It said, talks daily, Amelie's hue, what a painful time, the latest unbearable acts of police violence against America's black community have led to historic protests across the country and the globe. Some police forces have responded to protests against police brutality with more police brutality. How do we possibly move forward from this? What are the ways to make real progress for justice? Today, we have something a little different. This is part one of a timely four way conversation on potential responses to systemic injustice.

It features community leaders Phillip Atiba Goff, who heads the Center for Policing Equity. Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change. Dr. Bernice Albertine King, the CEO of the King Center. And Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU. This is part one. You'll hear head of Ted Chris Anderson and Ted's current affairs curator, Whitney Pennington Rogers. Then each of our guests share some powerful thoughts. Responding to this moment, you might hear some audio changes since this was recorded remotely, but it's worth it.

Hello, tech community, welcome back for another live conversation. It's a big one today. It's because they get. You know, when we created this Build Back Better series, I thought was how could we address issues arising out of the pandemic? How could you imagine building back from that? But the events of this past week, the horrific death of Jorge Floyd and the daily protests that have followed. I mean, they provided a new urgency, which we, of course, have to address.

I mean, can we build back better from this? I think before we can even start to answer that question, we just have to seek to understand the immensity of this moment. You know, that's that's right, Chris, right now, so many people in the United States and beyond are grappling with feelings of anger and frustration, deep, deep sadness and and really helplessness. You, no matter who you are, you have questions about what to do now, how to make things better.

And as we've seen violence like this unfold for many, many years, what is the path forward?

We're joined today by a group of activists, organizers and leaders known for their crucial work in social justice and civil rights. We're so grateful to have them here to engage in a discussion about racial injustice in America, the unbearable acts of violence that we've the acts of violence against the black community, that we've witnessed the dangers to a nation riven by anger and fear and how on earth we can move forward from this to something better. So first, each of our guests will share their thoughts on how we move forward from this moment.

And then we'll engage as a group, including you, the community. And we'd like to thank our partner, the Project Management Institute, for their generous support has helped make today's interviews possible. And of course, as Chris mentioned, we want you to take part in the conversation, so please share your questions using our Ask the Question feature and continue to share your thoughts in the discussion through. That's he. OK, let's let's get this moving, our first guest, Dr.

Phillip Atiba Goff, is the founder of and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity. They work with police departments across America, including in Minneapolis, to seek measurable responses to racial bias. So I can scarcely imagine how distressing the last week must have been for you. Welcome and overdue for your opening comments. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, this week has been a gut punch to anybody who felt like we could be making progress in the way that we put forward public safety that empowers particularly vulnerable communities.

We started working in Minneapolis about five years ago. At the time, it was like most major cities in the United States as a department that had a long history of unaccounted for violence from law enforcement, targeting the most vulnerable black communities. And we try to put into place a number of things that we know work on to change the culture so that the culture can be accountable to the values of the community. And what we saw was small but measurable progress.

We always knew with small and measurable progress that you're one tragic incident from going back to Ground Zero. But the events of the last week and a half haven't brought us back to ground zero. They've torched ground zero and we've dug a hole. We have to dig ourselves out of what I hear from police chiefs who call me from activists I talked to, from folks in the communities that are on literally on fire right now. I hear folks saying they had one activist say to me that the pain that he was feeling was too large to fit into his body without thinking about.

I said right back, that's because it's too large to fit into a lifetime. What we're seeing isn't just the response to one gruesome, cruel public execution of a lynching. It's not just the reaction to three of them, Ammad, Aubrey, Rihanna, Taylor and then George Floyd. What we're seeing is the bill come due for the unpaid debts that this country owes to its black residents. And it comes due usually every 20 to 30 years. It was Ferguson just six years ago, but about 30 years before that, it was in the streets of Los Angeles after the verdict that exonerated the police, that beat Rodney King on video.

It was Newark. It was Watts. It was Chicago. It was Tulsa. It was Chicago again. If we don't take a full accounting of these debts that are owed, then we're going to keep paying it. Part of what I've been experiencing in the last week and a half and what I've been sharing with the people who do this work who are serious about it, is the the acknowledgement, the soul crushing reality that at some point when things stop being on fire, the cameras are going to turn to something else.

And the history that we have in this country is not just a history of vicious neglect and a targeted abuse of black communities.

It's also one where we lose our attention for it.

And what that means for communities like in Baton Rouge, where those who still grieve Alton Sterling and in Baltimore, for those who are still grieving Freddie Gray, is that there is not just a chance, there's a likelihood that we are a month or two months out from this with no more to show for it than what we had to show after Michael Brown Jr.. And holding the weight of that individually and collectively is just too much, it's just too heavy load for a person or a people or a generation to hold up.

What we're seeing is the unrepentant sends the unpaid debts. And so the solution can't just be that we fix policing, it can't be only incremental reform, it can't be only systems of accountability to catch cops after they've killed somebody because there's no such thing as justice for George Loida.

There's maybe accountability. There's maybe some relief from the people who are still around who loved him for his daughter, who spoke out yesterday and said, my daddy changed the world. There won't be justice for a man who's dead when he didn't have to be. But we're not going to get to where we need to go just by reforming police. So in addition to the work that C.P.E. is known for with the data, we have been encouraging departments and cities to take the money that should be going to invest in communities and take it from police budgets, bring it to the communities.

People ask, well, what could it possibly look like? How could we imagine it? And I tell people there is a place where we do this in the United States right now. We've all heard about it, whispered.

Some of us have even been there. Some of us live there.

The place is called the suburbs, where we already have enough resources to give to people so they don't need the police for public safety in the first place. If someone has a substance abuse issue, they can go to a clinic. If somebody has a medical issue, they can go, they've got insurance, they can go to a hospital. If there's a domestic dispute, they have friends, they have support. Right. You don't need to enter a badge and a gun into it.

If we had an disinvested from all the public resources that were available in communities that most needed those, we wouldn't need police in the first place. And many have been arguing even more loudly recently that we don't if we would just take the money that we use to punish and instead invest it in the promise and the genius of the community that could be there.

So I don't know all the ways we're going to get there. I know it's going to take everything and it's going to need the kind of systemic change and the management tools that we traditionally offer. And it's also going to need a quantum change in the way that we think about public safety. But mostly this isn't just a policing problem. This is the unpaid debts that are owed to black America. The bill is coming due and we need to start getting an accounting together.

So we're not just paying off the interest of the damn thing.

Thank you, film Rashad Robinson is the president of Color of Change, the civil rights organization that advocates for racial justice for the black community. To date, more than four million people have signed the petition to arrest the officers involved in the murder of George Floyd. And, of course, one was arrested last week. Thank you so much for being with us, Rashad. Malcolm. Thank you and thank you for having me. It's an opportunity that I'm taking today to just tell you about how you can get involved, how you can take action, because right now, strategic action is critical for all of us to do the work to change the rules that far too often keep the systems in place that hold us back.

Make no mistake, the criminal justice system is not broken. It is operating exactly the way it was designed it at every single level. The criminal justice system is not about providing justice, but about ensuring that certain people, certain communities are protected while other communities are violated. And so I want to talk a little bit today about color of change, about activism, about the work that's happening on the ground from other organizations are all around the country. And the way that you can channel this energy when we talk about at color of change is how do you channel presence into power.

And far too often we mistake presence and visibility for power presence. Read tweets, the stories of the movement. People feeling passionate about change can sometimes make us feel like change is inevitable. But power is actually the ability to change the rules. And right now, everyday people are taking action. And what we're trying to channel that energy into is a couple of things. First is a whole set of demands at the federal level and at the local level, as Phil described, that policing, you know, operates on many different channels.

And what we need to recognize is that while there are a lot of things that can happen at the federal level locally, all around the country, there are decisions that are being made in communities around how policing is executed, where community needs to hold a deeper level of accountability. At the state level, we need new laws. So at color of change, we've built a whole platform around a set of demands that are working to build more energy from everyday people to take action.

We're fighting for justice for Amanda Berry, Brianna Taylor and George Floyd. We're also fighting for justice for other folks whose names that you haven't heard, Nina Pop and others whose whose stories of of injustice in the relationship to the criminal justice system represent all the ways in which fighting right now is important.

Over the last couple of years, we have worked to build a movement to hold district attorneys accountable and to change the role of district attorneys in our country and through the winning justice platform at Color of Change WW winning Justice League. What we have work to do is channel the energy of everyday people to take action.

So for folks who are watching what's happening on TV, Sieger on their social media feeds and are outraged about what's happening in Georgia, what's happening in Tennessee, what's happening in Minnesota, you yourself probably most likely live in a place in a community where you have a district attorney that will not hold police accountable, that will not prosecute police when they harm hurt black folks, when they violate the laws.

You live in a community where police are part of the structure that is racking up mass incarceration. But many other aspects of our system are racking up and cause mass incarceration. And district attorneys are at the center of it. You live in those communities and you need to do something about it.

And so at Winning Justice that are we've created the only searchable national database on the twenty four hundred prosecutors around the country. We're building local squads in communities for folks to be able to engage around efforts to hold DA's accountable. We've worked with our partners across the movement from our friends in Black Lives Matter to folks who are doing policy work to our friends at local ACLU chapters around the country to build six demands, six demands that folks can get behind in terms of pushing for reform.

And then we build public education material.

But the only way that we work to change the way that prosecution happens in this country is that if people get involved, if people raise their voice, if people join us in pushing for real change, at the end of the day, I want people to recognize, though, when Philip talked a little bit about this, is that people don't experience issues.

They experience life, that the forces that hold us back are deeply interrelated. A racist criminal justice system requires a racist media culture to survive. A political inequality follows economic inequality. They all go hand in hand. And so I also want us to not take ourselves out of the equation.

We likely work inside of corporations that make post symbols for Black Lives Matter one day and then support politicians that work to destroy Black Lives Matter the next day. We oftentimes are engaged in.

And practices inside of our companies are in our daily lives supporting media properties and others that are harming our communities are telling stories.

Recently, we produced a report at Color of Change with the Norman Lear School at UT at USC. It's called Normalizing Injustice, and it can be found that Change Hollywood dog and normalizing injustice looks at the twenty two crime procedurals, those crime shows on TV and looks at all of the ways in which they sort of create a warped perception about our view of justice.

May they create sort of an incentive for the type of policing we see on the country and actually serve as a PR arm for law enforcement. We've been working in writers rooms around the country to work to push folks to tell better stories. But we need folks to be both active listeners and we need folks in the industry to push back and challenge those, not only the structures that lead to that content coming on the air, but the proliferation across our airwaves.

At the end of the day, we have an opportunity in this moment to make change.

Inflection points are those moments where we have an opportunity to make huge leaps forward or the real real threat of falling backwards in our hands is the ability to do some incredible things about undoing so many of the injustices that have stood in the way of progress for far too long.

But everyday people must get involved. We must challenge channel that presence into power, and we must build the type of power that changes the rules.

Racism in so many ways is like water pouring over a floor with holes in it every single in every single way it will find the holes. And so for us, we cannot simply accept charitable solutions to structural problems, but we actually have to work for structural change. And so I want to end by saying one thing about how we talk about black people and how we talk about black communities in this moment, because we have to say what we mean and we have to build the narrative that gets us to where we want to go.

So far, too often we talk about black communities as vulnerable. We talk about black people as vulnerable. But vulnerability is a personal trait. Black communities have been under attack. Black communities have been exploited. Black communities have been targeted. And we need to say that so we don't put the onus on fixing black families and black communities, but we put the onus on fixing the structures that have harmed us. We will say things like black people are less likely to get loans from banks.

Instead of saying that banks are less likely to give loans to black people. This is our opportunity to build the type of progress that makes real change. And at that center of this story, we need to show and elevate the images not just of the pain that we are facing, but the joy, the brilliance in the creativity that black people have brought to this country. Black people are the protagonist of this story. And we need to make sure that as we work to build a new tomorrow, we ensure that the heroes are at the center of the liberation that we all do need.

Thank you. Thank you, Rashad. Dr. Bernice King is the CEO of the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, the center is a living memorial to her father, Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. It's dedicated to inspiring new generations to carry his work forward. In this moment when so many are hurting, how can we better approach unity and collective healing? Dr. King, over to you. My heart is a little heavy right now because I was at six year old.

I was five years old when my father was assassinated. And he did change the world. But the tragedy is that we didn't hear. What he was saying to us as a prophet to this nation. And his words are now reverberate reverberating back to us. Change, we all know is necessary right now. And yet it's not easy. We know that there has to be changes in policing in this nation of ours. But I want to talk about America's choice.

At a greater level. The prophet said to us, we still have a choice to be non-violent coexistence or violent annihilation. What we have witnessed over the last eight days has placed that choice before us. We have seen literally in the streets of our nation. People who have been following the path of nonviolent protest. And people who have been hale bent on destruction. Those choices are now looking at us and we have to make a choice. The history of this nation was founded in violence, in fact, my father said America is the greatest purveyor of violence.

And the only way forward is if we repent for being a nation built on violence. And I'm not just talking about physical violence. I'm talking about systemic violence, I'm talking about policy violence, I'm talking about what he spoke of, of the triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism, all violent. Albert Einstein said something to us, he said, we cannot solve problems on the same level of thinking in which they were created. And so if we are going to move forward, we are going to have to deconstruct the systems of violence that we have said America and we're going to have to reconstruct on another foundation.

That foundation happens to be love and nonviolence. And so as we move forward, we can correct course if we make that choice, that daddy said non-violent coexistence. And that continue on the pathway of violent annihilation. So what does that look like that that looks like some deconstruction work in order to get to the construction? We have to deconstruct our thinking. We've got to deconstruct the way in which we see people. And deconstruct the way in which we operate, practice and engage and set policy.

And so I believe that there's a lot of heart. A.R.T. work to do in the midst of all the hard, hard work to do, because hard work is hard work. One of the things we have to do is we have to ensure that everyone, especially my white brothers and sisters. Have to engage in the hard work, the anti-racism work in our hearts. No one is exempt from this. Especially in my white community. We must do that work in our hearts, that anti-racism work.

The second thing is that I encourage people to look at the nonviolence training that we the king said of the king sort of bag so that we learn the foundation of understanding our interrelatedness and interconnectedness. That we understand our loyalties and commitments and our policy making can no longer be devoted to one group of people, but has to be devoted to the the greater good of all people. And so I'm inviting people to even join us on our own land protest that's happening every night at seven o'clock PM on the King's Facebook page, because so many people have things that they want to express and contribute to this.

We all have to change and have to make a choice. It is a choice to change the direction that we have been going. We need a revolution of values in this country. That's what my daddy said. You change the world, you change hearts. And now what has happened over the last seven, eight years and through history, we have to change course. And we all have to participate in changing America with a true revolution of values where people are at the center and not profit when morality is at the center and that our military might.

America does have a choice. We can even choose to go down continually that path of destruction. Or we can choose nonviolent. Coexistence and as my mother said, struggle is a never ending process, freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation. Every generation is called to this freedom struggle. You as a person may want to exempt yourself, but every generation that's called. And so I encourage corporations in America to start doing anti-racism work within corporate America.

I encourage every industry to start doing anti-racism work and pick up the banner of understanding nonviolent change personally. And from a social change. Perspective, we can do this. We can make the right choice to ultimately build the beloved community. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. King. Anthony Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union as one of the nation's oldest social justice organizations. The ACLU has advocated for racial equality and some deep support to the black community in moments of crisis.

And in moments like these, black voices are almost always the loudest. And at times, the silence from our non black white brothers, non black brothers and sisters brother can feel deafening. How we can bring our allies into the mix to better support ending systemic violence and racism against the black community is a question top of mind for a lot of us. Anthony, welcome to the show and thank you so much for being with us. Great. Thank you.

Thank you, Whitney, and thank you, Chris, for inviting me to join this community. I think community is really important right now with so many of us feeling the trepidation, the weariness, the anger, the fear, the frustration, the terrorism that we've experienced in our communities. This is a time to huddle around a virtual campfire with your posse, with your family, with your loved ones, your network. It's not a time to be isolated or alone.

And I think for our allies in this struggle, those of us who don't live this experience every day, it is time for us to lean in. And you can't change the channel. You can't tune out. You can't say this is too hard. It is not that hard for us to listen and learn and heed. It is the only way we're going to build out of this by hearing the voices of Rashad and Phil and Dr. King, by hearing the voices of our neighbors and loved ones, by hearing the voices on Twitter, people who we don't know.

And so white communities and allied organizations need to pay even closer attention. This is the test of your character. How willing are you willing to lean in and to engage? For me, I have. These have been really hard couple of weeks. I feel like this is really a test of whether or not we really believe in the American experiment. Do we really believe it? Do we really believe that out of many one, that a country with no unifying language, no unifying culture, no unifying religion, can we really become one people all equal before the law, all bound together with belief in the rule of law?

Do we really believe that or do we just think it's a nice thing to see on the back cover of a paper dollar? And for me, this is a referendum on the American experiment on whether we really believe and the future is in our hands. And this is not like other crises. I've been the head of the ACLU for almost 20 years. I feel like I've seen it all. This is different and this is different because it is cumulative.

Like Phil and Rashaad and Dr. King told us, this is centuries of systemic discrimination and the bill has come due and it will continue to be due and we will pay unless we really do something quite different. I have been scratching my head at the ACLU for the last week. We've been at this for one hundred years. My organization has been working on this from its inception. Nineteen thirty one, we were involved with this report about lawlessness and and law enforcement.

That was our first report that we got behind in nineteen thirty one. We opened up our first storefronts and after the riots in Watts so that we could bring legal services and lawyers to the community so they could demand justice from the police departments. We brought Miranda, you know, the right to remain silent. We brought Gideon the right to a court appointed attorney, if you can afford one. We fought Bloomberg on stop and frisk and took him years and a loss in front of our litigation to finally apologize.

We've been at this for one hundred years and for the communities that have lived this for four hundred years. And I've been scratching my head thinking it ain't working. We don't need another pattern and practice lawsuit with another training program on racial bias or implicit bias in police departments. We don't need to find another lawsuit on qualified immunity. We don't need to kind of bring another race discrimination or gender discrimination lawsuit to integrate the police department. Yeah, we've done that and we will continue to do that for me.

Where I come is that we need to defend the budgets of these police departments. The only way we're going to take power back and the more I read over the last couple of weeks about where this country is, the more I'm clear that that is my north star at the moment. We will continue to bring the litigation on qualified immunity. We will do the efforts to hold unaccountable law enforcement officials accountable. We will bring patterns and practice lawsuits because the Justice Department is not doing that.

So we will continue to do all that good work. But the real thing is we're going to go after those budgets. And when you look at the fact that we spent a hundred million dollars on policing more than incarceration, that the city of Minneapolis spent 30 percent of their budget on policing. The city of Oakland, forty one percent on policing that when you have New York City Police Department spends more money on policing, it does on housing and preservation, development, community youth services, homelessness.

We're going after the money. And that's that's hard core advocacy bills drop and local legislatures to cut the funding to police to stop these programs that give the federal military surplus to police departments. So they become like little mini armies. These almost like police officers. These are like standing armies and the enemy are communities of color. So we need to take away their toys, need to cut their budgets. We need to shrink the police infrastructure so that we can get police out of the quotidian lives of people of color and communities of color, the ubiquitousness of police enforcement and things that the police to not have a role should not have a role to play.

People do not should not lose their lives over whether or not a cigarette pack has a proper tax stamp or whether a 20 dollar bill was for or not. That's not worthy of spending our dollars on police. Get them out of that business. Let's focus on the most important and the most serious of crimes. And that's it. That's it. I'm going to d police our communities, shrinkers, budgets. We're going to reinvest those moneys in local communities.

It will be like water on stone campaigns and local legislatures. Local city councils will have report cards for people who talk out of both sides of the mouth and say, we believe in police reform and yet they're still going to vote for 30 or 40 percent for the police. I'm going to put that to the public. And I think we just have to stay at it because I think that's the only way we can get at this in a different way, because much of what we try to do is just simply not working with that.

I struggle with how do you find the optimism in this moment? Because you have to find the optimism. You have to find the way then can I still think that even though in the face of so many setbacks, there's been change, it's been too little, too slow, not enough. We need to kind of rocket boosted, but you can't lose sight of the optimism. And, you know, I've been thinking about who are the folks who inspired me, Dr.

King's father, of course, and the words of Rashad and Patrice, scholars and others have inspired me. But I found inspiration in the words of a kind of a scholar I really don't like very much. Sam Huntington kind of often criticized as being a conservative, a racist. But sometimes you can find inspiration, even in your enemies words and is one of his books which I pulled off the shelf. I have it's just he writes about how America is a disappointment because it failed to live up to its aspirations.

And he actually started talking about America as a failure because it doesn't live up to its ideals. But it's not a failure. It's not a bunch of lies. It's a disappointment and a of disappointment also is the fact that there's hope. I'm paraphrasing it, but I think we have to kind of wrap all of that together and think about the disappointment and the hope and the resolve to do better. And we need to listen. And then and I thank the TED community.

I thank Dr. King. I wish to thank Phil and thank you.