Sunday School Extra Credit 6/14/20

HUD Secretary and lone African-American on the Trump cabinet Dr. Ben Carson made a couple of classroom visits yesterday, chatting with George Stephanopoulos on This Week, and with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

I wanted to look at these two discussions together to see if there were any differences between the questions, and the answers. 

Let's start with George, who opened with Trump's claim that he's done more for black Americans than any president since Lincoln, and wondered if Carson stood by his boss's claim. Carson said it was better to talk about what's been done than to argue about who's done the most. The accomplishments he pointed to?

• Opportunity Zones, which he said were designed to bring money to neglected areas;
• Prison reform, which is "just the first step. There are other things that need to be done"
• Making funding for the HBCUs regular, and increasing the amount of funding provided.

George agreed that was a fair point, bust still asked if the president should stop making the comparison, given LBJ passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act, Grant sending in troops to take on the KKK, and Eisenhower sending troops to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. Carson said all of that "is a significant part of our history" and that it's important to acknowledge it. 

George wondered how Carson has counseled the president about his tweets, his attacking protesters, and his not wanting to rename any confederate bases. Carson said we "should look at things from multiple perspectives" as we're a diverse country with diverse opinions, including the president's. 

So, I - I don't have any problem with him expressing his opinion as long as he's willing to listen to other opinions. 

And, he said, the US is a "destination country" -  a place people want to come to, not a place they want to leave. There's a reason for that, he said.

And we're the only ones who can destroy ourselves. And we have to stop, you know, putting everything into the arena of combat. And let's see if -- if we can find a way to work together because, if we don't, we're doomed.

So, it would seem, Carson hasn't counseled the president? 

George, never one to drop a bone, asked again if Trump's talk of dominating the streets, or saying he'll send in the troops - which admittedly seem 'combative' - were "appropriate right now." Carson dodged again, saying there are lots of ways to express things, and then he did what everyone does - explain what the president meant with his inflammatory remarks. Trump was talking about not submitting to anarchy, see? And we all agree with that, right?

We might not all express it the same way, but we would all agree with it. And so we've got to begin to look at the big picture, what is the thing we're aiming to do, not what someone said this day or that day.

So, what is that? What needs to be done right now, George asked.  Carson said we need to acknowledge why the protests are happening, we need to "open the discussion" and listen to the police and the protesters; we need to look at the communities where the protests are happening. He's all for peaceful protests, but not the destruction of businesses and livelihoods - "that's very, very bad" - and we have to talk about that, too, when we talk about "what makes sense."

Does it make sense to allow rogue police to move from one precinct to another?  Of course it doesn’t. Does it make sense not to use the technology that we have to help us to be able to investigate? No, it doesn’t.

We need to make the good things pervasive through our society, he says. 

And, regarding Trump's rally in Tulsa, site of the largest mass murder of blacks in our country, and it originally being scheduled for Juneteenth,  Carson said

...I did talk to the president about the Juneteenth event. I was pleasantly surprised at how much he knew about it already -- and knew about the Black Wall Street there and the whole history of it. And was thinking about making some remarks to acknowledge what had happened there and why we don’t want that kind of situation to ever occur in this country again. But, you know, it is what it is. And it’s probably good to have moved it.

Medically, he said the rally's being done in conjunction with the public health experts, and so it's acceptable - but, he added,

We do need to always, all of us, need to do what we can to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but it is very important that we utilize what we have learned about the disease so that we can live with it, rather than allow it to dominate us and determine how we’re going to live.

And, what about Trump's nomination acceptance speech, moved to Jacksonville, taking place on the 60th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday? Carso said we're at a point where everything is being dissected and we "try to ascribe some nefarious notion to it."

We really need to move away from that. We need to move away from being offended by everything, of going through history and looking at everything, you know, of renaming everything -- I mean, think about the fact that some of our universities, some of our prestigious universities, have a relationship with the slave trade. Should we go and rename those universities?  It really gets to a point of being ridiculous after a while. And, you know, we’re going to have to grow up as a society. 

 I agree, to a point, with him on that.

In the Fox News Sunday classroom, the conversation started with the police killing of Rayshard Brooks. 

Wallace wondered if deadly force was appropriate, given the original offense of sleeping in the drive-through lane at Wendy's.  Carson said that this situation was not "clear cut, like the murder that occured in Minnesota" and that people who are experts need to review it before making any judgments. 

Wallace pressed on Carson's saying this wasn't clear cut. 

Because we don't know what was in the mind of the officer once somebody turns around and points a weapon at him. Is he absolutely sure that's a non-lethal weapon? You know, this is not a clear-cut circumstance. Could it have been handled better? Certainly in retrospect there probably are other ways to do things.  But again, we don't know.

Interesting. Note that Brooks' death has been ruled a homicide, so I guess someone knows something now. 

Wallace talked about the bigger issue, which is whether there's a racial problem with policing in black neighborhoods. He showed stats from Minneapolis (use of force against blacks 7 times higher than against whites) and nationwide that blacks are shot and killed by police at twice the rate of whites. And he asked Carson, a father of three boys, whether he or his wife had ever had 'the talk' with their children.

I had the same talk with them that my mother had with me and my brother, told them we should always respect the positions of authority like the police. I tell my sons the same thing. I've never had a problem, they've never had a problem. 

He also said that doesn't mean there are no racist cops, and that we have to get the racist cops out of the system. Reforms are needed, and this is "probably a good time to shine a spotlight on them and get it done." He said just like criminal justice reform, people have talked about it for a long time but didn't get it done.  

That's one of the things the president has made very clear, this is an issue, you know, and it will be looked at, it will be dealt with.

Wallace noted that his parents never had that talk with him, and he never had to have it with his kids, and that's part of the problem.  And then he moved to some of the things that the Democrats are talking about in their proposal, including a national misconduct registry and limits on liability for police officers, and asked if Carson thought the administration would support those. 

Carson said he expects the president will gather the appropriate stakeholders and look at everything, 

but obviously we don't want to create a create a situation where the police are under a microscope and that they don't want to do their job because they're afraid. That's not going to be useful... You know, when people make decisions based on anger or emotion, seldom are those good decisions.

So, that would be a non-answer? 

Wallace moved on to the cultural shift happening in the country, pointing to the NASCAR ban on the Confederate flag, and the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee talking about renaming military bases, which Trump opposes.  The question? Is Trump at risk of being left behind? 

Carson said many of the bases were named after the Confederate generals 

as a conciliatory movement after the war and to now change that would be having exactly the opposite effect. We have to recognize that we have a history and to try and hide that history is probably not a smart move. You take the greatest book ever written, the most popular book, the Bible, it doesn't get rid of all the bad things and just talk about roses and flowers. 

He said that "smart people, wise people" use their history to improve, while "other kinds of people" try to bury their history. And he told a story about buying a farm in rural Maryland, with one neighbor putting up a Confederate flag in protest, and all the other neighbors put up American flags. The Confederate flag came down, and the Carsons became friendly with that neighbor.

A lot of this has to do with people getting to know each other and relationships, but you know, we should be proud of our country. The American flag is the appropriate emblem, but we shouldn't impose our will on others.

The last question was on Trump's rally, and he echoed the same sentiment as he did with George - we can let it dominate us, or we can learn to live with it. 

I was hoping for a little more from Carson that his now famous non-confrontational thing, and I also was hoping he would have been asked questions not just because he's the black guy on Trump's cabinet, but maybe something about what HUD might be doing regarding police interaction in their communities, or what's going to happen with foreclosures and evictions at the end of the month, and so on - you know, policy stuff. Or even a direct question about the Black Lives Matter movement, I don't know.

It is what it is, I guess.  If nothing else, I now know about Ax Handle Saturday, which is something I was not familiar with before.  Which just proves the point that we're always learning, if we're open to it. 

See you around campus.

Sunday School 5/31/20

OK, let's dive in to yesterday's classrooms - the beauty of doing this all virtually, right?

I want to focus on some of the women who made the rounds yesterday, all of them leaders, all of them people of color. Let's start with my least favorite classroom - Meet the Press - and Chuck Todd's discussion with DC's Mayor Muriel Bowser and Atlanta's Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

In response to Todd's question about whether things were better Saturday night than on Friday, and if  "we're going to see some calm going forward or no," Bowser said that the "level of just destruction and mayhem among some" people who gathered in the city on Friday night was "maddening", and that they were working with "all of our law enforcement partners to ensure calm" in the capital. She also said that a clear message is being sent to participants that exercising their First Amendment rights is OK but they don't have the right to destroy DC.

Similarly, Lance Bottoms said that "Things were a bit more calm" Saturday than Friday, "but they weren't perfect." Around 157 people were arrested, she said, and that "...all of the issues and all of the concerns and anger that were there on Friday haven't gone away." She also described it as a systemic issue that will take time to fix, but agreed with Bowser that "the solution is not to destroy our cities."

As to there possibly being "outside forces at work," she said what happened in Atlanta, "even just from a physical standpoint, didn't look like our normal protests," adding

We, obviously, have a large African American population in Atlanta. This crowd was a very diverse crowd. And that was noticeable on Friday even before the problems began. We also noticed that many of the protesters even got lost when there was a detour. And many of our organizers in this city, who often don't agree with me, have shared that these were people from the outside. They did not know them. And had no idea where they came from.

Todd then asked Bowser about the "one resident in Washington, DC who ...was backseat driving you on Friday night," referring to the president, of course, and wondered if she thought Trump could play a helpful role.

Well, I think that the president has a responsibility to help calm the nation. And he can start by not sending divisive tweets that are meant to harken to the segregationist past of our country. And he can start by doing that right now. We certainly urge him to do that. We, as Mayor Bottoms has just said, we have systematic issues in our country to address. And it's going to take us, at every level, federal and local... 

Lance Bottoms was asked what she'd like to hear from the president, and if "any of his words could be helpful here."

What I'd like to hear from the president is leadership. And I would like to hear a genuine care and concern for our communities and where we are with race relations in America. We know that when he spoke on Charlottesville, he made the matter worse. And we're already -- we’re well-beyond the tipping point in America. And it's as my grandmother used to say, "If you don't have anything good to say, sometimes you just shouldn't say anything at all."

I don't have an issue with the president of the United States addressing our nation. But I am concerned that this president has a history of making matters worse.

Last word from Bowser, on potential Independence Day celebrations, which the president wants.

Chuck, well, even before the events of the last several days we've been very concerned about large gatherings. We will not be in a position to allow parades in our city while we're still in phase one of our reopening from the Coronavirus.

Todd also talked with Florida Rep. Val Demings, whose interview last week on another network was cut short by technical difficulties, so I'm giving her time this week as well.  The first question? Over the past decade, when something like the murder of George Floyd happens, "there's outrage. The country has some sort of collective conversation about race and inequality..." and not much else happens; he asked why, and what if this time could be different. Not treating it as an individual department issue is one bit thing.

...I do believe the time has certainly come, we are overdue, for us to look at the problem as a nation. I think we all need to pause and every law enforcement agency in this nation, whether they are ten persons or 35,000 persons, need to review their hiring standards, their training standards, look at their de-escalation training that they're doing within the department, look at those officers who train other officers.

We know, she said, that the training officer sets the standard for what's acceptable and what's not. And, she added,

we have to continue to work with our community leaders to build relationships, to foster trust. And we don't wait to do that, you know, when we're in the middle of a crisis. We have to continue to do that every day. And I do believe we are long overdue for every law enforcement agency in our nation to review itself and come out better than before.

Todd wondered if it wasn't "very hard" to get rid of an officer who doesn't meet the chief's and the community's expectations. Demings commended the Minneapolis chief for immediately firing the officers, and having charges quickly brought against the one officer, and that, while it seemed like a long time before charges were filed, "historically, that was a pretty swift arrest..." And, she said, while the federal government doesn't have "direct jurisdiction" there's a big role it can play "in terms of helping law enforcement agencies throughout the nation maybe come up with some standards for hiring and training, especially use of force training."

Pointing to all that's gone on over the past few months - the impact of the pandemic on people of color, and the high profile incidents of racism, two involving law enforcement, Todd wondered what it all means from a governing perspective, and what Demings thought about "direct help, direct aid to African American communities to sort of fix these injustices." 

Referencing President Lyndon Johnson in her response, she said he knew that it was not only hiring and effectively training the best and brightest; he also said "But we have to address those social ills that cause decay in African American communities in the first place. We have to look at economic development. We have to look at jobs. We have to look at wages. We have to look at education."  Adding her own thoughts, she said

... some believe that, you know, in order to be fair, if you will, that you treat communities the same. Well, it's not that simple, unless communities all start in the same place and we know that's not true... racism in America and the injustices that comes with it is nothing new. And so we have to get serious about, number one, admitting there is an issue. And number two, working together.

She also said some leadership from the top would help, although she doesn't "know why I would expect this president to do something that he has never done before..."

That led Todd to ask what she'd say to Trump if he called her and asked for her help on what to say. Well, there's "showing some compassion for" the families who have lost loved ones; there's talking about America being "great and wonderful because of the beautiful diversity we have in this country, that we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of laws, but we are a nation of immigrants. And we have to work together." And then, 

maybe we begin today by acknowledging the sins of the past and even said things that he has said and done that caused harm and brought pain to the American people.

Yeah, like that'll ever happen - either that he'd ask for her help, or that he could deliver that message with even a drop of the emotion he used when describing American carnage in his inaugural address...  

Finally, let's spend some time with perhaps the most or second-most despised member of Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who visited This Week with George Stephanopoulos. George asked if things were more under control Saturday, with the National Guard, than earlier in the week. 

I think, last night, the community did feel safe to know that there will not be a burning of their businesses and their homes. We were obviously worried and feeling terrorized about that prospect, but there really was also many people who chose to demonstrate and not abide by the curfew, who felt like they also were terrorized by the presence of tanks, by the presence of the National Guard and a militarized police. And so, for us, it's -- what we are trying to do is try to figure out something between extreme aggression and ways to figure out how not to get our city burned down. And it's a challenge.

The country is in pain, she added, and people can't get the image of George Floyd out of their minds, but it reminds us that "we are living in a country that has truly, for a long time, brutalized African-Americans, from slavery, to lynching, to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration, and now to police brutality."  And she pointed to Minneapolis having "some of the worst racial disparities, people are also understanding that there have been severe social and economic neglect in our communities." We have "real work to do" she said, to "figure out a system that works for all of us."

George asked, now that one officer's been charged, "what more must be one to deliver justice here?" She said that often, even if justice isn't denied outright, it's delayed. People are looking for justice to take place, including charges for the other officers who stood by and did nothing.

But, also, we need nationwide reforms. We also need to make sure that the kind of investment that we are making in our communities is a real one. We are living in a country that has a two-tiered justice system. And people are tired of the -- people are sick and tired of being sick and tired. And we need to really step back and say to ourselves, where do we actually go from here? And that can't just be getting justice for George Floyd. It needs to be bigger than that.

On the question of how peaceful protests turned violent - whether it's "far left thugs and Antifa" as the president says or "outside instigators from the right" as others have suggested, George wondered what information Omar had on who might be joining the protests. She said that not just here but around the world, we see unrest that stems from people truly being fed up, saying they've had enough, looking for "bold and systemic change;" at the same time,

And what we also know to be true, not just here, but across the world, is that there are people who exploit the pain that communities are feeling and ignite violence. In Minneapolis, we have marched. We have protested. We have organized. And when we see people setting our buildings and our businesses ablaze, we know those are not people who are interested in protecting black lives. They might say they care about black lives, but they're not interested in protecting black lives, because, when you set a fire, you risk -- you risk the community that you are saying you are standing up for.

George asked her what she'd like to hear from the president now, noting that Omar has "faced threats inspired by President Trump in the past." She didn't shrink from the opportunity to answer this question. 

The mayor of Washington, D.C., just recently addressed the nation. And, in her remarks, she talks about how there was a kind of leadership that could have been displayed by Donald Trump. And that leadership has not been displayed. And now we -- she said, we look to one another for that leadership.

Many people in our communities are moving on and deciding that they themselves are going to show up as leaders. They are going to push for the kind of systematic change that we need. They are going to ask for people to work together to rebuild our communities. They are going to be vigilant and make sure that they are protecting one another.

This president has failed in really understanding the kind of pain and anguish many of his citizens are feeling. When you have a president who really is glorifying violence and was talking about the kind of vicious dogs and weapons that could be unleashed on citizens, it is quite appalling and disturbing.

We condemn other nations when their presidents make those kinds of statements when there is unrest in their countries, and we have to condemn our president at the highest sort of condemnation.

I don't agree with the Congresswoman on much, that I recall, but I do agree with her on this.

That's all we've got room for, for now. Keep washing your hands, wearing your mask, and social distancing as much as you can, even if you're protesting. 

And stay safe, especially if you're protesting. There are a lot of bad actors out there, including those who infiltrate in an effort to do who knows what kind of damage. I get the sense they don't care who gets hurt.

See you around the virtual campus. I anticipate a healthy Extra Credit post for you later.