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(upbeat music) (crowd chattering) - Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

Today's Friday, January 20th.

My name's Dan Moulthrop, I'm the chief executive here and it's so great to see all of you here.

Thank you for joining us.

Today we have another forum in our Authors and Conversation series.

We are thrilled to welcome back to the City Club stage, New York Times bestselling author and founder of Democracy in Color, also a son of our fair city, Steve Phillips.

(crowd applauding) Yes.

(crowd applauding) The last time Steve was on this stage was in October of 2016.

Prior to a very fateful election, he had just released the paperback of "Brown is the New White," and in that book, Steve spoke about our nation's changing demographics and what they portend for public policy and for politics.

Needless to say, our nation has endured a great deal since the fall of 2016.

That was, after all, prior to the presidency of Donald Trump, prior to the nativist fervor that accompanied that administration prior to the pandemic, an insurrection, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the building of a border wall or part of a border wall, a refugee crisis, a war in Ukraine, and on and on.

It's been an exhausting few years and it may seem as if quite a lot has changed.

However, if you take a a longer view back to, say, 1865, these recent changes start to look less significant.

They may rather seem to be part of a longer set of patterns and trends that have shaped our nation over the last two centuries.

That's the background for Steve's latest book, "How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good."

Phillips argues that the Civil War never actually ended and that this lies at the root of our nation's inability to overcome long-standing inequities and political stalemates, Steve Phillips is a columnist for both the Nation and the Guardian.

He's a graduate of Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco College of Law, and a small independent school in Cleveland, Ohio called Hawken.

He has practiced civil rights and employment law for many years and he is a widely sought after political consultant on the political left.

If you have a question for Steve, you can text it to 330-541-5794 or you can tweet your question, @thecityclub, and we'll work it into the second half of the program, but right now, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming to the stage, Steve Phillips.

(crowd applauding) - Good afternoon.

It's great to see so many friends and family here.

Thank you for inviting me.

It's good to be back at the City Club.

It's good to be home in Cleveland.

If you'll indulge me for a few minutes, I'd like to tell you a story.

It's a story about a nation that had been bitterly divided for years over how much to pay attention to the quality of life for black people, arguing over just how much black lives really mattered.

The conflict had even turned violent with white nationalists in several states going on murderous rampages where they used their guns to kill thousands of people who did not share their view that America is and should be a white nation, but on a rainy Sunday in April, the two sides reach an agreement to end the fighting.

A couple days after that rainy Sunday, the president of the United States gave a speech from the White House balcony calling for national unity and expressing support for protecting the right of black people to vote.

One of the people in the crowd listening to that speech was a 27 year old white man from Maryland.

This young man was opposed to the idea that black people were equal and should be able to vote, and he had written a letter six months earlier, stating, "This country was formed for the white, not the black man."

The young man did not like what the president had to say about black suffrage and at the end of the speech, he turned to a friend and he said, "That means nigger citizenship."

That is the last speech he will ever give.

Three days after giving that speech, the president went to a play, "Our American Cousin," the young Maryland man was also an actor and had performed in several plays at the local theater.

He was known entrusted by the theater security guards.

While the president was watching the second act of the play, this young man evaded the Secret Service, tiptoed upstairs, entered the box seats where the president and his wife were sitting, and shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head.

Just five days after the surrender at Appomattox that supposedly ended the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth, an unapologetic white supremacist and confederate sympathizer, assassinated the president of the United States, and you might be thinking, "That happened in 1865, 158 years ago.

That was a long time ago, Steve, the Confederates surrendered, things have changed, and we are no longer engaged in a civil war," so, let's move forward a bit in time.

Let me tell you a slightly more recent story about how a bill becomes a law and what the challenges are when that bill relates to racial equality, and don't worry, I did not have the time nor the talent to turn this into a "Schoolhouse Rock!"

song.

Young people, you can Google "Schoolhouse Rock!"

and "I'm Just a Bill."

(crowd laughing) In 1866, a year after Lincoln's assassination, several progressive white members of Congress introduced the Civil Rights Act, legislation stating simply that citizens of every race and color should all have the same rights.

The then president of the United States, Andrew Johnson, the man who only became president, because a white supremacist had murdered his predecessor, was not a fan of protecting the rights of black people.

Johnson had unashamedly said, "This is a country for white men, and, by God, as long as I am president, it should be a government for white men."

He vetoed the civil rights bill and offered an early argument about so-called reverse racism, writing in his veto message, "The distinction of race and color in this bill is made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race."

"But that was a long time ago, Steve.

Things have changed.

The Confederate surrendered, we are no longer engaged in a civil war," so, let's move along to the 20th century, 1932 to be exact, when a Texas lawyer went to Washington to argue before the United States Supreme Court.

Thornton Hardy was a respected lawyer in El Paso, Texas, a loving husband and father of four children.

He was known for his unfailing courtesy and courtly bearing.

On his death, he was honored on the floor of the US Congress with a tribute saying that he was an eloquent defender of those principles and constitutional government, which he believed essential to our nation's wellbeing.

In 1932, he had the honor of bringing his courtly bearing to the Supreme Court where he argued an important case about those very principles of constitutional government.

In that case, Nixon vs. Condon, Mr. Hardy argued successfully that it was perfectly fine for Democratic primary elections in Texas to be restricted just to white people.

He said that since political parties were not government entities, that they weren't bound by the 15th Amendment in his prohibition against discrimination in voting.

He did not say the quiet part out loud, mainly that, as a practical matter in the South, there was only one political party, because the other political party had the temerity to support the end of slavery, and so, nearly all voters in the South belong to that one party, and if you restricted primary elections to just white people, then as a practical matter, voters of color were effectively disenfranchised and that was the whole point.

"But 1932 was a long time ago, Steve.

The Confederate surrendered.

Things have changed.

We're no longer engaged in the Civil War," but, was it a long time ago?

My father who is sitting here today was born in 1932.

Happy early birthday, dad.

(crowd laughing) But let's jump forward in time to 1973, when I was nine years old.

Let me tell you a story about a Tennessee politician named Douglas Henry.

Mr. Henry was the longest serving member of the legislature and a master of the arcane rules around the state budget, described by his peers as the epitome of a southern statesman and gentleman.

He was known as Duck to his friends and was involved in civic organizations, such as the YMCA and the Kiwanis Club.

Henry was also a Tennessee history buff.

Drawing on that knowledge of history, Henry drafted a bill to honor a major figure in Tennessee history, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the resolution called for procuring a large bronze bust to prominently display in the Tennessee State Capitol, the seat of democracy in that state, the People's House.

Who was this man that Tennessee wanted to honor in its capitol building?

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a 19th century businessman in Memphis, Tennessee who had a company called Forrest & Maples.

An 1850s ad described the business as a "Negro mart" that had constantly, on hand, the best selected assortment of field hands, house servants, and mechanics.

They are daily receiving fresh supplies of young Negroes, Negroes sold on commission and the highest market price always paid for good stock.

You can find a copy of that ad on the Wikipedia page for Nathan Bedford Forrest right now.

When the South went to war to protect the right to buy and sell black human beings, Forrest became a leading general in the Confederacy where he distinguished himself by leading a particularly savage and brutal unit in the Confederate army.

After the formal end of the Civil War, Forrest was selected as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the domestic terrorist organization that unleashed violence and murder to stop people of color from voting, so, in 1973, when I was a child singing along to "Schoolhouse Rock!"

videos about how laws get made, the political leadership of the state of Tennessee so revered Nathan Bedford Forrest that they passed a law bestowing a special place of honor for him in the State Capitol.

Only after the modern day lynching of George Floyd sparked a racial reckoning in this country in June and July of 2020, did Tennessee finally vote to remove the bust of Forrest from the Capitol, meaning, for the for that my entire adult life, the state of Tennessee, where my niece, Courtney's, raising her two young daughters, has fiercely defended a prominent monument to a white supremacist mass murderer in its State Capitol.

"But Tennessee did vote to remove the Forrest bust in 2020, Steve, and that was a long time ago anyway.

The Confederate surrendered.

Things have changed.

We're no longer in a civil war," so, let's consider a more recent story, January 6th, 2021.

On that day, a violent mob carrying the Confederate flag, wearing sweatshirts saying "MAGA Civil War, January 6th, 2021," stormed the United States Capitol, hurled racial epithets at the black police officers guarding the building, and proceeded to try to hunt down the nation's elected officials who were preparing to finalize the peaceful transfer of power, the cornerstone of a democratic society.

Even after the assault on the citadel of democracy had been repelled, the majority of the members of the Republican Party in the United States Congress voted to reject the verdict of the American people and essentially supported overthrowing the elected government of the United States of America.

That was two years and 14 days ago.

Sadly, memories are fading about the severity of what happened, and many would like to argue that January 6th was a long time ago.

It's not like it happened yesterday.

You know what really was yesterday, yesterday, 24 hours ago?

While much of America celebrated the birth of Martin Luther Luther King this week, in Texas, state employees got a paid day off yesterday, because it was Confederate Heroes Day, a state holiday where state employees get paid public funds to not work, so that they can honor the white supremacists, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and when we think about these monuments and these holidays, it's worth noting that there are no monuments or holidays honoring Nazis in Germany, and that's intentional, but here in this country, we still have states celebrating Confederate white supremacist mass murderers, and there are 2,000 such monuments littering the landscape of the United States of America, poisoning our public spaces.

There are still 18 statues, busts, and paintings of Confederates in the United States Capitol today, and that's definitely not a long time ago, so, I have come home to Cleveland and returned to the City Club to share with you in as plain the fashion as I can that the Civil War is not over.

The Confederates have never stopped fighting and we remain locked in an existential battle over whether America will be a white nation or whether it will be a multiracial democracy.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that we can and should finally win this war.

There is, in this country, a multiracial new American majority.

That's what I came to talk at this podium about in 2016, and it's what I wrote my first book about, "Brown is the New White."

That majority consists of the overwhelming majority of people of color, approximately 75% of people of color, and a meaningful minority of whites, roughly 40% of whites nationally, and because racial issues are so difficult to talk about, it is important to note and appreciate that there have always been whites who have worked to advance the concept that this should be a multiracial nation.

Thomas Jefferson tried to include a condemnation of the slave trade in "the Declaration of Independence," which the slave holding states forced him to remove.

Abolitionists advocated for not just this, this 1866 civil rights bill, but also, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, embedding protections and equality in the concept that this is a multiracial country where everybody should be protected by the same laws.

Activists risked and lost their lives in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, fighting for the right to vote and end segregation, and for equality, and we do have to be clear-eyed that progressive whites comprise a minority of the white population, but it's a meaningful minority, and that meaningful minority allied with the overwhelming majority of people of color is the majority of people in the United States of America and the majority of eligible voters in most states.

That's why the modern day Confederates are so focused on voter suppression.

That's why Ohio just passed this new voter ID law.

They're still trying to restrict voting to white people.

In order to prevail, we have to keep the faith.

My grandfather, Evan Orensia Cochran, was the minister of Glenville's Church of God for 50 years here in Cleveland and he taught me that the Bible says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

That evidence is actually all around us and what I've tried to illustrate in my new book is, that all across the country, we are, in fact, winning critical battles with long-term ramifications and implications, the evidence of things not seen as in Arizona.

In 2010, Arizona passed a hostile anti-immigrant law known as the Show Me Your Papers bill, which was a fear-based reaction to the changing composition of the population in Arizona.

The movement against that effort galvanized a whole generation of young activists, immigrants, and people of color who understood the importance of voting, the changing electoral outcomes, and public policy.

Over the course of the past decade, the leaders of that movement, working in coalitions, such as One Arizona and Arizona Wins, registered hundreds of thousands of Latinos and other people of color to vote, and that coalition was the driving force behind defeating Donald Trump in 2020, handing control of the US Senate to the Democrats in 2020, and electing Democrat Katie Hobbs as governor this past November.

The evidence of things not seen is in Texas.

Yes, Texas.

The city of Houston is named after Sam Houston, who was the president of the Texas Republic in 1836, a republic that was created, so that white Texans could continue the practice of buying and selling black human beings.

Sam Houston himself owned 12 black human beings throughout his life and he also referred to Mexicans as "phlegm."

Today the city of Houston, through the work of organizations such as the Texas Organizing Project, is now run by a black man, Sylvester Turner, who is the descendant of slaves.

The county in which Houston is situated, Harris County, has as its top executive a Latina, Lina Hidalgo, who used to live in Mexico among the "phlegm."

Lina may well be the future governor of Texas.

The evidence of things not seen is in Georgia, the book "Gone with the Wind," which romanticizes and sanitizes the violent white supremacy of the Confederacy, is set in Clayton County, Georgia.

In 2020, thanks for the decade long work of Stacey Abrams and dozens of other organizations, the number of black people in Clayton County, Georgia, who voted increased by 15,000 people.

Joe Biden defeated Trump in Georgia by 11,593 votes.

That same multiracial movement in Georgia elected the literal successor to Martin Luther King, Reverend Raphael Warnock, who preaches from Ebeneezer Baptist Church where King preached.

That coalition elected Reverend Warnock United States Senate, flipping control of the entire body and setting a whole new set of public policies within this country that followed.

These success stories show not only that it's possible to win, but they also offer a blueprint and a template for victory.

They have shown how we win.

They have modeled a liberation battle plan.

While we are engaged in a civil war and the battle is existential, the reward for winning will be amazing.

We have the power to write a new social contract in this country, one that could be so much more than we've ever imagined.

Martin Luther King's last book, it's called "Where Do We Go from Here?"

And in that book, he talks about the question of poverty and how all these different social programs that existed, we tried to do something addressing families or addressing housing, and that will impact poverty, and that's how we've tried to approach addressing poverty, but what King said in his final book was that the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly through a guaranteed income and there are now dozens of cities across the country, including Cleveland under Mayor Bibb, who have become part of this Mayors for a Guaranteed Income program, and we saw during the pandemic that you can send checks to every single person in this country.

You can actually suspend rental payments for evictions and secure people's basic living.

We've learned that you don't have to get into a car and drive for miles polluting the environment, and going working in a big high-rise building in order for the economy and society to function.

We can let our imagination soar and our hearts expand.

We can draw up a new social contract that meets the needs of the entire human family, and, in the end, that's what the original Civil War was about.

What kind of nation are we?

What kind of people are we?

What kind of country do we want?

Do we wanna be a white nationalist nation bitterly divided and resentful of the progress of people who don't look like us or do we wanna be a fully flourishing democracy in color where everyone is embraced, valued, and cherished, where everyone's potential is unleashed for the betterment of humankind?

We can get there.

We have the numbers, but, first, we have to recognize that the Confederates have never stopped fighting the Civil War, and then we have to turn to, listen to, and invest in the leaders who have shown that they know how to win.

If we do those things, we can, in fact, finally win the Civil War and build the kind of society we will be proud to live in and leave to our children and grandchildren.

Thank you for inviting me and thank you for listening to my stories.

(crowd applauding) - Thank you, Steve.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A and I should mention again that you're with the City Club Forum and our speaker is Steve Phillips.

He's the author of "How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good."

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, of which there are many, and those of you you joining us via our live stream at cityclub.org or the radio broadcast on 89.7 Ideastream Public Media WKSU.

If you'd like to tweet a question for our speaker, please tweet it @thecityclub.

You can also text your question to 330-541-5794.

The number again for our radio audience is 330-541-5794, and our staff will work it into the program.

May we have our first question?

- Ron DeSantis and the Florida Board Board of Education has rejected a college board approved African-American studies AP class in Florida high schools.

This is the first time any state has rejected any college board approved class to be taught in our schools, aside from everything that you've discussed, how this follows, and you talk about in your book of how this follows history, of this is all from the Confederate playbook, distorting history, letting us not learn the lessons, because, of course, we know that's how we repeat them.

Aside from even the distortion of history, I think about as a parent, how I look forward to my young boys taking AP courses, getting credits, using those to help them get into college and maybe make my college bills cheaper, because they got the credits, so, they talk a lot about parental rights.

What about a parent's right to have a little bit more of an affordable education for their kids?

I'm feeling a little outraged about this.

Florida's a very red state.

Ron DeSantis was just easily reelected and we all know he's trying to run for president.

I think it resonates a lot with us in Ohio who are feeling like, when these things happen here, the question is, how do we fight back in red states against the confederacy here in our lives today?

- Thank you, Katie.

Well, I'll first say... Dispute the premise to a certain extent.

Florida is not a red state.

Florida is a state that votes red, but Florida came within 30,000 votes of having an African-American governor in 2018.

I have not forgotten how close that race actually was and that was a reflection of the composition of Florida, and even in that race, as well as this last one, you still had 3 million people of color not voting in the election.

Tom Bonier of the organization, TargetSmart, who does a lot of data number crunching, had a recent tweet in the past couple days about analyzing what happened in Florida, and so, that would happen if the Democrats stayed home, the floor fell out, so, when I was talking about there's a new American majority, there's a new American majority of eligible voters.

The challenge is can you get the eligible voters to become actual voters?

And that's why the laser focus of the modern day Confederates is stopping people from voting, is to have as few people as possible voting, so that they can have the electorate to be the way they want it to be, so, the fundamental, that's like a premise issue, but I think it also gets to the larger question.

Ultimately, we have to get more people to vote and they have to do the work to do that, and we also have to raise the... What we were actually talking about before, we have to raise the accountability level of the various entities that are doing civic engagement work within this country.

They're engaged in our country's elections around, how are they actually spending their money?

And so, hundreds of millions and actually billions of dollars are spent every election cycle, but the vast majority of the money is spent on television ads, and so, it's not spent on organizing, hiring people.

I came up from the midterm elections thinking of this concept, we should have a million precinct captains in this country, a million precinct captains for justice and people whose job it is, who, to know the 1,000 people in their neighborhood, to talk with them on a regular basis to inform them of upcoming issues, to make sure everybody is registered, make sure those who are registered to actually get out to vote, and I think that would cost less than all these television ads that we're actually doing, and so, if we do that, that will flip these outcomes, and so, we do not appreciate how close we came both in Florida and in Georgia in 2018 in particular, and so, I think that showed the potential, and then, even a place like Texas where, again, people see it as a red state.

Texas is 39% white, so, the majority of the eligible voters are black and Latino within Texas, and so, this comes to that question of voter turnout.

How are we actually getting people to actually participate?

So, I think my fundamental answer... Well, that say that's my fundamental is getting more people to vote, second is, and we were actually talking about, I feel we have to challenge, we have to... We used to say back in the '60s, heighten the contradictions.

We have to actually present the issue more starkly, and I believe that if you present the issue to most people and you ask them, "Do you want this to be a white country or multiracial country?"

But people say, "Well, I don't want it to be..." They don't want to be associated with that.

That's not the, what was it?

Tawny C. Coates wrote an essay several years ago.

Somebody was claiming, "No, I'm not racist," and Coates says, "Who does a person have to lynch around here to get called a racist?"

And so, nobody wants to be associates, so, if we make it as stark and...

But I think most progressives, and, frankly, most Democrats feel that if you put that question squarely, I think they feel most white voters will flee and will go to the to the other side, and I don't think that's actually what the evidence shows, but everyone's been reluctant to put it forward and to be able to really challenge and summon people to their highest and best selves, and I do believe that enough people will respond that we can then beat these things back, and so, I guess to the education piece as well, what do we want people to learn?

And then, just this last thing on this.

I know we have other questions that, but I had a section of the speech about this I took out, so, I wanna say it here, is that... Who were we talking to about that?

This has been so almost unimaginably consistent, how the Confederates and their successors have gone about this, so, the whole lost cause, we were talking in Hawken yesterday about the lost cause is no different than the the current election deniers of what's happened after 2020, people trying to rewrite history aggressively, and enthusiastically, and fervently.

There's an organization called United Dollars of the Confederacy, which has 700 chapters around the country still was very active in the early 1900s, policing what was taught in the schools about the Confederacy, monitoring what books were being taught, giving approved lists, trying to ban books, so, this has been going on for a long time and it's very consistent how they've done it, and, again, if we were to challenge it directly, I feel that most people would respond, there's also a way to educate more people and force them to make a decision, and I think what my analysis of the past decade of politics is that when we've pushed that question that the majority will be with us, and I think that's the underappreciated aspect of Obama's election and reelection, even in state like Ohio, which we haven't won since then.

The country was essentially asked, "Do you wanna have a black president?"

And Ohio responded affirmatively, but it was put to them, and so, that I think is a big part of this approach.

- Yes, and listening to you talk, I know that the current battle over comprehensive immigration reform somehow figures into it, but I'm not sure how, please tell me.

- So, and thank you, that's another part of the speech I had to cut out, and so, there is the very first immigration law passed in this country in 1790, so, to be a US citizen, you have to be a free, white person, a "free, white person," and not only was that the first law in 1790, that was governing law until the 1950s, and it was the practice of this country until the 1960s.

There's a United States Supreme Court case, Ozawa v. United States in the 1920s.

It was a Japanese person who had worked in the United States and had contributed, and wanted to become a US citizen, and the, the US said, "No, you're not white," and then, that case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, "No, you can't be a citizen, because you're not white, and that's what the law says," and so, that is one fundamental piece, I think that we have to appreciate in terms of the centrality of this question around, who are we as a nation?

Doesn't get more basic than, who gets to be an an American?

And that has been so narrowly defined in terms of being white, and it's also contributed to the distorted composition of our country's politics and public policy.

We talk about red states or whatnot.

I was working on last book, I... Because we take it as such an assumption that most of the people are white and then, the "minorities" are the people we should be nice to, but there's not really enough for them to make a difference, et cetera, and I was like, "What's the percentage of people of color in the world?"

And then, I started, actually, recently, my best estimate is it's roughly 88% of the people in the world are people of color, and so, then you give a question, "Well, how was this country so white?"

And it was intentionally and unnaturally this white, and that's also why there's this existential fear and resentment about that, the composition changing, the prior president talking about "S-hole" countries, immigrants coming from there, so, the issue of immigration goes to the heart of who we are as a nation, and, again, that's an issue I don't think that we affirmatively and unapologetically embrace and tackle, and the fact that we're even still talking about comprehensive immigration reform, and we don't have it is a reflection of the timidity of a lot of the public officials around tackling that kind of an issue, so, I would just, again, I think the same answer... A little bit of the same answer of lift up the issue, force people to confront it, and do the organizing work to be able to bring a new majority into our public policy bodies that share these perspectives, and so, that's, I think, a big part of all of these different pieces, so, I talk about it in the book and I've been fortunate to know and partner with Stacey Abrams for a decade now, and then, she called...

I talked to her in 2021 after the Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff flipping control of the house, the representatives enabling COVID relief bills to go out and a whole series of public policies to get through congress, and I said to Stacey, I was like, "So, you took that initial support that we gave you in 2012 and you've turned it into $2 trillion for the American people?"

And she says, "I'd like to provide return on investment," but it's illustrative.

That's obviously a huge example, but if you do the work, you organize the voters, you turn out the voters, you change tunes in public policy, then you can change public policies to be able to deal with these types of issues.

That's the answer to immigration reform, I feel.

- Welcome home to Cleveland.

- [Steve] Thank you.

- Here's another issue, the social contract, the new social contract that you envision, does it include reparations?

And could you let us know the status of that effort in the US today?

- So, yeah, I addressed that somewhat in the book and in this sense of we saw how much more is possible during the pandemic, and so, after the first COVID relief bill went through, that was, like, $1 trillion went through in two weeks.

I have to find out who did this tweet, so I can properly credit them, but somebody tweeted out, "So, we could afford reparations?"

(crowd laughing) In joke fact, so, much more I think is possible than we have come to believe, but, fundamentally, there is a question of will and it does get at the core, so, what I probably lift up in my book, even before getting to the remedy of reparations, is we need to have a conversation around what is owed and in a country where there is profound contemporary inequality that you can very directly trace back to one grouping of people doing the work to create the wealth and pick the cotton that got turned into a clothes that got shipped overseas and created great wealth within this country, to say nothing of the whole country itself having been taken from its original inhabitants, what is owed to those people?

And people like to say, "Well, I didn't hold slaves, I wasn't part of that, et cetera."

I keep trying to figure out, what's the right metaphor or illustration to talk about though?

It'd almost be like if somebody came into a neighborhood, moved into the biggest houses, kicked the other people out, and then, they have these big houses, and then, the children of those people are all like, "Well, I didn't do that," but you're living in the big house that your parents came and took.

That's the situation, so, I think that's another question that people are very timid and reluctant to engage, in that, ultimately, I think we're gonna have to look at also, public policy solutions, and I don't think any of those should be off the table in terms of, should you actually pay reparations to people?

But the main consequence is the inequality in our society.

Should there be a reparations lens around a modern day Marshall Plan to redress the inequality and injustice within our society.

That's the kind of thing I think we may want to ultimately move towards, but it's, again, another very timid issue, so, we have yet to be able to pass a bill in congress to even study reparations, and so, John Connors, when he was in Congress for like 20 years, kept introducing this bill, couldn't get more than a handful of co-sponsors.

They finally got a bunch of co-sponsors, and even after George Floyd was killed, and there was the brief racial reckoning, there was very little... We were not able to get it passed and certainly be able to get it passed through the Senate, so, that's not to give reparations, it's just to study it, so that I think showed, but this is another piece around... And this is my other point, we have to lift up and challenge all of the different public officials, so, there's nothing stopping the president of the United States from creating a commission himself to study reparations and to lead a national dialogue around what is owed, so, that's the one of the types of things that can happen, and the other thing I just wanna say too, particularly since there are students here and people who are young activists, is that there's a level of accountability that needs to happen, so, even before getting to reparations, there was a whole slew of commitments across this country from foundations and universities about what they were gonna do around racial justice after George Floyd was killed, and we're seeing all kinds of backsliding, and failure to follow through, and lack of commitment, and weakening of will, so, this is the kind of thing that could be an academic project.

Somebody could study, what were all the commitments?

You can contact people, ask them, "Where are you at?"

There was something in that paper the other day about Penn State backing off of its of its commitments.

Different foundations have already quietly backed off from them, so, call 'em up, email them, put it up on the web.

Here's a running list of what their commitments were, where they currently stand, and where this is at.

That, I think, actually is a way to leverage hundreds of millions of dollars that people had committed, but aren't so thrilled about spending now.

- Good afternoon, my name's Merle Johnson.

I'm a member of the State Board of Education and I think many in this room know... (crowd applauding) (Merle chuckling) Thank you.

(all laughing) Many in this room know that there's a national movement to privatize public education.

Right here in Ohio, Senate Bill 1 has been introduced, which would remove most of the responsibilities from the State Board of Education and the Ohio Department of Education, and put it in the hands of the governor.

They would be in control of federal and state dollars coming to our schools and, basically, it would be even easier for them to turn our public schools into private schools that use vouchers, and expand charter schools.

My question, do you see a connection between the movement to privatize public education and this civil war?

- Oh, very much so, and, again, it's not anything that's new, and thank you for your work on the Board of Education.

I served on the San Francisco Board of Education.

My mother was a public school teacher here in Cleveland for Cleveland Public Schools.

It's an issue that I care deeply about, and I talk a little bit about this in the book, so, when Brown v. The Board of Education came down saying we have to desegregate public schools, many different school districts just shut down entirely, so, rather than have to have our kids sit next to black kids, we're not gonna have public schools, but what they did was they created private schools, so they could actually have their kids go get education, whereas the black kids were left in an underfunded, underdeveloped education system.

That was a very direct and explicit response to Brown v. the Board of Education.

There's a document called the Southern Manifesto that you were calling for, massive resistance, was the phrase that they were using in the 1950s, to a ruling that said that there should not be segregation in schools, so, that I think is one of the clearest, most traumatic manifestations.

I live in California now, and I've seen it over the past decade.

California used to have unquestioned enthusiasm for investing in public higher education, but, as the state got more diverse, that enthusiasm diminished and then, they started cutting the support.

This fell back on investing in California's public schools, and I think that's a broader issue overall, and I think that was part of the thing about the healthcare, the opposition to Obamacare, it wasn't that people didn't want healthcare for their own families, they didn't want "those people," and so, the question around public support for public policies that benefit everybody diminishes, because it gets racialized and gets interpreted through the lens of the ongoing civil war.

- Hello, and thank you so much for your words.

Selfishly, I'm gonna keep it on the topic of public education.

I want to ask you about your thoughts about the original purpose of public education and who it was that that system was actually built for, white male landowners, and not for many of the people in this room, and not to build a multiracial democracy, so, while we're talking about the systems as they are and how they're being attacked by this legacy of the Confederate, how do we come together and really reimagine a public education system, not fixing the one that we have, but creating a brand new vision for public education that will advance that multiracial democracy?

- Well, I do think that that is probably how it originally was conceptualized, but much of the expansion of public education took place after the Civil War, during reconstruction, and then this is when people had to say, "Well, are we gonna have public schools?

Are we gonna invest resources to educate all of the different children who are there?"

So, I think that's part of the tradition that we need to reconnect with and then, part of this is a values issue, and you see this a national politics.

People saying, "Oh, you have to focus on economic issues.

You can't focus on social issues," but I actually think equality is a economic issue and this fundamental question, what kind of society do we want?

I went to China in the late '90s and we visited some of their children's centers, and they don't call them children's centers, they call them children's palaces, because the value that they attach to those entities is very different than what we actually do here, so, I think my fundamental conclusion and belief is that we have to be far more enthusiastic and unapologetic about laying out an agenda for an entirely different kind of society where everybody is properly educated.

Why can't we double teachers' salaries to attract people and keep people within it?

Why can't we pro do creative things like provide low interest or no down payment mortgages to teachers, so that they can actually stay in the regions where they're actually teaching?

So, these things are all...

There are people thinking about them, moving them forward, but we don't put 'em forward as an agenda, and I think that we underestimate the appetite of the public for a much more sweeping, progressive public policy agenda, but we have to put it out there to really be able to get the response.

- How do you account for the 25% of the people of color who don't see the message?

- Well, I don't know.

Have you ever been to a Thanksgiving with different people of color?

There's going to be a spectrum of opinions, of people in any grouping.

Obama got, I think it was 94% of the black vote, and I wanna know, who are that 6%... (crowd laughing) In terms of...

So, there's always gonna be, I feel, a spectrum of people, and then, I think part of the problem is the fear that progressives and then Democrats have about associating with people of color, and so, they're afraid that will turn off white people if you stand too strongly for racial equality, and so, then they don't say anything, and so, then in the absence of showing that you're for people of color, well, you can get more drift, and then, particularly as other people actually start trying to make an argument and putting...

In 2020, and I think the statistic is correct.

It's very, very close.

Every house pickup by the Republicans in 2020 was a person of color, so, they understand getting candidates of color and getting people who come from those communities, and that's a way to actually attract, where the Democrats are far more timid and reluctant to actually do that, so, you've gotta take a stand that otherwise you do leave it, you're susceptible to encroachment from the other side in that regard.

- Hi, Steve, I have one of our many, many, many text questions to share with you.

How do we persuade the democratic party that Steve's analysis is correct?

I was frustrated that Tim Ryan's campaign focused on the white middle, not POC, and he used anti-China rhetoric, which inflamed the Asian-American community.

Thank you.

- Well, there's a book called "Brown is the New White."

(crowd laughing) So...

It tries to lay this out in some specificity.

I do think there's an issue around accountability in using the various platforms that we have, so, the organization I work with, Democracy in Color, we did report cards on Super PACs in 2020 and we found that the Senate Super PAC, as of August 1st, 2020, had spent $7 million in Iowa, and zero in Georgia, and there was no empirical basis for that, the prior presidential election, the prior gubernatorial election that Georgia had been closer than Iowa, so, why would you spend your money that way?

But they'll need decisions to get made in a vacuum, and so, that's where I feel it needs to be an echo chamber of people using whatever platforms they have, social media, their emails, their neighborhoods to shine a light on people making these decisions.

This information is public.

You have to lay out in the FEC reports, fec.gov, how the money's being spent, but nobody ever questions them on it and calls them on it in the absence of that accountability, then I feel that these types of decisions can get made.

- So, the older generation says that the future is in the hands of the young, and a lot of young people believe they have no or little control over their futures outside of voting, what would you say is the best form of affirmative action to create a more diversified future?

- Well, I think they go together.

It's voting and it's public policy, and so, it's not enough just... What is the thing they were saying in the '60s?

We don't just want black faces in high places.

We want political power, and so, once you vote and once you get people in, then, what are you gonna do with that?

And so, that's where there's a role for people to do the imagining around, what are the different types of public policy solutions that could be advanced that are not being championed, and things that would actually be specifically relevant to the various communities, and so, I think there's a lot of research and policy development that people should be doing to come up with good ideas, such as this guaranteed income concept, and then, to promote it and get it out there into the public sphere more.

- Hi, I'm a Hawkens student, so, a few questions ago, you were talking a lot about specific, like, how youth, how our generation can help propel those that are in Congress as are in the House to make decisions to lead to a more equitable future, but, specifically, in my case, obviously, I am coming from a white perspective, and it seems that our voices are more often than not silenced, because we are coming from that youth perspective, so, one of my main questions is, how do you think, at least in your mind, what are the most feasible action plans for youth to make those steps and hope that our voices won't be silenced?

- Don't underappreciate, don't undervalue the communications potential of all of the technological revolution is that before you had to be able to convince the editor of a paper to put your article in the paper in order to get anybody else to see it.

Those barriers don't exist anymore, and so, if somebody wanted to hold somebody accountable, do a report around whatever entity, and how they're actually spending their money, are they living up to their... You can create a Google doc, and then, get it out there in the world and then, I think there are other people in the media who will then look to that.

People like to see power being held.

It's like a good story, and so, do not undervalue the potential impact of your energy, and research, and analysis skills, but then, the communication potential of all of the different social media and online communications opportunities that exist now.

That certainly did not exist back in 1983 when I worked at the plane dealer and they were typing on typewriters.

(crowd chuckling) (crowd applauding) - Steve Phillips, as we close, I want to just mention that this is part of our Authors and Conversation series here at the City Club.

We present in partnership with Cayuga Arts and Culture, the John P. Murphy Foundation, and Cayuga County Public Library.

We would also like to just mention briefly that we welcome guests at tables hosted at Beyond Breakthrough Hawken, and, of course, the 1980s Hawken Alumni Association Incorporated.

(crowd laughing) Honesty for Ohio Education, MC2 STEM High School, the Metro Health Foundation, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, and the Ohio Progressive Collaborative.

Next week, we have a packed agenda here at the City Club.

Leadership from the Cleveland Guardians will be here on Monday the 23rd.

The Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman, will be here on Tuesday the 24th to talk about her recent visit to Ukraine, Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin speaks on Wednesday the 25th, and concluding that week, we have on January 27th, a conversation between two international leaders, instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa.

You can learn more about all of these forums and also visit our archives at cityclub.org.

That brings us to the end of our forum.

Thanks once again to Steve Phillips.

Thanks to Max Bax for providing book sales today.

Steve will be signing in the lobby immediately afterwards.

I'm Dan Moulthrop.

Our forum is adjourned, have a great weekend.

(crowd applauding) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(upbeat music) Production and distribution of City Club Forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fond of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.