time once again for community form and we are very lucky to have back with us live in the studios this morning shawna swan sharma's who want is still a city council member representing district four i thank you very much for coming in and spending time with prise to your listeners who live in the seattle area that very having a massive crisis in the shortage of affordable housing and the exploding homelessness in the last decade the rents in the seattle area have grown by sixty five percent and the median home price is now over eight hundred thousand dollars so in other words what we have seen is the price of affordable housing of the price of housing going up to such a degree that people are being forced out of the city that they work and so in other words you know we're having we're seeing people move farther and farther away from their places of work and keep in mind seattle like every other city is not a run on a daily basis by billionaires it's run by hundreds of thousands of working people going to work every single day and but it's those same working people including the middle class who are facing an a cute crisis in affordability and not to mention those of us who've already been pushed into homelessness there's now increasingly people who have experienced at least bouts of homelessness we have four thousand kids in th big schools who are facing bouts of homelessness this is an absolute scandal if you think about the kind of society will we want to live in and really and i want to talk about the tax in a second but i wanted to frame that in the context of what this question really is about it's not just about access or housing it's about who gets to occupy urban spaces in america today because what we're seeing is a housing crisis not just in seattle but we're seeing this in every metropolitan area around the nation we're seeing it in vancouver b c we're seeing it in london in every other city in the world as well so what we have what we have on our hands is this massive inequality that is growing even greater under capitalism and that manifesting itself in the question of housing affordability that is why it is absolutely urgent that we do something about it and that's why that's the genesis behind looking to raise progressive revenues to build but eminently affordable publicly owned housing and it's important to emphasize publicly owned because all this faith in the market has completely failed us we know that the market is not going to deliver us out of this crisis as a matter of fact relying on the market has made the crisis even more even sharper because all that's happened with all this construction boom in seattle is that more and more homes are being built that are only affordable to the richest amongst doesn't it's become the city has become a playground for the rich so where do you go for the money to build this housing do you go to the working people of seattle who are in a state with the most regressive tax system in the nation do you go to small businesses who as it is struggle to maintain a foothold no you go to big business that hasn't paid anything close to its fair share to worse the city's survival so it means that amazon and corporations like amazon top three to five percent so that we can raise one hundred fifty million dollars every year which would allow us to build up to seven hundred fifty permanently affordable publicly owned units with union labor and priority hire agreement you know meaning apprenticeship programs for the kids who live in the city and it would allow us to greatly expand homeless services so the there was two hearings about this this week one was a monday night a public forum where the public was invited in and then there was a follow up on wednesday where council began to hammer out some of the ideas around the proposed legislation as our it is right but if i might talk about it a little bit on monday we had a public hearing on the tax on big business to find affordable housing and homeless services in other words the employee our stacks are as you said correctly mike h d and on wednesday there was a committee meeting to discuss the details of that law but you know i think while it's enough maybe in some ways to say just that and leave it at that i would go a little bit  beyond just the superficial details to go into what actually happened at these meetings because what happened at these two meetings and juxtaposing them against each other really contains a narrative that is important for us to understand how we can win social change because first of all just to give a little bit of a context to your listeners who haven't been part of our ongoing struggle but who supported you know who would agree with us for what we are doing  the reality is that we are not at this point where the council is on the cusp of warding on the stacks because the majority of the council members agreed with ordinary working people and really really want to alleviate the dire situation that they're facing the reality is that the city council just like the mayor's office is occupied by primarily by politicians who primarily represent the interests of big business so it's not that they advocated it was the movement of ordinary people renters housing activists through the people's budget movement last year the housing for all coalition the affordable housing alliance which is also a coalition that works with housing for all and it was basically activists on the ground including from socialist alternative from democratic socialism america the tenants union and many other organizations grassroots organizations and we fought in the people's budget last fall to stop the sweeps of homeless encampment and for th tax but you know what happened last november which is only months ago the majority of the council voted against this decks and they voted against the stop this reaps legislation so what we're seeing now and this is an important lesson what seeing now only a few months later with the council being at the cusp of voting on this this shows the power of building organized movement and organized resistance because the same council made up of the same politicians who opposed a big business development corporation and owned by paul allen and we had a spokesperson from safeway which is owned by the new you know huge chain called albertsons all of them have said two things that they cannot afford to be the stacks and second that this is a tax on jobs both are lies and then our movement in order to exert our power in good in the public hearing we started anting between speakers we were saying housing is a human right so do you know what after listening very politely and respectfully to the big business representatives then decided she is going to turn on the ordinary people who are there and keep in mind that included homeless people that included women of color that include a young people who are struggling with homelessness and you know many dozens of activists who have been fighting so diligently and sincerely she decided that it was wrong of us to chant housing as a human right she decided that was disruptive and the second time we chanted between speakers she threw us all out and i see us because i'm not separate from the movement and when she decided to take that action i completely disagree with her i spoke about it and i walked out with the movement we were being you know we were outside the locked doors can you imagine how undemocratic this approach is where the public is tone out of a public hearing i had a lot of people come up to me and say how can this even be happening you know how can you throw the public are the public hearing but the reality is that it showed it gave the movement a chance to show what happens when we fight back which is that we can win so in other words the woman refused to go away the moment if used to accept her idea that only ten people at a time would be allowed to allowed in we said that's not a public hearing if you're just allowing a limited number of people inside chambers so instead of accepting the establishment it's not about just can't remember back to this is about the establishment internet fixed is accepting this this completely unacceptable approach to how the public hearing should be conducted we were we stood outside the doors and kept chanting lead as in and amazon we never relented and it was ultimately to save face for the establishment and other council members said you know why we need to let the public and because they understood that this is going to be completely disgraceful and shameful for the establishment and a complete loss of face to allow the movement to dominate like this but we did end up dominating because we all came in together and we all resoundingly spoke in favor of the tax and against big business now wednesday two days later we had another meeting as you said a committee meeting at that meeting people were not able to mobilize so who ended up dominating that hearing  our boat as far as i know posted that because they were amongst those who voted no as i said in november and what we had was a lot of discussion on details of the tax what we had was council members using up time to make the meeting boring and asking asinine questions like what is a housing unit is it an apartment i mean these are not questions because any individual politician is too stupid know they're very smart they're this is a conscious doc tick that is used by the establishment to make meetings boring because when you make meetings boring you make politics an x inaccessible to ordinary people it is when people mobilized to city hall and really exert their voices and that chanting is part of that that you really you know you have the ability to exert pressure on city hall and city hall dominated by corporate politicians and as one speaker the public hearing said you know amazon and those corporations don't need to come and chat they don't even need to come to the public hearing they don't need to write letters they don't need to bubblicious leaflets and you know stand outside of tables and get people to come to city council hearings they don't need to do any of that because they have so much political clout that they have many of these politicians in their back pockets that is why it has to be understood that the movement exerting its own you know it's own exist and its own ability to organize is absolutely critical because without that we wouldn't even be here it was interesting and watching the video of monday's forum and it looked like the first ten or twelve  very pro big business fact it's it's interesting how they must've been when forever to get on that list and the time you know the marilyn strickland who used to be the mayor of tacoma and is now the spokesperson for the metropolitan chamber of commerce she has a dime to come hours before working people don't you know they you know they barely come on time because they have to hold down jobs there was a speaking of jobs there was a couple of those people who spoke that specifically said that hey we're we're a big union outfit you know we have a lot of union workers as if the business itself had been interglacial in bringing the union into their business yes that was the spokesperson i think that was that i was born the spokesperson for safeway which is owned by albertsons yes you're absolutely right she ducked about the unionized workers as if safeway had welcomed the union into the workplace as a matter of fact it was a union yes c w you know that that obviously historically if you look at the historical record they fought to unionize retail grocery workers and it was the fact that the workers are unionized was used disingenuously by the safeway spokesperson to say to peddle this mythology that this is a tax on jobs and that if you implement this tax you're going to oh my god you're going to negatively impact unionized workers because we're going to have to close down stores because our profit margins are so ten you know first of all i mean just because they can as an economist  it is not true that this is a tax on jobs plain and simple this is a lie it is reminiscent to me of the lies that big business used to peddle during the fight for fifteen in two thousand and fourteen you know when we were fighting for fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage big business went around saying well you know you can't pass this because it's actually going to hurt the very people you want to help because if you increase the wages then we're going to have to lay people off and then you know what what's going to happen how people you're trying to help but what happened after before for fifteen dollars an hour has there been any economic apocalypse because of the wage increase absolutely not as a matter of fact even though the head of the or the former head of the washington restaurant association himself said that because of the wage increases in seattle what did happen was that the russian front outside seattle on the periphery were forced to consider increasing wages because they were not competing for workers who were able to get higher wage jobs in seattle so in other words all of this is mythology that you know this is a tax on jobs this is the kind of lie big business will say because they don't want to pay that tax so let me give you some facts amazon which is one of the major corporations that will be paying this tax and keep in mind this is not a tax on small business and as a matter of fact big business try to bring in a tax on small businesses through something called the skin in the game you know that small business should have a skin in the game  movement and my office computer ferociously opposed the skin in the game and i have no doubt in my mind that ultimately the draft legislation that we have does not have a tax on small businesses precisely because our movement fought against it and we said that small business working people should not be paying for this amazon and big corporations like amazon should be paying for this so let's look at some of the facts about amazon amazon made five point six billion dollars of profit not revenue profit last year j the owner of amazon is now the wealthiest man in the world with one hundred billion dollars of wealth i mean that is just in comprehensible to people know much one hundred billion dollars even looks like i mean it is in comprehensible levels of wealth and the i r s in two thousand and sixteen found that amazon and not revealed a lot of their tax relevant information in their taxes and order amazon to be pay over a billion dollars in debt for taxes are back taxes so called back taxes but last year a late last year trump and the republicans gave a one point eight trillion dollar corporate tax you know handout to big business this is a whopping historic corporate handout and to this handout to a grandfather clause in this and out amazon now does not have to pay back seven hundred eighty nine bill million dollars of those before taxes so we're talking about  corporation that can not only afford to pay that tax we're talking about it is pocket change for these corporations so also brought up a couple times the first dozen or able with the stated idea that this shouldn't this cannot just be a seattle solution because it's not a seattle problem it's a region wide problem now on the face of that that sounds completely accurate and reasonable as an economist i would agree this is not just a seattle problem this is a regional problem because when you see housing prices exploding it doesn't you know it doesn't prices don't just don't observe city borders in any strict way you know that housing crisis spills over in fact now s molly activists are talking about how the small business immigrant own small businesses in tukwila are finding it hard to remain intercooler so no doubt there's no doubt that this this problem has spilled over far and wi completely dishonest about one table is the cost composition of that body and the solutions that they are putting forward what they have said is no taxes on big business and not really raising any real revenues but solving the problem in other words i mean to quote one of the speakers who is an amazon tech worker himself and making a good salary who spoke very who spoke passionately for their tax our public hearing back on amazon he said that if you have business owners and business representatives who say that yes the problem is getting worse i agree homelessness and affordable housing problem is getting worse yes i agree we need to do more and hence my conclusion is that we need to raise less revenues from big business he says they're just not good at math the best thing you can say about them is that they're weak at math and the worst thing of course in the truest thing about them is that their loyalties their political loyalties are aligned with big business so in other words if we  our breath at too far one table or of you know corporate government aided politics anywhere at any level to solve this problem that's not going to happen that is why ordinary working people have to fight for themselves and that is the only reason  and our housing crisis so it sounds like there are some business people out there that do get that relationship it's a lot of small businesses have actually supported this tax the owner of a this very unique combination of being a business owner and a socialist she's a member of socialist alternative and she has said very clearly over and over again that this is not a tax on small businesses and that business big business should pay and as a matter of fact small businesses struggle to survive but the reason they struggle to survive is not because workers are demanding too much it's because gap alyssum as a system favors big business it favors consolidated corporations it does not favor your neighbor copy shop this whole idea of you know the mom and pop capitalism is is that only met it was in mended to get ordinary people to buy into the capitalist system and you know feel like i'm ultimately i'm going to benefit from this and so actually henders said that's not going to happen and that there's a direct correlation between the siphoning off of the wealth at the top and expanding problems that we are seeing at the bottom is not an unfortunate coincidence that jeff bezos is one hundred billion dollars and many of us are facing homelessness that's not an unfortunate coincidence that's a good wrecked gaza link between the two things and as a matter of fact there is a direct causal link between increasing rents and homelessness there was a study from the journal of urban affairs recently nationwide study and as i said it's not a seattle only problem it's a it's an american problem now homelessness and affordable housing crisis this study found that nationwide  every under a dollar increase in the median rent you see a double digit increase in homelessness and how much there is a much increase exactly depends on which region you're talking about so in other words for every hundred dollar increase in run you're seeing homelessness explored by fifteen percent twenty percent in some cases sixty percent so it's not it's no surprise that we're having home homelessness crisis and it's completely wrong and i know more most of the people who are listening to this agree with me it's completely wrong to say that if you become homeless it's because something you did wrong oh you became you know involved in things that ruined your life and somehow you are responsible alone no homelessness and the price is an affordable housing is a social problem and as a society we need to ask ourselves what kind of city do we want seattle to be do we want seattle to be a playground for the wealthy or do we want it to be a city that is truly welcoming to all i mean after tr elected you had democrat after democrat saying you know i won my city to be welcoming for all yes but how is it going to be welcoming if the very people who make the city run can't afford to live here and are facing a daily problem not just our survival in general but imagine the commute and the traffic snarls that people have to face every single day because they are pushed farther and farther away from their place of work so just about two minutes left so you discuss the legislation  a bit on wednesday why would one not expected to be watered down between last wednesday and then the other two hearings about it later we should absolutely not expect that it wouldn't be watered down or at least that attempts would be made you know when we were fighting for fifteen there were a lot of people who were you know progressive leaders who were fighting for fifteen dollars an hour what the legislation meant into city hall they said they were urging me so alternative fifteen now all the grassroots activist to stop fighting you know you know because it was time apparently according to them it was time to be nice to the politicians nice to city council and you know because they were going to pass this they have promised us they're not going to mess with it it's going to be as is going to be passed as as we got actually recognize that is absolutely not going to be the case that the city council would push for loopholes as much as they could and what happened was not only that they pushed for in april and i remember saying oh my god you want to deny three to four months of wage increases to workers to what end you know to what end it is this is great judas and it was only because fifty now did not agree  analysis that this we were done fighting that we kept fighting to love very and it was appropriate that we did because because of our fighting we were not we did not succeed in keeping every loophole at bay but we did succeed in defeating some of the worst loopholes which would have truly weakened the legislation so we have to remember the lessons of that struggle and note that this time around it will be the same if we stop mobile ising then  pushing back against loopholes let me mention of very key loopholed that i found out only on wednesday that apparently some don't remember i don't know who is going to push for a so called sunset clause meaning this tax would end after five years th really insidious amendment that would come in and it will succeed if we don't push back so i really urge everybody who's watching this please join me on may ninth that is a wednesday a two pm at the committee hearing because we absolutely need everybody who time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning dr vincent and tony vinson and tony is a associate professor of history and founder of the center for black studies at monk college in washington d c he's also director of research for american university's nuclear studies he is a regular contributor to the have to huffington post and he is here to talk about his book african americans against the bomb nuclear weapons colonization and the black freedom movement and said thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us this morning thanks for having me so start out tell us what was the motivation in writing your book african americans against the bomb for most of my career as an academic and also as an activist or evolved around the black freedom movement civil rights issues nuclear weapons really wasn't on my radar like a lot of kids and  everything changed for me the first time i went to hear shimon nagasaki in two thousand and five i went theirs as a student and i was so filled with anger and guilt and rage about what my country had done in japan that when i came back i remember saying to my advisor at the time as a young student i need to figure out a way now to combine these two passions of mine eliminating racism and eliminating nuclear weapons and he said answer me one question what did african americans think about dropping the bomb in hundred five and i was trying to find the answer that question that then just started ten years of research and taking it all the way up to obama on and ended up as a result of this book yeah i have to say prior to hearing about your book it it was obvious that people of color have not been clued at all in the fight against nuclear weapons yet we typically look at this or think about this is being a pacifist white middle class issue and that's just simply not the case a lot of people in fact when i pitched this idea said you're crazy you're not going to find anything and understandably so african americans are too busy trying to gain their own freedom and equality didn't have time to deal with an issue like this and  but they were wrong and so when i started looking i think one of the first things that really caught my eye was finding the that malcolm x had actually met with secretly with atomic bomb survivors and eureka apartments and how he always combined this issue with colonialism and with the black freedom movement and so then it just started that process of looking at so many people and so it was finding people inside organizations people acting on their own  two boys and then so many black women that were influential in this and just on and on so it was always there and at times it would have been flow but to see this issue constantly be there in the black community was  that again is just too often overlooked because we want to we want to compartmentalize this we want to take you know black history month comes and we have a picture of maher and a picture of rose in our textbooks for kids in that concludes black history month and to keep them the nice neat little categorical boxes and not act as if they had any role in international relations foreign policy militarism or any of these things and that's just not the case so talk about specifically when did the resistance to nuclear weapons for start in the black community  immediately so first thing i understand is that there was an affinity with japan already built in before the bomb was ever dropped people often forget that when italy invaded ethiopia nine hundred thirty five it was the japanese that  came to the defense in said they were going to help their color brothers and sisters it was during japanese internment nothing's monolithic so it's not save a body in the black community thought the same but there were many in the black community which happens in terms that said here are a group of people that are being put in these concentration camps for no reason except the color of their skin this could happen arson actually trying to sneak food and clothes into these to the to the concentration camp so people like dubois had already bend traveling in asia and was lionized in japan this was all before the bomb was dropped and so and when we dropped the bomb before there was any organized movement some of the first groups to come out against it of course were its comic scientists and religious groups fellowship reconciliation but also those in the black community not and again any major organization just individuals even coming out pastors in black churches and certainly in the black press were so many early on pittsburgh courier chicago defender baltimore afro american where the black community really got their information from they were they were seeing columnists write about this as well what about the regular people i understand through some of your research there are people who are writing letters to the editor yes so i wanted to besides getting the actual the bigger names that we know of i wanted to feel what was going on in the community so i started going through letters to the editor which you know for kids today when i talk to students today they can go to pro quest and they can put in a few key words hit enter and it's all right there and for me i was in the library of congress on microfilm going through issue by issue and painstakingly but it didn't matter if it was beauty shop owners or it was truck drivers or it was domestic workers it was all the same and it was a very much a very apocalyptic version of this agree don't have enough religion to stop this the genie is out of the bottle what are we going to do even those that were happy about the war ending were expressing a celebrate tory attitude towards the bomb because we also see that there are in the black press there's praise for african americans who worked on the bo project but again if you go back and look at them they're praising them for being these wonderful mathematicians and scientists showing that they can work side by side with whites and showing that this should lead to equality not praise for the actual bomb itself i don't know the details on it yet but i know that there with the hanford nuclear reservation that blacks were worked a lot on that facility building in any way and that they were segregated off into i believe pascoe at the time yes this is part of the larger environmental racism or environmental justice and how these things are connected so what we start to see happening is one nuclear testing early in the one nine hundred fifty s done on black veterans so we were taking veterans that had fought and then sending them out to nevada and then not telling them what we were doing and testing nuclear weapons on them of course were filled with cancer and there was no nothing done for them the atomic veterans both black and white are still around today and of the only apologies or anything that ever came of it was in the ninety's with bill clinton but nobody ever really pay attention to except it was the same day that the o j verdict came out so little overshadowed but i still talk with a lot of the atomic veterans and even as some of them are passing out about trying to get a medal for them and trying to get their recognition and actually the most recent person who blocked it was john mccain of all people but yes we also see this in the us of that what you're talking about hand for with the savannah river project and that was in georgia where again they were doing the same thing hiring african americans to work in these but in these bomb plants not giving them any kind of protection and there scrubbing walls and they're cleaning this nuclear waste knowing getting nothing in return filled with cancer so you know what nuclear weapons nuclear weapons destroys everything in their path they don't discriminate but those who possess them do and so we look at everything from economic conversion to nuclear testing around the world to building the bombs where the uranium comes from and it's such a where they've been used it is people of color who are mostly who are more affected in many ways than other populations talk about byard reston and the connection to  movement that developed in africa that is a long history of activism of course dating back to the one nine hundred thirty s and it's so tragic that that two in particular rustin and paul robeson are so forgotten  our history and of course for us that has been marginalized because he was gay so he was iced out of this history and kids don't even know his name when in fact you may have not had a march on washington without rust and he was the organizer he was an amazing organizer is so ruston felt so strongly about this issue and was surrounded though by white pacifists who didn't want to take as a militant a stance as he did in many cases so when the french want to be a nuclear power and on a world stage and they decide they want to test their first nuclear weapon and they make the announcement they're going to do it in the sahara and you had this raid at the time as a revolution was happening you had this raid at the time is when the crew most coming to power in ghana and the people in ghana feared that the nuclear fallout would affect the cocoa industry and so rust and puts a team together british activists and himself an african activists and and goes to africa on a mission to stop the french test and he argues it's the most important work he'd ever done they're literally laying their bodies on the line eventually the french do test their nuclear weapon but it leads to protests all around the continent it leads to new crewmen having follow up world without the bomb conferences and being an activist against this but not everybody wanted this  a philip randolph at the time was sending letters to ruston saying you need to come back here and off of the stuff that we're trying to get ready for john kennedy in the primaries in one thousand nine hundred convention and we need now for you to be back here working on civil rights and russians writing letters back to him saying don't you understand how colonialism and how this is this is all connected this is you can't separate these things and so finally rest and says to the black leaders in united states i'm going to leave it in your hands you decide to come back so he eventually does j musty goes to kind of fill in for him in africa but but yeah was he always said it was some of the most important if not the most important work you've ever done in his entire career that's wild because wasn't that a criticism for martin luther king to on the issues he was trying to expand the entire movement to and are saying no no you need to focus absolutely and again we tend to do is we want to you know preserve king on the steps of the lincoln memorial as if i have a dream and his life and we're hearing all of this now because of next week not only a year fifty years from when he died the day he died but also of course april fourth one thousand nine hundred seventy year to the day died when he gave his beyond vietnam speech we would argue is that last year is when he was the most radical and we're starting to see more and more people highlight that year and really focus on that and show that there was so much more to him in terms of how he looked at economics with democratic socialism and how he looked at the sanitation workers strike and and of course triple evils  when you look at nuclear weapons the fascinating thing about king is he was talking and speaking out against nuclear weapons a decade earlier i first found him talking about this is early one nine hundred fifty seven and so he consistently talked about this in what talk at spelman or in black churches to other civil rights leaders and say what is it it makes no sense to care about integrating lunch counters and not worry about the world in which you're trying to integrate or what does it matter if we finally achieve this social justice if we're all dead from nuclear war so he was constantly pushing these things and yes of course now last year his life many turned on him for this thought he should just focus on civil rights not speak out against vietnam or nuclear weapons even by ruston at the end his views and kings and up actually becoming inverted by by the end of that last year because ruston wants nothing to do with communism at this point in ties to vietnam anti war movement to that so he's very much against king going out and doing these things he actually changes his views later in life during that period so yeah king is is is always focused on this while he's looking at civil rights and the thing is where he learned a lot of this from was his wife of course carette it was such a seize an activist dating back to her days and college she had been a season activist with women strike for peace women's internationally give peace a freedom she had you know always talked about combining peace and civil rights and how these things are are in are connected and again in the rewriting of history the patriarchal society so many and not only do we forget that history but for many of these women they were dealing with not only a patriarchy but a race prejudice inside these women's organizations that were dominated by white women that thought th should be a single issue that you shouldn't be bringing race into this so they were often navigating this racism within these groups in trying to deal with both things it wants and the the single issues  issue comes up a lot with let's say black lives matter currently i mean that seems to be this critique that constantly follows almost any type of issue that someone is choosing to focus on some groups or are focusing right and again what you you can really learn i think a lot we look at intersectionality such a buzzword now and how all these things are connected and i believe that they are certainly but that issue i think we really can learn a lot from in the recent with parkland and what this last march and i've been to a lot of rallies and protests and marches in my day and i brought so many of my students to this recent one in washington for gun violence and i would argue it was one of the best i've ever been to if not the best simply for looking at the or how they organized it who they had speaking the crowd it was just incredible in a lot of ways one thing i thought was a recent article in about this that they did brilliantly is they managed to still make the main focus the focus about gun violence but yet they were clearly intersectional throughout their entire rally chicago was well represented they had speakers to make sure that black she males were discussed and why they are being marginalized they had the girl talking about some l a and hispanic community so they were talking very clearly about all these other issues when it whether it was feminism or whether it was racism they were all these things are all interweaved throughout this yet gun violence was still the main thing they were pivoting around and so i think this march do we include what was then a black lives matter and call that back then and so there are all these debates about what we should do and they managed to include those would still having nuclear weapons as being the main focus and they just pivot around that and i think that's what we can learn from that you certainly can do both ok so related just to you since you brought it up the rally that happened last week and heavy critique on social media about oh did they talk about how the u s is killing people in other countries you know we're fine with removing guns from our streets but no one brings up you know justifiably so that that is a major issue can you since you were there can you fill me in if you touch shore first of all let's again keep in perspective and i think they're brilliant and they are way ahead of their time but they are seventeen year olds so we're not expecting them to have i don't expect them to have a large critique of us foreign policy and start debating neoliberalism in what trumps doing it this wasn't the really to do that right so that's the thing is you know versus when you had certain organizations remember during the iraq war were i thought the iraq war protests thought you was great i was very critical of answer very critical an answer does any railing or organizing i think it's awful i think there's the speakers go on drivel on and on and on and you end up having all these larger issues militarism and again there's a place in a space for that but the thing was doing these interviews for this june twelfth march and talking to them one of the things they were really focused on was making sure they got middle america making sure they got different communities involved in this it's how you got a million people without the internet in central park to rally against nuclear weapons so imagine if these kids had come out and said we're going to now start railing against us foreign policy we're going to start really against the military industrial complex going around you what would you have got eight hundred thousand people and then all the so again it's not to say these things are all connected and somebody wants to do a march and that great will support it but we need to keep things in perspective and that regard i think you know so with social media you're going to have a you know anybody that wants a critique going to critique but you know so talk about one of the aspects is obviously colonialism in your book talk more about the connection between colonialism and nuclear weapons now one of the first to really come out against and connect this colonialism issue weapons and the answer of course was the belgian control congo and he was making those connections that of colonialism works with the west and how it effects and how it is related nuclear weapons there was the issue again of at that point who had nuclear weapons and how they were using this as a car its talks about atomic diplomacy as blackmail to get then resources out of various places you have and then again when you have even king starting to say an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere you had melcombe that was talking about how what's happening in the non white world is all connected and so ruston again looking at the french and looking that is an act of colonialism and what they were doing in africa so you see that you know over and over again during the vietnam war threatening to use nuclear weapons multiple times and of course what did we want we really want to you know get a foothold into southeast asia for rubber ten oil you know iron ore all of these things natural resources so i don't see how you can you know pull colonialism out of this even when you look at issues with nuclear testing whether it's in the marshall islands or whether it's native american lands with it was kazakstan for russia or there are over and over again it's people french polynesia people of color that suffer suffer this nuclear colonialism is what you could really call it  see i think it's always there and you can't really separate it in the best evidence of that is when you look in one thousand nine hundred five such a critical year in so many fronts in the summer of fifty five you know the heinous murder of emmett till and later in the year in december rosa parks refused to  give proceed on the bus in the middle of that you had the bandung conference the all african asian conference first ever in indonesia and if you look at their platform they're very clear that they were against colonialism nuclear weapons and white supremacy is the three main things are talking about in some us representatives actually send congratulatory messages and welcome messages but at the bandung conference such a remarkable time in our history that again doesn't get connected once really in this larger frame of the black freedom movement and the three issues all these issues are still embedded in the fabric today absolutely and i don't think there's any more clear evidence of that than having a nuclear weapons ban treaty passed at the united nations where you have over one hundred countries most of in the majority of them being nonwhite majority people of color and at the same time ninety percent of the world's nuclear weapons are in the possession of two authoritarian white nationalist leaders in the world right now with trump and putin i mean you can't have a bigger juxtaposition right now when you have a majority of the now we're alaskan and this madness and then you have these two men wanting to start a new arms race essentially and or use actively use their weapons in third world countries absolutely absolutely and again threatening to use them using them in third world countries and what are the countries that are are being and people say well you but you're ignoring you know that pakistan is clear weapons in india and china absolutely not ignoring that at all some say only you know the white west has nuclear weapons but we are looking at who has the majority of them right now and who would be harmed by it just in general i mean if just just pakistan and north and india had a small  conflict we're talking billions billions with a b that would be that would be dead through famine and through the temperature changing and through fallout you hear trump talking about you know this is another thing of that we don't focus species in baltimore city schools at the same time you have a president that is willing to spend one point two trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons when we already have enough to end civilization so it's educating and letting people know that you know how these connections are made that you cannot talk about one without talking about the other and that again is something that we're not doing enough of right now and talk about of the strength of this fabric of colonialism  holding the current power structure together because for a brief period there we saw with the obama administration that it appeared that he was anti nuclear and anti nuclear weapon and weapons and then boom he turned around  in the military industrial complex with the largest spending spree in in history yeah obama is spoken out in really been against nuclear weapons since he was a college student he was a journalist after june twelfth  hundred two march wrote about it in college and i think that he had done a lot of positive steps very early on he had in his nuclear summits and he worked to get loose nuclear weapons making materials in safe hands which he successfully did a lot of countries in fact he got enough material out of the ukraine for for nuclear weapons before it fell into chaos i think he deserves credit for the new start treaty and of course for i think the most important thing he did as president was the iran nuclear deal without firing a shot through diplomacy is that mean that he doesn't deserve criticism of course not he didn't i would have liked him to take nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert before he left obviously with king with who came next decrease the amount of clear weapons not signed on for this one point two trillion or two trillion dollar modernization plan but at the end of the day i don't put that on him i put that on us everything that we have wanted we have had to push for everything that we've gotten so if we wanted this we needed a million people in the streets demanding at this and he was asked once during his campaign in zero eight what would martin luther king support you he said no king would be on the streets making me do what i said i was going to do he got it he knew it so it has to be on us you know and i think there was just with obama there was a level of there was such racism and such obstruction against him that for a lot of us that normal we are against the man we were saying wait our man is the man and how do we handle this and do we go out protest him but the other side is so horrific i think there was a lot of that do we give them a pass on something when maybe we shouldn't all these kind of things and so and i think there was it again i'm not saying it's the right thing but some people still trusted him and you know it's ok he's not you know you think to me the most important question when you're going to go in a voting booth for get even party is if we are faced with another cuban missile crisis who do you want sitting in that chair and people feel confident having the cool calm collected harvard educated lawyer sitting in that chair versus what we have now so but as far as you know this issue goes i think you know obviously it's just it's maddening were at now with colonialism or with nuclear testing or with money being spent all of it you know it's  it's horrific when the few minutes left in your book you have examples of individuals who when they couldn't find an organization representing their viewpoints they created it right there were many in the black community that were wanted to be part of this and when they were either joining or trying to support a particular way organization they were faced with again internal prejudice and racism they were pushed to the side they were told as you know we don't really going to reach out to the black community has nothing there they don't care and so when i was writing this book and writing for huff post and others this gentleman contacted me and greg johnson he said and you talk to you and show you all the stuff i haven't him  wife gregg and brenda at the time african americans was a librarian at georgetown university ordinary citizens and they cared deeply about this issue in the one nine hundred eighty s and nobody's reaching out to them so with a rotary phone in one flyer they started the group blacks against nukes and that grew to multiple chapters and hundreds of members they were featured on the cover of ebony and jet magazine and were asked to speak in hiroshima and it's just an example of ordinary people doing something extraordinary you know not waiting for for this this movement to come to them and then go ahead and doing it so if you really examine that the one nine hundred eighty s you see and and again beyond obama i know we have to wrap up but you know he certainly wasn't the first want to you look at the congressional black caucus jesse jackson  if you look at harold washington there's a long list of black politicians that really put this front and center and worked hard on this and we need that again and even organizations that this into the fabric of what they were doing for instance the black panther party which was so key in doing so many things that we see today like you know the bread breakfast program and we have clinics here in seattle that still to this day are functioning due to the black panther party yeah which is really the revolutionary stuff and what really made the f b i look at them not the guns in the rhetoric it's these programs but in terms of this if people think nuclear weapons anything the panthers but if you go back and read executive mandate number one bobby seale read and sacramento it clearly connects the black freedom movement to the atomic nagasaki and of course i talked to him about it and he had sort of we did that on purpose we always looked at ourselves in an international light which is why kathleen eldridge no those were asked to speak in hiroshima and they always viewed themselves in the same way all right we are just about of time we're talking with dr vincent intoned he's author of the book african americans against the bomb nuclear weapons colonialism and the black freedom movement and you are speaking monday night here in town in seattle at university of washington bagley hall room one thirty one at six pm doors opened at five forty five so looking forward to that and you're also more you're in town you're working with washington physicians work that you're doing currently thanks my organization yeah washington physicians for social responsibility is a proud member of a statewide coalition that we started about a year and a half ago called washington against nuclear weapons so this is a growing state why coalition of members of the faith community health professionals communities of color peace organization educators and we're all working together to raise awareness about nuclear weapons issues particularly here in washington state and to put members pressure on our members of congress to reduce the threat of nuclear war and the threat posed by nuclear weapons especially here in washington state so you can learn more on our web site www dot org we invite you to join us and hope to see some of you on monday at university of washington six o'clock very good and site in the western hemisphere from its production of plutonium for nuclear bombs and the bang or trying to nuclear sub base that's twenty miles here from seattle which is the largest repository of nuclear weapons in the western hemisphere  we have a unique role where we're located at and in a motivation i would hope towards solving this problem once and for all in a good way so with that we are enforcing our time i want to thank you very much for coming