are leaders in our community elders in our community if dr levy palms will also accept elder at this stage of our life in my community and elder is is a distinguished leader and as long as you're past thirty i guess you can be an elder so we want to welcome them to this conference we appreciate their leadership we appreciate the history of their commitment so first of all dr really oldest political question coming out of the powerful modern mess that we call finally science has come out of the closet primarily and sixteen seventeen hundred europe all of these categories that we live under inventions of europeans various groups mainly french british german it is it just blows my mind i mean i'm not talking about people everyday people walking the street i'm talking about intellectuals and i'm not sure that it's all just ignorance it's a part of ideology that something you don't want to know and that's where we are right now but we still have an opportunity i think to rights among these life liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the most it's the most powerful words written in the modern world dr king himself  the greatest socio political document coupled with the constitution to have been written way beyond the magna carta so that it is still inspiring people and the man who striking thing about thomas jefferson is he talked about all men are created equal and men and he was holding at the time over two hundred men and women and children in bondage that's a contradiction my friends i'm stirring as a violent country ditch in america grows out of contradictions that's what we're fighting right now in the midst of out so refuse to millions and millions and millions of you your opinion until recently it's also house of bondage for african people and the indigenous people that's a contradiction you can't get around it so what james baldwin simply ask america to do we did a he was about love too but his language was a little different from d king loved he said what the lovers in the society have to find one another and organize and displace what passes for life in this you know he said the number one thing facing white people i don't believe in this stuff when i'm using the language that we understand white the way people and things that they're facing if they refused to grow patriotism and nerve to live up to their own own constitution there is no negro problem never had been this is an invention is no indian problem it's a surprise to proud every country as a myth historians understand that is as very important in the making of people who it is not a myth is not necessarily an idle tale there are always some truth to it some fact put it gets elaborated upon and it gets into fantasy and so forth and that's what we're done in the united states of america i applaud them if you talk about sheer political michael valiant genius this is the best example of the creative  people who didn't even know most people were not acquainted with the printed word when jefferson wrote those words you're talking about the elites of american society hand over into these rule everywhere not just in anthropologist at princeton for years he has an english background he was a courageously brave man morally here he overturned racism and social science physical and what monica you talk there's a rigorous what's wrong with race is that it goes beyond the fact which makes it in fact an era where black skin don't tell you a damn thing about me it really does you don't know what language i speak as who am you know what values i carry you don't know what mr i care and i hea you don't know what my beliefs are you assume you know put in america because of black americans are the ones they know and pounce upon a lot of other black people in america with black america we are a tiny part of a billion people who would be defined as negroes by european thought so it is this can be some of this stuff can be reached in morrow if we had some moral that's what's facing us what king was about moral courage to try to tell the truth as french writer says speak loud tell the truth shame the delf get free we like that coverage and it's in my community to their you've been to school and you got some certification started occasion according to the greeks education essence of education is a lead yourself out of ignorance of education  and science of making human beings teaching people to be responsible to oneself for oneself and to others as you do to others it's unselfish an educated person is unselfish he knows ideology or not so call white there are people in my community who practices that doctrine because there is the only game in town we think is the think like a white supremacist there are black people who do white supremacy things to other black people their native americans who do that for the native people they are a q u e race as a superstition that's where it is another giant intellectual throne with a fringe background is called knows on the state of virginia in o t years on the state of virginia by thomas jefferson circumstances the blacks are inferior to the whites both in the minds of the mind and body and he gets on the native people calling them need to he didn't need it as a power like most so many young poor white people people who are under him powerful people don't need it i have to say it's democracy we want democracy we want what white can proclaim but they can't actually because they don't have any courage not enough courage anyway i don't want to would break out tomorrow all those clowns in washington would have to leave the  process not a static condition it is not being but becoming it can be easily lost and never it's not so much the time it's the quality of the words thank you very much professor  it's no my pleasure to turn the mike over to professor good morning everyone it's truly a privilege and an honor to be here it's also a challenge to follow professor mahmoud let's give him another round of appl i consider him to be one of my mentors and he's really planted some very strong seeds about this notion of white supremacy which many of us are afraid to talk about but i'm thankful that you have deposited seeds into the next generation so that we can carry on the torch and the work so i'm glad to be free today you heard the news that the charges were dismissed against the eleven  and i have to say alleged organizers of the model of america demonstration for black lives matter i had to keep correcting folks in court to say alleged because when i looked at the list of those of us who had been charged i realized that it really was a random collection of people and i said there's absolutely no way these charges can stand they had very scant evidence and for me personally i knew that i was being politically prosecuted for going out into the media and speaking truth to power on behalf of the young people who were helping organize black lives matter and i had to get to the place and my involvement with those young folks who were standing on the front lines where i felt like queen esther where she said if i perish i perish but i'm going to speak the truth on behalf of my people and that's the mentality that i've had to take in terms of thinking about this notion of vigilance and that's what i want to impart today as we're talking about these issues what i'm hoping is that those of you who came out today are looking to get more involved in the fight for racial justice freedom and equality and that means more than passively sitting and listening to some great speeches and some great workshops and some excellent panels it means internalizing the things that you hear today and then channeling and transforming that energy and using it as a catalyst to shift the paradigm in our society it's going to take people who are willing to rise and get on the front lines and there's no greater place to do that they're right here in the state of minnesota and i know that in terms of minnesota we tend to think of it as a place that's very progressive liberal a land of opportunity in fact when i first moved here in two thousand and three that's what i was told about the state of minnesota this a great place to raise your family are distressed communities aren't so distressed and i believe that for my first couple of years here that was until i put down the mainstream newspapers and i started picking up the african american newspapers when i started reading those different narratives in the african american newspapers it opened my eyes to the truth that there are two minnesota's one black one white both separate and unequal and we tend to think of ourselves as being some the north in terms of race relations when you hear about issues happening nationally we see things happening in the south and we say those people over there are the ones who are the problem but here in minnesota we care about everybody i'm sure that there are many of us who do care about everybody but the reality is that the statistics don't bear that out our policies don't bear that out and it's caused me to redefine how i see the state of minnesota i've taken to calling minnesota the jim crow north and i don't mean to offend anybody because i do love minnesota that's only reason that i'm here in the frozen tundra otherwise i'll be sitting under a palm tree somewhere in california to promote he tells let's keep a real but i love the state of minnesota i think that there's a lot of promise ear and potential to be a beacon of hope equity and racial justice but if we're going to get to that place that means that we have to do something fundamentally different than what we're doing right now we're going to have to make up our minds that not only do we want to shift the paradigm in our state but that we are done with business as usual in our state now see a lot of people are not near heads in agreement with what i'm saying right now but lead black lives matter say we're going to go to the state and i've had those personal experiences as someone who's been connected to the movement as a matter of fact when the young folks who are part of black lives matter sign paul were getting ready to help black marathon i wasn't even involved in that particular demonstration and yet i started to receive e mails phone calls tweets from people who were telling me sob stories about you know their preparation for the marathon and why people shouldn't you know go and disrupt the marathon someone even e mailed the dean of my law school to say you know i'm fine with professor levy pounds lying on train tracks and and marchin intimidating but the marathon has just taken it too far now thankfully my dean was a has been supportive all along and my institution has been supportive he wrote a book about the legacy of dr king and his theology and that knowledge that he gained in writing that book was very helpful in the stance that i took and knowing that he understood why i was actively protesting and standing against injustice but as i received those e mails and phone calls i decided you know what i am going to go to black marathon because i'm really tired of hearing these sob stories from people i'm not saying that people didn't take the time to go out and prepare for a marathon or that they're not out there actively raising money for a good cause i send the money to africa or raising awareness about breast cancer those things are important but the outcry of concern from people who didn't want young people just rubbed in the marathon paled in comparison to what we've seen around the country from young people saying why aren't you concerned when unarmed black folks are being killed by police and here in the state of minnesota same thing just weeks before black marathon happen we saw sa kill a native american man who had mental health issues i didn't get any e mails phone calls or tweets about that weaves before that we saw metro transit police beat a seventeen year old african american autistic kid until he had multiple seizures try to leave him for dead except that a passer by saw what was happening and called nine one one i didn't get any phone calls emails or tweets about that and there we just before that a young african american man was riding the train didn't pay a dollar seventy five cent fare was taken off the train handcuffed slammed to the ground one of ish dreadlocks pulled out and was arrested for a one dollar and seventy five cent fare do you think are received e mails phone calls or tweets about that nobody called my dean about that nobody called the governor about that in fact i didn't hear the governor speak out about that i didn't hear the mayor saying possibly got about that i didn't hear many of our government leaders speak out about that but when you get to the place where you're disrupting commerce like the state fair like the marathon like shutting down a train suddenly people start to listen and when you hear of folks who are living in inner city communities constantly saying we're being abuse that we're suffering under the weight of oppression we can't get jobs in our community no one will listen to us we don't have political power as a society we tend to ignore what they're saying until they go out to start tearing stuff up that's when we decide to listen to them and when we listen a lot of times we're demonizing them were saying why would they tear up things in our own community what what i can tell us someone who grew up in south central los angeles you don't have any ownership of what's around you in your community you don't own any businesses typically you have folks who come in from the outside sell their goods to you take the money and the resources from the community they may not even hire people who live on your block but you are forced to constantly buy goods from them with no ownership in their process you typically don't even own homes in those communities you are a renter subject to the whims of your landlord at any time if they want to kick you out or they have a problem with you you can end up homeless in your own community and so when poor people finally have enough and they say you know what they're not listening to us we're going to get their attention sadly it takes getting to that level of people setting fires in doing the things that many of us don't agree with in order to raise significant awareness about the problems that are going on and the real issues that we're looking at is the fact that we're seeing the millions of dollars burned to the ground dr king once said a riot is the language of the unheard and we need to ask ourselves as a community why are there certain people that we just simply refuse to listen to see i was once one of those people as i mentioned before i grew up in south central los angeles not in a suburb of l a right in the heart of the inner city i moved here when i was eight and a half years old from jackson mississippi and i'll never getting off the greyhound bus and walking through my community seeing graffiti on the walls see and hopelessness in the faces of the people who lived there and realizing that there were some on finished business from the civil rights movement because a lot of times when we're looking at things set of happiness storch lee we're looking through the lens of revisionist history where someone has written a tale that that really cast what's happening stork lee in a light that doesn't give us understanding it may tell us that you know people fought for their rights the laws changed and now it's all good and that's what i believe for a long time and then i woke up one day and i said wait a minute now dr king was actually assassinated first enough for what he believed in and his assassination in april of one thousand nine hundred sixty eight cause the movement really die down and to go underground think about what happened between one nine hundred sixty eight and two thousand and fifteen some things got better but many things got worse and one example of what got worse is our criminal justice system now for those who may not know our criminal justice system didn't just creep up out of nowhere the criminal justice system was in place during the days of slavery but the reality is that the majority of those who were incarcerated were poor white men now when the south after the thirteenth amendment to the constitution was established we saw a huge shift happen within our criminal justice system where we're from primarily poor white men to newly freed african slaves and that language opened the door to a new form of slavery because it says i'm paraphrasing neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall be allowed except if one has been duly convicted of a crime now in this country if we were serious about abolishing slavery we would have simply said neither slavery nor involuntary be allowed period point blank into story but instead we open the door to a new form of slavery to the criminal justice system and if you don't believe me you can look online and see accounts of newly freed slave brought into the criminal justice system for very minor reasons like spitting on a sidewalk talking to loud being unemployed hanging out late at night and lest we think that was a problem just in the south guess what ordinances we just had to repeal last spring in the city of minneapolis spitting on a sidewalk as a crime and guess who was being brought into the justice system as a result primarily young african american men so we have to wake up to the reality that the of slavery still exist in our society and if we're not conscious and cognizant of that fact we're destined to repeat and perpetuate those same cycles of injustice and oppression so when these young people are standing on the front lines after mike brown was killed in august of two thousand and fourteen by darrell wilson rather than demonize them we should be looking more critically at the issues and the concerns that they're raising and realizing that they didn't just come out of nowhere that these are issues that have been going on for a very long time in our society as a matter of fact in the early one nine hundred eighty s we had the start of the war on drugs and that was around the time that i moved to los angeles what i saw it was an overconcentration a police in an already poor black and latino community i saw a lack of jobs and economic opportunity and many of the young men in my community had a greater chance of being hired by the local drug dealer than actually having an employer provide them with above ground employment opportunities i saw young men cycle in and out of the justice system i saw some of them joining gangs many of them did not live to see their twenty first birthday that's the legacy that we inherited because of the unfinished business of the civil rights movement and our failure to address our unreconciled racial history in this country see many of us would like to believe that race relations have gotten better why because a lot of the narratives that are out there are void of any discussion of white supremacy when we're looking at disparities in public education for example in the state of minnesota there's a narrative that runs through our local media where they are essentially say you know black kids fall far behind white kids in their test scores reading etc and white kids are just doing so don well and i look at night and i just wonder why are we allowing that narrative to be perpetuated why do we place the blame for disparities in public education on poor black families we have a false narrative that says they don't care about their kids education and that's really the problem and their kids come to school and they misbehave and that's really the problem and if we don't solve poverty we'll never be able to educate them and that's really the problem they're coming to school hungry and that's really the problem does that narrative get us anywhere and actually solving the issues in public education i would argue absolutely not we use this language of the achievement gap which i don't subscribe to it's a false narrative that is being spun about what's happening in public education we can't look at what's going on in public education in a vacuum and think that is just something that's happening because poor black kids don't want to learn we need to look at it through the lens of history as professor okai was telling us to do and understand that the battle for black children to receive a high quality education has been in place since many of our ancestors arrived here in chains during slavery it was a crime to teach black people how to read a crime some people would actually risk being maimed or even killed i was actually told i have to some people that's what i was  of eleven minutes but some people right am i right to i have more time ok so many keep going see that's what it means to be vigilant now like standing up for her so and advocating that's what i teach my last two days but we have to realize that some people risk be a man or killed when they try to learn how to read and be educated or when they try to teach slaves to read and be educated and we saw that as slavery ended black children still didn't receive access to a decent education that's why we have brown versus the board of education and we have to realize that although brown v board brought some relief the reality is that the supreme court justices said implement changes with all deliberate speed and that's exactly what we've done we've taken our time and in two thousand and fifteen we look and we still see the problem surrounding public education how really a lot of the policies how the resource allocations are designed to protect and preserve access to high quality education for white children that's exactly how the system is constructed and if you look at minnesota when we talk about this language of the achievement gap a lot of us fail to actually deconstruct what that means so i got curious and i started to wonder why is there an achievement gap and what i realized was that there are lots of policies in place that play a role in terms of who gets what type of education resource allocations play a role not only economic resources but also human resource allocation so i'll give you an example in minneapolis public schools if you go to the minnesota department of education's website you can look at schools they're saying in southwest minneapolis and you see that the teachers who have the highest credentials and the most teaching experience are the ones who are allowed to teach in the widest most affluent school districts and then you contrast that to schools on the north side of minneapolis and you see that the teachers who have the least amount of experience and the lowest credentials are placed in those schools on the north side and the same can be said for financial resources where we just saw somewhere between forty and eighty million dollars allocated to build a new wing and at southwest high school and meanwhile you have schools on the north side where the kids have come to the school board and complain that they don't even have basic facilities that they need when they're playing sports they don't have access to technology and the list goes on and on we hike those inequities behind the language of the achievement gap without asking the deeper more critical questions of why that's what it means to be vigilant not just accepting the status quo not just accepting the narratives that are out there because the narratives that are out there are designed to perpetuate the status quo and anyone standing on the front lines of social justice will have to make up his or her mind that we have to look at things differently when we look at our criminal justice system we're often fed this narrative about our need to get tough on crime now the crime rate has been going down for years why is it that we're continuing to build more prisons why is it that we're continuing the cycle millions of people in and out of the criminal justice system every year and a big part of it had to do with the proliferation of the war on drugs which as i mentioned earlier started in the mid one nine hundred eighty s i call the war on drugs a war on poor black and brown individuals children and families because the war on drugs from my perspective is similar to what happens when the united states decides to wage war in other countries they get the money that they need to hire personnel to purchase military equipment surveillance equipment they find the places that they want to target they go into those places they wreak havoc a lot of times in those places and there are casualties that's exactly what happened with the war on drugs they went into poor black and brown communities and sadly they kick people while they were down and this was happening as we saw jobs continue to be removed from those communities we saw corporations moving their operations overseas we know that when you take economic opportunity out of a community you leave a people without hope you leave them desperate you leave them vulnerable to becoming involved in markets that are below ground such as drug trafficking never mind the fact that in many wealthy communities people are using drugs people are stored in coking but you won't see them demonized in the news you won't see conversations about the impacts on their children when they're using drugs but when it comes to poor black and brown people we often see them being demonized for doing the very same thing that many in white america are doing they are some of our political leaders and entertainment professionals are doing so thinking about the war on drugs we wage war we took people out of their communities and now we're suffering the consequences the united states holds five percent of the world's population but twenty five percent of its prisoners more than two point three million people currently incarcerated and so over seven million under some form of correctional supervision or control roughly forty percent are african american and many are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses we have lost the war on drugs because the studies show that drugs are cheaper easier to get and more potent than ever but meanwhile what have we done as we've taken people out of their communities as we've destroyed some of our institutions in our communities we've actually created jobs for white america through this system let's keep it real when we're talking about institutions such as the criminal justice system that's somebody whose livelihood in the state of minnesota we have a situation going on right now where there is a prison population legislative task force that i just became a part of where they are determining right now whether to give the department of corrections one hundred and forty million dollars in binding money to build a new wing onto a prison because they're saying that the prisons are overcrowded here that they need five hundred more beds and they need to build a new prison and during the last session we had officials from apple samina someone come to the table and say you know why don't spend that money to build a new prison we have an empty prison right in appleton we have people who need employment opportunities and we will only charge you six to eight million dollars a year to reopen this prison your stand you need five hundred bar what we can supply fourteen hundred beds and that is the conversation that was happening and i sat there as one of only three african americans even on that committee and i said now wait a minute how can we be concerned about the economic interests of people in appleton minnesota saying this is going to create jobs for them and yet we're not concerned about the double digit unemployment in the african american and native american communities that's actually helping to fuel the criminal justice system something is wrong with that picture and i look around the table in everybody's white making decisions on be have a poor communities of color it is not just happening in that venue you look at our business community same thing having forums about air quality and there are no black people in sight as a matter of fact there was a situation where i went to and even at the got three was a good three business circle even i had been invited by my pastor who is white he invited for african americans to attend before the session they all congregated in the same area near me so i thought there were other african americans present we get in the room  everybody but the four of us that our pastor invited was white and they had the mayor of minneapolis talking about racial equity i was inferior to looking around saying this is unconscionable so i went home stayed up all night and i wrote an article that appeared in a star tribune called white privilege the elephant and minnesota's liver wrote i have to go there what i want to do is call us to a higher level of consciousness in the state of minnesota we have a chance to shift the paradigm here it's going to mean that there are times when we're uncomfortable talking about race it's going to mean that there are times when we may be unpopular because we've brought of subjects that people don't want to hear about and it's going to me when we go into our workplaces and we look around and everybody's white that we start raising some questions about why and if we fix education no that's not going to solve the problem because racial bias is playing a role in who's getting higher because there are black folks with betters degrees master's degrees and doctorates who cannot get jobs here something's wrong with that picture it's going to mean when we look at our criminal justice system that we begin to ask the question of who's incarcerated and why why are we continuing to expand our public safety budgets but we won't invest in the economic infrastructures what then are poorest communities we won't create jobs to be people right where they're at if we're serious about equity we're going to have to do something fundamentally different many in this room may not go lay out on train tracks as part of black lives matter you may not go marchin protests at the state fair you may not disrupt a marathon but what you can do is use the power of your voices to speak the truth to hold our elected officials accountable and demanding the change that we need that time for justice is now the time for freedom is now the time for equality is now where do you stand thank you