college in raleigh north carolina which in fact is where i met my first ethiopian fellow student because that was one ethiopian student it's a dog at that particular time this was early on this was on the night that we came to the university on the other side of the state washington state university spent four years there then went back and finished the ph d of minnesota in one nine hundred seventy seven and i've been teaching ever since then been teaching and writing  a devoted my so devoted my career to try and the study african american history and the west and particularly in the pacific northwest i often tell people i mean we have you know obviously we have a lot of information only at the opiates some of you who are in front of your computer screens you may be able to tell us you know how many entries we have but take a look at our entry on add us abba take a look at our entry in the battle of add one and i don't know if you guys are familiar with th sense that different communities and different peoples are making to achieve equality in modern society the first is you get kind of give us your perspective regarding the current state just in general of social aggression well i'm going to look at this as a historian everybody who sits in this chair is going to answer that question in a different way i look at it as this process as a historian and i look back and see where we were before and when i say where we were we don't mean just the nineteenth century or slavery or whatever what i mean is where we were before as a people twenty five thirty or forty years ago there's been progress but we also haven't reached the promised land as martin luther king would say in other words there are still problems and in some ways the progress that's so generates new problems and so you have to end up confronting those new problems but some of the problems have been around for a long time we all know that in seattle and across the country there's the hands up don't shoot movement which is based on police brutality right i can tell you that has been an issue for african americans in seattle for most  of the twentieth century and in fact one of the things that makes this whole business that we're talking about now is very interesting is that there was a police brutality case in one thousand nine hundred thirty eight in the city of seattle where two white policeman thr a black person down the stairs in a hotel down on the what is now the international district and they killed them and there were witnesses and those two policemen were they were arrested  and sent to jail oh that's so radically different from what seems to be happening now but but it came from that actually came from the fact that there was a community that mobilized much smaller black community than exists and seattle today it was only about twenty eight hundred black folks in all of seattle but they mobilized led by the head of the urban league joseph jackson they got people to come together and those those people including white allies as well and people in the filipino community because i fairly large filipino community they all say that this year will not stand and as a result they demanded that the city attorney and eventually the county prosecutor bring charges against these cops  did so my lesson from that a lesson that i take away from that is that while it's important to you know to engage in protests it's also very important to make sure that you understand what your purpose is what the protests and to make sure you you use your resources and you concentrate your resources on making a difference you know protesting the fact that a cop shot someone and that there was no grandeur or jury indictment right is is thing but you've got to get to the point where you can where you can actually reform the political system and this is one of the things that i think should happen in ferguson in the future a lot of people don't realize that about seventy five percent of the black folks in ferguson don't vote  and if they had voted they had voted then there would be a different police force that would be a different mayor there would be a different city council and that whole question would have been handled rightly that those are the lessons that we have to learn and i you know i i think sometimes we don't learn those lessons and as a result history repeats itself but yeah the question of police brutality is not a new question it's been around for a long time if i had enough time i talk about the rise of police forces as a consequence of slavery in the south but what we do about this how we respond to these issues the police brutality is like extremely important yet have we made progress of course we have the very fact that all of us sitting in this room the very fact that you're doing this the very fact that you know i'm teaching at the university of washington i hold the oldest doubt chair at the university of washington and i live in that chair scott and dorothy bullet chair in american history and the bill is an old family the the bullets are an old family and if you think king t v that was originally owned by the bullet family back in the day and it was the first they had the first radio station and eventually the first t v station and i think t v is still ma may have the largest audience no longer owned by the bullet family but but the the station was developed by them in the one nine hundred twenty's and thirty's and forty's and then when t v came out they were a dominant political force they were they were also liberal quite liberal and they supported civil rights activities in seattle and the nineteen in the one nine hundred thirty s i want to come back to this business of africa and immigrants always talk about african immigrants because i'll be honest there has been historically some tension between african immigrants and african americans and i think that's unfortunate and i think it's unfortunate because african americans and the immigrants from africa don't realize the common have actually but also don't realize that their cultures are different and they have to respect both cultures you know in front of a cop or still black cop you're still lag but the response and lead the open community may be different from what  the response is me african american your adventure one of the things that i think we have to also realize is that and this is a statistic a lot of people don't don't embrace or don't understand there are more black people there are more africans people from africa who have come to the united states since one thousand nine hundred ninety that were brought doing the entire slave trade there are more black people there are more africans people from sub saharan africa who come to the united states since one thousand nine hundred that were brought up doing the entire slave trade right what this means that is that our definition of african american is dramatically changed yeah in other words in the future african americans are going to mean listen and you know his parents were from ethiopia but he grows up in the united states right and one of the most remarkable things about immigrants and you know and i praise them for this one of the most remarkable things about immigrants is that some of them are doing for very well something like seventy percent of the black folks who are attending ivy league colleges and universities are from immigrant communities now they're mostly nigerian right but they're also from ethiopia and a whole host of other places and there's something about the drive and the determination of ever brands that i think african americans can and should copy in some ways they will sort of like what happened with blacks when they first came out of slavery they were hungry for education and then fall away and i think the immigrant community is that the same so it's now the question of the key is the make sure that the second and third and fourth generations don't fall away as well but immigrants from africa are doing very well do you know that of all of the immigrants groups that come to the united states the one that has the highest percentage of ph d s is nigeria i want you to think about that format we don't normally think about immigrants from africa being highly educated but of all of the immigrant resign from china from japan from the whole world if you if you look at the percentage of immigrants who have will get ph the unit that i jury and at the top of the list of all those number groups and so what's going on and so here we get into the whole question of the glass half empty half full because you know african americans are in many instances facing an achievement gap and we're doing not as well in school as we should be right some immigrant africans are not doing as well as they should and yet there are others who are just beating the pants off everybody else in the country right you know we think about  asian kids we don't necessarily understand that there are a whole bag of african kids who are doing very very well and we've got to cultivate that and we've got to we've got to emphasize that we've got to make sure that the communities the immigrant communities recognize and we have to make sure that the larger community recognizes this as well another interesting statistic i've heard is that more african americans graduate would be a b s in computer science but if you look at the numbers of them actually hired it's not that well yeah that may be there may be a disconnect there but you know you keep going i mean i would rather have people graduate degrees in the requisite areas and not be hired right than they have and not have the eventually they will be hired and let me say why they will eventually be let me say why black folks so eventually going to be incorporated into the system and particularly immigrant groups it's not because of the love of america it's not because americans various groups it's because these minorities are on the cusp of being a majority and other words if you want a workforce to continue to do the kinds of things that we have expected in the past then you're going to have to incorporate people from a whole host of the ethnic and racial backgrounds that's a reality that has nothing to do with whether you know you're good spirited or liberal or what it has everything to do with the survival of the country and i think sometimes we people of color get don't understand the tremendous capacity that we have right the very first black person to come to seattle and he arrived before most white folks that was manual loeb's and he came from  canary islands off the coast of africa so the very first black person in seattle was an african and so we so we continue to accept and embrace and you know the various immigrant groups that come here and africans are no different from from the other immigrant groups on the other hand what's going on that's different now from the one from the nineteenth century is what you guys are doing here yeah but all this this technology is linking us directly to the people in the opium now and that's a very very powerful and we can use that certainly you use it effectively to create so that so that there is a kind of a flow not just a flow of people know they don't go into the legacy and all the the history of that we built the pyramid so we had kings and queens back then so i have one word for you please well you were black passed out or passed out or talks about very thing that you're talking about talks about that legacy right if you want to learn about ethiopia for instance fifth century a d you go back to black past really if you want to learn about the long history of both muslims and nation the third largest in pyar in the world and twelve fifty was mali ok and the richest ruler in the world you know this about you know this is not hyperbole or not something that we read off the back of a chair the richest person in the world at that time with matters the most right you know and so we need to understand this week and so when you talk about these kinds of questions we get away from this whole issue of i don't think anybody ought to be ashamed of slavery because slavery existed in every country in the world there's no people on the face of they are all over europe who haven't faced slavery at some point but we need to understand that our history is not defined by if this is where you were going with your question but word we're doing much better than we sometimes believe that we are once we realize we're doing much better i think we need to keep going and matter fact we need to accelerate the pace of movement to bring class or i'm not teaching a class i'm only but as one of my colleagues once that years ago he says black history month has negro historians full employment law and i and what that means was that i get to do a lot of speaking and i spoke at city hall yesterday i'm going to be speaking again on monday ok and i have mixed feelings about that on one hand i appreciate the fact that there are people who want to hear me talk about these various issues on the other hand i hate the idea that we equality when you say the community you mean the entire seattle community or the community of color or the at the open community which what's going on i guess i would say like for any group of people that is i mean ideally we'd want to foster these discussions and conversations and  kind of solution based efforts within the entire community in seattle and in the country and in the world of course but you know wherever within the african american community within the ethiopian community or just within seattle in general how do you think that we can allows an imbalance of representation and so how do you think that we can kind of encourage people ok i would never speak against civic engagement i would never speak against the idea that we ought to be some ways will take away the birth the burden of race or at least will move it will be one of those things is education route how to eliminate the achievement gap but when i say we it means the entire society but it also puts a particular burden on us meaning black students and black parents and black relatives how do we do this how do we make sure that all of the kids all of the kids in this room how do we make sure that all of the kids in this room get the best possible education once that happens that's step number one and that's something that that's not easily resolved because it has to come from but then with the students themselves it has to come from the parents it has to come from and it has to come from the larger society being willing to push and accept this step number two once we have that education and once we're able to effectively use it then you begin to ach then you begin to do certain things that will make you invaluable to the larger society once you start doing that a lot of what we call racial tension will go away now i'm not naive enough to say that  oh all we have to do is work hard and smile and that that's going to do it but what i am saying is that the underlying cause in terms of ferguson first of all let me go back to to the boy everybody focuses on the fact that michael brown and that's right and that's a tragedy there's no question about that is every every murder is a tragedy but the larger tragedy is that michael brown was going to have a difficult time in his life guard list of what happened to him and w the police right that's not to say the police should have killed him but it is a say that in some ways michael brown and tens of thousands of young people young black folks and young black men were dying a slow death because of their margin ferguson we need to we need to get to the root of this you know the old fashioned expression jobs careers opportunity once you do that then you turn around the dynamic which makes the ferguson possible once you do that then you know then we don't think as much about that the idea police but when it becomes less of a factor because we're moving in the world policeman for the most part there are some exceptions but policemen don't shoot wealthy people they don't shoot people who you know who tend to be well educated who move up and says i again i don't want to i don't want to leave you with the impression that all you have to do is work hard and exactly that's what i'm trying to say i mean i you know we will continue to have the michael brown situation you know for a long long time but the way the turnaround turned that around is to turn the michael off the hook but it is to say that we have to start transforming ourselves and toronto once we began the do that then we reduce will never eliminate but we reduce the number of michael brown and various others who  so i was born in ethiopia but i grew up all over the states and one of the main ways that i was able to really connect with the culture growing up here was through the music my parents would play these old cassettes in the car and in the house but it wasn't until i started going in two thousand and one that i really started connecting more strongly with the culture and the first time i went to ethiopia my mom took me to the city of behind a daughter in northern ethiopia to the shores of lake which is the source of the blue n i grew up in cairo in as a young kid i used to cross the nile every day to go to school but kyra's so crowded in crossing the nile with almost like crossing this barrier to go in as a kid you just start taking the nile for granted in egypt and you think you think you think of more of the barrier than you think about it as a river that connects egypt to a lot of other cultures only when i came to the us that musicians from all the other night cultures in started realizing that we share so much more than the water of the nile lake victoria which borders kenya  out of recycled water bottles and the boats will be the stage where will perform to people on the river banks of the nile so after we perform we're going to sit down with the people and they get to meet the musicians and learn about their neighbors down the river so our floating caravan is going to include more than just musicians we're bringing together hydrologists anthropologists climate scientists fishermen all people whose work and life centers around the river we're bringing them together to a nihilo where they can share their information their ideas their solutions with each other as well as with the people living up and down the river so since we've been sharing this idea with people the response has been really incredible i received the ted senior fellowship for this um so last month i was on ethiopia's lake ana the source of the blue nile we were perched on this tiny motorboat and i was singing to myself and watching the clouds make their way across the sky and i felt to myself these clouds are the in the sky the rainfall becomes the lake the lake becomes the river the river becomes the sea and all along the way the systems that feed this river relate even more broadly to the systems that feed all rivers and all watersheds and all of us we are todd i'm a singer and songwriter and co founder of the nile project and the project began when nina and i went to an ethiopian music concert in oakland of the devil band and afterwards we were talking and i had recently brought my ban to ethiopia this was in two thousand and eleven and mina had just come back from egypt as well and we were talking about music we were talking about why is it that we're neighbors in east africa but actually we have to come all the way to san francisco to hear each other's music you know and if you're here you can't really hear the music of the neighbors  and then in egypt it's the same it's it's there's actually not a lot of access to each other but we talked about the fact that we share the river and yet we don't know each other at all and so we thought to ourselves well what if we brought the music of the neighbors to the neighborhood the neighborhood what if we created music with and we felt it was a was a strong idea and we got really excited about it and we started talking to people about it and other people were excited about it too and felt the potential in it so we kept on going you know it was very difficult very is a lot of difficult  aspects aspect you know the first thing we did is we organized a kickstarter campaign and we raised money to go to five of the nile countries to meet musicians and we met with musicians in ethiopia in egypt in kenya in uganda and tanzania and at that time we realized that actually musicians were really excited about the idea they felt like it was a possibility for them to learn something new to grow creatively and also to let their own culture shine in the context of the eastern continent a lot of the musicians said that you know the world knows west african music they know music from mali they know music from senegal but actually the world doesn't really know east african music and so many musicians felt excited about the idea that could shine their music to the world and really give an identity to to to a part of east african culture that's essential which is the music i think the idea of pan african ism is very exciting to us and also that something that because the way you now the you you know found its heart in addis ababa you know he'll be a has been a touchstone of pan african ideas for a long time so we felt but but at the same time you have to start somewhere you know and we would love to to continue collaborating with musicians from across africa but you know  the idea of the nile has is what has united us for an hour or month u s tour so next we go to long beach california and san diego santa barbara berkeley stand for from there we go to the midwest and from there we go to the east coast and we're doing many shows the university of maryland boston university dartmouth pace university lincoln center and