- 3 months ago
As we gather in New Orleans, we sit at the cusp of the most comprehensive attack on civil rights in a century and an effort to decimate Black political representation like we have not seen since the fall of Reconstruction. Essence authors curator Nikole Hannah-Jones argues we are in the Second Nadir and so she has brought together this panel with some our sharpest minds to help us understand not only what is happening, but the necessity of building Black political power even in the darkest moments.
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00:04This is Jelani. Jelani Cobb, Kimberly Crenshaw. I'm Nicole Hannah-Jones. Thank you
00:11all for coming out to this talk that I put together on black political power. I thought
00:19it was very important in this moment to address what's happening nationally to our people.
00:26We are here in Louisiana, a state that since Reconstruction has only had two black people
00:35ever sent to Congress from the state of Louisiana since Reconstruction, despite this being a
00:40state where nearly one out of three residents is black. We are in the middle of, oh, and
00:46by the way, they want to eliminate one of those black seats. We are in the midst of the most
00:52wide-scale attack on civil rights in a century by the most openly white nationalist administration
00:58of our lifetime. The Supreme Court has struck down decades-old federal limits on how much
01:06money campaigns can coordinate to raise for political candidates, just further opening the
01:13door for the overtaking of our democracy by the oligarchy. And of course, the Supreme Court
01:19just struck down kind of the final provision of the Voting Rights Act designed, I've never
01:24lived under a country that did not have a strong Voting Rights Act, where they ruled that intentionally
01:30black congressional districts are unconstitutional. And of course, law enforcement has also, or
01:35the Supreme Court has also ruled that law enforcement can stop people for immigration checks just based
01:41on how they look. So on the one hand, they're saying you can't use raise if it might help black
01:46folks, but you can use raise if it's going to harm people of color. And the court just
01:52handed down a ruling upholding birthright citizenship, but it was a split ruling on something that
02:00shouldn't have even came before the Supreme Court. So while we can celebrate that birthright
02:04citizenship is not ended, it seems to me, both of you, as two preeminent scholars in this country,
02:11that the court upheld birthright citizenship while creating an America where that citizenship
02:19decreasingly has value, where the citizens have fewer and fewer rights that the court will uphold and
02:26fewer and fewer ways to actually access that citizenship. So I'd like you to begin just talking about this
02:35political moment that we're in. I've written that we're in the second nadir that we're in for a long
02:41call struggle. And so I really would like you both to kind of set the stage of where we are
02:47in the
02:48country right now. I'll start with you, Dr. Crenshaw, then I'll come to you, Jelani, or excuse me, Dr.
02:53Cobb. Dr. Cobb. Jelani is fine. Y'all earn them credentials now. Well, we, as you say, Nicole,
03:03we are in the middle of the end of the second reconstruction. What does that mean? That means
03:11that the laws, the rights, the struggle, the infrastructure that was created to deal with the
03:19shadow of segregation, to deal with the reality that we were enslaved people and that enslavement
03:25stretches across the generations, even to now, is actively being dismantled. By dismantle,
03:33I mean, they are undermining the Voting Rights Act. So the actual law that made it possible for us to
03:41fight against the efforts to weaken our political power, to push us out of the political equation,
03:47has basically been gutted. So that does not exist anymore as a backstop against what power has
03:55always tried to do, which is diminish our effectiveness, diminish our power, and push us
04:02back. The recent case that you mentioned, which is birthright citizenship, that very attack on birthright
04:11citizenship, is really an attack on the legacy of African Americans. African Americans fought for
04:18the right to be citizens because our citizenship was denied by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott. Why?
04:26Because we were enslaveable people. And because we were enslaveable people, the founders, the court told
04:33us, never intended for us to ever be citizens. Ever, ever, ever be citizens. So one of the consequences of
04:42the
04:42winning of the Civil War was the 14th Amendment that said, if you were born on this soil, you are
04:49American
04:50citizens. Well, this recent case was the Trump administration's effort to peel that back, to say, well, not so fast.
04:58There are some people who were born on American soil who will not be American citizens. For a lot of
05:05people,
05:06they might think, well, this is not about us because nobody is challenging our citizenship. But think about it.
05:12It is the first step toward unraveling the entirety of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment. But more
05:20fundamentally, it undermines the legacy of black freedom struggle. Because when we struggled and the
05:26things that we won, it wasn't just one for us, it was one for everybody. So part of the challenge
05:33that
05:33we're facing right now is that anti-blackness is the corrosive cancer that's undermining our entire
05:41democracy. And at the same time, anti-blackness is the thing that nobody wants to talk about,
05:47including our political power, including our political party, sorry, and including the media as
05:54well. So we have to really fight this with an understanding that every erosion of our democracy
06:01comes back to our legacy. If we don't fight to protect our legacy, number one, the nation is going
06:09to be lost. But we're basically going to be marginalized in this whole process, which is exactly
06:15what is happening now. So I want to start by saying that we are here in Louisiana, where
06:27the Plessy v. Ferguson case was centered. The case that codified segregation, that made it possible,
06:39made segregation the law of the land. The argument was that it was consistent with the Constitution
06:44of the United States. We came from all over the country. We would ask for a shout out, we would
06:52probably have nearly every state represented in this convention hall today. This is important.
07:01And there are reasons why this is important. So when I talk to my students, and I'll say, why
07:08was it that Louisiana and Mississippi and South Carolina were so dedicated to the premise of preventing
07:18black people from voting? And they'll say, oh, well, they were racist. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was
07:23racist and everything. Why were those states so fixated on making sure that black people could not exercise
07:30the rights of citizenship? And the answer was the most obvious one, because there were a lot of us.
07:38We were looking at Mississippi with 50% black population, and Louisiana at the time with 40% black
07:45population, and South Carolina with 50, 51% black population. That is an electorate. That is power. And so when
07:57those
07:57avenues were closed off, and black people began migrating to other parts of the country in the midst of
08:06World War I and World War II and all the things that we know about where our ancestors came from.
08:11My people came
08:11from Hazlehurst, Georgia. If you heard of it, it means you're my cousin. My people came from Bessemer, Alabama.
08:18They came to New York. My parents met in Harlem. We all got some version of that story. Any of
08:23us who are outside the
08:24South got some version of that story? Let me tell you why that is important right now. When we had
08:32that sit-in at the Woolworths counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, and we start the sit-in movement
08:46demanding integration and equal access to services. This is at a Woolworths in Greensboro.
08:55And individually, who cares? There's a bunch of coloreds who are trying to eat at this counter in
09:03Greensboro, North Carolina. The problem is that Woolworths also had a branch in Brooklyn, and the black
09:12people weren't going there. And they had a branch in Milwaukee, and the black people weren't going there.
09:19And then the store manager in Philadelphia is like, oh, hold on. Seems like there's not many
09:25black people in here. I walked past the Target Pavilion the other day, this morning, by the way.
09:31It's neither here nor there. It's here and there. It's here and there.
09:35But the fact is that black people who were in places that were not being directly impacted were
09:45willing to fight on behalf of black people who were in the places that were. We have to go
09:51back to the history books. Because Adam Clayton Powell, I am from New York. Adam Clayton Powell, who was the
09:59first black congressman from New York, was answering letters from people in Mississippi. He was
10:07answering letters from people in Alabama. He was answering letters from black people in Georgia.
10:13That we will have to, as a community, leverage every ounce of influence, every ounce of power, every ounce
10:23of organizing ability that we have in defense of those of us who are fighting for our political
10:29lives in the places where this is happening. And it is simply that, when Martin Luther King
10:36said the subtitle of that book was Chaos of Community, we're either a community or we will collapse
10:42into chaos.
10:44That's right. You see why I had them up here? You see that? Because, again, we can come here.
10:52We can party. We can have a good time. That's great and necessary. But outside of these walls,
10:58they have a very ugly future planned for us. I want to quickly help us understand birthright
11:05citizenship. That comes because black folks who have been born in this country for generations
11:11were stateless people. We had no rights of citizenship in the only country that we ever knew.
11:17So I know a lot of black folks, I have seen the discourse saying this doesn't have anything to do
11:22with
11:22us. We're not from immigrants. They can't strip our citizenship. What America are you living in
11:27where you think your rights are secure? Just because we have it now, trust and believe they plan on
11:35denaturalizing people who have been here for generations and those people look like we do.
11:41We also have to understand that you can't have a racist apartheid country and democracy at the same
11:47time. So democracy requires racial justice. And so the fight against racial justice is a fight
11:55against democracy. We also need to realize that those two things are intertwined. Now I want us to
12:01talk about, you started touching on it a bit, Jelani, because I also think those of us, I saw this
12:06after
12:07Trump first got elected and some of us thought we were in safe states. Well, I live in New York
12:12or I live in Illinois and those things are not going to come to me. I think they're going to
12:16challenge electoral maps in a place like Illinois, in a place right like New York that are also black
12:23majority electoral maps. So can you help people understand that it doesn't matter where you live
12:28in the country, there is a pattern. And we know that they're not just going to come for the rights
12:33in
12:33the South. And we shouldn't dismiss the South. Half of our people live in the South.
12:36That's right. Can I say one thing in addition to this? Notice how the conversation around
12:43immigration changed. When Donald Trump ran in 2016, he said he was going to pursue people who
12:51were in the country illegally who had committed crimes. And he's telling people, our issue, our
12:58issue was with people who are committing, as he said, the Mexican rapists. That's what he said
13:02at the beginning. And that we have to get these people who are undocumented, people who are
13:06in the country illegally. And then that changes. And it stops just being people who have committed
13:13crimes, according to them. But they have to go get people who are in the country illegally, period.
13:19And then when we look at ICE and what has happened in the second administration, they are going
13:24after people who are in the country legally. And the objective now, I work in higher education,
13:32is to make it more difficult for people even to come here to attend an American university.
13:37This is an agenda of attempting to re-whiten America. That is what the concern is. But lest
13:44we think, first off, there's a whole bunch of Haitian brothers and sisters who were impacted
13:48by this. When people are saying that our community is not impacted by this, we got black people from
13:54Jamaica who were impacted by this. We got black people from throughout the entire Caribbean
14:00and Latin America who were impacted by this. But the other part of it is, when we get to
14:05the birthright citizenship issue, the reason that the 14th Amendment is written in the way
14:10that it is, is because John Bingham, who framed that document, understood that this was going
14:16to apply to other communities. Go back and read Frederick Douglass and his speech about what was
14:24being done to the Chinese. This man was a former slave, but he understood that what was being
14:30done to the Chinese was a template for what could be done to black people. And when they
14:35began challenging the 14th Amendment, the minute that the 14th Amendment was on the books,
14:40this attempt to undermine what the 14th Amendment created is not new. They began trying to challenge
14:47that from the minute that Amendment was ratified. And one of the first places you saw that it
14:52began to be challenged was in the rights of the Chinese in California. And so if we want
14:58to imagine that this is some sort of issue that's going to leave us unscathed, it will not.
15:05And if we are wise, we will take an example from what we have seen in Minnesota and how people
15:11came out night after night after night in defense of people whom they considered their neighbor.
15:18And so this is the crucial thing for us. It's great for us to have a good time. We all
15:22have to be
15:22having a good time. But let's be very clear that our community is under attack and we have to be
15:29ready to stand up. So of the cases that we all have been talking about, I think one of the
15:41most
15:42important things that slips our consciousness is the role of our own politics in contributing to the
15:49possibility of unraveling the protections that we have. So Nicole started off with the gutting of the
15:56Voting Rights Act, with the gutting of campaign finance reform, with the contemporary
16:03undermining of constitutional protections. One of the things that's so important to
16:07recognize is that those were 5-4 decisions. Who was that fifth vote that made it possible
16:15to gut the crown jewel of the civil rights movement? It was Clarence Thomas. Who was the fifth vote
16:27that said police can use the claim of traffic violations for race specific targeted driving while black harassment?
16:39It was Clarence Thomas. Now let me take you back to what got Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.
16:45And I don't want to undermine all of the anti-blackness that is already part of the mix. But let's
16:54think about
16:54Clarence Thomas was affirmed to the Supreme Court with the support of the African American community.
17:01Where did that support from the African American community come from? When did the support from the African American community
17:09turn into a political power move that put a far right winger on the Supreme Court that now has come
17:17to undermine our democracy?
17:19It happened when Anita Hill came forward. It happened when Anita Hill said, this is what happened to me.
17:28It happened when Clarence Thomas was able to wrap his anti-blackness in a tale of a high-tech lynching.
17:38Black people fell for the lie. See? Tell the truth. Tell the truth.
17:45Because people heard it and they said, okay, I know this story.
17:48Because this is the story about how anti-blackness is narrated to ourselves.
17:54And it's not that the lynching is not an important part of our history, because it is.
17:59But it's not the only part of our history. The way black women have experienced anti-blackness through sexual assault,
18:08sexual abuse.
18:09Sexual abuse has been a condition of our lives since we arrived on these shores.
18:15Enslavement was industrialized sexual abuse. But it's something that we never talked about.
18:22We never talked about what had to be believed about black women to breed us.
18:26We never talked about what had to be believed about our mothering to take our children away.
18:32We never talked about how our being written as people who are not fully human has been a part of
18:38how black women have been imagined and it's never been interrupted.
18:42So that's part of the zeitgeist. That's part of the environment that allowed Clarence Thomas to basically say support me,
18:51not her.
18:52Allowed black people to think sexual harassment is not something that black women worry about.
18:57Allowed our people to think that when a black woman says something about being sexually abused or harassed, she's acting
19:05like a white woman.
19:06In fact, there was actually an op-ed that said even if Clarence Thomas did all the things that she
19:14said he did, she's still lying because black women know how to take that stuff.
19:20Black women have a lower standard for sexual abuse.
19:24So because we believed that, we did not have a way of understanding that she was talking about our lives.
19:31We didn't have a way of repudiating this far right winger in favor of a black woman who was telling
19:39our story.
19:40So what now has happened?
19:41Not only have black women been marginalized, not being able to tell a story in a community and be believed.
19:49Not only have black people suffered because the civil rights infrastructure was undermined by Clarence Thomas.
19:55Our entire nation is now in the grip of an authoritarian regime that is taking away the few protections that
20:05we fought and bled for to maintain.
20:09So the main point is when we say believe black women, trust black women, it's not just for us.
20:16It's not just for black people.
20:18It's for people of color.
20:19It's for the democracy.
20:20And quite frankly, if this thing goes down, the rest of the world goes down with it.
20:24We're seeing wars all over the place because these people are in office.
20:30So we have to think intersectionally when we think about the responsibilities we have to each other.
20:37We have to think about putting black women into the narrative of what this country is about.
20:42Because if we're not in the narrative, we've lost the story.
20:50Powerful.
20:51I mean, you already know how much I love your mind.
20:57But we have to be able to break this information down in a way that regular folks can understand.
21:03You don't have to get a college degree to understand what Jelani and Kimberly are talking about.
21:10I just want to do a quick poll.
21:11How many of y'all were born after 1968?
21:16Okay.
21:17So if you were born after 1968 like I was, then you've actually never lived in the country that they're
21:23bringing forth.
21:25You were born into a country where because of the battles of our ancestors, you had equality in the law.
21:31You had affirmative action.
21:33You had Roe v. Wade, right?
21:36You had a federal administration that even if it didn't actually believe in equality, at least espouse the values publicly
21:43of equality.
21:44And do y'all remember a few years ago when it was in vogue for folks to be like, I
21:48am not my ancestors?
21:50Right.
21:51Absolutely fucking right.
21:53100%.
21:54100%.
21:54Right.
21:54Because everybody here who thought what they wouldn't have taken back then, oh, I wouldn't have let them water hose
22:01me.
22:02Oh, I wouldn't have let them whip me.
22:04What are y'all doing right now?
22:06Y'all shopping in the Target line.
22:09At Essence Festival, you can't even boycott one store.
22:16So what I would like to know, and look, I always assume if you ask me to speak, I may
22:22never get invited back again.
22:24Because I'm going to tell the truth wherever I am.
22:26I don't care.
22:27Right?
22:28The stakes are too high for us to be worried about a paycheck and not be worried about our rights.
22:34So what I would like in, how much time I got?
22:37Okay.
22:38I'm going to ask one final question.
22:41We have ancestral knowledge that we need to tap into.
22:44The ancestors that we said we are not have actually fought against the thing that we are not prepared to
22:50fight against.
22:51So I would love both of you as kind of our final remarks to tell us what can we learn
22:56from our ancestors in order to prepare us to do battle.
22:59And y'all, it's a long battle.
23:01I need us to be very clear.
23:03You don't lose your rights from the Supreme Court and get them back in the next election.
23:09Some of these rights are lost for generations.
23:11But we have ways where our people fought when we got to the same place before.
23:16So to close us out, I'm going to start with you, Kim, and I'll end with you, Jelani.
23:20Tell us, what do we need to draw from our ancestors in this moment?
23:23Well, you know, you put your finger on it.
23:26This is not a fight about the next.
23:28This is not about the midterms.
23:30This is not about the next presidential election.
23:34We are in a fight for the future of the century.
23:37Our ancestors, if they could speak to us, would tell us we were in exactly this position in 1876.
23:44We were exactly in this position when we were effectively written out of the equation.
23:50We were in the same situation where there was a counter-revolution against everything we had fought for and won.
23:58And you know what?
23:58When we lost, we lost for seven decades.
24:03Seven decades we lived under racial tyranny.
24:06For seven decades, the faction of this country that would rather destroy it rather than share it with us was
24:13running the table.
24:15So what they would tell us is that everything they're trying to take away from you right now, it's valuable
24:22because it is the key to our future.
24:24It is the key to our survival.
24:26So when they want to take away our vote, don't let them tell you that voting isn't important because if
24:32it wasn't important, they wouldn't have been spending millions of dollars to take it away from you.
24:37When they're trying to take away our books, censor us out of the narrative, take over the colleges and the
24:43universities, even K-12 education, go after our concepts like structural racism, anti-blackness, have a whole list of 100
24:52words that cannot be said in the federal government which are all about our ability to narrate our story.
24:58When they are spending time and money to take it away, it's telling us this is what we need to
25:05survive.
25:06So we're not showing up at school board meetings when they try to take critical race theory, black studies, intersectionality,
25:13anything out of the curriculum.
25:14We are giving them our power.
25:17When we don't show up at the community hearings, when we're not showing up at city hall, when we're not
25:25showing up at city council.
25:26It's not just the presidential election.
25:28That's once every four years.
25:30This stuff is happening every day.
25:33So if we don't want to contribute to our own disenfranchisement, we've got to make this costly.
25:39And the only way we make it costly is to fight back.
25:44No anticipatory compliance.
25:46No letting them make us go lower and lower.
25:49Every time we give up something, they come back and say, OK, what more can we take?
25:54We've got to draw a line in the sand and say this and no more.
25:59We are pushing back with everything we have.
26:03Jelani, they're giving me the double eye on both sides, that side and that side.
26:07So you got one minute.
26:08I'm going to say this in one minute.
26:09Look, our enemies have studied us.
26:15We have studied them.
26:17But they have spent a lot of time studying us.
26:21And you look at what has happened in this administration.
26:26They went after, look at what's happening right now in these rulings around the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve.
26:34That ruling is about an attempt to remove a black woman, Lisa Cook, a black economist, from the Federal Reserve.
26:42When they came in, they removed Carla Hayden, a black woman, librarian of Congress.
26:49They just are defaming and attacking Elizabeth Alexander, who is the head of the Mellon Foundation, a black woman.
26:57They understand what black women contribute to the black community.
27:03And that by attacking black women, you facilitate immobilizing the rest of the community.
27:12This is about our self-interest.
27:16We need to examine.
27:19We had a tradition in this country from 1830 to 1901, the colored convention movement, where black people gathered to
27:27say, how do we get free?
27:30The first thing was, do we have to leave the country?
27:34Is it possible to even fight for freedom in this country?
27:37We need to look at that.
27:39We need to gather.
27:41We need to set agendas.
27:43And we need to be real about what we are fighting against.
27:47This is not a question about the next election.
27:50This is a question about what kinds of conditions you want your children as adults to live in.
27:57This is a question of what kinds of conditions you want your grandchildren to be born into.
28:05And just as there were those people who, in 1964, in 1965, in 1968, when those cornerstone pieces of civil
28:16rights legislation came into existence,
28:20they came on the backs of people who died before they were ever signed.
28:25We have to be prepared to do something that we will not see in our lifetimes.
28:32But we will know that the next generation and the generation after that will be the beneficiaries of the things
28:38that we were willing to fight and die for.
28:41Jelani Cobb and Kimberly Crenshaw, please show them appreciation.
28:45Thank you all.