net loss for african-americans if we remain silent you're not at the point where you wish you voted for John McCain no I'll never be at that point so last question so you're invited to the White House for a talk with President Obama what do you most want to say to him well you know I think I would say to him as someone who themselves you President Obama who violated our nation's drug laws and who I would hope has there but for the grace of God go I attitude towards all those cycling in and out of our prisons and jails today you know are you willing to not just change your rhetoric about the drug war which he has but are you willing to end it and how difficult would that be politically do you think it would be difficult for him to to do but I don't think anywhere near as difficult as he might imagine you know most of the surveys that are done out there today suggest very low support for the war on drugs most people acknowledge that the war on drugs has failed and you know it's an area where we could save billions of dollars that could be redirected towards health care towards education to drug treatment which he claims to care quite a bit about and although he's changed the rhetoric around the war on drugs you know his drug czar said we shouldn't call it a drug war anymore the reality is is that Obama's drug budget devotes the same ratio of dollars to drug treatment as enforcement as the Bush administration is some have even argued that his drug budget is worse than Reagan's and I'm not sure that's true but it's certainly not much better and so you know I would say as someone who might well be cycling in and out of prison in jail but for the grace of God mr. Obama I hope that you'll you'll stand up and and do the right thing even if it requires a little courage Michelle thanks so much this is a real treat appreciate it thank you so much for you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 53,418

Keywords: Michelle Alexander, Jim Crow, law, colorblindness, War on drugs, mass incarceration, affirmative action

Id: a99ZHfsFiKk

Length: 59min 34sec (3574 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2011