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TRANSCRIPTION FOR “THE

NEW JIM CROW” PODCAST

Bedrosian Book Club

July 28, 2015

Transcription for Bedrosian Book Club’s The New Jim Crow Podcast USC Bedrosian Center July 28, 2015 Disclaimer: Please note that the text below may contain transcription errors. >> Welcome to the USC Bedrosian Book Club podcast. Today's edition features the groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Filling in as moderator is USC Price professor, David Sloane. David is joined by USC Gould professor Jody Armour, former Los Angeles Council woman, Jan Perry and USC Price PhD. Candidate, Danielle Williams. [00:00:27] >> David Sloane: Hello, I'm David Sloane, welcome to another edition of the Bedrosian Center Book Club podcast. I'm filling in today for Raphael Bostic. I'm a professor at the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, I conduct research on street gangs, community health planning and alternative styles of commemoration. Today we're discussing, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander. I'm joined by an amazing set of scholars and public servants and I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves very briefly starting with Danielle. [00:01:04] >> Danielle Williams: I'm Danielle Williams, I'm a doctoral student at the Price School at USC and I study program evaluation particularly related to issues of incarceration and prisoner reentry. [00:01:16] >> Jan Perry: My name is Jan Perry, I'm a former Councilwoman of this area, served as Councilwoman for 12 years, graduated from the University of Southern California twice undergrad and graduate school. I currently serve as a general manager of the Department of Economic Development and the opinions expressed today are my own. [00:01:35] >> Jody Armour: I'm Jody Armour, I'm at the USC School of Law, Gould. I teach criminal law and tort law. I've written a book called, Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Costs of Being Black in America, it addresses many of the issues we'll talk about today. [00:01:49] >> David Sloane: Thank you, the book is just a really difficult way to get at an incredibly important public issue, I think. And I was wondering if we could just take a minute, maybe Jody you could start, and we'll just go around and describe what Michelle Alexander is trying to do in The New Jim Crow?

Transcription for Bedrosian Book Club’s The New Jim Crow Podcast

USC Bedrosian Center ❘ 1

[00:02:09] >> Jody Armour: Yes, she's trying to, and she successfully did, bring to the public conversation the mass incarceration problem. Up until about five years ago I've been standing on tabletops screaming at the top of my lungs, that's when I publish Negrophobia back in 1997, it was about a lot of the same issues. Nobody wanted to hear it, there wasn't a sensitivity to these sets of questions largely because I think a lot of folks on the left especially, who voted for some of the legislation that led to mass incarceration, by the way. Like over half of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the 1986 Anti Drug Abuse Act that created the mandatory minimums in the 100:1 powder to crack disparity. Over half the Congressional Black Caucus supported that at the time. She gave us a way to think about mass incarceration that didn't just blame it on the inmates themselves for making bad choices and lacking personal responsibility. She said actually mass incarceration is like Jim Crow, it's about social oppression, not just selfdestruction. [00:03:17] And that move by her gave the left finally something that they could get traction on and that traction has been building since, so this is an absolutely critical seminal work, I'll go into some of the critiques later but one of the most important books that I can think of in the last 10 to 20 years in the social justice area, maybe longer. [00:03:37] >> David Sloane: Jan do you want to add to that? [00:03:39] >> Jan Perry: Yeah, I think she woke people up, her book will wake people up as they read it and it took disparate pieces of historical information and put them on a continuum which made a lot of sense and I started tabbing a lot of the pages when I got to the part where I was you know 10 years old, 11 years old and really vividly remember why parents reaction to things that were happening across the country. And you know with respect to this issue and a greater growing sensitivity I see that even in what I do now in developing strategies to put highly disadvantaged people back to work. And so now, you know the language, the verbiage has changed to people who have had interface with the criminal justice system because people who do work force development are clear. And the government has changed its thinking to that they need to put workforce dollars into making sure that we close the skills gap for people who have quote interface with the criminal justice system, because the best thing that we can do is to train people, get them focused and to put them back to work. [00:04:53] Or put them into the opportunity to work so that they can pull themselves in a different direction. [00:05:00] >> David Sloane: Danielle, do you want to add anything?



[00:05:01] >> Danielle Williams: I mean I think just from an academic perspective it's an incredibly compelling piece, it's very methodical, and it articulates so well really how mass incarceration is a racial caste issue. [00:05:14] >> David Sloane: So I think the thing that struck me best about the book was how she piece by piece creates this argument for a racial caste system. And one of the things that struck me most about that was the way that she went through policing criminal justice and if you will the post prison experience for people in this situation. She focuses mostly on AfricanAmericans but occasionally brings up Latinos or others, she in some sense, and I hope we'll talk about this in length a little ways down here, tries to come up with some sort of how do we move forward. Although she expresses concern about wait, this is a whole different book, but she does that. You know, as I read it I have a lot of questions but in my youth we celebrated what we hoped was the death of de jure injustices and particularly around race. [00:06:18] And then we worried about the move to de facto, in other words by law, to by practice, and reading this book it doesn't fit right? It's not a move from de jure from legal discrimination to bigotry or in reality it's in some sense a continuation or reemphasis of the legal ways that we actually practice discrimination even though as she argues, I think quite persuasively we portray it as if it's colorblind. And I was wondering do you agree with her around this, is that what's happened, have we recreated to use her phrase, a new Jim Crow? [00:07:03] >> Jan Perry: I think we've created or institutionalized a system whose unintended consequence or perhaps unexamined consequence, because it's a very difficult topic to discuss in the public domain, has created a de facto form of discrimination. And then you throw the sub issue in of a caste system so that we create this permanent underclass as she references in her book, and for me if I apply you know, my own professional and personal experiences of people. Who children, of children, people who have been compromised from the day that they were born in circumstances that they may or may not ever be able to transcend. And you add violence on top of that, undiagnosed mental illness, perhaps developmental disabilities, lack of family structure in some ways, then you create all those factors. [00:08:09] All those factors are there, all those signals are there, those markers if you will, to create a caste and the term that she uses for this permanent caste, it's very telling. Because on the other side of that equation are not just people who are not AfricanAmerican, there's a class divide. And that I think is the more nuanced discussion and the evolution of where we are now. [00:08:40]



>> David Sloane: Yeah, I read several critiques of the book and one of the critiques was that in some sense she makes it about race but she doesn't really explore the way that this is about class, in a real significant way. It was an interesting website, communist website that didn't like the book at all and it was a little striking to me. But in some sense it does, you know there's this conflation between race and class in our society any ways and so how do we handle that if you will and I think in some sense it's a little unfair to her because I think she's focused on another piece that if she tried to bring in I think it would be very difficult. But I do agree Danielle? [00:09:23] >> Danielle Williams: She does touch on it a little bit, I mean she talks about the divisions with the black middle class and the complicity and some of the war on drugs, so yeah she doesn't devote tons of energy. But again the scope of the book is such that she's really trying to give a massive over view and to do it in 261 pages is kind of amazing in my perspective, how much she's able to weave in. So does she focus on that the way that she could no, but you know that's another I think, I feel like that could be a whole other book, you know. [00:09:54] >> David Sloane: And Jody you brought up the Black Caucus supported much of this or part of the Black Caucus and many Democrats supported this, in fact she I think reminds us about Bill Clinton, the other side of Bill Clinton, very effectively. You know there's the good Bill Clinton and then there's the bad Bill Clinton and it's got nothing to do with sex, it's got to do with policy. And so I mean I think very effectively shows how the Reagan, Clinton, Bush sort of movement was really not disturbed during the Clinton administration. [00:10:30] >> Jody Armour: Yeah, and it raises the central problem that the book leaves behind, leaves in its wake after it effectively shines a light on mass incarceration resulting from nonviolent drug offenders for example. And how we can think about those folks, President Obama recently did that, talked about it last week as he was raising the national consciousness on pushing for prison reform and that sort of thing. And he made the centerpiece of his rhetorical apparatus, nonviolent drug offenders, because we all can see them basically is equivalent of people who were violating prohibition. We don't see anything so morally reprehensible about somebody sipping on a wine spritzer right now. When I started teaching criminal law, samesex love was a felony in many jurisdictions constitutionally, so when it comes to certain kinds of wrongdoers we don't have a hard time sympathizing with them. But as Marc Mauer recently pointed out in the New York Times, if you got rid of all the drug offenders in prison tomorrow, you'd still have 1.7 million people in prison. [00:11:42] And so it's a little too easy to talk just about the nonviolent drug offenders and a lot of people would take her on and say I don't see anything new Jim Crowish about mass incarceration. Because the real Jim Crow that you were talking about quote unquote, that is the planned institutionalized legal Jim Crow, that was social oppression against innocent Blacks. That was



Martin, Medgar and Rosa Parks, those were innocent Negroes being socially oppressed by an unjust system. When you're talking about the victims of mass incarceration, you're talking about Blacks and made bad choices, often preying on the most vulnerable members of their own community and have wound up in the joint, right. And so they are they are really about selfdestruction not social oppression, they would say I don't see any moral equivalence between Martin, Medgar and Rosa on the one hand and Stanley Tookie Williams, a gangbanger, a drug dealer and a prostitute on the other. I don't see the moral equivalence there, right? [00:12:43] And so what she's left behind is the project of demonstrating to people that there can be social oppression and selfdestruction, they don't have to be either or but that's a nuance sophisticated argument but that's where it's got a go next. [00:12:58] >> David Sloane: And I think Jody she begins that, I mean, there's an interest she doesn't over state, I mean she really stays with the non violence, violent drug offenders. But in some sense think she is trying to push the boundaries of that category and talk to us about how the apparatus is in place. I think the striking thing about the book is the iterative nature of you know, you are bad, you are bad, you are bad, we're going to hold you in this cage forever. Right, you know, we don't believe in rehabilitation anymore, you're a criminal, you're a criminal, you're a criminal and you're going to stay in that state. And you know she has that statistic 650,000 Americans get out of jail every year, a prison every year and yet once they get out and they are still in many ways in prison because we limit their rights and privileges within our society. But so and I do think that that is one of the next steps is how do we talk? [00:14:02] You know, I'm an American historian that's where I started my career and one of the things we thought about a lot over the generations that I've been doing this is the difference between what you might call the worthy poor and the unworthy poor in the American Society and this has affected hospitals, it's affected prisons, it's affected society, it's affected the way people think about poor. And I think you're getting exactly at best, how do we imagine criminals in our society, you know there's an article in today's New York Times about a judge in Long Island who one guy an undocumented immigrant hits a car and kills some people, his bail was million dollars, another guy hits a car and kill some people his bail is $250. One of them is an undocumented immigrant one of them happens to be a friend of the judge, a white guy. You know and so the capriciousness I think is one of the things she gets at. [00:15:03] And one of things I was struck by, was two different pieces of want to get your reactions to, the first was the role of civil rights organizations and civil rights leaders in this this issue and she is in some sense is very critical of them. And then I'm going to point at you Jody because I think we want to talk about the criminal, the reflectiveness of the criminal justice system and how it is



or is not reflective, self reflective of itself. So let's start with civil rights organization, she in some sense suggests that civil right organizations have focused inordinately at, or at least they have focused, let's leave it at that, on affirmativeaction as their major issue and have been reluctant to take on this issue. Does this just come back to, these are good people, these are people that are difficult to defend or? [00:16:01] >> Jan Perry: No, I I go to a lot of NAACP meetings and other advocacy group meetings and I think for the last decade, people have been, at least within the AfricanAmerican community of people who are active in advocacy have been talking about this as a growing, looming crisis. And there's not been one person who can take it all and put it under one cover, so I don't think the conversation has just been confined to affirmative action. Because I think we've known this was coming for quite a long time and that the war on drugs was a failure because the war was among ourselves and then there's a supply tech chain issue, because it's actually a business. But, what I think civil rights, and I'm speaking in the broadest of strokes, we must hear what these young people are saying. Because they don't know how we got here and then our generation may not have done as much as we should have to communicate to them the foundation upon which this is all built and I think we're a bit derelict in communicating to these younger people in a way that they can understand. [00:17:19] And that may involve the use of technology, it may not be getting people in the room anymore in an auditorium and lecturing them because they don't learn that way and we need to as older people, as parents as you're very young. [00:17:35] >> Jody Armour: Oh, I wish, it's not years, it's the miles. [00:17:37] >> Jan Perry: But you know we have to teach them in a way that they will grasp it and internalize it and understand how it applies to them. Because what we have now is a generation and even among people my own age group, they don't understand the connection to themselves. So unless you have somebody in your own family or a friend or relative who's been to jail or has had substance abuse issues or has been affected by crime in some way, you don't really process this and don't understand how it affects you. And so to me when I read this book I need to figure out in dialogue and with other groups and connecting that, civil rights organizations, how to make this connected to the people it affects emotionally so that they'll do something legislatively, so that they'll do something educationally, so that we'll use technology to integrate all that. And to me that is the future of the relevance of civil rights organizations is to be able to take all of that technology that we have even on social media and to expand it, our reach and our grasp so that we can knit it all together. [00:18:51]



>> Jody Armour: Yeah, I see her critique, Michelle Alexander's, of the establishment, black leadership, all the way through the crack plague and in its ancestral aftermath, starting with 84, 85 see that's the onset of the crack plague roughly. Till now we are looking at a 30 year disaster that has struck the black community and imposed as much damage as 1000 Hurricane Katrina's, hitting 1000 ninth wards, let's just call it what it is. And black folks have been complicit, especially the black middle class, especially and including the political class. Like I said the congressional Black Caucus, 1986 Anti Drug Abuse Act. Look at Charlie Rangel sitting there when Reagan is signing it in grinning from ear to ear standing right there next to him. Okay, as were shipped being off, you know, hundreds of thousands of these young male black bodies and female black bodies, okay. So and that complicity came from a politics of respectability that prevailed then and still has currency, a little less now than it did a few years ago but Bill Cosby represents, you know America's dad, right lecturing at the NAACP, by the way, at the NAACP getting some award and lecturing you know the black underclass truly disadvantaged Blacks primarily. [00:20:25] A real class thing and politics respectability by naming your kids, pulling up your pants, all the respectability politics while he's slipping roofies into women's drinks and raping them, okay. So there was a lot of selfrighteous hypocrisy coming from the black bourgeoisie and those politics of respectability black at the time but they use that as a wedge between, you know those Blacks who are good Negroes and those Blacks who are bad Negroes. That's what Brandy Kennedy argued in 1997, Race, Crime and Law, he said the black community needs to distinguish between good Negroes and bad Negroes and distinguish and distance themselves from the bad Negroes and he called a bad Negro any the black who's done a crime. Chris Rock said the same thing when he said in the routine that launched his career, I love black people but I hate N word, okay. And he defined and N word as any black who's committed a crime, right. So that is what she's talking about that politics of respectability perspective that says we can't carry bres [phonetic] for bad Negroes, that will make us look bad. [00:21:30] We can for affirmativeaction because by the way that's going to primarily help middleclass Blacks, it will bring primary beneficiaries affirmative action when it comes to higher education anyway. Okay, which is a concern I have with Obama for example, lecturing Morehouse graduates about personal responsibility and not making excuses, he doesn't go to any other college campuses and say that when they've shown ample personal responsibility he says you need to keep a dad in the house. He didn't have a daddy in the house, you know why he made it to president without a daddy in the house? Because of the class factor he had middleclass grandparents who sent them to the best private high school in Honolulu, from there to Columbia and on to Harvard, you'll do alright without all those, you know, cultural poverty factors, you know being explanatory. [00:22:15] >> David Sloane: It's really go ahead.



[00:22:16] >> Danielle Williams: I was just going to say, you know we even in terms of the politics of respectability, of course how it's perpetuated by the media, which even I mean you think at this point we wouldn't have to deal with that to the extent that we would with all of the shootings of black citizens. You know I was reading was Sandra Bland, you know they listed I think that she had previous traffic violations, I have previous traffic violations, almost everyone has previous traffic violations and the fact that that's included, when someone has clearly not done anything wrong is just it's horrific, it's horrific and the fact again, just for the podcast listeners I'm a white person. I don't have to distinguish myself between you know good white people and black people. I have the luxury you know I don't have to do that and so to make it incumbent upon Blacks to distinguish themselves is incredibly, incredibly I think corrosive to the community. [00:23:11] >> Jody Armour: Here's who you have to be and I'll just jump in here's who you have to be, you have to be black victims in a church praying to God, then you get some sympathy for so you have to be the Emanuel Nine. [00:23:21] >> Danielle Williams: And you have to practice forgiveness, right and from Charleston or actually little place Goose Creek, it's a little bit north actually it's mentioned in this book, it's the site of the high school drug raid, that was my high school. I went there a little bit before, yeah that's my high school and you know, the fact that this emphasis on forgiveness was just fantastic from a religious and a grace perspective but that that's what you have to be to sort of, for your life to matter. [00:23:48] >> David Sloane: Jan. [00:23:49] >> Jan Perry: I was at an event that Congresswoman Waters put together with mothers of the young people, the various people that have been killed, Tamir Brown Tamir and Michael and Eric and Eric Garner and each mother spoke. And the thing that nearly brought me to tears I remember one of mother said, you know I married, I have a husband, I have two other children, they went to college and you know and the fact that she felt like she had to even say that, to say that I'm like you, just it's heartbreaking, yeah. [00:24:33] >> David Sloane: It is I mean I will tell you that I've done several of these podcasts and this has been was by far the most difficult book for me to read. I mean I knew all of it at some level, I didn't really learn all that much but it was just the way that it aggregates, it's just one after another, after another and it is this, it get you to the point where how do we get out of this politics of respectability. How do we get to the point where there's categories are so easily



constructed and they've been around a long time, they shift, they moved, they turned but they're buried bedrock to the idea of the American dream. Right, there are people that can do it and there are people I can't and we should focus on those who can. And it is, it is so distressing as we go along, and one of the things that I admired about the book was, for those listening on say page 164, where she talks about the silence of the society around this issue of imprisonment of literally millions of people. [00:25:45] I mean we're not talking about a few thousand really bad drug dealers here we're talking about millions of people, many of them who have in an addiction issue with either a serious addiction issue or a social addiction issue like many of us have with, for me ice tea. And so I mean this just like, it is amazing how many people are caught up in this and how large this structure has become. And one of the things she does early on is talk about this change from 1980 till today and how we imprison literally 10 times as many people as we used to. And we now, I love, it's such an effective way, she talks about Germany, which literally had the same incarceration rate in 1980 and now has basically the same incarceration rate while we have gone insane. So I was curious about the silence, is this power she gives to the silence because it's not just the, if you will, the black elite, it seems to be everybody. [00:26:57] >> Jody Armour: Yeah, in pointing out the reaction of the black elite, I'm saying that this is a group whose own members are suffering so if they can't generate empathy [inaudible] you know, don't expect people outside the group to have a whole lot of empathy or sympathy for these folks. Here, to me the bottom line is just this, how are you going to sympathize or empathize or generate a lot of care and concern for some N words, right, for some bad Negroes, as Randy Kennedy was calling them. For the people that Bill Cosby was wagging his finger at, you know when you drive a wedge between the criminal wrong doers and the rest of us, the law abiding rest of us, a moral wedge like that then this reaction doesn't surprise me at all. What I think we need, how just kind of cut it off with this, in short I think what we need is a moral revolution of the kind that we saw with the survivors of the Emanuel Nine. [00:27:59] When you're able to say we've had a system predicated for the last 30 years on retribution, retaliation and revenge, we've gloried in it, and our popular culture we made a big deal about satisfying that retributive urge, we need to replace that with restoration, redemption, reconciliation as an approach. We need to turn away from the punitive response to social problems and find it in our hearts, even Obama said last week, I think tellingly even though he talked too much about nonviolent drug offenders, as all of the reforms were aimed at, he said redemption has to be part of justice, you have to see redemption as an integral part of the concept of justice itself. Tempering justice with mercy and forgiveness, and that's more revolution we need. [00:28:54]



>> David Sloane: And again but one of the things as you do this I'd like you to work on prison reentry and one of the things I think Michelle Alexander shows so vividly is that that is a key part of the mass incarceration system is when you get out. [00:29:12] >> Danielle Williams: When you get out because you're not out, I mean just what she says, I mean you're out technically, but in terms of I mean every aspect of your life, you know employment, housing, trying to see your kids, you know and it's all sort of, again it's linked to this idea of personal character. Right, if you could just work a little harder, the opportunities aren't there I mean we have institutionalized for years in terms of housing which is one area that I work on in particular since 1996. You know people getting out and there's some estimates that 25% of people who are incarcerated were living in either section 8 or public housing before they went into jail or prison and then the can't live with their families when they get out. Where are they supposed to, where is 25% of people supposed to live, formerly incarcerated people coming out supposed to live if you're not, if you're making those institutional barriers. And there's been some I think clawing away but it's been very piecemeal, I mean we're still struggling with it, but yeah the reentry component is huge for these people. [00:30:21] >> Jan Perry: So I'll just close with this observation, I met a [00:30:25] >> David Sloane: We're not done yet so [inaudible] we still got 20 minutes. [00:30:29] >> Jan Perry: All right, anyway I met a man through my work and he was in his fifties and had been in jail, in prison for 27 of his 50 years, so if you think about that all the technological advances that he missed, just basically stuck in another time. He went to a worksource center and he got wraparound services you know to bring him up to speed, he ended up getting a very good job making the very high wage and he was very proud to say that he gotten married and had purchased a home and he was living a decent life. But what I went back and asked later you know how was that evolution and the recruiter told me that originally the individual who was doing the hiring was looking for you know younger people but that he realized in looking out this gentleman's background and the way that he carried himself and comported himself that he had leadership skills that had been, you know misdirected. But that in this setting in which he was hiring, that those leadership skills were so strong that he not only hired him, he hired a colleague of his who had also been in jail. [00:31:42] And they both thrived because you know they had strong alpha dog tendency to be able to keep subordinates in line and to get them to stay on task and keep a focus. So you know he took something that normally might be considered a negative thing and provided an opportunity for



them to practice their skills but they had learned in a positive setting and then monetize it so they could mainstream, they actually did mainstream, [00:32:16] >> Danielle Williams: And just to go back again to you talking about unemployment and I think Michelle Alexander I'm pretty sure she quotes this study it's Deva Pagers looking at the mark of a criminal record. And she finds and it's very elegantly designed study where she has pairs of similarly raised whites and blacks, go in, one says they have a criminal record, one says they don't. And that basically whites with the criminal records were more likely to get a call back than Blacks without criminal records. In the Blacks with criminal records were so disadvantaged I mean it was minuscule how likely they were to get a call back compared to similarly situated whites. And that, you know, it's just there's so many things stacked against people when they come out it's tragic. And going back to what you were talking about in terms of the silence I think we're all, we are all kind of complicit in it right for years and years. You know we talk about police brutality, the police are allowed to act the way they act because we're okay with it, you know because society has been okay with it for years. [00:33:22] And if you know we actually weren't okay with that we could stop it, we live in a democratic society, but we don't. [00:33:31] >> David Sloane: And I think the other side of that is that in some sense what surprising, what's startling about the book is we often focus on police and brutality and in some sense what you take away from the book is the brutality of the criminal justice system. As a whole and to be fair to them, there's a number of judges, I have an article here again that recently has said, I'm putting people who may be innocent away because the system is so weighed against them actually having the rights to do this. And I thought Jody, that one of the things I came across in the book most vividly was this idea of how the Supreme Court and the court system has shrunk the ability of particularly poorer criminals or poorer appellate's, arrestees in this system and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that before and we're going to move towards, and I want you to think about this, what's happened in the last five years. [00:34:43] >> Jody Armour: Yeah, well, when you paint a black face on crime there's going to be a lot of less care and concern for the criminals and their rights, and their wellbeing and that's born out in the empirical psychological literature, right. There are a number of studies that show that there's rescuing behavior when the supposed victim is white that isn't there if the supposed victim is black and now they have FMRI's that can check out your mirror neurons and whether they're firing when you're observing someone and those basic building blocks of empathy aren't there for our group members, all right. So there's a lot of indifference that comes from painting a black face on crime for those who aren't black and even for those who are black and think like



Bill Cosby and Chris Rock and some of the Congressional Black Caucus who voted in the politics of respectability based 1986 Anti Drug Abuse Act. [00:35:45] All right, so the laws, one of things I teach over in criminal law and torts at the Gould School of Law right next door is, is that the law reflects culture, it reflects attitude, ideals and beliefs that we all share. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that if we think that this group of citizens, criminals are quasi sub humans, certainly not deserving of our care and concern that their protections would shrink over time as we became more concerned about our safety. When we have to strike a balance between our safety and treating them more humanely, our safety every time especially if we demonize them and say, you are some other and that N word with fierce felicity expresses otherness. [00:36:35] >> David Sloane: I mean it is, just to remind our listeners, Michelle Alexander, demonstrates in the book, The New Jim Crow, that there are survey after survey after survey after survey has shown that everyone in our society, whites, blacks, Latinos, etcetera use drugs at relatively the same rate and yet the number of individuals in jail or prison for a drug related crime is extraordinarily high among AfricanAmericans and to some extent Latinos and actually quite low for whites. And so in some sense this idea of how, we have as I think as she argues, we've actually created a figure. When I was growing up the sort of prototype criminal was an Italian, right the Mafia and that seems to have shifted to the prototype being an AfricanAmerican drug dealer and that that has had some significant impacts upon how we imagine the justice system. [00:37:47] >> Jody Armour: Let me just point out one distinction that I think is important between the kinds of crime she's talking about like drug arrests, which really do since everyone is using roughly, everyone is using roughly about the same amount, that differences in arrests and convictions that do reflect bias in enforcement priorities, that you can identify as bias there is no bias when it comes to counting toe tags in communities, you know. There is a lot more violence happening in the black community, you know, men lie, women lie, numbers don't, those body bags don't lie. Right you take a group of people, you disproportionate concentrate them in desperate circumstances and it is sad but not surprise you that they disproportionately turned to desperate undertakings like crime, including street crime, violent crime. So those numbers aren't in dispute either. [00:38:34] >> David Sloane: No, no and I don't mean to dispute them. Before we turn to the five years did you have any problems with the book? [00:38:42] >> Jan Perry: No, I thought it was a great



[00:38:44] >> David Sloane: Any critiques? [00:38:45] >> Jan Perry: No, I mean obviously there's parts I agree with and disagree with but you know I don't generally have a problem with it, I thought that she related her perspective and backed it up with statistical analysis and historical analysis which was really, really good and very, very spot on. You know I don't know that I the culture of silence is it's true, I guess the challenge and it's not completely addressed in the book and maybe that's in another book is what do we do to stop the silence and turn it into action and that's where I get frustrated. I'm glad I'm doing this, I'm glad I'm doing this and talking to all of you today because I think that it expands my consciousness too and maybe the people who listen to us may be affected in some way but I don't want it to just in with us having this great, in the bubble, intellectual discussion that doesn't translate into something that's substantive. [00:39:54] >> Danielle Williams: Yeah, and I mean I think that's a key point when you talk about the invisibility of it, she talks about knowing and not knowing and it's very interesting because if you read I think in the acknowledgments she thanks her husband, she said, you know he's a federal prosecutor, he doesn't you know he doesn't agree with this, he doesn't agree with this assessment of the criminal justice system. And to me it's like, she's made a very convincing case if she can't get her own husband you know to see this then maybe there's politics they are in terms of not wanting to write that out, it's very interesting so how do we get people to see it? And then I have like a minor quibble because she equates gangster rap with minstrel shows and I feel like that's a little, it's a little maybe it's just because I have sort of a romantic artist's perspective of people being allowed to create the art that they want, you know it's not, to me it shouldn't be incumbent on black men too you know be somebody's role model. You know in creating their art they should be allowed to say what they want to say so that was a little problematic I wanted to take those two pages out, or reconfigure them but that's, it's minor, it's minor quibble. [00:41:02] >> Jody Armour: Well, she's wrong six ways from Sunday when it comes to criticizing gangster rappers in that way, what we have with the folks who started socalled gangster rap which really started here in the Southland, Ice Cube and when he was with NWA we had a movie getting ready to come out about that, he was really the forerunner, Pocknot, Big, JayZ, all of them you know he came in and what they were doing and certainly all the other people I just named like Tupac and JayZ etcetera, what they were doing was saying is you're calling us the Nword you're saying I love black people but I hate Nwords. Or let's distinguish between good Negroes and bad Negroes and all those Bill Cosby and sometimes NAACP criticisms of those of us who are turning to crime. Well, let us give you our perspective from our own mouths, let us give you a vision of the world and a version of the world that expresses how we see things and what drove us to do what we do.



[00:42:06] And so I see them as actually representing an oppositional discourse, they came out with an oppositional discourse saying something like I'll give you a [inaudible] line for example since we're talking about politics of respectability. We don't listen to it too often you know he has a line, these are heros let's hear two for the coon who do cart wheels because they said they played their parts well, now they claim caviar, hate that oxtail, lambda, sigma phi, bad John Lapel, why do you always tell them oh he speaks so well, are you the one we look to the decent Negro, the respectable Negro hell no, but they say these are our heroes. That's the analysis the getting into in this art, right and to write that off is just obtuse artistically, you know you're not in touch with the music, you guys haven't been following it. But you know some of the other things it's part of that politics of respectability. [00:42:58] >> Danielle Williams: That still sort of permeates the work a little bit which is interesting, I'm a personal fan of 911 as a joke. [00:43:04] >> Jody Armour: Yes, yes. [00:43:05] >> Danielle Williams: But yeah that even when you know she's sort of talking about it there's a little bit in their. And I think that shows you know someone that's very cognizant of it, how it still sort of impacts all of us. [00:43:17] >> David Sloane: So how have things changed in the last five years since the book was published, have they gotten better, worse, no change? [00:43:25] >> Danielle Williams: I mean, I'm struck by just the preciousness, like of some of this, I remember reading, I read this for my qualifying exams so that was a couple of years ago and I reread it for this and you know there's a whole section on chokeholds. You know Eric Garner died last year and like you know this is, so this is four years before his death and she's talking about how the Supreme Court was basically saying, you know all he can't bring suit because you have to show that the police are going to do this sort of in a consistent way. The police to do this in a consistent way or not that it kills people, you know, and so to me that was very interesting, I do think there's greater conversation about it. I mean Obama I think really in the past month, there's sort of been a larger push but again it's a little bit connected to you know nonviolent drug offenders. And as Professor Armour points out you know prisons are filled with more than you know nonviolent drug offenders and what are we going to do about them, and what are we going for them?



[00:44:26] >> Jan Perry: I think that things have changed, they are changing and that's the normal state of things, nothing is static that that's the way it is and should be. And there's always going to be tension, there's always going to be a push and pull, some of it comes from needing resources and funding and there are people on all ends of the continuum of opinion. But I guess the greatest change for me and maybe again it goes back to what I see on a regular basis, is more of an interest in putting people who have had this experience back on a path that ultimately should be designed to be sustainable. And sustainability to keep people on a path towards recovery, towards redemption, towards employment, towards reunification so that the only objective is not to, well, it's to save people from killing themselves too and killing each other. [00:45:29] I guess that's why get so upset when I see people left behind on the streets and that enough housing is not built rapidly enough to house them with services onsite to aid them in their recovery. [00:45:44] >> Danielle Williams: You know, going back to what you were talking about in terms of then transitioning and the reentry piece I do think that there's work I don't want to sound pessimistic, you know in 2011 Shaun Donovan who is the head of HUD, sent out a letter trying to encourage public housing authorities to use their discretion. I think there's been a lot of efforts like that and a lot of conversation but I guess to me it doesn't, it does quite go far enough yet and you know we're still fighting ban the box, we're still fighting you know not transferring juveniles to adult courts which to me is something that is absolutely in sort of a modern society's kind of horrific that were putting children in jail. To me is the definition of cruel and unusual punishment but we're still having to fight this battle. [00:46:30] >> David Sloane: Jody [inaudible] over the last five years. [00:46:33] >> Jody Armour: To my mind this has been one of the most important book in the last five years to help galvanize this movement, this heightened consciousness on the left that mass incarceration was a social justice problem and not just a problem of people lacking in personal responsibility and getting themselves into trouble and it being their own damn fault. There needed to be a gestalt shift in thinking about crime and blame and punishment and deserts and this helped to midwife that change. Now, so you know I'm on one knee, you know genuflecting to the really importance and greatness of this book, I think it's important equally to realize that it has just established a beachhead, it has just started us down this path. Some of the things we've talked about are important next steps like pointing out how selfdestruction really is social oppression, recognizing that unless you're already preaching to the choir a lot of people aren't going to buy the analogy between the old Jim Crow and the new Jim Crow.



[00:47:39] They don't see the parallel between Rosa, Martin and Medgar and the gang bangers okay. And so recognizing that we have to make a frontal assault on the progressive left anyway who want to do something, and the far right. You know we see how many people are coming together around reform the Koch brothers, okay, along with you know, Rand Paul, along with Newt Gingrich. You know again they're doing it because it's just too inefficient and costly and another reason some of them because their religious constituents are care about redemption. So you have and then the people on the left are thinking well you know social factors drive people to do things, so it's you have you know it's a river, this river of prison reform and reform in our thinking about blame and punishment is a river fed by many streams. Right, but they all converge on a moment that we need to take advantage of but recognize that if we don't have a revolution in morality and how we think about wrongdoers we can easily go back. [00:48:45] We are one Jessica's law or one Megan's law, one, you know posterior person victim from people saying what the hell. You know let's start ratcheting back up the blame and punishment. [00:48:58] >> Danielle Williams: Yeah, and I think that, at least for me, was one of the major takeaways, you know I was familiar with the specially a lot of the war on drugs, the media and its role in that, the legislative parts not so much the Supreme Court I thought that was interesting as well. But this idea, you know as a policy person I kind of don't care how you vote I just want you to vote the way I want you to vote you know I want to get things done a little bit. You know if you're voting because you think the prison system is inefficient, great vote to reduce sentences, we'll be on the same page but I think the compelling, really compelling, at least for me, piece of this was that if we don't, if we don't start looking at it as a racial caste system and if we don't truly understand that, we are just going to come up with another version. There's going to be you know the greatgrandchild you know if mass incarceration is the grandchild of slavery than what's the greatgrandchild and I think that's another piece that we already have to start looking at when we're trying to still dismantle the grandchild. [00:49:53] >> David Sloane: So Jan start us off what is the one thing that you would suggest that we start, obviously it's an enormous endeavor, it took 30 years to build as I tell my students about autocentric cities they took 70 years to build it's not going to happen overnight that they're going to go away. The same thing is true here, this is a very highly developed, intricately connected system interwoven from arrest to post prison, we're not going to what would you suggest what's one thing? [00:50:26] >> Jan Perry: Well, there's know one place to start but I guess if I had my fantasy about what I would do if I were queen of the world, I would put together a group of people like a Susan Burton, very involved in ban the box and people from the federal government, people from the philanthropic, people from mental health and then education and job development, job



placement. And examine where we are now because we don't have time to go back 25 years and have a retrospective look at where we are now and set some realistic goals for the next 3 to 5 years, the next 10 years, the next 15 years and you know focus on an area that needs some turning around. I'm not sure where that would be, it could be here, it could be Chicago is having a lot of problems now and then you know, throw all the resources there and see if we can turn it in another direction. [00:51:24] >> David Sloane: Danielle? [00:51:25] >> Danielle Williams: So I think actually talking is a South Carolinian and talking about the Emmanuel Nine, while I was of course ecstatic that the Confederate flag has finally come down, to me it was sort of sad that that was sort of the major galvanizing point that happened out of this extraordinary tragedy. And while I think it's meaningful all you know there's so many other things. I think the first thing I would do again if I was queen of the world, make would make it incumbent upon police officers to tell people when they are free to go. To explain, much like we have Miranda rights to explain to them that they do not have to consent to searches and to really hold police departments accountable for racial profiling, and I would change yeah I would basically try to change I guess 30 years of jurisprudence on search and seizure and you know the fourth amendment. And also overturn, I think it's McCleskey versus Kemp, you know so yeah, so you know just little things, just like you know redoing the Supreme Court, yeah, yeah. [00:52:27] >> David Sloane: Jody you're king of the world. [00:52:29] >> Jody Armour: Well, of course California voters have shown the way because the [inaudible] of politicians would never have done with the California voters did with proposition 47, taking a whole big categories of crimes and reducing them from felonies to misdemeanors. Okay, politicians ever since the Dukakis lost and 88 in part because of the Willie Horton campaign have been black and white, left and right, especially on the left running from the crime issue. I'm law and order and I'm going to ratchet up the punishment so you know that sort of thing, get rid of drug laws all that, radically reforming them and go through the usual suspects. But if I had to get to the path root of the issue it's going to be where I would be if a program called a Better Chance hadn't reached down into the inner city and pulled me out and put me in a high school that gave me a chance to go to a better school. That is I'd be in the joint where most of the guys I was running with were from because it was about personal dignity to go out there and hustle. [00:53:31] Okay, what I've seen happen at Crenshaw High, right around the corner from me, in 2005 they lost their accreditation, your kid who played by the rules done everything you're supposed to do, you’re supposed to do and you find out that at the end the diploma that you're looking at is worth



toilet paper in the admission process because it's coming from in an unaccredited high school. Okay, so it shows you it's a cruel hoax what's going on out here in a lot of ways and that kid is now, may not be able to get into community college, he can barely making minimum wage, he sees a vision of loveliness across the street, walks up to her and says, with his young self I'd like to have coffee with you can you meet me down on Thursday street with this bus pass. Because on minimum wage you don't have enough to pay your insurance on the car let alone a car, the note, you know you we're talking about the part of town you're going to live in. It's about dignity that you're out there hustling, I'm going to have some beige rocks in my hand because I want dignity. And this culture defines dignity in terms of material wellbeing, let's face it. [00:54:32] >> Danielle Williams: Yep. [00:54:33] >> Jody Armour: Okay so I'm going to do something about radically redistributing wealth and power, i. e. starting with tax rates are going up, incremental tax rate up to where they were in the fifties when we we're having our heyday, they were up to 70, 80, 90 % in some cases and didn't get in the way with a lot of economic growth. Okay, so I'm going to do something very basic about those I sound like Bernie Sanders in some ways but I also recognize you can't reduce race to class and there's some independent autonomous dimensions of race that you have to tackle too. [00:55:08] >> David Sloane: You know, recently Raphael Bostic, head of the Bedrosian Center asked a group of faculty to think about how do we start dealing with race in society and I have this draft sitting on my computer and it's really actually for me I think the first step is, and it is just a first step, although an enormous first step is to recognize we don't live in a colorblind society. That we just have to recognize that race and class and gender matter, that this is a real thing here. And one of the things but away from the book in Bergen and with this you can do it quickly, you can ignore me if you want but I was intrigued by her use of Martin Luther King, Jr. You know, one of the, I'm old one of the worst days of my life was going sitting in my room and my mom calling me down and you know, King is dead. You know I went to junior high school the next day, I went to high school that was about a third black, it was a bad day in the world. [00:56:12] And you know there were talks that the Blacks were going to come burn our junior, our high school, junior high school then, half the people left in the principal locked himself in the office. We sat there and went why would the Blacks burn down our and then I ended up at a ceremony at the largest black church in Syracuse, New York in memory of King. And so it was an extraordinary thing to me and yet over the rest of my life, King seems to have slipped a little away. You know he's become almost a trite figure in our conversations. [00:56:47]



>> Jan Perry: I don't think that's true. [00:56:49] >> David Sloane: I think nationally, you know, we talk about the dream but she uses him as actually, a stepping stone to a new civil rights and we've sort of froze you're fair Jan, a better way to put it is with frozen him in time and she is trying to push us to see him as in the People's movement and trying to think about the society differently. [00:57:15] >> Jan Perry: She's taking his teachings and his words and reinterpreting them to make them relevant for where we are now, so in that sense I don't think he slipped away I mean just the establishment and the building and the construction of the memorial in Washington DC tells us that he is still relevant even now. But I think it's our responsibility and so if anybody slipped it's us. [00:57:43] >> Jody Armour: Well, King has been used, you know I follow twitter a lot now, my students dragged me into the 21st century and got me on the doggone thing and I'm glad you did because you see, recognize that there is an important phenomenon in the digital world going on that that is making political movements possible and a lot of other things important going on there. And I can take the pulse sometimes of you know our countrymen and country folk and I often see King's name thrown up by folks who are telling black folks stop protesting, stop taking to the streets like that. You know do it in a more peaceful, do it in a more King like way. [00:58:26] >> Danielle Williams: A more respectable way. [00:58:27] >> Jody Armour: A more respectable way, be respectful, it plays into in some hands in other words like all cultural symbols whether it's the Confederate flag or the N word or any other linguistic or nonlinguistic symbolic form of symbolic communication, there's going to be some struggle over its meaning. There's some struggle over the meaning of King, you know I was a Malcolm guy, you know back in the day, but it felt King too, you know you kind of bal there's some people who were primarily King people but they felt Malcolm too you know. So which was the accent you know kind of thing that King at the end was about you know what we were just now talking about, redistributing wealth and power as a way to really get at this problem. So at the end of the day you know he was out fighting for the unions, the garbage workers and that sort of thing, so he was really that King we don't hear as much about, we do sometimes but a lot of times he's dragged out as the Mahatma Gandhi King. You notice take that police, if he shoots you in the right leg, put up your left leg to take a shot. [00:59:32]



>> Danielle Williams: Yeah, and my personal favorite is they show you know an image of Dr. King marching and you know it's like this was how protesting was done in the sixties and then those, you know, I mean quite frankly the applied thing is savage black people protesting and Ferguson, this is how they do it now, you know you should be ashamed of yourself. [00:59:49] >> Jody Armour: And I'm not saying that everyone is doing it that way but it's just used that way and you're right, others are and I'm struggling over his meaning, I'm down to struggle over his meaning. Let's define him and let's claim him in terms that we think does more justice to what he really stood for you know, which was radical change, revolutionary change, he was a revolutionary Christian. [01:00:07] >> David Sloane: I think that's the best way to say it of course he has not gone away, he's amazing and a remarkable figure in our society now on the mall and yet at the same time she reclaims him in a way for a struggle I think again, move towards questioning the colorblind. And to make our society a better, more livable, safer place. I'd like to thank you, thanks again to Jody Armour, Jan Perry and Danielle Williams for joining me and discussing this important and timely read. Join us again next month when Rafael will be back to discuss Walter Mosley's, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, check out our playlist on soundcloud or iTunes for past episodes, thank you and have a great day. [01:00:57] >> Thank you for listening to the USC Bedrosian Book Club podcast, tune in next time for conversation about. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley. We'll read the novel with the governance lens and discuss Mosley's look at race and aging in South LA. Read the last days of Ptolemy Grey along with us and listen on August 31. Find links to the books and some of things we've discussed at our show page, find it at Bedrosian.USC.EDU. Tweet us at Bedrosian Center, that's Bedrosian Center as in center in. This podcast was produced by Aubrey Hicks and Jonathan Schwartz, I'm Kristen Descombes, thanks for listening. The USC Bedrosian Center Book Club podcast, recorded at the USC Gould Price School Public Policy.



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