- Coming up on American Black Journal, our round table is back to take on the stories that matter to the African-American community here in Southeast Michigan.

We're gonna talk about the sentence for former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd.

Plus we'll examine the cause of the disastrous flooding that has affected so many Detroiters.

You don't wanna miss this show or the conversation.

American Black Journal starts now.

- [Masco Advertiser] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- [Reporter] Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African-American history, culture and politics.

The DTE Foundation and American Black Journal partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Announcer] Also brought to you by AAA, Nissan Foundation, Ally, Impact at Home, UAW Solidarity Forever, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to American Black Journal.

I'm Stephen Henderson, your host, and as always, I'm glad you've joined us.

I'm coming to you today from the little radio studio I have built in my home to take Detroit today, which I do each day for WDT.

Today it is doubling as television studios space.

We're halfway through 2021 and it's been quite a year so far.

It's a good time to bring back our round table to examine some of the latest news headlines.

First up former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison for murdering George Floyd.

Is that inappropriate punishment?

Is it enough?

Is it too much?

And will it change the relationship between African-Americans and police?

Not just in Minneapolis but around the country.

We're gonna talk about that sentence and the calls for police reform.

And then if you live in Detroit, you probably were affected by these amazingly heavy rains last week that flooded basements, freeways, and streets all over the community.

We're gonna examine the issues that led to the devastation that left so many people of color, really vulnerable.

So let's get right to it.

Here's my conversation with round table guests, Karen Dumas, Brandon Brice, Greg Bowens, and Kerry Leon Jackson.

All right, so we got a lot to talk about and we have some late breaking news that I absolutely wanna add in to the conversation here.

But let's start with the sentencing of Derek Chauvin, which we have waited a long time to see how that would wrap up, how it would all end.

22 and a half years in prison was the sentence that he won't serve all of that probably because of a good time and parole, but long time in prison.

The question is, is this enough?

Is this justice for what he did to George Floyd?

I'm gonna mix it up and start with Kerry Leon Jackson this time.

- Even though the range was a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of 40, I think that a judge adding 10 years on top of the 10 years pretty much because of the depraved nature of what he did it's good sentence.

I mean, the truth in matter is even in Wayne county the prosecutor's office, generally, if somebody is charged with first degree murder they usually give them a 20 to 40 year sentence for a guilty plea.

22 years is a pretty fair sentence.

And family members are never...

Anybody who watched the video of course wanted him to go away forever and the die, but the truth of the matter is 22 years sentence is a pretty significant and it's also the most any police officer has ever received for deciding to kill a black person, an unarmed black man.

So it's a significant sentence.

And even though he might be eligible for parole in about 15 years, parole boards probably not gonna let him out.

But here's the other thing, he's never gonna be in general population.

They're gonna probably relocate him somewhere to a federal facility.

He's going to wind up stand where nobody can beat him.

'Cause the thing is, prisoners would be...

Killing somebody like him in prison would make somebody else golden.

So they're gonna have to go out of their way to keep him 15 years of being confined and that's pretty hard time.

He's gonna have to pay a price.

- Karen Dumas, what do you think?

- Well you know not speaking from a legal perspective, but I'm looking at it from a messaging perspective.

Does it send a message that George Floyd's life mattered, that police officers that break the law are not beyond reproach, and that is this going to be the conduit for changing what is necessary so that good cops are supported and elevated, and bad cops are penalized and somehow taken off of the force.

And to me, that's yet to be seen.

Kerry spoke to the fairness of the sentence that was imposed, but what happens to the conversation socially here after.

Do we stop?

I think there are two statues for George Floyd.

Is this looked upon as the end of this discussion and of this process.

And to that, I say, no.

If it is then we have not come any farther than we were prior.

If it is the start of what should be a continued discussion and change in process, then yes.

- Brandon, is this enough?

And does this is send us further down the road of this conversation about how policing auto change?

- Well, 20 years I think is sufficient.

I'm always asking the question, what do we learn and how is this going to change or make an impact.

And so I think when we look at going down the road, what did we learn?

We learned that there's a challenge and we need more community police.

We need more officers who don't know the area to take the time to invest in the communities that they patrol.

What else are we learning from this?

We're learning that let's be honest of where we are.

We've got an equity issue around just fairness.

The fact that are there real opportunities that engage to get more blacks in law enforcement and on the police force.

And so I think this is not only a teachable moment, but it's really a way up reflection on, do we have the representation when it comes to law enforcement agencies that would need to, and if not, how do we get there?

- Greg, what do you think?

- Well I think that, to be honest with you, I don't think that this is really gonna have an impact on much right now.

I can go back to Budzyn and Nevers here in Detroit being convicted for killing of Malice Green, and that was without any video tapes.

And then, you know what we've seen all this time.

I've seen just on videos black men getting shot in the back by the cops running across a field, just ridiculous stuff.

And so nothing has changed.

I mean, well, let me put it this way.

I shouldn't say nothing has changed.

We've become a lot more aware, some of the laws have tightened.

But in terms of addressing the systemic racism that exists and that proliferates throughout our law enforcement community, we haven't seen a lot of change and we haven't seen a change as Budzyn and Never.

So I'm not optimistic that we will see real reform out of this.

I am looking forward to the federal prosecutions now of Chauvin and the other cops that were involved as it relates to a violation of Mr. Floyd's civil rights, that's coming up next.

And so he'll get even more time added on to what he's gonna serve now.

The interesting thing is the way that this has been covered is that I didn't see the same kind of reaction, you remember when my man OJ Simpson, I say, my man, I don't know him.

But that verdict came down and how one side was cheering and another side was sad.

It seemed like on this one, everybody was middle of the road, more expected that he would get a sentence.

And so, we'll see what happens, but I'll be honest with you I'm not convinced that we're gonna see real reform as a result of this.

- So I wanna change the subject here and get to what we're experiencing right now here in Southeast Michigan, which is the cleanup from yet another major major storm that not only don't dumped rain, but caused floods, wind damage, power outages.

Seems like these things happen every couple of years.

We don't seem to be adapting to the fact that they are gonna happen in a couple of years and that (indistinct) fix the infrastructure to be able to withstand this kind of thing.

But the thing that I've noticed over the last couple of days really is the disproportionate impact of these kinds of storms and their aftermath on people of color.

The devastation in Detroit looks different than it does in many other places.

I know Grosse Pointe is an exception to that.

And Greg, I'm gonna start with you 'cause you lived in Grosse Pointe and are dealing with what happened there.

A pumping station failed and water backed up into, it looks like everybody's basement in Grosse Pointe and everyone's backyard.

I've seen pictures of people's backyards that look like Lake St. Claire.

Tell us how you're doing Greg bailing out and tell us what you think about... What we're prepared to do to manage all of this?

- Yeah, that's a good question and a good point.

Nature is no respecter of geographical lines.

It doesn't care where you think you wanna draw your city maps and water goes where it's gonna go.

And so just two blocks over, my friends like Steve Hood who live on the canal over there they got hit again too.

The front of my house looked like a river.

The front of the house is on script, looked like a river as well going up to their doorstep almost.

And so this is a lesson that we keep learning over and over again as it relates to not investing in our infrastructure and not doing the kinds of things that would allow for the runoff to dissipate in ways that it doesn't back up into, Karen's basement, and everybody else's basement.

And so the simple things, I don't know, I mean, part of it is that the whole water sewage infrastructure is an industry, it's an industry.

And while cities while they're not supposed to be designed to make money off of 'em the water and sewage departments in every city as an enterprise agency.

And I think Steve, it goes back to one of the questions that you've been asking for like 10 years as it relates to, what is the cost of life?

How much are we going to put a value on the things that we need?

Whether it was the poisoning in Flint or something as simple as traffic control and stuff like that.

And so this situation that we're in now where I can look up and down my street and every single house on my block is got damage going all the way up from Jefferson all the way up to the river.

Now on the other side of Jefferson, not so much, but if you continue down my street to seven mile and you hit like seven mile on Lake Point, boom, same thing.

That area is devastated.

And I think this really does speak to a need for us to rethink the way that we do stuff.

For example, we have concrete driveways, and the water runs off on the driveways, it contributes more.

What's wrong with having stone driveways with pebbles and stuff like that to soak up the water.

You can do that with parking lots.

There are some easy fixes to eliminating some of this water.

And Stephen, everybody knows that the east side of Detroit going east is a big giant flood plain.

And so there ought to be things done, I think, to mitigate this, And it's not just about digging and laying more pipes, it's about things that we can do right now.

- So Karen, I know you have rich family history along the riverfront here in Detroit.

That area was devastated, of course, by this, not the first.

A few years summers back we had similar kinds of problems there.

And we still, again, we're not doing anything, but managing the crisis.

Nothing seems to change in terms of the way that we live or the way we prepare for these kinds of things.

But give us a sense of what it's like in in your sort of home spots here in Detroit.

- Well, as you say, I grew up on the canal.

We were used to preparing for floods, the city used to deliver sandbags to help prepare for it.

But here we are 30 years later and we're still dealing with, as Greg indicated, the same things in spite of increased technology, in spite of increased or higher taxes, in spite of repeated promises to help improve the quality of life for Detroiters.

So I think it speaks to a lack of accountability.

I think it speaks to the proverbial canned kicking that we have become known for here in this city.

We're always in this proverbial state of coming up or coming out or emerging from something that we never do.

And it does impact and impose upon people who do not have the resources.

we had water coming in our garage and in our basement through the conduit.

We took the pump from our pond to pump out the water in the basement.

So there was minimal damage, but what about people that don't have access or immediate resources?

Their basements are flooded, their memories are gone, their houses are compromised.

Our concern is what impact did it do for drywall for a redesigned basement that we just completed?

I mean, so those are other things.

It becomes increasingly more expensive to live in this city every day.

I mean, it really, really does.

And the cost and the quality of life don't equate.

- Yeah.

Kerry, what do you think about this?

- You started out on one point in term of how black community has been impacted, the Detroiters has have been impacted.

And traditionally, as we quickly found out during COVID, the black community always is the one that's impacted whether it's for the hurricanes over in Florida and in South Carolina, whether it's whatever happens in Texas during the weather, it's always the black community is the one that's in a position to wind up being punished by it.

I wished that there was a quick fix to that.

First thing we've gotta do is to get beyond systemic racism, and then we can deal with it.

But everything that Greg just listed, everything that Karen just listed requires leadership, requires folks to not kick the can down the road or stand in front of a camera and say, "It's climate change," as if they didn't know it's going to rain or it's going to snow, or that fires are going to occur.

Stop pretending that we're gonna blame everybody else.

And I'm telling you, everybody that held a press conference in the last two days, I didn't hear one leader say, "We failed you we're sorry."

It took Karen to tweet out a suggestion for the Duggan Administration to go back and decide, maybe we've got to look out for the citizens and not punish them for putting stuff on the curb.

Please, the city needs leadership.

The state needs better leadership other than what we currently have.

- And there were two candidates, Stephen on the east side.

One candidate was going and helping residents remove debris, and another candidate arranged for a special pickup.

Those are things that the city should be able to flip a switch and pick this stuff up, not give a ticket and allow people to put housing debris on the curb because there have been structural compromises as a result.

- Yeah.

Brandon, what's your thought about.

What we ought to be doing?

- Well the first thing we ought to be doing is taking environmental justice a lot more serious than we have, specifically around black and brown communities.

One of the travesties is, we don't realize that there are so many issues that happen when you talk about economic injustices which can lead to or become in some cases, public health issues, it can become a financial crisis if you don't have the means to take care of it.

And I think this is where the city has really got to start to look at... Kerry mentioned systematic racism, but what does that mean in 2021?

We're not talking about the picketed fences anymore, now we're talking about the lack of resources to take care of a flood if you don't have the resource, if the city refuse to do it.

Or we're talking about things like, what happens when you are out of technology or you get a fuse burst because of the environment.

And so I think this whole concept of, we talk about systematic racism, and we talked about economic justice and racial justice, but the environmental justice, I think, is something that has a much more greater travesties, especially for those communities that don't have the means to take care of it or to deal with.

- Okay.

So I was gonna just have those be the two topics, Derek Chauvin and flooding, that we talked about.

But the day we taped this, there was big news in the city of Detroit.

The mayor of the city of Detroit, Mike Duggan, announced that he intends to marry a woman that he had been having an affair with and broke up his marriage and somebody who has a pretty big city contract as well.

Of course, sex, and marriage, and relationships always make for spice and stories when you enter into politics.

This one seems to me to rank right up there with them.

It is a fascinating turn in the mayor's personal story, but also a new chapter, I guess, in the story of the city of Detroit.

Karen, you served two mayors here in the city, you never had to plan a wedding though.

So (chuckles happily) - No, that wasn't part of it.

And on a personal level, I think I speak for everybody, we certainly wish the mayor happiness.

I mean, life tends to take different turns, left and right.

And sometimes you find happiness where you find it and not where people tell you you're supposed to.

So we wish him well.

But on the other side it's very interesting that side chicks are on the come up these days.

This is a woman that certainly well-respected in her professional right, but she was the mayor's mistress.

She is the beneficiary of contractual subjectivity here in the city of Detroit.

And again, as we said before, it's always the same thing, it's over and over and nothing ever changes.

The interesting thing is, and I appreciate you acknowledging the whole backstory of this, Stephen, is that people were gonna paint this picture that, now we've got this nice love story and we're going to have a couple back in the Manoogian Mansion, Like we forget and we wanna try to erase things that to me are relevant when we're telling stories.

So we gotta look at the whole picture.

- Greg, you also served a couple mayors here in Detroit, you didn't have to plan a wedding either.

What would you do for Mike Duggan?

- Well I mean, look, Detroit is the blackest city in the country and Mike Duggan is marrying a brown woman.

And so, you're gonna have your first interracial couple in the mayor's office.

Now what... - Allegedly Gregory, allegedly.

(chuckles happily) - I wonder why you said, allegedly.

But assuming that it gets reelected and they have the wedding, and this goes through, you will have a very sort of different picture.

What would that represent more the city of Detroit in terms of us being, the city being the blackest city in the country and having an interracial couple, and how will that play out.

The next time that Mayor Duggan goes to Manoogian and he starts preaching about how like racism and red lining impacted Detroit, will they have more credibility now because he is in an interracial relationship?

I dunno.

But it's interesting.

Go ahead.

- What are you shaking your head about?

- No, that's... - He's not gonna get more credibility.

- Oh, you said Kerry, I'm sorry.

(laughs happily) - So we just going to ignore the fact that he lied about it.

he punished people that asked the questions about it, that the media refused to cover the way that they covered Kwame, that they refused to cover the hush-hush divorce.

We just to sweep all in under the carpet now because he's taking a picture with her and saying, I'm gonna marry the side chick.

Which in terms of Karen saying side chicks come up, married men very rarely leave their wives to marry the side chick.

And in this case, he's marrying the side chick.

(crosstalk) He's not gonna get more credibility.

She will forever be Monica Lewinsky.

She will always be the side chick.

- You know what, I'm a guy and I take that we're hitting he side chick thing just a little too hard.

This is a respected professional, who's part of a leadership team in a university.

- I said that... (crosstalk) - I know, you did, you did.

- As a woman.

I don't mean that offensively, I don't mean it negatively, I don't mean it disrespectfully, I mean it honestly.

If you are seeing a married man, you are a side chick.

I don't care whether you have a PhD or whether you're throwing sliders at White Castle.

I mean, that's just the reality of it and what you do and who you are, doesn't change that.

- Well, I think on some level us referring to her in this kind of way, would we be doing the same thing if she was white?

I mean, is she getting treated a little more harshly and we'll she get treated a little more harshly because she's not white.

And at the same, Karen and Kerry just brought up that there's a discrepancy in the way that the media is covering Mary Duggan and relationship to this issue And you're insinuating, this is probably true, because he is white, right.

You're saying he gets a pass.

- Brandon, I wanna get you in here.

Are you gonna go to this wedding Brandon?

- You know, I probably won't be invited.

I never really a fun of the mayor anyway.

But there's a couple of major issues here.

I mean, let's forget whatever ethnic group she is, that's not important here.

The real issue is here is the challenge of how the media has really given kudos to one mayor and refuse to address the issues of another.

One of the things is, I mean some have said that, this is an example of when the media picks and chooses, who are the enemy and who is the victor.

And I think this is a bigger problem to say, this is regardless of the situation, regardless of the love here, there is some corruption that has occurred here.

And so now the question is when you wanna talk about this whole concept of systematic racism, it's getting into the fact that, is the media deciding and picking and choosing when they hold black leadership to one account, but they don't hold the counter to the other.

There's a much bigger issue here aside from just this whole wedding issue.

And then the other thing is the media, once again, has a responsibility to tell the entire story or not report it.

I can not say that that has been done here.

A matter of fact, it's almost when you wanna use the term whitewash, that appears to be the situation here.

And so stay tuned, we'll see.

But I think when we talk about just the role of black leadership and the fact is, are we being fair with one administration over the next.

- It's always great to have you guys here.

Thanks so much for joining us on American Black Journal.

- Thank you.

- That's gonna do it for us today, thanks for watching.

You can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org, and as always you can connect with us on Facebook and on Twitter.

See you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Masco Advertiser] Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- [Reporter] Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [DTE Advertiser] The DTE Foundation, proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African-American history, culture and politics.

The DTE Foundation and American Black Journal partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Announcer] Also brought to you by AAA, Nissan foundation, Ally Impact at Home, UAW Solidarity Forever, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(bright music)