(printer chugging)
- [Lola] I got my first job at the Daily Star.
I was working as a copy girl.
I was like so excited,
and it was like such a big deal.
- [John-Peter] My partner at the time,
we had left the East Coast.
He was Jewish, I was black.
- [Lynn] I was in a book store,
getting some books in
for one of my kids in the college.
I remember I was bending down looking for something.
- My first week on campus as a postdoc,
I was helping out with a conference.
And so I was taking a bunch of professors,
we were having dinner together,
and worked with the organizer,
and I said, "I'll take these guys home."
This was maybe about 10, no 10:30 at night.
Pulled over at the parking lot on Cherry Street
just south of Speedway,
so that I could hop out,
ask my passengers, "Hey, let's figure this out.
"Where are we going?
"Let me look at your map."
"Okay, cool."
- And then one day, I came in and this guy,
he was from New York.
He came in and he said,
"Lola, can I talk to you?"
- So we were invited to go to a party
where I was the only man of color.
There were about 40 gay white men there.
- UAPD pulled a U-turn.
They had me put my hands up,
because they thought that I was
trying to steal my own car.
- And I heard a voice behind me say something like,
"Well that's a waste of a good towel."
- And he says, "Well, I've been appointed
"to tell you that this is gonna be your last day."
- They're asking my passengers, "Are you okay?"
Like, they thought they were in
the middle of a carjacking.
- I kinda stood up, and I said,
"Excuse me, were you talking to me?"
- And my partner at the time, Neil,
was in a circle of men, and someone said,
"Who brought the darkie with him to the party?"
- He's, "I'll tell you."
- He said, "It's, you know, if you were in
"a large city someplace, this job would be
"a perfectly okay thing for you.
"But you don't fit here."
- The floodlight directly on me with a
trigger-happy cop, with his hand on his Taser
telling me to move or don't move.
- "That's it, 'cause I'm just gonna tell you,
"You just don't fit here."
That was racism.
- [Protesters] Someone's got to go right now!
Hey hey, ho ho!
This racist system has got to go!
Black lives matter!
- Every time there has been progress,
by black folks in particular,
but I think the same could be said
about any marginalized group,
there has been a corresponding backlash,
what Carol Anderson at Emory University in Atlanta
calls white rage.
- Good evening and thanks for joining us.
At least one person is dead
and several are injured tonight
after protests and counter-protests turned violent
in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
declared a state of emergency.
- It happened after slavery ended.
It happened after segregation ended.
It happened at the beginning of
affirmative action programs.
- We want our kids to grow up in a country
where they have access to the best schools
and the best teachers.
(audience cheers)
- It happened during the Obama years.
I mean, every single thing that
seems to push people of color,
particularly black folks, forward
is responded to with this hateful,
rage-filled reaction on the part
of certain white people.
The election of Barack Obama and the
reelection in 2012,
there were a number of people who
were under the impression that we had attained
some kind of post-raciality as a society,
that, "Well, we've attained this spot.
"We're never gonna go back to the sort of days
"of dog whistling racism and appealing to
"racial resentment, and those days are over."
And I think there were some of us
who knew that this is very much embedded
in the American political process.
- [Crowd] You will not replace us.
Jews will not replace us.
- We have a system of racial inequity
and white supremacy that we all sort of
are part of, for good or for bad.
And we're either responding to it
and trying to challenge it,
or we're part of it and we're collaborating with it.
And one of the ways we collaborate with it
is with our silence about just the day-to-day stuff.
- Because it's not on our news every night
or we're not hearin' about somebody
doing something like that,
I think it's easy for people to fall into this,
"Oh, well Tucson is a safe place.
"That doesn't happen here."
And they just need to understand it does.
- [Todd] In July of 2016 I was sitting at my desk
and I got a call from a reporter
who was covering a story in Phoenix, in court.
- A wave of anti-Semitic vandalism and threats.
A Jewish center, cemeteries and schools
are being targeted across the country,
including right here in Arizona.
- This individual had,
was arrested for suspected terrorism.
(speaking in foreign language)
- March the 13th, 2017, there was
some community members that had come to pray
the early morning prayer,
and they had noticed that the door was open,
we'd been broken in.
- [Woman] After weeks of sweeping vandalism
against Jewish communities across the U.S.,
now another religious center is being targeted.
- [Man] Over the weekend, a break-in and--
- The place had been vandalized.
There was copies of the Koran thrown everywhere,
pages ripped out and scattered all over the floor.
It's like your core values being desecrated.
- He had identified in open court
that the Tucson JCC was an aspirational target of his.
We have probably 17,000 people a week
that come through our doors,
people from six weeks old up to 106.
- All the murders and homicides
that have been attributed to terrorists
in the last year were attributed to right wing,
white supremacist or white nationalist terrorists.
There have been 40 to 50,
last time I checked the numbers,
folks who've been murdered by domestic
right wing white terrorists,
but we don't even use that language for them.
If I know Jim over in the HR department,
that I have an in and a shot at the job,
if I know Tom over in Accounting, right?
He's gonna write a letter.
He's gonna put in a good word for me,
and I've got a better shot at a job.
And half the jobs are being filled that way.
Well, in theory that's not racist.
In theory that's not sexist.
In theory that's just, oh, it's old boys' network.
The problem is that in practice,
who are the people that Jim or Tom
are more likely to know,
and therefore recommend,
as opposed to the people they're less likely to know.
And the research says they're
more likely to know other guys like Jim and Tom.
They're more likely to know other white dudes
who went to the same colleges,
who played the same sports,
who were in the same fraternities,
who do the same stuff.
And they're not bad guys.
Like, Jim and Tom are fine.
They're decent dudes, right?
They're not racist or sexist in the sense
that we would think of that word.
But they are perpetuating a process of exclusion
just by virtue of the way that they think about,
"Oh, who'd be good for the next job here
"at my company,"
or whatever it is, right?
That's a form of racism.
- Yeah, yeah, you're, okay.
All right.
(ringtone plays) (Lola laughs)
Tucson Second Chance Community Bail Fund,
can I help you?
It's people saying, "Speak English."
It's people saying, "We can't teach
"your cultural history."
It's white women saying to brown women,
at the Women's March that "You're only there
"to be decorations, but that your agendas
"and your communities are not being centered
"in our conversations.
"That's why we can have cops at this event
"and not concerned how that impacts you
"and how that looks for your community."
A charge is nothing more than that.
It's not a conviction of persons
presumed to be innocent.
But even so, we--
We know that black and brown kids get suspended
or criminalized and sent into juvenile courts more often.
We know that our kids,
that people of color are stopped more often.
We know that if you're a black person in Arizona,
and you're convicted of a drug offense,
you're gonna get 50% more prison time
than a white person convicted of that same offense.
So, so it's like, it's the thing that's happening
is that as you pull off the facade of niceness
and you start really seeing whose backs
are being broken by the system.
- Sharing when you're used to everything
feels like oppression.
It feels like the end of the world.
When white folks, and particularly white men,
are actually having to share space,
whether that's politically, economically,
culturally or whatever else,
with people of color,
with LGBTQ folk,
with women as women,
with non Christians,
with working class folks,
whatever it is,
it seems like, "Oh my God,
"the wheels are comin' off the bus."
Like, "I'm not in the same position that I was,"
and that's true.
- There's a certain amount of attack that they feel
upon them, but here's the weird part.
Whenever I ask them, "How are you being attacked,"
they can never put their finger on it.
I ask them, you know.
"I feel censored by political correctness."
"Well, what happened?
"Did something happen in a class?
"Did someone call you out?
"Was there an intense uncomfortable
"conversation that occurred?"
"No, it's just a feeling that I have."
- I always say, "We all live in fear."
And the way I define fear is,
forever engaging in antiquated realities.
- We're here at this moment and if we can
build a better future for the,
or a better environment for our community now
then we should do that.
- Yeah, we want the government to do the right thing.
We want the policies in place.
We want the courts to do the right thing.
But while we're waiting for them to do the right thing,
or if they never do the right thing,
what do we do?
You have more power than you think, right?
You're a member of a community.
You might be a member of a church
or a synagogue or a mosque, or whatever.
You might have kids in school or you might not,
but you might have a job where you're
working with other people every day.
And so you're in these various locales
where you have an opportunity to raise issues,
to ask questions, to push for change.
- This is not a time for status quo, people.
We need boldness,
but boldness doesn't come from a community of complacency.
So what I think the good thing is happening
in Tucson right now,
is that we are now starting to have this energy
and this vision of what's possible.
People are now saying, "We can do better."
What kinda world do you really want?
What kinda world are you willing to fight for?
'Cause this one is unfair.
It's racist, it's destructive.
It's oppressive, it's destroying lives.
And we need to stop it.