#Next20: American History 101

You can’t move forward without understanding the past. As we look to dismantle systemic racial injustices, we need to know how these systems were first built in order to take them down. In this episode of #Next20, V Teamer David Hubbard interviews Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, to discuss recent events and the importance of studying Black history as a blueprint to build a more equitable future.

Video Transcript

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DAVID HUBBARD: Hi, everyone. I'm David Hubbard with Verizon's Legal and Public Policy Team. Welcome to #Next20, Verizon's new series of conversations about race, social justice, technology, and business issues that will define the next 20 years. We will feature emerging and established change makers to explore the inspiration behind their activism and the ideas to build a better future. From this series, we hope to accelerate their calls for change and move the world forward for good.

Our topic today is American history, and I'm thrilled to introduce our guest, Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies. He's also the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library.

I met Dr. Muhammad-- I want to say it's about seven years ago or so-- with my family at the Schomburg, and it is great to see you again, Khalil. Thank you for joining us, and welcome.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Thanks, David. Thanks so much for having me, and it's good to see you again.

DAVID HUBBARD: So I'd like to start in the current-events space, if we can. And, you know, for many Black people living in the United States, we've had-- we've seen the unfortunate murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain, and so many others as well, which are very tragic and sad.

That said, I don't-- as many Black people, including me, we're not necessarily surprised at these events. And, you know, couple that with the fact that we're in the middle of a global pandemic that has impacted Black and brown people in the United States disproportionately. You know, I'd like your sense. Did these events and have these events surprised you from a historical perspective, and, you know, how did we get here?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: This is a really important question, I think, at this time, and a lot of people are asking it. Even as a historian, I have to say that the pandemic has raised the stakes or so much uncertainty about where we are as a nation in this moment in time. There's really no precedent for the massive and immediate changes that have affected all of us. And I think in that way, seeing the events of this summer unfold with the killings of Black people by vigilantes, by law enforcement is really kind of the tipping point.

You know, from my vantage point, people often refer to the kinds of deaths that we've all borne witness to over the past several years as tragic. They most certainly are sad, but I'm always a little uncomfortable with the idea of tragic because those killings were all intentional. Ahmaud Arbery was literally hunted in a neighborhood where white men decided he didn't belong. Derek Chauvin put his knee on his neck along with an assist by two other officers for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in front of a camera while people pleaded that he stop, while George Floyd called out for his own mother.

Tragedy should be reserved for things that happen when a car swerves off the road and 10 people die suddenly. Tragedy should be reserved for when ice falls from a building and strikes somebody in the dead of winter. Those are tragic.

What we have here are systems of racism that were built intentionally a long time ago, that have been focused-- that have been the focus of reform and attention time and time again, that have been durable, and they've evolved. They're not the same. They don't look the same. Policing is not the same today as it was in colonial times or in the Jim Crow South of a hundred years ago.

But we have so much work to do to both understand why those systems were built the way they were built in the beginning, how they were architected. I mean, Verizon is one of the most important technology and communications companies in the world. Clearly we understand what engineering means. We also understand what it means to take something apart. And so the conversation today, David, for me is as much about understanding how these systems were built as they are giving us a blueprint and a possibility for dismantling.

DAVID HUBBARD: Let's talk about the understanding-- the importance of understanding our history. You know, when you think about the history in the United States and when it's discussed, it's pretty-- let's call it segregated. You know, some even would call it, to be plain here, whitewashed.

You know, I heard it said recently-- and I want to quote him correctly. I think it was Bishop TD Jakes put it. He was making the point that, hey, look, you can get a GED in-- you can't get a GED in America without learning white history or understanding white culture, but you can get a PhD-- and I know you know this all too well, having one-- without knowing anything about Black history and culture.

So getting sort of, you know, back to the point here, why has our history, American history, been so compartmentalized, and how has sort of the whitewashing of history affected our society and understanding of race?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Oftentimes in these kinds of conversations we talk as much about the actual history-- and I know we're going to get to some of that-- and we try to just sort of explain step by step. But in many ways, what is as important in 2020 with the moment that we face is really understanding why we have not taught these histories because the version of history that passes through most K through 12 education systems is a form of civic nationalism. It is the history that underwrites a tale of American exceptionalism, that says that here is the greatest nation on Earth, the wealthiest nation on Earth. This is how America became a superpower rooted in these founding principles of liberal democracy that then became the most important nation the world has ever known.

That's the story in a nutshell. That's what history, social studies teaches most of our young people from K to 12. Now, if they take some AP classes, they might get a more complicated story. Most certainly if they go to college they'll get a version, if they opt in, to African American history or Black studies or something along the way.

And what these stories are meant to do is to bind us together in a universal theme of how we as a nation have accomplished many great things, and I understand that. I get it. I was taught that way as well.

But that narrative has cost us dearly. It's cost us dearly because not only is it not entirely truthful, it shades the truth. It hides. But as you noted yourself, it suggests that Black history is something separate and apart from the national story. It positions slavery, for example, as an aberrational moment in history, as something that shouldn't have happened, but it wasn't that important because, well, we ended it, and so let's move on.

But the truth is that what our students ought to be learning and the opportunity that is in front of us right now that we can opt to choose to teach them is that there is no American history without Black people's contributions to it. There's no founding American wealth without the experience of enslaved Africans as the wealth generators for this nation.

And this isn't just Marxist talking points from a Howard Zinn book a long time ago. It's just a fact. Any business person should ask themselves, where did the capital come from to generate the value of America in the very beginning? All the genius in the world wouldn't have shown up on a debit or credit column in a London banker's asset accounting were it not for the actual value of human life that were the chatteled people of African descent.

The land was cheap and plentiful. There was no gold in abundance in the way that Christopher Columbus had hoped there might be. What there was, was the possibility for an agricultural economy that would become an export economy, first for the colonies and then for the world, that was predicated on forced labor.

And so if we started there, then we would recognize that the founding fathers had flaws, that 10 out of 12 of them were, in fact, slave holders, and they had a very difficult time extracting themselves from the economic incentives that this early version of global capitalism produced for them. If we told that story, then we'd have an easier way of understanding why business people today have a hard time changing business practices, even when they know that they are exploiting poor people in low-income communities.

So we've got to get our history right, David. It is the possibility in front of us that will give us a new origin story of America that will actually help America be a better place.

DAVID HUBBARD: There's so many things to unpack, Khalil, in what you just said there. And, you know, I want to get into the wealth gap a little bit. I also want to maybe start with-- you know, we started with American ideals, right? And so, you know, you think about those American ideals, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And, you know, we have to ask ourselves, well, do Black people have equal access-- equal and parallel access to the American dream itself?

And, you know, it appears to me that talent, you know, is created equally but that opportunity is not. And so what are your thoughts about that? And how do we build an antiracist America which-- you know, which is done with equity and access to life, health, and then-- and the wealth that you've talked about.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: This idea of the sort of talent distribution running in every direction and therefore we just need to pluck the best and brightest out of each of our communities and that's what makes America great is actually part of the mythology of it because what we've basically done is we've built systems of knowledge. I mean academic knowledge. I mean what actual experts, my colleagues-- not necessarily right now in 2020 but over the last 150 years since the modern research university was born, going back to the 1870s with the University of Chicago or, of course, Harvard University much earlier.

What you essentially had was an efficient way of saying, well, let's look categorically at groups of people, and let's decide, like, which groups are more likely to produce talented people and which groups are less likely to do so. That was the science of racism, and it wasn't the purview of a small number of bigots. It was high science. I mean, literally it is what drove the distribution of scarce resources and the understanding of how best to achieve progress in civilization in society.

So if we understand that, then we have to recognize that private schools, social networks that produce employment opportunities, all these things compound on top of ways of perpetuating inequality or privilege. And so what happens is the privileged on the other side of that equation look around and say, well, clearly we were right. People just like us are in abundance in this place. People not like us aren't here, and so all of this makes perfect sense.

But your point being the talent-- that God gave talent and distributed it in not only every community but also many different kinds of talents. And one of the biggest misunderstandings about diversity and inclusion is that so much of what diversity and inclusion has been about in the private sector has been about diversifying skin color or gender, when it was possible, but looking for the same kind of talent and excellence.

You can't know what you don't know if it's not in the room, and I try to tell that to people all the time in higher education. People who do work like me were not acceptable in higher education. The most famous Black sociologist for most of the 20th century was a man, WEB Du Bois.

DAVID HUBBARD: Yeah.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Du Bois couldn't get hired. He was the first Harvard-trained PhD. He couldn't get hired in a research institution of any renown because his white colleagues looked at his Black skin and thought, you know, he's not good enough to be here. But looking back on the course of his career, he was one of the top-five most talented sociologists and historians in the United States of America. Never got the opportunity that he deserved.

So we have to be honest about the networks that we sit in. We have to look around and say, you know, we have a few folks here-- we call them tokens generally-- who make us feel good, but are they really challenging the way we think about what we're doing? And maybe we ought to look for other ideas that aren't present at the table.

DAVID HUBBARD: You mentioned WEB Du Bois, and I was reading in-- and I don't know if it was in "The Condemnation of Blackness"-- which you wrote, and it was wonderful-- or if it was in one of your articles. I've read a number of them, both in the "New York Times" or otherwise.

But you actually had quoted WEB Du Bois and his what I'll call prophetic notion of whiteness, and it was whiteness reflecting morality, the morality of America. And I was-- you know, I was sitting and reading it, and I'm going, gosh. Du Bois wrote this in 1910.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: That's right.

DAVID HUBBARD: And it was almost a warning shot to America that if we didn't change the ideals and structure of the country, the narrative of whiteness being synonymous with goodness would come back to haunt America. And so-- and, of course, the flip side of that, you know, the yin to that yang is that, of course, they created that Blackness being bad or the criminality narrative that has been put or even the lack-of-intelligence narrative, to your point, about Du Bois and education that many Black people resonate with in terms of going into a classroom, being at Harvard, having so few with people looking at why-- how you got there. You know, so if you can talk a little bit about that.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I mean, Du Bois writes this essay in 1910. It's called "The Souls of White Folk." Now, some folks watching this program will have read or know of his famous book in 1983 called "The Souls of Black Folk," but he inverted the story because by 1910 Du Bois essentially had given up on the academy. He decided that no amount of research or knowledge or evidence was going to change white people's minds. They were committed to white supremacy everywhere that he looked-- in the North, in the South, liberals, conservatives. He was very, very frustrated.

And that's the moment when he left Atlanta University-- which was a historically Black-- still is historically Black university-- went to New York City to become the director of research and the editor of "The Crisis" magazine, which is still in circulation today. And he decided that he was going to use his pen as a form of propaganda to argue for the humanity of Black people because he realized that if he didn't actually use the power of the pen in as mighty a way as he could wield it, then he was playing a game he couldn't win. The objectivity of science was stacked already against him.

And one of the first things he wrote-- which you just pointed out, which is brilliant. It's the first whiteness essay in the world. I mean, it's literally if Robin DiAngelo and others are talking about white fragility, it's the first moment when Du Bois basically says that the tape of the world is measured by whiteness, that morality only comes in a white face, that the suffering of Black children doesn't register for white people when they see something happening to a Black child as they see their own.

And what's so powerful about that essay and what's so powerful about the life that he led-- he lived literally half a century longer. He died in 1963 after he wrote that-- is he had decade after decade after decade after decade to make the case, and it wasn't enough because at the end of the day, Black people making the case is not enough for white people to choose to change their behavior.

And so that's the work that's in front of us. That's why we want to give those who are ready to change the history, the information they need, but they have to first choose to want to change. That's where we are today.

DAVID HUBBARD: Khalil, when you think about where we are, it's amazing that, candidly, you can look at the media now and you can look at America now, and what he wrote in 1910 just applies the same way. So I won't belabor that point, but, wow, it's so profound. And we can change it now. I'm optimistic about what we have before us, and I want to come back to your suggestions for helping us get there.

But you actually talked about statistics, and you also have done a number of-- a fair bit of work exposing sort of the fallacy of statistics and how this has moved into oftentimes a narrative space, as you were just explaining to us.

But when we're looking at economic inequality in America-- specifically, you know, I recently read that, on average, it takes 11 and 1/2 Black families to equal the wealth of one white family in America. Also, college-educated Blacks have less wealth, on average, than high-school-educated whites.

So can we discuss the historical reasons for the wealth gap in America and what role-- and apologies for the compound question. But as you discuss that, can you talk a little bit about the role that education disparities and things like housing laws, predatory lending, admission policies, et cetera might play in understanding the wealth gap?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So the first thing is that the wealth gap-- that the latest numbers are roughly that the average white family has $170,000 in net assets relative to the average Black family, which has about $17,000 in net assets. And so it's a 10-fold difference, which is where that 1 to every 11 and 1/2 families to equalize probably comes from. It's astounding.

Now, $170,000 in today's terms probably doesn't hit everyone's ears as, oh, that's a ton of money, but we are talking about the average. That means that the very wealthy among white America, the billionaire class, are also skewing that number higher. And, of course, there's low-income whites.

But the other statistic you cited about a typical college-educated Black family having the same net assets as a typical family of high-school graduates in white America is more revealing, and you know where that comes from, David? It comes from intergenerational wealth transfer.

So one of the biggest asset builders in America, no matter who you are, is home ownership. And we know for people living today-- I live in a house right now, for example, in South Orange, New Jersey. I commute to Harvard in case people are-- how does that work?

I live in a house right now that literally was built in 1928. There's a good chance-- in fact, there's almost a 100% certainty that I could not have lived in this house until the 1950s as the earliest, perhaps the 1960s. This is, in some ways, an exceptional community also because it was intentionally integrated.

But fair-housing laws were not passed until 1968 to actually guarantee, through some enforcement mechanism, that I could live in this house, which means that my mother had already been born in 1950, which means that her mother had been born in the 1920s, which essentially means that relative to the white people who lived in this house and in the houses of my neighbors, Black people couldn't have bought a long time ago when this house cost $5,000 and passed it on so that one day it would be worth $100,000 and then worth $500,000, and then I won't even mention what I had to pay for it to live in it.

So that's the story. It's not that much more complicated than the fact that it has been homeownership that has been the greatest generator of net assets for white Americans. Black people were excluded from home ownership at all levels. First it started in the private real-estate market. That is that private realtors signed ethics codes that said they would not sell to Black people lest they lose their real-estate licenses.

Private homeowners signed restrictive covenants. The deeds on their homes restricted them from selling their homes to Black people. But I'll tell you something that most people don't know. It allowed Black people to live on the premises of homes by white folks in places like New Jersey or Chicago, Illinois-- we're not just talking about Birmingham, Alabama-- because in those cases, they needed the servants to live on premises, which is one of the great and brilliant ironies of racism in America because in slavery, white women literally would not only depend upon Black women to provide child care but they would be nursemaids. Hundreds of thousands of white Southern children grew up suckling from Black women because they were their nursemaids.

So racism is a very complicated thing in terms of proximity and intimacy. It was always about citizenship and equality. It was fine for Black folks to be around. It was fine for Black folks to live in the neighborhood as long as they lived in a garage or in the basement or in a coach house. They could not live next door to you as citizens with jobs and independently owning their own property. That was the problem.

And so therefore, like in housing, so too-- oh, and just one more quick thing. The federal government then sanctioned, beginning in the 1930s, when it used New Deal resources, massive tax redistribution to create the biggest middle class this country has ever had beginning in the late 1930s going through '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. So the very mortgage programs that made it possible to have the 30-year mortgage, to have guaranteed support behind development as well as borrowing is what created this massive wealth gap today for most white Americans.

And they think of it, of course, as hard work, right? My parents worked hard. They saved their pennies. They rubbed them together. They were able to buy a house. They passed it on to me. I worked hard. I passed it on to my children, so on, so forth.

And it's true. A lot of hard work went into and goes into homeownership. But when you have a government and you have the private sector in collaboration with your hard work, you can do amazing things. When you have the private sector and government working against you, stripping your assets from you, then it's very difficult to catch up.

In the education system-- education system has been segregated for the vast majority that public education existed in this country, which goes back to the late 19th century. Guess what, David? They have only been about 20 years in this country, between the mid-'60s and the mid-1980s, when we saw segregation in education go down. That is closer to equal educational opportunities.

And then, in some ways, the South did a lot more work than the North because the South was under the gun of federal pressure. The North said, hey, we're not the South. It didn't do as much, didn't work as hard. And then once things got rolled back in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, segregation has gone back up. So we have a two-tier education system in public education just like we have a two-tier society in so many other dimensions. That is really the bread and butter of the systemic racism.

Police officers come on the back end because they basically enforce these inequalities. They make sure that kids are locked up if they misbehave in school. They make sure that people stay in their communities. They make sure that they're criminalizing poverty because wealth is really the greatest protection in America against exploitation.

DAVID HUBBARD: That is systemic racism defined right there--

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: That's 101.

DAVID HUBBARD: --Khalil.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Yeah.

DAVID HUBBARD: 101. And thank you for that.

But you just mentioned the police, and so I'd be remiss if I didn't jump to the police, especially in light of what we are seeing in America right now. So I'd like to get your thoughts on it, and I know you have done extensive work on sort of the national discourse for, you know, racialized criminality and the like. But given America's ongoing legacy of police brutality, it's important to consider sort of those narratives that we were talking about before. And can we talk briefly about the historical use of statistics to support what we'll call the folklore and the myth of the Black criminal?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: This is a great question. It's not intuitive. So the first thing I'll start with is everyone, more or less, has heard the statement numbers speak for themselves. I mean, how many of us in just random conversation about whatever it is, let's look up the numbers? You know, because your opinion and my opinion-- we can find out the facts, OK?

So we're all wedded to this kind of empirical gesture to truth that is captured in a number that then helps to resolve these opinionated differences that we got. There are truly facts that exist among us. I'm not suggesting that all numbers are lies. But what I am suggesting is that certain kinds of numbers exist in the first place because they do a certain kind of political work. They express certain kinds of ideas.

So the one way to think about this is-- and I'm starting kind of with the answer to go back to some of the history. And that is if I asked a viewer right now how many Irish Americans committed burglary last quarter, no one could answer the question.

DAVID HUBBARD: Yeah, who knows?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: How many Italian Americans committed domestic violence against their partners? Impossible to know.

Now, the interesting thing is over a hundred years ago, going back to the 19-- well, not even over a hundred years ago, going back to the 1920s, you could look in the crime statistics of any police department and see the tracking of crimes of various European immigrant groups across all categories-- rape, murder, burglary, assault, you name it. Why? Because back then, the idea was these groups are suspect. We need to keep track of their crimes because we need to know what they're up to, and we need to know where we need to deploy the police to keep them in check.

That's the story, my friend. By the 1930s America said, you know what? The Irish, the Italians, you know, they're pretty good. They're still a work in progress, right, but we're going to hire them on the police force. We're going to hire them to fire departments. The first among them are going to become mayors of communities, and so that's what happened.

And literally every police agency in America decided that they would no longer be recorded as Irish or Italian. They'd just be recorded as white. And when that happened, not only did it consolidate whiteness into a singular category-- I would say that was progress-- but it also meant that focusing on their crimes as groups of people was no longer important.

But for African Americans, the same reasons, in many ways, that they had started keeping track of the Irish and Italians, they had already been focused on African Americans coming out of slavery. Before slavery, there wasn't as much need for crime statistics. People were enslaved. It was pointless. They weren't even subject to criminal statutes because they were treated in a separate category of punishment, plantation punishment.

But after slavery, beginning in the 1860s, Black people were, in fact, citizens subject to criminal sanctions subject to the most racist laws imaginable called Black Codes in the South. And the whole point of those codes was to put Black people in slavery.

What did they criminalize? They criminalized Black freedom. They criminalized the right to vote. They criminalized the right to be a parent. They criminalized the right to negotiate fair labor terms. They criminalized the right to walk with your back up and your head held high in the face of white supremacists who said you should have your head hanging low.

So of course it produced a lot of arrest statistics and eventually led to a lot of people serving time in jail or prison or in a convict-lease arrangement, which then a whole lot of national experts decided to look at those crime statistics and say, oh my gosh, these people have only been free for a decade or two. Their crime rates are through the roof. There was no asterisk, no footnote, no way of saying, well, of course they're subject to white supremacists and Klan influence in the South, and we are mistreating them in the North. Nobody had time for that except Black people who were pushing back.

And so the crime statistics were sensationalized just like they were sensationalized for the Irish, just like they were sensationalized for the Italian, but they never got rid of the Black crime statistics. We're still using them, and we're still justifying inequality and racism and discrimination because of those crime statistics.

So the knowledge that we get from certain kinds of numbers are themselves an expression of systemic racism. It's not to say that every statistic of a Black criminal is some measure of racism or that every Black person is innocent. It just means that the point of having that data in the first place was really never about individual's innocence or guilt. It was about the collective guilt of Black people in general, just like it was about the collective guilt of the Italians or the Irish at a certain point in time. They got a free pass eventually. Black people didn't get a free pass. We're still debating as a group what these people do as compared to what individuals do who happen to be African American.

DAVID HUBBARD: You said so much there, but if I can just highlight how you referred to the crime that it was to walk straight and hold your head up high. And I think about being a young Black boy, and I think about my parents and my family and neighbors, and I imagine many of us have heard this over the years where they were like, you know, hold your head up high, boy. Walk straight. Stand straight up. Walk tall.

And when you hear those things-- and as you said that, I just wanted to thank you for it and for the history because for all my Black brethren out there, that takes on renewed meaning when you share how it was a crime for us to do that before and how free we are to do it now and how proud we need to be when we do it. So I just wanted to thank you for that.

And sticking with sort of the US issues in terms of crime and police and the like, you know, we've got the highest prison rates, as I understand it, in the world. We're 5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners. Can you educate us on some of the impact of institutionalized racism? And I know you started by, you know, sort of explaining how we haven't, as Black people, been able to-- the narrative hasn't been to make us, quote, unquote, the same type of citizens as many others in America.

But when you look at something like drug use, drug use is the same across young Black folks and young white folks, but yet 80% to 90% of the people in prison on nonviolent crimes are Black and brown folks. So can you talk about that a bit?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: You've said it in terms of defining the scale and scope of American punishment. No other nation anywhere in the world has ever locked up as many people. I mean, it's one of the most profound ironies of a nation so committed to the idea of freedom that we have so much unfreedom when it comes to people in cages in this country, and it's just breathtaking and remarkable.

I mean, the irony is that in the '80s and '90s when a lot of the war-drug apparatus was being put in place-- mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing laws, which meant that people convicted of crimes had to serve 85% of the time that they were sentenced to without any possibility of parole or good-time release. When these laws were being put in place, which by definition meant more people going to prison and staying longer-- that's how you get mass incarceration. It's not rocket science.

Other parts of the globe had also experienced significant upticks in violence, drug-related violence, street-crime violence. This was true in Great Britain. It was true in France. It was true in Germany.

If you look comparatively at Western European countries between the '80s and '90s, they all had violence curves going up like this, meaning everybody was going up. In the United States, our incarceration rate also went up to match the violence rates. But in other places, the incarceration rates stayed flat. They never invested in incarceration as the means to solve what was a global social problem of an uptick in violence.

And I'll be honest with you. No one has ever quite figured out where all that violence had come from, what precisely was the driver. People had lots of theories. Some of it has to do with the social upheaval of the late 1960s left a lot of people disillusioned. They had less trust and faith in government. Coming to the Watergate scandal, for example, in this country, but in other countries going back to 1968 where there's a lot of global upheaval. So there's a lot of theories as to why, but the lesson that I want to convey is that as everybody's violence went up and as the United States incarceration went up, Western countries stayed flat, and everybody's violence came down.

So the point in telling that story is that what we now know looking back to the 1980s or the 1990s when Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, who was the lead senator on the 1994 crime bill, put the biggest amount of federal resources behind incarceration at any time in history-- largest crime bill ever in history, $10 million, 100,000 new police officers all across America.

What we know looking back to that period is that there wasn't actually a relationship between our incarceration investments and the lowering of the crime rate. People in the criminal-justice system wanted to believe there was because, well, that's what they had made their investment. They had cut their teeth that way. I mean, it defined political careers.

But it turns out that the violence dropped here and elsewhere because people stopped engaging in violence. In the case of the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, younger children took a lesson-- a hard lesson from the older people in their lives. Don't do crack. It's terrible. I mean, it wasn't that people just wanted to be crazy. It was that you tried something. It was highly addictive, and now you have a problem. It was a public-health crisis back then just like it's understood to be a public-health crisis now.

So, why did we do all this? Well, partly we did all of this because the appetite and the willingness and capacity to do punishment to control Black people had been the fundamental foundational basis of our criminal-justice system going back to slavery. We'd never uprooted it.

The problem with that system, of course, is that it gets everybody. It doesn't-- I mean, it doesn't just stop with young Black men. It goes on to Black women, to girls. It picks up Latinx people. It gets immigrants, and it even gets low-income white people. There are more white people in prison today than at any point in history, along with more Black and brown people than at any point in history.

So the racism is a cancer that eats into all aspects of our society, but it's also a cancer that was built to sort people. And the criminal-justice system took on the primary role of doing the sorting and the controlling going back to the late 19th century. That's really the big explanation for why this country-- so drug abuse was just one explanation for it. It was the reason for these investments.

But even to this day, about half the people in prison today are there for violent crimes, not murder. Murder is a very small percentage. Something like 5% of all convicted people are there for murder. It's mostly robbery, and robbery doesn't even have to mean someone put your hands on. It just means that the threat of violence is what caused it to be a violent crime.

So we do have people who are actually guilty of doing something. What they show them is that policing and prisons don't solve why people commit violence. What solves why people commit violence is therapy, jobs, restorative justice, a chance to talk through the decisions one made, and guess what? Age. People get old. They stop being pissed off at the slightest insult. So we have all kinds of old people, old Gs incarcerated based on these crazy draconian laws that nobody else in the world has that ought to be released because people age out of choosing violence as a way to resolve differences.

DAVID HUBBARD: That's prophetic. So let's talk about-- I want to get into lynching, candidly. And last year I had the pleasure of visiting the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum, you know, from enslavement to mass incarceration, which we're talking about. Does a wonderful job. I highly recommend anybody taking a trip to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit.

And there's also the site of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which documents the over 4,400 postslavery lynchings in America from 1877 to 1950. And it was a life-changing experience, truly.

And by the way, I understand that your father was a big part of many of the photography that I've seen there, having read up on it. So, you know, congratulations, and kudos to him for that. It was extremely powerful and impactful.

But that said, last month our Congress just passed America's first and only anti-lynching law. Why in the world did it take so long for us to get there?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: These are really great questions, and they don't have good answers. The political marketplace-- you know, this is a business community, part of this conversation, so people understand markets, right? If I'm doing something that will engender votes for me, then I'm going to keep doing it. If I know that I'm not going to get votes for something that is the right thing to do, then depending on the kind of politician I am or business person and the kind of principles I have, the risks that I'm willing to take, I'm not going to do it.

And so going back literally to 1921 when the first anti-lynching legislation was brought in Congress by a congressman, of all places, from Minneapolis, Minnesota-- his name was Dyer, D-Y-E-R-- Brought forth an anti-lynching bill because by 1921, lynching had been going on for four decades. And the pressure at that point to pass anti-lynching legislation had come from the newly founded NAACP which had just been founded in 1910, about a decade before.

They were born not to desegregate schools, as they famously did in their advocacy around the Brown versus Board of Education decision. The NAACP was built to fight racist terror in America and partly because it was moving north. They were afraid, as mostly Northern liberals, that it was coming home to roost. And so this organization advocated for that bill. That bill never made it out of committee. And in another decade they tried again.

There is a famous picture of Howard University students-- and I say this because this reminds me a lot of the young people today who are on the front lines of trying to change this country. There are about seven Howard University students. They are men and women. They're all dressed in their Sunday's best-- you know, fedoras, dresses, skirts, ruffles, everything. They're standing outside of the White House. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is president, and a lynching bill is going-- making its way through Congress. It's 1934. They're literally all standing there with nooses around their necks.

DAVID HUBBARD: Whoa.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I mean, it's just a-- and you can google the image. It's a powerful image.

Now in the middle of the lynching era with respectable, college-educated Black folks in Washington, DC, with one of the most progressive presidents in US history in the White House and you can't get a lynching bill in that moment? I mean, like--

DAVID HUBBARD: Yeah, yeah.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So the political marketplace never rewarded the need for federalizing the crime of lynching. It just didn't happen. White supremacy was more important in terms of being elected no matter where you were than was being willing to risk your political career by voting for anti-lynching.

Now, federalism, just like in the Civil War, the states' right was that murder generally was a state crime. It was not a federal crime. So part of the justification for resisting anti-lynching legislation was that the states had the responsibility for prosecuting lynch mobs. But, of course, they wouldn't do it. And by the time you get the 14th amendment in the context of Reconstruction, which, of course, precedes the lynching era-- we get the 14th amendment literally in 1868. The point of equal process-- equal protection under the law and due process of law was to protect citizens when, in fact, states wouldn't.

So there's the answer. We didn't have enough white Americans to vote for white politicians who were willing to say enough is enough.

DAVID HUBBARD: I'm going to take the fact that we actually just got this bill passed in June as an indication that we're making incredible progress in America. I think sometimes we-- you know, we look at things as so dire, but maybe the fact that people voted for it now and we have a movement and, well, you know, a conscious awakening that we're seeing happening across America, maybe that is, you know, the start, the harbinger of change and more change to come.

But that, of course, leads me to your thoughts on the mass societal changes that we're seeing now. You know, we've got the Black Lives Matter movement. You know, there are books that are flying off the shelves right now about antiracism. And, you know, we've got back order on Amazon, you know, dot com and certainly local bookstores that are-- it's a wonderful thing for Black authors like yourself, I would imagine. And it's really important that people read up and educate themselves on Black history, as we talked about.

But can you give me your thoughts on the movement in and of itself and the change that we're seeing? You know, are you as optimistic as I am about this-- you know, the progress.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Yeah, I am. I mean, first of all, I live with young people. I've got a 20-year-old son. I've got an 18-year-old daughter. Both are in college. My daughter's a rising freshman. My son is a rising junior. And, you know, watching them respond to this moment has been incredibly inspiring.

You know, I have to say that also being on a college campus, being proximate to young, idealistic, imaginative young people who really care deeply about justice and egalitarianism-- know something is rotten, know that their parents have not kept up with the times and are set in their ways-- gives me a lot of inspiration.

I spend a lot of time, David, not only in community and in communication with young people who-- you know, to educate this audience. Black Lives Matter is like saying the civil rights movement. While there is an organization that carries that title and has branches, that's just one organization of dozens of organization, most of which are actually very local, some of which are national.

And so there isn't really a Black Lives Matter organization except one. It is like saying the Black Lives Matter movement is akin to like saying the civil rights movement. There was SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Dr. King. There was SNCC. There was the NAACP. OK, I just want people to know that.

So within that context, the creativity, the energy-- what we're seeing play out in the wake of George Floyd's killing, this sort of acceleration and cataclysmic coming together of so many people, it's not accidental, and it's not just the pandemic. It is two other things.

One, it is the Black Lives Matter movement activists themselves bringing together people and communities to be ready to act, to organize them so that they would be building capacity in each of their communities. And then the second thing is we all know to some degree how impactful-- sorry about that-- how impactful Greta Thunberg's climate-change rallies were over the past year with young people around the country. And so my daughter, for example, participated in many climate-change rallies. So when you have a movement building capacity at the local level and then you have other movements being built on top of that, as in the case of all of these climate-change rallies, all with young people as the primary focus of attention, amazing things can happen.

And the last point I'll say about this that gives me hope is that young people aren't waiting for permission. They're not waiting for any more permission than John Lewis waited for permission at 17 when he told his parents in Troy, Alabama, who were successful chicken farmers that he didn't want to be a third-generation chicken farmer, that he was headed to Nashville, Tennessee. He was inspired by Dr. King because he'd read about him in a comic book, and he wanted to be part of change. He had to tell his parents no because they were afraid. They didn't want to take the risks that were required. And thank God John Lewis took that risk.

So we have to have the faith, the courage, and the commitment to support our young people because, in the end, if we don't support them, then we will leave the world worse off to them.

DAVID HUBBARD: This is obviously an important subject, and we didn't want to limit the conversation. So if you want to learn more about American history and the specific actions that you can take to build a more inclusive society, listen to part two of our conversation with Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad on our "Up to Speed" podcast series. Just type in "Up to Speed" on your favorite podcast player.

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