Did you watch the conventions? Did you read the policy booklets? Well, we did and want to share with you our insights with Rashad Robinson. Hosted by Alphonso David and Ebony McMorris.
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00:00We are going to our final topic of the evening, focusing on public safety, gun violence,
00:06policing, criminal justice reforms, reparations. These are all issues that affect us directly,
00:13and we are extremely lucky and privileged to have with us a key expert on public safety issues.
00:20Rashad Robinson is the president of Color of Change, which is a racial justice organization
00:26with more than seven million members who demonstrate the power of Black communities
00:30every single day. Color of Change uses innovative strategies to bring about lasting change in
00:36systems and sectors that affect Black people's lives. Rashad Robinson, thank you so much for
00:43taking the time and for joining us. It's great to be with y'all.
00:48Look, the paint the polls Black stage is hot and it's about to get hot.
00:52I was hearing this last conversation. I, you know, we always follow follow follow Dr. Simpson,
00:59but she and that was a great conversation and so important the way that all of these issues
01:06intersect. And I hope that to be able to connect when we talk about justice issues and criminalization,
01:12what is happening around the criminalization of Black women and Black people for reproductive
01:20choices, right? These bans and these attacks on reproductive freedom are also part of a
01:27criminalization strategy. And so we can't separate any of those things because that powerful quote
01:34of Audre Lorde, right? The idea that we don't live single issue lives, right? People
01:40don't experience issues. We experience life and the forces that hold us back are interrelated.
01:44So a racist criminal justice system requires a racist media culture. Economic inequality
01:49goes hand in hand with political inequality. So I'm so glad you all are taking the time to
01:54have these conversations. And I'm so glad that you are connecting these issues because for all
01:59of us every single day, we are facing these challenges and these issues and these opportunities
02:05together. I like that. You said the word opportunity and I was gonna jump to the
02:12to the mass shooting about Georgia, but take us through that word opportunity first,
02:18because a lot of times we do all these issues that we're talking about that are affecting
02:23Black America. What is the opportunity that you are seeing as we talk about these issues?
02:29Well, the opportunity is to win, right? To win more things that actually make people's lives
02:36better. Elections are not about giving politicians jobs. They're about making people's lives better.
02:41And so as we paint the polls black, as we head into this election, the opportunity here is to
02:48put people in office that we can negotiate with, that will be on the other side of the table
02:55to be partners, right? Not our heroes, not our leaders, but our partners in actually getting
03:02things done. So I think a lot about opportunity because that's why we do this work. You have to
03:08be an optimist. You have to be aspirational to be a civil rights leader because you have to believe
03:13that even in the face of so many challenges, even in the face of systemic structural barriers, even
03:20in the face of systems that were not designed for us to win, that coming together we can still
03:26win. We can still make progress. We can still move things forward. So opportunity is one of
03:31those things I think about all the time. I think about it in our campaign work when I'm thinking
03:35about where are the openings? What are the levers? What are the things that we can actually do if we
03:40push people, if we open up the possibility for more people to get involved? The opportunities
03:47can be vast. And that in so many ways is how we should be approaching this. We have to be
03:54clear-eyed about the challenges, but we also have to be clear-eyed about the opportunities.
04:00Let's start with some of the challenges. There was a mass gun shooting recently in Georgia.
04:07There was one a few weeks ago in another part of the country. We all watched what happened at the
04:14high school. The epidemic of mass shootings has become an epidemic in the entire country. Can you
04:21dissect this issue, how important this is for voters, and what is the problem? Are we not
04:28addressing certain things? How can we do that? What is it that the parties really need to do?
04:34So, you know, it does go back to a confluence of things. But first and foremost, far too often we
04:43see issues like gun violence or issues like the challenges in our criminal justice system or so
04:50many of these other issues as unfortunate. Like, that is so sad, what can I do about it?
04:56And when we see those issues as unfortunate, rather than seeing them as unjust, people sometimes
05:04kind of put their hands up. They kind of think about it almost like a car accident. Like,
05:08it kind of just happened. And when we think about problems as unfortunate rather than unjust,
05:14we can oftentimes get charitable solutions to structural problems. And in the case of what
05:21happens so much with these mass sort of violent attempts with guns and the killings,
05:29is that we end up with people avoiding the actual problem. And that is all the ways in which
05:37the manufacturing and the proliferation of guns is deeply profitable. And when you combine that
05:44with racism and manufacturing inequality, you add gasoline to a match and you get exactly what
05:53is intended to get. You get these violent and you get these deeply challenging situations that
06:05could have been avoided. And so what I think is really important is that we can't ignore sort of
06:12all the ways in which gun manufacturers, the gun industry, writes the laws in this country
06:20around guns. From the vehicle of the NRA that they used to use to how they buy off and own
06:29politicians. 70 to 80% of Americans want sensible gun laws. We have the vast majority of people
06:37that want more rollbacks to the availability of guns, the availability of the type of weapons
06:46we're seeing used in so many of these situations. And we don't actually get there because of the
06:52way that money and politics and the way that the gun industry has been able to own elected
06:58officials. And so that's really important to remember because sometimes the story just gets
07:03told that it's simply about Democrats and Republicans. And when we only tell the story
07:08about those in elected office and we leave out the confluence of other actors that are playing a role,
07:14we don't tell people a true story about the barriers that are actually holding us back
07:18from winning. And we don't give people all the tools that they need to be able to force elected
07:24leaders to do the right thing, to hold them accountable. And we also don't tell the right
07:29story to everyone about what does it actually require us in terms of how many people we need
07:34in office. We can't have small margins of victories on these issues. We can't have the
07:41House of Representatives and the Senate controlled by just one or two votes. We actually need
07:49majorities that are going to be robust. And then once we put people in office, we have to do the
07:54work to hold them accountable. And then we also have to do the work around corporate accountability.
07:59All of those things are connected in order to be able to get us the type of changes that we need.
08:06And so the story of why we haven't actually won is a story of all of the ways in which
08:16those who are deeply powerful and are deeply moneyed and will fight like hell in order to
08:22prevent us from winning. And so I oftentimes tell my team when we're building a campaign,
08:30especially a corporate campaign, or especially a campaign where we know we have powerful forces
08:35standing in the way. And that's oftentimes anything that Black people want, that there
08:40are people on the other side. So much of racism in this country is upheld by people who are
08:46profiting from that racism. This is not simply about changing someone's hearts and minds.
08:51This is about dealing with people's wallet incentives. And so I tell my team oftentimes
08:56that we will lose in the back rooms if we don't have people lined up at the front door.
09:02And so part of what I want to say to the people who are watching and listening is that you are
09:06the people that we need lined up at the front door. You are the people that I want to invite
09:11to stand with us and fight with us through an election cycle, but beyond an election cycle.
09:16Because part of how we actually have to do this work is we have to put people in office
09:21that will be that partner on the other side, as I said. And then we have to sometimes,
09:27not just let them know, but sometimes prove to them that we will take them out if necessary.
09:32Come on.
09:34We're in church today. So Rashad, I just want you, because a part of what we are trying to do here
09:42is, of course, provide information, but also address misinformation. And when we often talk
09:48about gun control or gun legislation, there's a common rhetoric that we hear, which is Second
09:55Amendment. Under the Constitution, we have a right to own guns. Help us square, for folks who may not
10:03be deeply steeped in this issue, whether or not that is a real argument. And if so, how do you
10:10address it?
10:12Well, it's not a real argument. I mean, the Second Amendment, like so many of these amendments,
10:18were put in place during a very different time in our history, in our country. And there's a lot
10:24that was in the Constitution that had to evolve. It has been interpreted over the years. Over the
10:31years, the courts have interpreted this idea of access to guns to give people to access to
10:41guns that didn't exist and couldn't have possibly been imagined at the time that the Constitution
10:47was written. They couldn't have imagined the type of automatic weapons that are now being defended
10:55by Second Amendment, quote unquote, Second Amendment advocates, who are not actually
10:59advocating for the Second Amendment, because we've seen over the years when Black people,
11:04whether it was Black Panthers or others, have sought efforts to own guns, people have said,
11:12oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, we've got to think about this in a different way. Perhaps we need to
11:18scale things back. And so, once again, this has very much been connected to the profit incentives.
11:26So take, for instance, the Stand Your Ground laws. The Stand Your Ground laws that were,
11:31are written by an organization called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
11:36ALEC is a right-wing think tank. They operate in state legislatures around the country,
11:41and basically what they do is they bring corporations and they bring state legislators
11:46together, right-wing state legislators, and they write legislation for corporations. And they
11:52are so successful that ALEC can sometimes bring people together at their conference,
11:57write the legislation, state legislators will go back home and introduce it, and sometimes forget
12:02to take the ALEC logo off the top of the page, and the bill will still pass. That is how successful
12:08ALEC actually has been over the years. And what is so nefarious about the whole thing is the
12:15Stand Your Ground law was really written by the gun industry. It was written by gun manufacturers
12:21and gun sellers in order to be able to do a really important thing for all the viewers to
12:28understand, is to sort of hype up this threat of black kind of predators in communities with white
12:36fear, and to let white people know, hey, you can go out and buy guns to keep yourself safe from
12:43these like threats of black people moving into your neighborhoods. And there's something called
12:47the Stand Your Ground law. And the Stand Your Ground law was written by ALEC, advanced into
12:52states around the country, and sold as a way to kind of push white folks to be able to own guns.
13:00And we know the impacts of Stand Your Ground. We know it through very high-profile cases like
13:07Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin. But we also know it from the times when black people have sought to
13:14use and leverage Stand Your Ground when they were under attack, and it didn't actually apply
13:19to them. And the courts didn't allow. And there were always a reason why black people couldn't
13:26leverage Stand Your Ground the way that white people can. I explained the Stand Your Ground,
13:31and I explained all that to kind of give us a sense of how bad faith all of these arguments
13:38are around guns, how it really isn't about people having access to be able to hunt,
13:45or even to protect themselves in their homes. This is really about upholding an industry
13:51that in order for it to survive, they need people to own lots of guns, not just one gun.
13:56They need people to be able to buy the latest guns, not just have one gun in their home to be
14:01able to quote-unquote protect themselves. And the larger conversation of being able to create
14:07this demand for people, to make people believe that they need these guns, it is a race to the
14:13bottom, and it doesn't have any sort of bottom in terms of where it might stop and where we
14:19hold people accountable. I'm glad you brought up. I do want those who are watching to go and Google
14:28if you don't even know about it, because you alluded to it earlier, Rashad. That was the
14:31Mulford Act in 1967 when the Black Panthers showed up with guns protesting gun control
14:38legislation in California. And they were like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. We will not do this.
14:43And then Reagan- Not today. They're like, oh.
14:45Not today. We showed up with guns. They were like, oh, no, we need to change these rules. But the
14:50fact is the power of what happens when we show... I'm not telling people to do that. But the power
14:56of what happens when we show up immediately, that just goes to show you how quickly legislation can
15:01change when people really want legislation to change. But I want to talk about the... We all
15:06remember the killing of George Floyd. And many people remember other Black men and women who
15:13have been killed and harmed by police. We just seen Breonna Taylor case with judges saying now
15:19it's no, it was her boyfriend's fault for the reason why she was killed and not the police
15:25officer who showed up without a warrant, the whole, and admitted to lying. But from her to
15:31Amadou Diallo, there's been legislation introduced in many parts of the country on a federal level.
15:37Outline for us what the main issue is you feel around, issue is around policing and how it
15:44factors into this election, because we haven't been able to get the George Floyd Justice and
15:51Policing Act passed, even though this administration has passed some of the most
15:56extensive legislation on guns. Yeah. So what we've been able to get in terms of policing
16:05by this administration is executive orders. And it's important for people to understand why and
16:11what that means. And so the president has gone as far as he possibly can at the federal level
16:16to rein in the overreach of police and has signed these executive orders. The George Floyd
16:29and Policing Act, which by no means was perfect, but was the sort of best negotiated piece of
16:36legislation we could get to, was not passed because of a number of factors. And the main
16:42factor is that you had to get 60 senators to avoid a filibuster. And I remember in those
16:51final days of trying to push for it before the 2022 election and talking to folks like Senator
16:59Booker and others who were actively working. And then there was folks on the other side,
17:04like Tim Scott, who was promising us if we just gave up something called qualified immunity,
17:09and I will explain that in a second, if we just gave up something called qualified immunity,
17:14perhaps he could get 10 Republican senators and he could promise us 10 Republican senators,
17:20and those 10 Republican senators would help us break the filibuster, get us to 60 votes
17:25and be able to pass this legislation. And I say all of this to say that this is what I mean by
17:31losing in the back rooms if we don't have people lined up at the front door.
17:35Now, we were very clear that there was no way that we could give up qualified immunity. Qualified
17:40immunity is this idea that makes police officers the only industry, right, basically the only
17:48industry where people can go and do harm and are completely immune from any type of liability.
17:56And this qualified immunity was something that police officers rely on. And in some ways,
18:04the lack of accountability and the lack of consequence in so many ways not just drives
18:09the behavior of police, but drives our inability to actually make any real changes. And so we
18:15didn't get George Floyd and Policing Act. But we have to understand that the people
18:19in office, the White House, worked really hard to get us there. And we pushed really hard. And
18:24along the way, we got some other things. And then we also got things in the states around the
18:30country. And we got changes in states in terms of justice acts. We elected reform-minded prosecutors
18:39in counties around the country. And we worked with cities to be able to do better. We watched
18:45in a number of places that police officers who previously probably wouldn't have been prosecuted
18:50for harm. And most recently, we saw in Springfield, Illinois, police officers quickly
18:58being held accountable after the horrific murder of Ms. Massey. And so when we see these type of
19:07situations time and time again, we understand that part of this work is both the cultural and
19:13narrative change work, the changing the unwritten rules. And then part of this work is about changing
19:19the written rules. And we say a lot at Color of Change that we can't mistake presence for power.
19:25And what I mean by that is presence is visibility, awareness, retweet, shout-outs from the stage.
19:31It is what people sort of, when they know you have an issue and they're with you,
19:37or they're saying they're with you, that's presence. And presence isn't a bad thing.
19:42But power is the ability to change the rules. And when we mistake presence for power,
19:48we can sometimes think something happened that didn't happen. We can think a Black president
19:52means we're post-racial when it doesn't. We can think that when a pop star from our community
19:58stops the internet when they release a new album, that means America loves us as much as it loves
20:04our culture. And we know that America can love, celebrate, and monetize Black culture and hate
20:09Black people at the same time. And so part of building the work ahead, part of not mistaking
20:16presence for power, is recognizing that as much as this work, as much as these demands are in the
20:24press, are visible, that part of getting us over the hill is all of the work that we have to do
20:30to be able to actually change the rules. And the final thing I'll say about all that is that this
20:35goes back to what I talked about about guns, is that we also have to continue to remember who's
20:39on the other side, who is blocking and stopping, and why mass incarceration, why the type of
20:47horrific policing, why it is profitable, why there are forces holding it up, whether it be police
20:53unions, whether it be corporations that benefit from the prison industrial complex. Those things
21:01are important. And it may feel like I'm kind of going on and sharing a lot of kind of detail that
21:09makes this complicated, but I just want us to all step back. If someone's job, if someone's
21:16livelihood relies on the current status quo, and our work is about changing that status quo,
21:24then we've got to fight like hell, because the people on the other side believe that they are
21:30fighting like hell, because what is our oppression has become their survival.
21:42Let's talk about oppression for a little bit.
21:47There's been an ongoing and somewhat controversial discussion around reparations.
21:51Mm hmm.
21:53Break this down for us. Tell us where the political parties are on this issue. And then
22:01tell us why this conversation about reparations relate to public safety in Black communities.
22:09Like, why is this relevant to voting?
22:13Well, we have to repair harm. Part of justice, part of progress is repairing what was done.
22:20And we've seen this country provide reparations when harm was caused, most notably to Japanese
22:31Americans who were put in internment camps and were provided reparations. And that was important.
22:39Black people, descendants of slaves, built this country for free. The head start that America got
22:49from 400 years of free labor, from all the ways in which the contributions across the board were
23:02very much not rewarded, not paid. And then it continued beyond the enslavement to
23:13sets of laws which extracted from communities, which held people down and held people back and
23:21held other Black people back who came to this country later. But the fight for reparations,
23:29particularly for descendants of slaves, but across the board for Black people,
23:36is incredibly important for us to be able to set ourselves on the right foot moving forward,
23:42to be able to put in place laws moving forward that actually serve all of us.
23:48And so there's a couple of ways in which this breaks down. HR40, which is the House legislation,
23:55which is championed originally by the late, great John Conyers, and then masterfully by the
24:05legendary late now Sheila Jackson Lee, who my organization honored posthumously last night
24:13here at the Congressional Black Caucus Week. They championed that. I remember that any time
24:20Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee would see me speak or any time we would be in a place,
24:24and if I didn't mention reparations, she would call me afterwards or send me a note or bring it
24:30up because she was tireless in trying to advance HR40, which is a study legislation, which creates
24:40sort of a panel that really looks at reparations and starts building the education and energy and
24:47muscle to get us closer to being able to do the work. But federally, there is a conversation
24:55around reparations, but there's conversations that are happening in communities around this
25:00country. And there are cities and counties and locations that have gone into study plans,
25:09that have built out commissions, that have started to actually move different types
25:14of reparations, and it's looked different in different places. But part of the narrative
25:20that we have to build around this is that this is about allowing this country to
25:30release itself from the harm that in so many ways prevents us from actually fully moving forward,
25:36to actually pay back the debt that is owed so that we can release ourselves into the next phase of
25:44opportunity and engagement. The other place that I think it's important for people to understand
25:52where the sort of different parties differ is who they will appoint to key positions.
25:58What we know is that the right-wing administration will put in place right-wing judges.
26:06Right-wing judges who, during the years of Donald Trump, judges were put in place
26:12not just at the Supreme Court level who have undone affirmative action and continued the
26:19process of dismantling voting rights and other pieces, but have said things like Brown versus
26:26Board of Education wasn't decided correctly, and other things that seem absolutely outrageous on
26:33their face, but they say it with a straight face. And when they are put in the position to do it,
26:37they will actually go about dismantling all of our progress. And so something that is as
26:44forward-looking and creates so much possibility as reparations will be impossible for us to achieve
26:51if we have people who are given lifetime appointments in the courts that will literally
26:58be focused on turning us backwards. And so any type of opportunity or time to turn us forward
27:04will be almost impossible. Wow. So you did light a match. You did pour a little more gasoline on
27:14it. You gave us a lot. I was over here writing some notes. I thank you. No, but what you said
27:19was so important, and it was eye-opening. And I hope and pray that all those who are watching,
27:25not just this conversation, but the other conversations from tonight too, that this
27:29gives you something not to just think about, but to also talk about, right? These are conversations
27:34that we have to talk about and challenge each other on. So thank you so much, Rashad Robinson,
27:38and the work that you are doing, Color of Change.