I'm Soledad O'Brien. The executions of George Floyd
and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery
have changed us, I think it's fair to say, as a nation.
Everywhere there have been expressions of anguish
and of anger and protests.
Our conversation today is around rethinking justice.
And with that, I have a conversation with our panelists.
Kimberlé Crenshaw joins us. She is an American lawyer,
a civil rights advocate, a philosopher.
She's a full time professor at the UCLA School of Law
and also Columbia Law School.
Kimberly Foster is an American writer and cultural critic.
She's best known as the founder of the black women's interest website For Harriet.
She was named to "Forbes'" 30 Under 30 back in 2016.
Rashad Robinson is an American civil rights leader and non-profit executive.
He serves as president of Color of Change,
and has been doing this work for a very long time,
like all of my panelists. So welcome to all of you.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, if I may, I'm gonna begin with you.
This is a look at justice. Where have we been when it comes to justice,
and where do you think we need to go?
Well, Soledad, I have to say that when I think about justice, I think about an old adage.
We went down to the justice department, and that's what we saw, just us.
And I think what we're talking about now are the various means and mechanisms
where the precarity of black life is at the center of policy
and that drives the actions of legislators
and opinion leaders and activists moving forward.
One of the things I've been hearing, Kimberly Foster,
is is this a movement, which means that change is dramatically?
Or is it a moment, which means we could be having the same conversations
six months from now and nothing will have really changed?
What do you think is different this time around, if anything?
I definitely think we have the makings of a movement.
I mean, even if you look at what happened in Minneapolis over the past few days,
the Minneapolis city council voted to disband the police department.
That is something that very few people would have been able to imagine possible,
and the fact that we're seen that development happen so quickly, like,
we're in-- we're on the brink of something different.
And I'm really excited about that.
Rashad, I'm curious what's different now?
And when we talk about dismantling or defunding the police,
what does that exactly mean to you?
Budgets are moral documents, and they oftentimes say what we value.
And so when we talk about invest and divest,
when we talk about changing policing budgets and taking away those resources,
what we are talking about is putting money into the things that we know
will help us fight for a better tomorrow.
So then, back to Kimberlé Crenshaw,
as you well know as an attorney
and as a professor, how do you fix a system
that seems to constantly have a few bad apples
have a fair amount of power, and also that don't seem to be held accountable
under the law many times?
I mean, the number of police officers who've been convicted
after murdering somebody or killing someone is very, very small.
Look, I think what's happening now is that old adage
that it's a few bad apples is really evaporating.
It's the bunch, it's the basket that the apples are situated in.
Police officers can pull over black people using race as one factor.
That's a constitutional problem.
It should be a far more important part of our democratic process
to look at what's happening on the Supreme Court
than it has been over the last couple of decades.
I think that's really true. Kimberly Foster,
the protesters in what we've seen on television are very frequently white.
And that is, in the years that I've been covering this,
a big difference, and I'm curious if you think white people
are going to be critical for conversations about dismantling a system
that serves black people badly.
I think that we need as much help as possible.
And I will say when we completely reimagine how we relate to each other,
when we invest in complete social transformation,
then everybody's life gets better.
You know, it's not just black women.
It's not just people on the margins.
You need to be with us so we can stand together in this fight
and push for real change, not superficial reforms.
I'm curious, Rashad, if we talk about dismantling police,
speaking politically in an election year,
do you have worries about how that gonna read to a big part of the country?
"Oh, so here's what's-- here's what they're advocating for. No police.
People running wild in the streets. It's insane.
To be clear, there's nothing that black people ever can do
to fight for justice that's going to be completely popular with everyone.
And so I think that sometimes we think of racial justice
as a thing that they have to worry about or they have to add it on
at the expense of something else.
It's the thing you do so the black people don't get too upset with you
and disrupt your speech.
But I don't think racial justice is charity or the thing that they offer.
Racial justice is strategy. I think we are in a huge inflection point.
We need not charitable solutions to structural problems,
but we need the type of change, and I believe that means that we change the rules.
Tick off for me the two specific things that you'd want to see.
I want to see a deep change to policing budgets around the country.
So there's a set of things on policing and then there's a set of things
that actually relate to the larger complex of budgets.
That's on the written rules side, and of course,
there's all the things that we can do to challenge Hollywood
and culture and all the ways in which the perceptions in our society
actually create the demand for so much of the policing
and the injustice that we see.
So one of the things that defunding does
is it moves those resources back into the institutions
that should be handling some of the social problems
that now no one is handling because of the voracious appetite of the police.
So that's a real direct thing that we need.
Until we're able to break that, a lot of this energy may go to naught
unless we're able to pull the unions off the backs
of those who are responding to this moment.
Kimberly Foster, I'm going to give you the final word today.
Are you feeling optimistic? Do you see a timeline where this has to unfold
or the power and the momentum is lost?
I think people are understanding now more than ever that we do have power.
Yes, we have been subjects to oppression and repression from these institutions,
but if we come together and make our voices heard, they cannot ignore us.
And that makes me feel optimistic?
I don't know, but I certainly am feeling better than I have in the past.
Kimberly Foster joining us today.
Kimberlé Crenshaw as well, Rashad Robinson.
Thank you to my panel. I certainly appreciate it.