Tamarra Coleman: Welcome folks as you're entering into the lecture this afternoon, I'm going to give some time to
let the Zoom populate you have a big group tonight,
and then I will introduce our guest speaker.
Loretta Ross: After introducing yourself of course.
Tamarra: Which I always forget to do. [Tamarra laughs]
Welcome, folks, we're going to go ahead and get started. It's a little bit after 4:00, and I don't want to take up
too much time and the sort of logistical stuff and get to the real meat of our event this afternoon, I am glad you all could make it today.
We are competing with the debate which who knew that that would happen right that this would be the night of the big debate.
I'm Tamarra Coleman English faculty at Moorpark College and also a part of the Multicultural Day Committee in which we plan our big multicultural day cheer, but also other
events throughout the year,
and in light of the events over the last six months and the work happening around the world around social justice, and more specifically racial
justice and anti-racism, we thought it would be a good thing to have a lecture series a social justice lecture series focused on race from different perspectives. So this afternoon, we are lucky to have a
I would call her an amazing speaker and and friend of mine,
to speak today, but just to give you, before I introduce her just to give you a bit on how we will operate throughout this meeting, if you need closed captioning, just click on the "CC" down at the bottom of the screen there will be live captioning happening as the event is going on.
There the chat is disabled for the event, but the Q&A will be
enabled, your questions will be answered at the end, those that we can get to, so we will try to do a good job at picking up on themes and similar questions that you all have.
We won't be able to answer all 219 of your questions, but we certainly will try to get to as many as possible in the last
half hour
of the lecture this evening.
Is there anything else I think, let me look at my notes here. So if I missed anything. Oh, this event is being recorded.
So in case you, for whatever reason, don't see the event in its entirety, or you want to see it later or show students or faculty members who are
here as well. It will be recorded and I will publicly let the institutions who have gotten invites to this event know so they can access the recording.
Alright, so, good afternoon again and welcome to the first in the social justice Lecture Series sponsored by Moorpark College's Multicultural Day Committee.
I am so excited, as I said, to be able to introduce today's speaker, Miss Loretta Ross.
I took an expanded version of this course over the summer. It was a four part series that also included weekly discussions and small groups.
I had friends join and we loved it, we gained so much from her experience as a Black woman, a scholar and activist and a human being, trying to navigate the complexity of her life, like all of us.
I met Loretta around 2006 when I was on a fellowship working for a small nonprofit on the south side of Chicago called Black Women for Reproductive Justice.
Her organization was a part of the larger collective of women of color organizations working on reproductive justice called Sister Song, of which Loretta was the Executive Director. Since that time, Loretta, along with other notable women.
of color activists and organizers, [phone rings]
and organizers, sorry.
She has taught me much about women's rights, reproductive justice, in fact, the writer was a part of the group of Black women who coined the term reproductive justice in 1994 based on a human rights framework.
Loretta Ross is currently a visiting associate professor at Smith College and the program for those study of women in gender for the 2019 through 2021 academic years.
She started her career and activism and social change in the 1970s, working at the National Football League Players Association, the DC Rape Crisis Center, the National Organization for Women, the National Black Women's Health Project, the Center for Democratic Renewal,
The National Anti Clan Network, the National Center for Human Rights Education, and Sister Song, as I said before, women of color reproductive justice collective.
Until retiring as an organizer in 2012 to teach about activism her passion transforms anger into social justice to change the world. It is my pleasure to welcome Loretta Ross to our Moorpark College community.
Loretta: Oh, that's a wonderful introduction Tammy. It's kind of embarrassing, though, I think you get a chance to work a lot of different jobs in 50 years. So it sounded like I just jumped from job to job, which is not true. But I do want to say as I load my PowerPoint deck,
that I had the privilege of doing anti-fascist work starting in 1990, and what that allowed me to do
was to learn specifically about what I'm teaching now which is called White Supremacy in The Age of Trump,
and as a professional feminist and someone to join the women's movement in the 70s. I learned that people who did anti-fascist work weren't bringing together
a sturdy enough gender lens for me, and so that's one of the things that I teach about nowadays is how to connect
the dots between racist violence and misogynist violence and anti-immigrant violence, religious violence, anti-gay violence, and on and on. So, if you don't mind, I'm gonna go through the PowerPoint now and try to cram as
much information.
Generally I teach this stuff as a semesters worth of ingestion. So for me to try to do it in an hour and a half it means that I'm going to be speed talking and speed talking is not a natural thing for for girl that comes from southern Texas.
But anyway, most of us are familiar with the Statue of Liberty and if we were asked to describe it we probably
wouldn't even have to look at it to talk about the torch, and the book in her hand and stuff, but I will tell the notice the feet of the Statue of Liberty because and her feet,
below her drapes lie a broken shackles and chains and that's because the statue was given to us by France
to celebrate the end of the Civil War and the massive patient of enslaved Africans, but nowadays people mostly think of the Statue of Liberty is just representing
welcoming immigrants and freedom and things like that, but we've always been a country of these contradictions, where we could celebrate
liberty and freedom while we committed genocide against Native Americans and enslaved kidnapped Africans.
I just want you to keep that picture of the Statue of Liberty in your mind as we talk about what kind of a society, we're going to build.
I'm always inspired by really brilliant people that say the things in much more elegant ways than I can. Hannah Arendt, of course, was a German born philosopher who wrote and analyzed fascism in the 1940's and she talked about how
Fascism developed...
I thought I had started my video.
I'm sorry, we got a glitch. Can you not see my video?
Tamarra: We can.
Loretta: You're saying when I turn my camera off, you can't see the slide?
I can't hear you. If you're speaking.
Tamarra: We can't see your video now.
Loretta: Yeah, but can you see the slides?
Tamarra: Yes.
Loretta: It's the slides. I want you to focus on right now. [Tamarra and Loretta laugh] I turned
my camera off,
because I'm Shuffling papers and things.
Tamarra: You hear that?
Loretta: Are we okay now?
Tamarra: We're good
continue Loretta. [Loretta]: Okay. I was in a panic. I thought the slides had crashed.
No it's not accidental that I turn the
camera off because I wanted to
have the focus on the slides and not on my beautiful face.
Okay, keeping right along. Had a panic attack there.
So anyway, we've always had this easy relationship between the ideals of Democracy and what we actually practice. Right now,
here in the early part of the 20th, 21st century, we're dealing with something that we've never seen before, at least we never recognized it as such in the United States.
And that is to have a government that's actively deconstructing democracy. We never actually experienced that before and some analysts, of course, have called this neo-fascism.
I prefer to call it neo-fascism, but of course, not everybody agrees with me in that term, but we are looking at the devaluation of Democracy and this is abetted by the fact that
more than two thirds of our country doesn't even know the three branches of government. They don't have the civics education to be fully informed participants in the protection of democracy,
and there's a lot of cynicism right now that doesn't believe that human progress is actually being achieved and that rationality and democratic institutions and adjust society are worth protecting.
And we have politicians manipulating fear and granting power to strong figures who panic longer, who tell people that is somebody else's fault that things are so bad in our country,
and there's collaboration between people who are openly fascistic and mainstream bigots to help normalize the unthinkable.
There are many things that we know now about how our country is run and, in particular how our President operate that would have been imaginable a decade ago.
And there's a lot of denial going on in our society, the media doesn't know how to cover this change in governance that's taking place in plain sight.
There's mis-education in the school system. I teach a lot of eager young people who are outraged that they weren't taught the facts of our country and how to become active citizens in defense of it,
and there is disdain for human rights, domestic treaties international agreements, "Who cares, we're just gonna do America First ism," and of course most deadly is science denial.
Right now we have debates of a whether or not people should wear masks as a public health safety measure,
as it were attacking people's liberty, because people have been taught to be afraid of knowledge, to disdain science and education, and of course, anything that's too simple,
too difficult to understand that must just be you elites talking because I don't believe in nuances, I just want black and white.
So if you don't know white supremacy as Mosi Platt says you will be confused by everything else and there's a lot of differences in how people use the term,
white supremacy. After Trump's election, the mainstream media became more comfortable with the term.
And move beyond the limited application to the Ku Klux Klan and the Neo-nazi movement.
But the differences between formal white supremacist, Neo-nazis, white nationalist, White patriots
are not just linguistic but there but different analysts mean different things by these terms and only if you're doing advanced work do you actually need to know.
So I'm going to conflate these terms for ease of discourse in this lecture, but you do also need to know that white supremacy is not about hate.
Hate is an emotion, nor is it about ignorance, but the ideas that exploit hatred and ignorance.
Ideology matters and the white supremacist movement includes all classes of people and not all White people are white supremacist and not all white supremacists are white.
You'll see a number of people of color who subscribe to the white supremacist ideology and you'll see a number of White people who reject the white supremacist ideology,
and because it includes classes of people, we got to avoid the stereotype of the poor ill educated and ignorant
person with tobacco juice dripping down their chin as a white supremacist because this is not an individual problem that can be cured with psycho therapy,
and diversity trainings. It's a wealth producing strategy erected on institutionalized anti-blackness and Native American genocide
that is the central defining characteristic of this experiment in democracy, call the United States. In fact, calling it a hate movement,
or hate crimes as an error, however well intentioned because, well, the term hate crimes is a term train has already left the station, but white supremacy is about choices and how to obtain and maintain money and power. A system of assigning values and advantages to certain people.
This is one formal definition of white supremacy as "A political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources
conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority, and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non white subordination our daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social change." This is by some critical race theorist
Francis Lee Ansley in the book written by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.
I also want to offer another definition of white supremacy by the Combahee River Collective that was written in 1977 for those who don't know the Combahee River Collective is
one of the leading theoretical and activist groups around black feminist theory and they write that white supremacy
is not really the individual delusion of being superior to Black people because a lot of White people who will simply say, "I don't believe I'm superior. I don't believe I'm superior. What are you doing? Why are you calling me
racist, etc?" "Institutionalized white supremacy does not need individual bigotry in order to function, because it is a universal operating system,
that relies on entrenched patterns and practices to consistently disadvantaged people of color and privilege whites."
We often have these conversations that say people, "I don't believe in white privilege, how can I have white privilege. I've worked hard for everything I've gotten,"
and they think it's something individually that they can do or change when in fact it is a totalizing system. The other mistake people make about white supremacy
is reduce it to racism only and there are many components of white supremacy, settler colonialism, Christian nationalism,
nativism, that hyper patriotism that we see, xenophobia, which is hatred of immigrants,
Anti-Semitism. I think that Anti-Semitism is under examined in terms of how it provides the anchor base for anti blackness and white supremacy,
Biological Determinism, that's a large academic work for, for people who believe that your biology is your destiny.
Homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, misogyny, Islamophobia and authoritarianism, these are all components of white supremacy and as a result of course we have social movements
that are working on different aspects of white supremacy, I think, collectively, they're called the human rights movement, and that's what I prefer to call them,
because we're all working on different wings or sectors of the white supremacist framework and yet I tend to see myself as part of the women's rights wing of the human rights movement working with the anti-racist wing
of the human rights movement, and it's really important that the human rights framework demands that we don't violate human rights in order to protect human rights.
So I can't do anti-racist work in a homophobic or transphobic way, nor can I do work in transphobia in a misogynist way without doing violence to the human rights framework.
I think we're really up against the fact that people don't care that they're deconstructing democracy or maybe I should say that in a better way that actually is their project to
deconstruct democracy so that they can establish a permanent minority rule in this country.
Not one man, one vote, was kind of like what happened in apartheid South Africa, where a small and battled minority ruled the majority of the country for decades, and so we're in a battle of value systems.
Whether egalitarianism is going to triumph over authoritarianism, or as more simply, I like to put it as democracy versus fascism.
Capitalism is already in crisis because of Covid, but I think that is going to be further be stabilized because corporations
really unapologetically controlled economies around the world and the governments, particularly since the citizens united Supreme Court decision
that loosened the limits on what corporations can spend in our elections, and so this winner take all democracy will generally will not continue to guarantee white privilege
if they don't do something to change the system. So they're doing this by changing our civil society institutions like attacking the media voting rights, universities,
stacking the judiciary, civil liberties, all of these things will be discredited and are under attack,
and they really do believe I think a lot of people who are elites believe that they can prevent a class or by forming a race war and you actually hear people
saying that if the election doesn't go the way that they wanted to go then we're going to have another cold Civil War as if this is something to be desired. Now I say, "Well, wait a moment. You didn't win the last one you trying to start it all over again. Let's see how that goes."
This is the modern face of white supremacy and I'll explain the connections between all these photographs of course the mag of people,
the confederate the neo-confederates, you see some klan people using the Confederate flag, some anti-immigration protest, of course, the Anti-Semitic incidents at a Jewish temple,
or synagogue, I mean, the armed patriot militias down there on the left, the so the middle bottom left photo is from the Nazis and the hate groups that mobilized 2017 in Charlottesville,
Virginia and the anti-abortionists who are protesters who were protesting that day at the Supreme Court. And a black feminist analysis intersects all of these wings of this movement in many ways that people neglect to connect the dots.
Since I'm talking about fascism, I thought I'd offer a classic Merriam Webster definition of it,
because it is a political philosophy and many of us will experience white supremacy call it fascistic and I'll demonstrate that later in this presentation,
but it exalts a nation and often raised above the individual and it believes at an autocratic centralized government
usually headed by a dictatorial leader with severe economic and social regimentation of poor and working class people not of the rich, by the way, and forcible suppression of opposition, and so obviously we have many of those elements right now in our political system.
And part of the problem is that
as we use the words like fascism, the f word
we're told that we're overreacting, and I love this quote by David Newark that says "The road to fascism is lined with people
telling you to stop overreacting." I think people who were trying to offer warnings in Germany in the 1930s were told they were overreacting, and that's what it feels like now.
And you have right wing and conservatives claiming that the major threat is coming from the left, not the right,
and of course, any claim that we're at this tipping point of our democracy that could lead to neo-fascism is actually they believe a hoax that we're trying to run on them and that we're fear mongering,
and they've been calling us fear mongers for a long, long time because they've been reorganizing for a long, long time.
The first person that I can find because I'm not a historian who said that this one man, one vote democracy will not
forever protect the interests of property owning White men, was John C. Calhoun who said that in 1837. So people have known for a long time
that one man, one vote democracy is not going to permanently protect the privileges of the elite and since the Brown v. Board of Education decision, that commanded
the end of school segregation, there's been an organized movement trying to transition us from Democracy into a more authoritarian form of government. I don't have time in this presentation to
talk about Nancy Maclean's awesome book Democracy in Chains, but I do recommend that you read that, because she talks about how in response to the board Brown v. Board of Education decision,
a group of people with funding from the father of Charles and David Koch help not only
start planning the overthrow of democracy, but also funded things like the John Birch Society that is a part of the anti-communist movement, these, these other things but
let me go on, but to accuse us of overreacting, when we have the evidence and hate crimes that's surging conspiracy theories being spotted by the White House,
lynchings of Black people that are taking place at the seven lynchings of Black people have taken place in 2020 alone,
and they're all being quickly described as suicides, as if there's a wave of Black people suddenly who are tired of being black or something.
and of course the increased violence against Native American, and people of color, and immigrant and then we even end up with this everyday people
letting go of their inner white rage with the bbq Becky's and the Central Park Amy's so that driving while black, breathing while black, swimming while black all suddenly become existential crimes that White people, everyday White people feel that they need to police,
and when you're told that you're overreacting to a non existent threat, then the government and any other authority feel that they don't have to do anything about it because we're just making up this fear as part of the campaign to discredit them apparently.
You have to understand settler colonialism, to really understand the DNA of America. People talk about the
the genocide against Native Americans as of that was just a historical event that took place, that it was isolated and it was necessary for our country to become a country that it is,
but many analysts say you need to look at settler colonialism as a structure, not as an event because this still determines race and gender formations in this country,
as well as claims of citizenship, and we've got this admixture of colonized people,
the indigenous people, enslaved, kidnapped and enslaved Africans and African descendants called African Americans, immigrant populations Latinx and Asian Pacific Islander,
and the colonizers people of European descent all trying to coexist in the same country under a purportedly pluralistic democracy,
and these power imbalances are maintained through direct and indirect violence and of course the prison industrial complex.
And militarized genocide did not start with Hitler, it actually started with our determination and I use the our loosely because I wasn't around,
but with the colonizer's determination to clear an inhabited land so that they could settle in it,
and that's the difference between settler colonialism and root and traditional colonialism separate colonialism is when the colonizers bring their
wives, and their children, and their families from settled in the country. Traditional colonialism
the people want to return to their countries of origin after extracting the natural resources and the wealth that they are trying to extract from the target countries.
And of course this is ongoing elimination of indigenous land claims by murder, disease, assimilation, and renewal and all of this results basically, in an exclusionary private property regime, which has its modern implications because it's amazing that that grand jury in Kentucky
when considering how Breonna Taylor was murdered only charged one of the officers with a property crime
shooting into the apartment next door and not with the murder of Breonna Taylor and the violation of their human right...
rid her of her human rights clearly demonstrating that we have a country that values property over human life, over everything.
And so this is one of the legacies of settler colonial logic and part of that logic says you can use coercive labor to colonize the land, to build infrastructure, to extract resources, to build well.
Obviously, different races of people and different ethnicities of people experience different types of racism bigotry and dehumanization,
and these different types are related to each other and reinforce each other, but they don't act the same
on each other the same way anti-black racism is not the same as anti-Asian racism when Asian Americans are forced to endure the stereotype as the model minority when Black people have never been called the model anything,
except you know well fed slaves, they try to run that myth on us, but feel these racisms require their own individual treatment, even as they work in concert together.
And another logical course of settler colonialism is control of land space resources and of course the people on that land,
and amazingly, we use national borders to lock people behind borders to contain our labor force, but we allow money and
capital, and environmental problems, and crime and drugs to be totally transnational but they don't recognize borders with those kinds of things.
And so we're really quickly arriving at a point of serious consideration, whether these borders that we so fiercely protect are even viable anymore and we do normalize brutality and racialized violence through an individualized philosophy.
I am calling into question of how the how the Enlightenment philosophy has been used to justify
genocide, colonialism, and settler colonialism because it's supposed to be a philosophy about autonomous autonomy and liberty, but the way is being used
makes me question whether or not it is still viable as the guiding philosophy to get out of this regime
of exploitation that we're in and I'm actually investigating some ancient philosophies like Confucianism and Buddhism and Unbutu to from South Africa
to look at what other kind of moral philosophies, we can use that help us express our human interdependence, rather than the alienated such project that we see in the Enlightenment philosophy,
and they do self justify this belief that indigenous people who inhabited this land couldn't properly exploit it anyway,
and so non settlers can't properly use their own labors, I mean, Africans who were kidnapped obviously wouldn't work without the slave owners, making them do so and so they justify their wealth building strategy by claiming that
they were the ones destined to do these things, and so you end up equating civilization and democracy only with whiteness, even though the whole concept of democracy itself was one of those that not only has its Greek antecedents, but
the settlers who came here learned quite a bit from the Iroquois nation.
Someone I would invite people to pay attention to and his writings...
he talks about the five stages of fascism and it's very
much when I'm talking about today.
The first stage is intellectual exploration where you promote national myths and conspiracy theories by Make America Great, America is a Christian nation,
racism only exists against White people, and on and on that you got to elect the president who suffered all these bankruptcies can drain the swamp of corruption,
really the ideology that a deconstructed government is unable to cope with things and we're seeing the results of that belief, when we find that our deconstructed government can't cope with Covid,
attacks on evidence and truth as part of that ideological basis base and it does sometimes attract elements of the center and the left and anti-government angst,
but that's why white nationalism must be disguised. The second stage is mainstreaming these ideas and I'll talk more about that later, but
you end up with the white supremacists making a pact with the mainstream conservatives to share power and not call each other out in this power sharing arrangement,
and so elected Republicans ignored justify our cover problems with the neo- fascists that they're in relationship with who they use to attack their opponents
while they pass their policies behind the cover of the chaos, so tax reform, corporate deregulation, hacking the judiciary, on and on. The second, the third stage is taking over state institutions like the judiciary, the electoral system,
the push for corporate deregulation,
decreased taxation, taking over foreign policy. They take advantages of the weakness of democracy and mounted revolutionary attack on the mechanics of democracies,
and these mechanics of where they pervert the non state, the non state institutions or what we call civil society like the media, colleges, universities, education, healthcare, and they convert these institutions very systematically to support their base and to recruit new followers
and then the final stage of fascism is militarization of the state against the population and arrest and rates, like we saw those
totally covert secretive raids against protesters in Portland and Seattle silencing protests, punishing and marginalizing critics,
manufacturing crises to keep the people fearful, exaggerating the threats because they're the strong people that are going to save people from those threats, and defining the other outside of the body politics, and of course, less perpetuate endless war as a way to justify staying in power.
Henry Giroux is a Canadian professor philosopher and he finds the times we we are in as "the culture of cruelty," neo-liberalism is basically a greed is good market fundamentalism, that is accompanied by extreme violence aggressive actions by the state and individuals,
it actually legitimizes suffering and there's a sadistic enjoyment of people suffering and feeling of powerlessness and how can people
understand that they can watch children in cages on our borders and don't think that that's a bad reflection on what we think of ourselves as like country,
but you're dealing with an ideology that says ethics and fairness don't matter anymore, it's only power and neither do facts and truth they don't matter either,
and unfortunately they're being abetted by the social media platforms that are monetizing hate.
I'm told it every time a serious hate incident or call out answer takes it takes place over Facebook or Google or whatever the platforms are, I'm not that technologically wise, but every time one of these
things reaches 1 million followers Google has made $400,000. They profit off of polarization is issues and
chaos, and so we're taught that
life is disposable, particularly those who are not producers, you have this narrative going on that
the good hard working, White people are the producers of a of the wealth of America and everybody else is not a hard working, White person is a taker.
This narrative of the producers versus the takers are the makers versus takers, and it really stokes up this white grievance narrative, this feeling that
White people are being victimized and really, I think, the climate change denial is the clearest sign that they were abandoning the needs of people in the future that I don't think that they are prioritizing the preservation of Mother Earth, while they can make money on its exploitation,
and putting children on the front lines of suffering because I teach a lot of 18, 19,20 year olds, these are children that have grown up with gun shooter drills in their schools and I'm really don't understand why we can't
control this runaway gun culture when all it's doing is making our children live in a very dystopian world, always fearful, and most people own these guns, they own multiple ones, as a matter of fact,
they're the ones that are having the increased with increased mortality,because self inflicted wounds and suicide
is one of the main things killing all these angry White men out here and of course they just can't take themselves out they got to take out their whole families
when they feel they can't take it anymore. So in addition to alcoholism, and opioid abuse, and other drug substances abuse is suicide by gun, is why
the mortality rates for White men are climbing through the roof while for every other population in the United States is going down,
and this hyper masculine rhetoric of survival of the fittest is so Darwinian and it goes hand in hand why people don't want to wear a face mask and really even the pursuit of justice is seen as weak.
And so...
I think Henry Giroux says something very profound about this cultural cruelty where cruelty is the purpose, it's not it's not just about it's accidentally cruel, for it is designed to be cruel,
And why does that happen? You have to go to the philosophy of Ayn Rand to understand partially why this is happening. She of course was a
writer, I don't think she was that greater writer, but people seem to love her, who really preaches preach the value of selfishness as a good thing,
and the way to be truly free is to be selfish of other people's needs and demands on you, and to not have to be responsible to each other is actually a virtue with what she preached,
that a social welfare contract that provides for healthcare, and education, and social security, and taking care of people when they're not able to take care of themselves as actually immoral
in her point of view, and it's irrational because and that is the Randian point of view in besting and people's need is the opposite of the smart thing to do,
and they denied that people are human are interdependent on each other, but I think Covid has exposed the fallacy of that thinking because you can not build enough gates and walls to protect yourself from a virus, nor can you shoot that virus with your 20 guns,
and really, they believe in a Darwinian style competition of everyone competing against each other and
profits should be maximized by businesses with through the lack of regulation and those that are strongest businesses will survive
and it doesn't really matter what kind of environmental practices for whatever you need to practice as long as you're answerable to the shareholders and you maximize profits.
And that the people who aren't lucky enough to be on top of our economic pyramid would be foolish to actually help less fortunate people,
and this whole thing you're calling human rights is just dreams. It's, it's too
utopian to be true. I wouldn't even be talking about and ran if it wasn't that several of the people who are in power and have been in power like Paul Ryan,
Rand, Paul, Donald Trump they believe this philosophy, if you can believe that. And if you ask them, you know, what are the most influential books they've read, they will always have an Ayn Rand book. Well, that's assuming Trump can read, but on their
reading list.
Of course, Carol Anderson is a professor at Emory University and she has detailed in her theory why there's always a white backlash against racial progress in this country and
she very carefully document how we have arguments of states rights every time anything is done to try to achieve any kind of racial forward movement, like there was the redemption after the reconstruction following the Civil War and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. After the Civil War
several Black people were elected to state and city legislators and so you actually ended up with an uprising of White people overthrowing democratically elected
governments in the south and they call this period, The Redemption. They were redeeming the south and redeeming themselves, I guess,
against the possibility of sharing power with non white people, and of course after the Civil War, the whole Plessy versus Ferguson, Jim Crow
segregation was institutionalized which re-instituted legalized white supremacy, at the same time, we had the rebirth of the clan of the 1920s as a response to the increasing
democratization of the United States and
what they saw was too many Black people building wealth, establishing homes, getting educated and actually the rebirth of the Klan in the 1920s, followed
the year 1919, when hundreds of Black people were killed in a wave of white on black terrorism,
because they had to temerity to establish businesses to establish all black communities, to establish schools to establish you know powers and things like that,
and of course the white citizens councils, the John Birch Society and the women ran White women ran something called Massive Resistance to oppose the
54' Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision I mentioned earlier, and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965 precipitated the southern strategy
that Barry Goldwater and for a few years later, Richard Nixon used to run for office and we still see that southern strategy right now, because that's what Trump is basically using,
claim that he's going to be the champion of law and order as Nixon talked about, and of course, we had the war on drugs that targeted
Black and Brown communities, leading to the explosion of the number of incarcerated people in our country, and then the Supreme Court decision in 2013 Shelby versus Holder that weakened the voting rights act as why we have all this voting right depression taking place and
gerrymandering and all the other things that are really compromising the ability of marginalized people to vote.
And Ta-Nehisi Coates has written this brilliant article called the "The First White President," because many of us believe that Trump was elected as a backlash against the election of Barack Obama. Make America Great Again is nothing but
a dog whistle and basically saying that we need to take our country back from these unruly Black people who shouldn't be empowered in the first place, and I mentioned dog whistles, because I want to bring it to this conversation
Ian Haney Lopez's book called Dog Whistle Politics.
Ronald Reagan ran for office, telling a story in the late 1970s, because he was elected in 1980, about welfare queens and strapping young bucks
buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. He never needed to mention race, though, because he was blowing a dog whistle, sending a message that's an audible on one level, but clearly heard on another through white speak
and he really tapped into a long Republican tradition that started with George Wallace and Richard Nixon and as I said earlier,
but it's really relevant in the age of the Tea Party that arose in opposition to Barack Obama,
where they claimed their movement was really about taxes when really they objected to a Black president and losing their country and then here comes Trump talking about taking their country back and making America great again, again, these are dog whistles,
and they generate middle class enthusiasm for political candidates who promised to crack down on crime, and stop an undocumented immigration,
and protect us from Sharia law and Islamic infiltration, but really what they end up doing is lashing taxes for the rich,
giving corporations regulatory control over industry and financial markets, and cutting back on the social contract, by eliminating a lot of social services.
and White voters sorry for the typo, don't see the connection between their political
agendas that they support and the surging wealth inequality that takes a toll on their lives. So the next book I going to talk about is by this a White physician called Jonathan Metzl where he was researching the health data of lower and middle class White Americans who voted for Trump.
What he found much to his surprise is that they oppose policies that could benefit them like the Affordable Care Act,
if they believe that Black people and other people of color would also benefit from those policies, you see so many people saying "I'd rather die than let those immigrants have health care," which
is a kind of nihilistic belief system that's hard to comprehend, even though they are poor and working class, they're anti-union and anti-workers right, because
the elites that they follow tell them that they should be against these things and tell them that they should support tax cuts, cuts for the wealthy because
eventually the benefits will trickle down and we're helping to build a strong economy, and there's nothing you can say to them, because many of them are still waiting, waiting on their Covid relief checks that haven't arrived and then always hold their nose, the same that they dislike
parts of the Trump
Administration like his tweets, and his racism, but he's a strong business man and he's gonna build a strong economy
and I wonder how they react to the revelation of how he really is a tax cheat who avoided paying taxes for every year he was basically in business and a lot of people these lower low income and middle class white Americans probably pay more taxes than Trump.
It's also interesting to note how identity voting works where you can't determine a personal politics by their
by the issues they support, but in fact, we're really at this point of identity voting where
what they believe their identity is determines how they feel about the issues, and not the issues themselves. So if I, so if they believe that they are voting to protect white privilege or voting to protect
an anti-science platform or what every whatever is really about
using these issues to disguise that they're voting their white identity and they're clinging to what they are mounted are the privileges and wages of whiteness.
And as we as we become a more multi-ethnic and multicultural nation,
there's a battle between this vision of America that is inclusive and tolerant versus racist white nationalists and white supremacists,
and they fight over who is a more American than others, and which ones who are more American why are they,
and it's not demanding that there's a fight over taking down Confederate statues right now or refusing to teach lessons, like the 1619 Project because these are debates over deciding
what is the future of America if their identities mean that they hold their noses at their evangelicals and vote for Trump, which is amazing, because he doesn't even know how to hold the Bible straight up,
I know I fell on the floor when he said 2 Corinthians as anybody raised in the church knows that you don't say it that way,
but nevermind, Trump is very much an ideologue without ideology money is his passion and violence is his ideology rather this rhetorical violence or an actual violence he believes that that is pathway to power and it's his pathway to holding on to power.
And I get asked this a lot about my students because my students
are carefully taught that there should be no politicization of education, not recognizing that education is always political and it's never neutral, you're either
educating people to understand the system or you're educating people out of understanding how the system works but it's never neutral.
And of course when you challenge identity voters, they always deny "Oh race has nothing to do with gender, gender identity citizenship status,
no this has nothing to do with it." But in fact, they are building their identities, and yet we're dealing with the disempowerment of the electorate because of the deconstruction and suppression of voting rights and, as I said earlier, the lack of civic education.
So when you think about challenging white supremacy,
you have to realize that is not just an individual delusion that delusion that we're working against,
but an entire system. And when you, when I even say the phrase white supremacy, you have to recognize that one words working a whole lot harder than the other.
I think white works harder than supremacy, because it is an operating system of control to benefit a specific race of people,
and we have to make the disadvantages playing by challenging the taker versus maker narrative is whenever a reporter talks about the white working class they really are basically saying that
other people don't work, apparently, and they're setting up and reinforcing that taker versus maker narrative and we need to emphasize how many deaths have taken place
because of Covid, the job losses that have taken place, the whole collapsing of our economy and the restructuring of so much and of course those that are responsible
for what's going, for what has taken place are in denial and like to blame it on us as if it's our fault somehow or blame it on China or somebody else.
And we really need to start redefining safety about focusing on social supports like social security, unemployment, education, health care, not having militarized police keeping unrest down.
I think we need to consistently use the term white supremacy to normalize the use of it so that we can stop
precipitating so much white fragility because of the term, because whenever you use the term
in an unexpected way people think that you're criticizing moral character you're not talking about an ideology and so we have to normalize
understanding it as an ideology and not a description of a race of people, and we need to have people understand the complexity of the black and white vote.
There's a lot of conversation now about which voters should be wooed and stuff like that, but as a Black woman, I will always say that we're the ones that wrote a memo on Donald Trump that white America didn't listen to.
I think 94% of Black women voted against him, and I'm not even I'm not really mentioned at this point how many Black men voted for Trump and continue to do so.
So I talked about avoiding that white worker theme. What is really good about the Trump Administration if there's a silver lining,
is that they have split white solidarity down the middle, that there are more White folks rejecting the ideology of white supremacy than ever before in American history.
A lot of people moan about the 53% of White women who voted for Trump, but I celebrate the 47% who didn't, because never in
my lifetime or the lifetimes of my ancestors have that many White people been actively oppose the white supremacy,
there's been over 12,000 demonstrations in this country, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd many of those are taking place in white communities that don't even have
people of color there to leave protests so I'm really encouraged by that but we can't stop it band aid and half measures,
take seriously this concept of defending to police to redirect the money towards social services versus having the police
act like an occupying force in communities of color. I think we have to stop demonizing our own people. The left base. I'm really tired
of people in the Democratic Party who are centrist, demonizing people in the Democratic Party or to the left to them.
Frankly, you do not see that on the right, even if they despise each other on the right, you don't see them going out there, leading with the narrative that the danger of their party comes from their left or their right. That's just not how it works.
And we need to have a way to talk about
the tax breaks and the lack of social support that the elites are giving the one percenters like the
Occupy Movement described, but without descending into Anti-Semitism. I'm seeing too much Anti-Semitism
on the right, as well as the left I see too much of it in the Black community and we need to call the question on that and hold people accountable for it,
and really teach about how, as I said Anti-Semitism as part of that anchorage for anti-black racism, dividing the country into red states and blue states is not the solution
even though I've heard a lot of people on the right which they succeed from the United States or like I said, they tried that strategy and lost the war. Well, they lost the war, but they might have won the longer term battle 'cause we're still fighting the Confederacy
these many years later, and the demonization of Black women has to stop this a particular fixation on race and gender, gender intersectionality that preoccupies the right,
and we can challenge white supremacy don't do it ourselves in a favor by demonizing Black women, but I think we have a moment that can be an opportunity.
Can you give me a time check Tammy, before I go on?
Tamarra: Yep, you're good. You have about 25 minutes.
Loretta: Okay, I think I can wrap it up in 25 then.
Tamarra: Okay.
Loretta: Great, but I do need some water...To
understand the relationship between all of these larger for system that I've described,
you have to understand the role that the far right, or what they rebranded themselves as the alt right, plays in producing the ideas of white supremacy and the religious right plays a role in sanitizing and wrapping a
moral mantle over these ideas and then you end up with conservatives and libertarians justifying these ideas of white supremacy
with their economic analyses and by the time it gets to the street level, where you're dealing with the police, or bank redlining, our school
failing schools and things like that, through traditional institutions
they absorb the ideas and they wrap tradition around these ideas without actually seeing how they're implementing the ideas of white supremacy. I call it moving from white supremacy to white privilege.
So when you look at the, where these ideas come from on the far right, they basically could believe and biological determinism,
that people of color are biologically criminals and terrorists and we go around making war on White people and that we are being manipulated by Jews
to dilute the white America stock with our inferior IQs, they believe this in their hearts, and their writings, in their practices. Now I could
go sideways, a little bit and talk about how they're intentionally recruiting people of color into their rank sometimes
as a way to claim that they're not racist, they're not into Anti-Semitism and stuff, but that's just, that's just a cover. They have the belief
that they are the chosen people of the world and everyone is out to get them and that they believe that Black people and Brown people
have such low IQs, they want to accuse Jewish people of being a smart ones manipulating us to attack them and I can't even begin to tell you how far back this Anti-Semitism goes in this is reflector, but the first pogroms against Jewish people were in the 700s on on the Iberian Peninsula.
The next time you see these ideas
are at the hands of the religious right and instead of using the biological explanation is that the far right uses, they offer religious based ones.
People of color are inherently sinners and it's up to the good White Christians to civilize them and make them believe in the Bible correctly.
They have this myth that Black people are the descendants of Ham. Ham was apparently one of the sons of Noah, who happened to find his father naked, one day, and God cursed to be a Black person everything he saw his father naked,
I don't get it but that's what I'm told, but they do believe that Black people, other people of color aren't able
to live the correct Christian values and threaten hardworking Americans who are the real producers of this society
and you're getting into these prosperity churches and a lot and really a lot of people of color have embraced this
these ideas of white supremacy, which is again that we reinforce white supremacy is a body of ideas it is not a race of people.
The next time you see these ideas, they're being massaged by conservatives, people of color, especially Black women abuse welfare, they have too many babies,
and these babies grow up to become criminals and the economy can't have afford this, we can't afford to take care of all these undeserving people,
and we need a small government except for defense and we want to, they use culture wars like attacks on welfare, attacks on LGBT people, attacks on feminists, on women, on abortion, on immigrants to build their base, but they usually sanitize the ideas of white supremacy through
economic justification, institutes like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute, on and on.
Another group of people who are for white supremacy are the right wing Libertarians now they're left wing Libertarians but they're not the subject of this analysis,
and they believe that the best way to to achieve individual freedom versus big government is to limit the size of government and they've, of course
emerge out of the John Birch anti-communist thinking but also out of opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and the federal government ordering and implementing desegregation.
Those are the two Koch brothers, by the way there, Charles and David Koch. One of them has died.
And their father Fred Koch, I think his name was, was one of the founders of the John Birch Society and lead the work
on resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education school segregation decision.
And they believe, of course, in minimal government except apparently when it comes to interfering with a woman's right to have an abortion,
they somehow want to stay in our bedrooms, but anyway, tax breaks for the rich and that individual freedom is always counterposed against big government. By the next time you see these ideas, they're put into practice. For our traditionalist situations
are required so that Black people need law in order to keep our keep us in control and add of white neighborhoods, out of white parks, out of white swimming pools, schools,
and any positions of authority and they implement white supremacist ideas, while not denying any allegiance to white supremacy.
So the first thing out of their mouth says, "I'm not a racist. Just because I call the police on you. You were threatening me, but I'm not a racist."
And they are the largest racial deniers in the world and they use a traditions or culture.
And every time people make a decision that "I want to go to a good school or send my child to school," or "I want to send my, live in a safe neighborhood."
Good and safety or words that's working to disguise their anti-blackness and yet they would deny that they are subscribing to the ideas of white supremacy.
One of the dangers that we're facing nowadays is the underreporting of white terrorism and how our government does not take it seriously. As I said earlier, the government believes that
all the threat that comes to America come from the left, even Bill Barr talking about "black identity extremists,"
instead of the white supremacists, who are actually committing all the crimes and who have killed thousands of people, including
Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Federal Building after he did that, by the way, the Department of Justice issued a report after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and then
the Republicans suppressed it, because they claim that it was too, making too many connections between the far right, and the Republicans and that they were being smeared by the report.
And we have hate crimes laws, as a matter of fact, our first hate crime laws were passed right after the Civil War,
but they're under utilized the whole white perpetrators accountable, because the term terrorism is only applied to violence committed by people of color or Muslims. It is
worth everything in my slim bank account to try to get them to acknowledge that people like Dylann Roof who murdered nine people in Charlotte, and we're going to church are terrorists,
and they individualize everyone who is white who commits terrorism
claiming that they just have mental problems which by the way is, is dishonoring people with mental problems, because racism and white supremacy is not a mental disease, it's not a psychological disease,
it's a belief system about wealth, but anyway, and while other people are collectivized and sort if one Black person commits a crime and all Black people are criminals, but when
when one cop commits a crime, you know, say, all cops, we're not allowed to say all cops right, and so this generalization that's only used against vulnerable people, while the people who commit the actual known crimes in America, in terms of
violence, and terrorism, and blowing up a building our individual lives. And so, of course, you hear Trump and Bill Barr focusing on the anti fascists threat they say
demonizing the entire left from liberals to socialists and claiming that we're all operating under a rubric of cultural Marxism
that tells us that we need to overthrow White people and and and make sure that they lose
their ability to not only control this country, but apparently their ability to exist all together, which of course is their fear mongering.
And white supremacy and public policy shows up in too many areas, the mention and I list some of course in law enforcement, in the prison industrial,
and the military industrial complexes, in our welfare system, immigration, Child Protective Services, healthcare, education, tax policies, land use, media, banking finance, and insurance, and I think I'll take the point of personal privilege to talk about how it shows up in my life in particular,
I was insured by a insurance company for my home that I own and an insurance adjuster came for a minor claim that I had that was actually less than $1,000 but I submitted the claim comes from water damage,
and he walked around my house, very carefully and then pointed out that this insurance company wouldn't be able to reissue my insurance policy because my sighting was more than was 20 years old.
And I said, "What do you mean it's a 30 year old house. Of course, it's going to have 20 year old siding and the wreck was replaced but 20 years is not old for siding,"
and they told me that, because I had 20 year old siding my house was no longer insurable that was classic redlining by an insurance company. First, I was able to get more insurance that cost several hundred dollars more,
and you know, I could go on, but anyway, there's so much embedded white supremacy in our routine transactions.
It's amazing that they've been allowed to get away with this for so long, separate property appraisal for my house.
As the homeowner, it was appraised for $80,000 less than who was when it was showing by my White staff person who pretended that she owns the house, same house different race of people showing off the property ended up in an $80,000 difference and appraisal.
And so I don't want to sound like they've got it all their way they've got a lot of challenges facing them, they're actually trying to repeal the 20th century and stuff it back into the into the toothpaste into the tube and that's not going to work.
We are in the 21st century and you can no longer can deny climate change, refugees, because of climate change, the corruption that is pandemic everywhere.
They want to reverse all our modern advances like women's rights, racial justice, LGBT rights and on,
and they want to restore the domination of property owning White men like before the Civil War.
Unfortunately, the clock does not roll backwards and they wish they could, I think, like I said, they want another Civil War to see if they have a better chance of winning this one.
They have to lie to maintain power, the truth is not their friend and anytime we can tell the truth in face of their lives, we actually get the upper hand, not only
substantially but morally. They're corrupt and they're very vulnerable to infighting. One thing you learn when you monitor hate groups
or these clan and anti and fascist groups is that they're constantly committing crimes against each other, stealing money,
many of the clans split because one group stole money from another group, somebody's wife slept with somebody else. I think I just saw a white supremacist
sentenced to 25 years because he was sleeping with somebody's wife and tried to kill him or something like that. I think their model is unsustainable, because it's built on hate and perpetual power and of course that hatred turns inward. Because when your only philosophy is hate
you don't have a lot to offer until the stars eating you up from inside and eating up all your other relationships.
Their most powerful weapon is violence, not the truth. And so I do believe that we have the upper hand, because their lives are not sustainable, where truth is.
I think they're also demographically doomed.
Their vision of a white race being forever in control of this country is somewhat predicated
on convincing white women to become like 19 Kids and Counting and having a whole lot of babies,
and somehow, I don't think that's working too well for them. Though I do want to acknowledge that
as someone who studies reproductive justice and teenage birth rates, the only birth rate that is increasing right now in America
is for low education White girls in the Bible Belt their teen pregnancy rate is actually going up while the teen pregnancy rate for every other demographic is going down,
and so maybe their strategy is working, but I wouldn't bet on it because too many women want to control their own fertility and not have it manipulated by someone else's fear of a demographic winter.
And their selfishness is on full display. They're pissed off because they're they pay their being asked to be concerned for others like wearing a mask,
or stop putting children in cages. So I don't think their model is sustainable, even though they're going to cause a lot of damage
in the process of getting rid of them. So I think I'm excited about the concept of fighting fascism with human rights.
We get to build a human rights movement for the 21st century that is dedicated to human rights and not perpetual war.
We offer critique of white supremacy and neo-liberal capitalism and that actually builds a large hit for a lot of people to be included, because we deserve a society without injustices, bigotry, nativism, and scapegoating.
Tamarra: Loretta we're at five minutes.
Loretta: Right, and this is the last slide. So we're on good time.
And we believe in a philosophy based on an ethic of care and human interdependence, and an ethic of love, because we are sharing an endangered planet,
and we can use the human rights framework to define a new social contract, not based on the scarcity model of plunder capitalism,
but based on human rights, taking care of each other and caring for each other. And really there's no contradiction between working towards world peace and human prosperity at the same time. So thank you all...
for listening to me...
and let me turn my camera on...
and re enter the room.
I can't hear you. Tammy, you're on mute.
Tamarra: I'm sorry. Thank
you.
Loretta: Alright, thank you.
Tamarra: We'll open it up now to questions for Loretta, there were lots of comments in the Q&A that I tried to respond to. They weren't direct questions.
So feel free to include your questions in the Q&A. There was one at the end
and it says, "Thank you for your powerful presentation summarizing a lifetime of meaningful work. What do you think it is going to take to convince substantially more White people to take substantially more action to push back racist behavior and systems that support white dominance?
Loretta: Well, one of the things I'm really pleased that, because I work with White folks all the time and teach white supremacy to rich White people all the time, that's what I do,
is how they are redefining how they want to live whiteness differently, what they have inherited is a deeply
problematic definition of whiteness and they don't want to be those people. They really don't want to be those people and so
I advise them not to disown your whiteness. I think there's a whole lot of mistaken belief that you can disown who you are. No, you can't just disown who you are, but you can choose to to live in your skin differently.
And so they're making choices and sometimes they're making mistakes like any other thing that you first learn how to do, you're gonna make mistakes at first.
But you have to develop that stamina and that muscle memory to keep on working at it till you get it right and I have to honestly say that
I don't think that enough of attention is given to that white project of redefining whiteness in a based on the human rights framework versus on the plunder framework, and so that's rarely mentioned in the in the media, and I also think that
a lot of people of color
are a little bit impatient. I'm not one of them, but they're really impatient, because it's like White people since Trump got elected are cramming for a test tomorrow that they've had 400 years to prepare for...
There's this feeling... you just woke up and yeah, you know, and so, but that I don't think is a universal feeling I'm so happy
that even if they're sitting on their couches and just clicking Black Lives Matter memes out I'm happy because that means that they are least not out there, strengthening the opponents
the believers of the white supremacy. So I don't care if you are an armchair activist and clicktivist, go for that you may not be working as hard as I wish you were working, but at least you're not strengthening our opponent.
Tamarra: Thank you Loretta, another question here, "I believe we as a society really don't want to go backwards. However, it takes one person to start the inner angers resentments and confusion. How would one take the middle of the road approach?"
Loretta: I don't know if I want to be in the middle of the road, I don't, I don't believe in false equivalencies.
I don't think there's a, I don't think there's an equivalence between the pro-democracy movement and the anti-democracy movement is if
I can stand in the middle and tilt either way, either you're for human rights, or you're not. You can't be a little bit pregnant, you know, that doesn't really work for me. And so now I do believe in civil society, I believe in civil engagement.
My next book is called Calling in the Calling out Culture because I think we're being
a little too judgmental against each other and a look we got we're waking working in his woke competition, you know, who's got the right language, who's got the latest word, who has the most radical analysis and stuff.
So in a way, we're a bit hyper critical of self destructive on the left and I'm calling that out because I think we can do better,
but I don't know about the middle of the road stance, because people who pretend that they're neutral are actually collaborating with the oppressors just silently
and stuff, and if you see an injustice and you're silent about it, then you're participating in that injustice,
even if you're not actually committing it. It's kind of like standing aside and watch people bully somebody else and then excusing yourself for doing anything because you're not the bully.
Well you became an enabler of the bullying or bystander to the bullying or bystander to the oppression.
That doesn't mean that politics on have a left, right, and center of course they do, every institution has left, right, and center but a middle of the road when it comes to fighting fascism is not a sustainable position for me.
Tamarra: "In order to avoid burnout as activists and scholars of color, what are the most efficient strategies we can utilize to combat white supremacy in all its forms?"
Loretta: I have to bring into this conversation, one of my mentors Leonard Susskind, who is a probably one of the chief anti-fascist researchers in the country,
and Lenny once told me when I was doing the anti-clan work at the National Anti-Clan Network, The Center for Democratic Renewal,
He says, "Loretta you're working too hard," and I was, I was working like 16 hour days because,
you know, I felt the weight of all of the Civil Rights martyrs on my back and I didn't want to let them down my boss was Reverend C.T. Vivian who's been aid to Dr. Martin Luther King and, you know, I had to live up to the civil rights
heritage I was working toward and Lenny told me one day, he said, "Loretta, you just need to chill, fighting fascists should be fun is being a fascist, that sucks."
and I was like "What, I heard that before," and he really said that, "You really need to party as hard as you work. And that's the way you stand you stay in the struggle for long term."
for the long term and also I found it very useful to have in my life many people I love who are not political,
because they keep me grounded. They did that may have conversations about Pinochle or the Dallas Cowboys or whatever those are my passions, but anyway,
tennis, I love tennis and so I keep a good balance of political and apolitical people in my life, and they're and I love them dearly and they keep me grounded. So I'm just not living in a leftist bubble all the time. [Tamarra]: I need...that.
Tamarra: "How long do you think it will take to dismantle white supremacy, and what what a post white supremacist world look like?
Loretta: If I knew that I'd have the power of God, because humans are really bad at predicting how fast humans minds and hearts will change. All I could do is
be the strongest link in the chain of freedom that I can be, but I cannot predict where the chain will end. I got handed gifts by my ancestors that I'm trying to be worthy of,
my mother cleaned White folks houses on her hands on her feet, while she on her hands and knees, while she raised eight kids, you know, my father was
in the military and he didn't make a lot of money either, because he was a poor immigrant,
and so I try to say, I don't have the luxury of being tired or burnt out, because I'm not on my hands and knees like my mom was and I only have one kid to raise not eight.
And so I try to see that doing this work is a privilege, when most people don't get paid to fight racism, and bigotry, and fascism and so I try not to take my, my knowledge so seriously that I forget to have fun and be human and be humble and
when I was 16 and first working in the movement I thought the revolution was going to be tomorrow...
and certainly, I didn't think that we'd be fighting for abortion rights for 50 years or that we'd be fighting for civil rights for the entirety of my lifetime.
And so, those who are expecting a quick result maybe we've been trained by this instant gratification culture that we're in right now,
but the reality is that is slow and painstaking work to change people's hearts and mind and it's not done quickly, it's all a big experiment it's going to take a long time, but I can say
that if you just keep doing the work, when that rapid change happens, it'll catch you by surprise, because I started doing anti-apartheid work
in the 1970s, and I was convinced that apartheid would still be the operating system of South Africa, long after I was dead,
and so when Nelson Mandela walked out of that prison in 1990 and then four years later, ran for president of South Africa no one could have been more stunned than me,
because I'd never thought that that slow painstaking work was gonna reach to that acceleration point where everything just changed.
And so that's what I think about white supremacy our slow, painful work is going to reach that acceleration point where everything changes. But you never can predict when that's going to be.
Tamarra: "Do you think that white supremacy is a theory?"
Loretta: Is a theory is shown as operating like it's actually in the real world.
I mean, I think that races of people are theory but racism is real.
So I don't think white supremacy it' an ideology. I don't know if that a theory should be able to explain things. A theory should be able to be tested. I mean, and so I don't know if I would call it the theory, is actually a practice of accumulating wealth by exploiting non-white people.
I don't know if anybody sat around and theorized that that's what they were going to do, but they certainly decided to do that when they changed their trade relationship with Africa to want to plunder,
and then that ended up changing their relationship with the Middle East, changing their relationship with Asia, changing their relationship with everything, and when the Portugal, the King of Portugal made that decision
it changed everything for Europe and the rest of the world. So I don't know if I'd call it a theory, unless theory is working in a much different way than I think it does.
Tamarra: "Given that you're in higher education, now, what is the role of higher education and building an anti-racist,
and confronting anti-blackness...
how do we educate, well, maybe there are two different questions there. "So what's the role of higher education and building I guess a
system of anti-racism and confronting anti blackness?" I'll leave that one first and the second one is, "How do we educate, to empower humanity?"
Loretta: Well, thankfully, we don't have to do it all ourselves in 1970 I think, Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator wrote about how you can purpose education for liberation,
how you can teach people the ability to analyze their economic and social locations, and actually the art of teaching them to read can be used to teach them how to practice
liberation, how to practice civic engagement, and things like that. And so if you use a Freirian model you're also teaching using education, teaching the politics of hope
so that you don't let people be consumed by despair and cynicism and stuff. So there's many Freire based educators out here
who believe that you can teach people how to be empowered take charge of their lives, take charge of their communities, and their political and economic systems
as a way to improve not only their individual lives, but the lives of their families and their communities. So there's a whole body of work out there about using education in a liberatory role and Bell Hooks has written about that as well.
Tamarra: Is that Teaching to Transgress?
[Loretta]: Yes. [Tamarra]: Yep, I gave a shout out to that book.
Teaching it too. [Loretta]: Yeah, I love that book. When I founded the National Center for Human Rights Education, that was our foundational text. [Tamarra]: Mhmm.
Loretta: We were teaching people
what their human rights were so that they could defend them.
You can't defend your human rights if you don't know you have them. [Tamarra]: That's correct. [Loretta]: And so I use Teaching to Transgress as one of our foundational texts we use.
Tamarra: Here's a good question. This actually reminds me Loretta of the four part series you did over the summer and you had a slide where you had circles of
for lack of a better word, of consciousness, like so folks who are activists and then the further you got out were folks who,
you know, might be in the category of white supremacist so that I wish we had that slide because that would help answer this question. The question is,
"Should we educate those who support white supremacy? It seems like I hit a wall when talking to loved ones who support the system or fall victim to it, while being a minority."
Loretta: Well, what you're talking about is my lecture on understanding your circles or your spheres of influence
and that those of us who are in that high unity circle of the 90 percenters, we usually lack the language or the worldview
or even to be able to reach people who are further out from us, like the zero and the 25 percenters people who believe in white supremacy, or at least they're they've been seduced by white supremacy,
but we can learn to work with the people who approximate to us or adjacent to us,
like the 75 percenters who believe like for me in women and women and girls empowerment, even if they don't believe in abortion rights, like I do
and then outside of them are people like my parents who were definitely middle of the roaders, because dad was in the National Rifle Association
and he was a 26 year military veteran, so he was hyper patriotic and all those kinds of thing, mom was an evangelical Christian,
and so we shared family values and we would build bridges across that family values and those loves,
even as we different on issues, and one example of that was that my mother was always into civic activities like doing things for the community,
and so she started this Black Girl Scout troop because back in the 50s Black girls weren't allowed to join the White Girl Scout troops. So she started one just so her daughters could have a Girl Scout troop,
and one of our routine activities was cooking food for homeless people. We just had to do it from the minute you can reach a stove we were cooking for homeless people, 'cause that was how mama
felt you served the world, and so in conversations about human rights with my mom, she couldn't understand why I was going to these planned demonstrations, or
doing the housing protests or, you know, fighting apartheid, I was like "Mom, you got to understand it this way, you work on feeding people who are hungry, and I work on why they're hungry in the first place."
And she got it. She got it. I didn't use any of those words that I would use if I was talking to my 90 percenters.
Mom understood, you can have the same values and express them in different ways. So in terms of talking to your difficult family members, talk about their values.
Talk about why they believe what they believe, not what they believe but what are the values driving those beliefs and you may find some common ground to build some bridges over.
Tamarra: Thank you.
It's a says, "First and foremost, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and wisdom with the positivity and humor I find hard to maintain.
I was wondering, given the increasing social activism and yet the simultaneous efforts towards democratic deconstruction you described, are you optimistic about the outcome of future elections?"
Loretta: Well so much of it depends on this one
because if we lose this election, there may not be future elections, [Loretta laughs]
because they are really working hard to deconstruct democracy and if there aren't future elections there may be those elections that many of us will not be allowed to participate in,
because if they get sufficient votes, they're going to call for a new constitutional convention and if they have a new constitutional convention, they're going to write us out of the Constitution.
You know, those of us who got our voting rights through the 14th Amendment, they're going to repeal the 14th Amendment, those of us who
you know, those of us who got our rights to the 19th Amendment, the right for women to vote, they're going to repeal that stuff.
And so that's why this is that precipice election, this is a tipping point,
whether we go forward into a future of democracy and human rights or we go backwards to the early 1800s where only property White men had power
and that's the choice that we're we're being asked and so do I feel hopeful that there will be future elections, well I feel hopeful that we're going to win this one and then that gives me hope that we'll have
more elections in the future, but if we lose this one and Trump gets a chance to stack the Supreme Court, stack the judiciary,
militarize the Department of Justice for his own personal ends, and then that really raises the question whether we'll have
future elections at least those that can't buy any judge can be called free and fair, we may end up with election monitors, like we have to use in other troubled countries where people aren't intimidated out of voting or charge money to vote, those kinds of things.
Tamarra: Wow, "How can we support and empower students of color emotionally when they're, attacked
or dismissed by perpetuators of white supremacy? Do you have any tools or resources you personally turn to when someone is harmful to you?"
Loretta: Yeah. What happens with students of color who are at predominantly white institutions is that they have to not only
maintain their focus on their studies, but they also have to build really thick skin to deal with series of microaggressions or sometime out not threat,
and just like the admission of trans students, many of these campuses have not done their work about
going beyond admitting the students, but making sure that they invest enough in the student success so that they individually graduate and don't encounter
these kinds of a microaggressions and stuff like that and basically sometimes racism, and hate crimes, and homophobia, and trans phobia.
These are things that we still got to work on as people employed by university, but we also need to recognize that the whole liberal education project needs to be rethought out because the way we're financing colleges through student debt, I mean, when I first went to college in 1979,
a tuition for a whole semester was only $200,
at Howard University.
And so once we came to a neo-liberal kind of way of looking at education where we stop
state and government investment in education transfer that investment onto the backs of students, that's where we got the student loan crisis.
We changed the model, unnecessarily. We change the model and what we changed one way we can actually change back, and so we need I think Covid is causing us to rethink
this neo-liberal educational model that we're all employed by, and whether it certainly isn't meeting the needs of the students, I don't think, and I don't think it's meeting the needs of the economy, either,
unless you happen to enjoy being on Wall Street and holding all of these student loans in your pocket.
Tamarra: Wow, there's a lot of folks affirming what you just said there aren't questions. It's just affirmations here. [Tamarra laughs]
I have a question, another question for you.
So this is a little bit of Garveyism here, "Should Black people look at going back to Africa as one of the options?" and "Why are we committed to a system that does not value us here?"
Loretta: Well, I think Black people are our first of all, not a monolith. So there's got to be Black people who are part of the black back to Africa movement and they're Black people who say, "No, as far as I'm going, back to Texas."
Just going to happen.
So I don't think it's all one way or another. I mean, I've been to Africa, maybe 60 or 70 times over my years, and there's some countries in Africa that I just adore and would not
hesitate to want to come back to,
and then there's other countries that
see them once don't want to go back, kind of thing.
But then I don't think there's going to be a large successful repatriation movement
in America, but we do need to talk about how we have to take on the process of decolonization to even work towards approaching anything like racial and gender justice.
As long as we have our living by the logic of settler colonialism, we'll always be thwarted in our attempt to get to racial and gender justice and human rights.
But that doesn't require us all, going back to Africa, or India, or Japan or Europe, and all that stuff to have to renegotiate our interdependence whatever geographical locations we're at.
Tamarra: It feels like that the the conversation around going back, wherever it is, whether it's Africa any other places you name is really about people being exhausted with the work. So it sounds like you're suggesting that the work is gonna have to happen no matter what right, whether...
Loretta: And wherever you are,
'cause I'm telling you,
I mean, you could go back to Africa as an expat they call us, when we go there we go there with the privileges so we end up as petty colonizers,
'cause we're black skinned, because we go over there with a US passport that by definition is of privilege and stuff and so wherever you are you're going to have to do the work. [Tamarra]: Yeah.
Thank you for that.
[Loretta]: Oh, let me add one other thing. [Tamarra]: Yeah. [Loretta]: And I never seen internalized white supremacy, like I saw in Africa, by the way.
Let's be real. I was at a bar in Kenya, one day, and this this these Kenyans kept calling me nigger, excuse me I'm using the word, and I couldn't understand like, "I'm black, you black, why are you insulting me this way?" It turns out that's what the British colonizers had taught them to call African Americans.
They thought they didn't even know they we're insulting me. They thought that was our word,
you know, and so, and I've been. I was in South Africa, both before apartheid fell, and afterwards,
and I was negotiating one time with this Zulu woman who I was trying to buy this necklace from they make the most gorgeous necklaces from and the necklace was only $10
in U.S. currency, it was had some price on it in Rand, but it was only $10, so I was offering her $20 because I thought she was undercharging for the necklace. And so she wouldn't take the $20 from me until she stopped a white South African and asked him if I was treating her fairly. [Tamarra]: Wow.
[Loretta]: And he looked, he said,
"You're charging ten and she's giving you twenty, yes you should take that," and I have to honestly say I was momentarily offended that she took his word over mine. When you just come out to apartheid? Really?
So there's a lot of work no matter wherever you are.
Tamarra: And that shows you how white supremacy is global, right, we're not just talking about a problem here in the U.S., but a larger global problem.
Something more current,
"What do you think about Trump's new executive order banning diversity training and anti-racist teaching and federal government?"
Loretta: Well, I think that he's signaling, what has actually happened out in a more decentralized way because you remember state of Arizona banning ethnic studies and things like that, so of course he's picking up on that white supremacist
idea that the only history that should be taught is one that valorizes White people and denies white atrocities and and and teach us this mythical history.
This is what they do. This is how white supremacy is maintained. So I think that it's sad that he would issue such an executive order because it's very clear that's the only education, he ever got, the little bit that he absorbed,
and so I'm not surprised by it, but, you know, the problem with oppression is that is that our resistance to it strengthens us. So that's cause a whole lot of people to pay attention now to the 1619
Project and other ways of teaching about the reality of our country and its future, in ways they might have ignored before.
Whenever they overreach they actually do a favor for us.
Tamarra: We've got one last question here. We have about five minutes left, actually, about seven minutes, it says "We're in California, which is a blue state. What can we do to change, make-up...
change the makeup of the rest of the country. We can't stand the racist Republicans who control the Senate, but how can we change that?"
Loretta: Okay. I'm not sure, but I think that we just keep after working for the good fight, as long as we can, and then, you know, put your, put your all into it. Don't give up hope.
Recognize everybody's working on being the best person that they can and allow people to be as complicated as we are, so don't stereotype them.
Don't label them just because they say something you don't agree with, don't don't put fixed labels on them and we'll get through this. They wouldn't be fighting so hard to keep us down if we weren't winning.
Tamarra: And that's fantastic note to end on. I want to... [Loretta]: Well thank you.
Tamarra: Thank you for joining our college community here at Moorpark, although we reached out to all of the five institutions in our county. So there are folks from
all of the Ventura Community College District, from Cal Lutheran University, and also from Cal State Channel Islands, and I want to thank you all for joining in.
Many of you have asked about whether this was being recorded. It is recorded, it usually takes about a week, maybe two for the
captioning to be added to it and then it will be available for public consumption and I will send it out to all of the campus communities for your, for your use. So thank you again Loretta, it was really awesome to have you here with us.
Loretta: All right, bye bye now.
Tamarra: All right, all have a wonderful afternoon or I guess we're at evening time now.