Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Bryan Stevenson - Christianity, The Law, and Racial Justice
144 Plays8 months ago
In this season of Interactions, Terri Montague and Brandon Paradise, engage with contemporary leaders and social change agents regarding the influence and convergence of Christianity, the law, and racial justice. Today’s guest is Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, and the author of the 2014 memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.This book was adapted for film in 2019 and features Michael B Jordan. Stevenson is also the creator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and a winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant. This podcast is produced by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University in collaboration with Canopy Forum.
Bryan Stevenson: Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Center for the Study of Law and Religion: Center for the Study of Law and Religion | Emory University School of Law | Atlanta, GA
Canopy Forum: Canopy Forum
Recommended
Transcript
Essentials for Human Completeness
00:00:03
Speaker
Love is key to human completeness, and I am persuaded that we are called, as the prophet Micah says, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. And when I find myself doing justice, when I see myself embracing mercy, and then trying to be humble, that's when I feel most at peace, most in harmony with the things that are important to me,
00:00:31
Speaker
and most affirmed as a human being.
Law and Religion: An Exploration
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to Interactions, a podcast exploring how law and religion interact in today's world and throughout history. In this season of Interactions, Terry Montague and I, Brandon Paradise, engage with contemporary leaders and social change agents regarding the influence and convergence of Christianity, the law, and racial justice in their work. This podcast is produced by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University in collaboration with CanopyForum.org.
Bryan Stevenson: A Human Rights Advocate
00:01:13
Speaker
I'm here in studio with my co-host Professor Terry Montague of Emory Law School. We're joined today by an incredible guest, a hero, both of ours, human rights, lawyer, phenomenon extraordinaire, Bryan Stevenson. Bryan, we're so happy to have you with us. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure to be with you.
00:01:35
Speaker
So a few brief introductory comments about Brian. Brian is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, which works to address racial discrimination and bias in the criminal justice system, as well as bias against poor criminal defendants. He's also the founder of two museums.
00:01:54
Speaker
the author of the 2014 memoir, Just Mercy, a Story of Justice and Redemption, which has a film based on it starring Michael B. Jordan and the creator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. He's also a winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant. So thank you so much for
Intersection of Christianity, Race, and Law
00:02:13
Speaker
being with us, Brian. My pleasure. So to begin our conversation today, we wanted to open up the intersection of Christianity, race and law, the theme of this particular series.
00:02:24
Speaker
with your key lessons and takeaways from historic efforts to obtain racial justice through the intersection of religion and law. Can you please share with us what you think the key historic takeaways are at the intersection of religion and law and the struggle for racial justice?
Spirituality in Oppression
00:02:43
Speaker
Well, I think as a context fact, I just genuinely believe that spirituality or some awareness of a spiritual identity
00:02:55
Speaker
has been essential for people who have had to deal with oppression and exclusion and marginalization. And for people who were kidnapped and trafficked and abused the way Africans were when they were brought to this country, there had to be something that helped you manage all of the ugliness and the pain and the
00:03:20
Speaker
and the difficulties of that horrific existence. And so in many ways, I think religion, as we use the term, has been part of the way we try to capture, express, and understand these things that are just hard to understand in the absence of some appreciation for what spirit represents, what grace represents, what mercy represents, what
00:03:45
Speaker
belief represents in the lives of some people. And so I inherited that. I'm the heir of generations of people whose faith allowed them to endure and to overcome and embrace that at an early age. And for me, what it has become is
The Church's Role in Self-Worth
00:04:05
Speaker
a journey. And I see the work that I do as a manifestation of my beliefs, poor beliefs about human dignity, human value.
00:04:15
Speaker
I do embrace the notion that we are all more than the worst thing we've ever done. For me, that is part of my faith heritage. And it has informed and shaped the work that I want to do. Growing up poor and marginalized, we had to have a different way of evaluating our worth and our value than the metrics that were being assigned to us. And the church provided that. We were taught that we were inferior to no person, that we were
00:04:43
Speaker
you know, no better, no worse than any other human being. And that's important when you have to deal with and contend with inequality and injustice.
Christian Identity Beyond Boundaries
00:04:54
Speaker
So I've always celebrated, embraced, admired, and encouraged people who are seeking a spiritual identity and for Christians in particular, an identity of faith and belief that transcends
00:05:10
Speaker
the boundaries that have often been imposed on Christian thought and Christian life and Christian belief because we know that Christianity has also failed in many parts of our history to respond to the challenges of inequality and injustice.
00:05:24
Speaker
And I'm just someone who believes in the power of grace, the power of mercy. I think love is key to human completeness. And I am persuaded that we are called, as the prophet Micah says, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly
Hope and Human Value
00:05:45
Speaker
with God. And when I find myself doing justice, when I see myself embracing mercy, and then trying to be humble,
00:05:54
Speaker
That's when I feel most at peace, most in harmony with the things that are important to me, and most affirmed as a human being. So if I could just recap some of the key takeaways that I hear in your response, it's the infinite value of each individual person that always
00:06:13
Speaker
goes beyond any particular aspect of their life. People are valuable no matter anything they may have, any offense they may have committed in the past, and they're valuable independent of their circumstance, independent of their identity. People are valuable, and we need to embrace that and lift that up. That's at the core of human dignity. And also, I see and I hear a current of hope coursing through your remarks about what sustains people in the face of incredible levels of oppression.
Redemption and Grace in Christianity
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, as a Christian, I read and experience the gospels to mean that everyone is eligible for redemption. Everyone is eligible for restoration. You know, we are taught to see people who were thieves and prostitutes and wrongdoers in various spaces. Those are the people that we understand redemption through. It's never the pious and the moral that become the
00:07:13
Speaker
the characters that help us understand what grace and mercy is about. And that means for me in our time that we have to recognize that if someone tells a lie, they're not just a liar. If someone takes something, they're not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. And grace and mercy and even justice requires that we understand the other things that you are.
00:07:34
Speaker
And where there's tension, in my view, in Christian thought, is that we don't always recognize, that we don't always think about that. And I think that has been a long-standing challenge for the church. So when you read the prophets, Hosea, Amos, Jeremiah, Micah, they are in many ways challenging the religious leaders of their time to recognize the inequality
00:08:01
Speaker
the disparities in wealth and status that exist. And what they are pushing them to do is to realize that justice is key to understanding what faithfulness requires. And that's why when they come to Mike and say, you know, what do we have to do to find favor? How do we become
00:08:17
Speaker
righteous, and they suggest all of these offerings, firstborn and gold. The response comes back that the Lord requires of us that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with Him. And I just think that tension between power status and desire
Incarceration and Systemic Inequality
00:08:37
Speaker
with justice, equality, affirmation, human dignity is at the core of what it means to be committed to the kind of faith that I think is important. So yes, I think that notion is very central to my worldview. And I think it plays out in very problematic ways when we abandon it, because much of what we are seeing when it comes to racial injustice
00:09:02
Speaker
inequality, mass incarceration. The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We went from 300,000 people in jails and prisons in the 1970s to 2.3 million people in jails and prisons by the end of the century. We have 4% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's in prison. 80 million Americans have criminal arrest histories, which means that when they try to get jobs or try to get loans, they're disfavored by that history. Incredible rates of increase.
00:09:30
Speaker
For women being sent to prison, 800% increase in the number of women sent to jails and prisons over the last 25 years.
00:09:36
Speaker
burdening a whole new generation because 80% of those women are single parents with minor children. Bureau of Justice projects in 2001 that one in three black male babies born is expected to go to jail or prison. And there is no pandemic like reaction to that forecast. So we're living in a time and in a world where there is this harshness, this excessiveness. And our policymakers debate policies and sentences as if they can put crimes
00:10:03
Speaker
in jails and prisons. And when you try to understand some of the laws that we have created to impose punishment, they don't make sense unless you understand that these people actually think they can put crime in jail. We hate the crime of burglary, so we're gonna put that in jail for 20 years. We hate the crime of rape, so we're gonna put that in jail for 50 years. We hate the crime of murder, so we're gonna
00:10:23
Speaker
give that life without parole.
Justice Beyond Crime
00:10:25
Speaker
And of course, what I understand as a person of faith and as a human being who's worked with other human beings is you cannot put a crime in jail or prison. You can only put a person in jail or prison. And I believe that people are not crimes. People can commit crimes and they can be held accountable for the crimes they've committed, but there's a difference between a crime and a person. If you want to get to justice, you have to ask, who is this person?
00:10:53
Speaker
Who is this woman? Who is this man? And those are questions that we don't typically ask. And I think in many ways the church has been complicit in allowing this narrative to emerge that you can be moral and just and Christian while you don't ask the question, who is this woman? Who is this man? Who is this child? And for me, that is the urgency
00:11:15
Speaker
of bringing faith, bringing belief, bringing the ideas that many of us embrace into the sector where I work, where I spend time, which is the justice sector. The Christian Church and actually many faith traditions have been active for years in prison ministry and in different
00:11:38
Speaker
modes of supporting the families of returning citizens during their incarceration after they come out.
00:11:47
Speaker
What do you see as kind of the new frontier? Our society, our economy has changed so dramatically. There have been efforts to do things like ban the box and help with lowering the recidivism rate and helping create pathways for them to reintegrate into community. But what should the faith community be doing differently?
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, I do think it's important that we understand what the priorities are. So if if a faith community wants to do something about hunger, I don't think it's an effective ministry to say, oh, we're going to find people who are food insecure. We're going to find people who are hungry and we're going to go to where they are and sit with them.
00:12:38
Speaker
pray with them, but not bring them any food, not try to help them get the sustenance they need to survive. We have within us the capacity to meet the actual needs of people who are unhoused or people who are hungry.
00:12:53
Speaker
people who are dealing with challenges that can be addressed. And so I do think if we're going to talk about prison ministry, we can't just talk about going into prisons and being with people who are in prison. If people have been wrongly convicted and unfairly sentenced and unnecessarily condemned, we have to actually come with some solutions to deconstructing those structures and systems that have created these problems.
00:13:19
Speaker
And I just think part of what we have to reckon with often is not just taking on the habits of someone who tries to do something that is easy and comfortable and convenient. I think ministry, when it's effective, is usually inconvenient, uncomfortable, challenging,
00:13:42
Speaker
And it requires us to really understand what we are doing, why we are doing what we do, and what is our goal and ambition. And I think when, particularly in Christianity, when we have failed to ask those questions, we have failed to meet the expectations, is my view. I think God expected more of Christians when people were enslaved in this country than to make apologies for slavery.
00:14:08
Speaker
I think God expected more of people in this country, of Christians in this country, when mobs were pulling black people out of their homes and beating them and torturing them and drowning them and lynching them, sometimes in front of churches and on courthouse lawns. God expected more of his people than to be silent and indifferent to that kind of abuse and degradation.
00:14:28
Speaker
I think God expected more of his people that they would go along with the racial hierarchy and the ideology of white supremacy that shaped and created Jim Crow laws and created segregation and division and exclusion for all of those years. And I think God expects more of us than to be comfortable with living in a country that has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
00:14:52
Speaker
living in a country where children are prosecuted as adults, some as young as eight and nine years old, living in a country where people are executed, pulled out of their cells and strapped and killed, living in a country where we tolerate the kind of violence and abuse and degradation that happens in
00:15:10
Speaker
too many of our prisons across the country. And so I think the ministry has to be informed by a vision of liberation, a vision of transformation, a vision of redemption. And if you're wrong, convicted in prison, your vision of liberation and redemption has to mean getting out of prison.
00:15:29
Speaker
If you're, you know, ministry to people who are suffering from mental illness to get the liberation, we're going to have to find care and treatment for that illness, care and treatment for that sickness. And I think all of that has to be part of what it means to be engaged in justice work, prison ministry, serving this population in this era that we live in today.
00:15:54
Speaker
Can I just, I want to just piggyback your comment about lynching. Your body of scholarship makes the strong correlation between lynching and executions. Can you just unpack that for our audience? Sure. I mean, I think it begins with the narratives of racial difference that we have inherited. And if you live in the United States, you live in a country where for 400 years,
00:16:21
Speaker
These ideas of racial difference have shaped and defined economic, social, political, cultural life for lots and lots of people. And I think they have created these toxins in the air. I don't think we're really free yet in this country because we are burdened by this long history of racial inequality. And it doesn't matter whether you live in California or New England or the West or the South.
00:16:43
Speaker
You live in a space where there are pollutants in the air. Some have argued that at some point these contaminants will dissipate, but I don't think that's true. I think we have to change the environment. And that means talking about things that we haven't talked about before. And we were silent about the genocide of indigenous people when Europeans came. We had millions of indigenous people living in the lands of the United States before Europeans.
00:17:09
Speaker
By the end of the 1800s, there were fewer than 500,000 Native people left in this country. We created a constitution that talked about equality and justice for all, but we didn't apply those concepts to indigenous people. We instead created a false narrative that Native people, they're savages. They don't get the benefits of our equality and justice, our constitution, our declaration. And we made ourselves comfortable with this narrative of racial difference, which somewhere excluded
00:17:34
Speaker
and some are not. And that narrative of racial difference gave rise to two and a half centuries of slavery. And when I talk about this, I often argue that the great evil of American slavery wasn't the involuntary servitude in the forced labor and the abuse and the degradation. All of those things were horrific. For me, the greatest evil of American slavery was the false narrative we created to justify enslavement.
00:17:56
Speaker
And so people who were enslavers did not want to feel immoral or unchristian or unjust. So they needed something to help them reconcile, pulling screaming mothers away from their infant children when they were sold, pulling siblings apart who had leaned on one another, loved one another, destroying families, allowing abuse and degradation to define the existence of so many people. And so they made up a false narrative that black people aren't as good as white people.
00:18:25
Speaker
that black people are less capable, less worthy, less deserving, less human. And that narrative gave rise to this ideology of racial hierarchy. And it was so powerful, it defeated our commitment to the rule of law. So you have the Civil War, where the North wins the Civil War, but the South wins the Narrative War, because that idea of racial hierarchy became a priority over the law. So we pass the 14th Amendment that says equal protection for emancipated black people, but we don't enforce it.
00:18:52
Speaker
We've passed a 15th Amendment that says you have a right to vote, but then we stop enforcing it. And during Reconstruction, the Supreme Court said, no, we're more concerned about preserving racial hierarchy
00:19:03
Speaker
than enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments. And they did this through a set of cases where they allowed states and non-governmental actors to continue this. And that then created an environment where black people were unprotected and people terrorized African Americans for 100 years. And the reason why there is a connection is because 6 million black people flee the American South during the first half of the 19th century.
00:19:27
Speaker
And we don't talk about the fact that many of them fled lands that they owned. They had fled opportunities to create wealth for their children and their grandchildren. The demographic geography of the United States was largely shaped by lynching violence because of Black people in Chicago and Cleveland and Detroit and Los Angeles and Oakland and Boston and Minneapolis. Most of the Black people in these communities didn't go to those communities. As immigrants looking for new economic opportunities, they went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror.
00:19:56
Speaker
in the American South. And a narrative of racial difference, a presumption of dangerousness and guilt was reinforced each time a black person was lynched and we did nothing. Each time we tolerated this kind of violence. And yes, in the 50s and 60s we had a heroic civil rights movement, we tore down the legal architecture of Jim Crow and segregation, but the narrative architecture remained in place.
00:20:21
Speaker
And so that presumption of dangerousness and guilt, it continued, and it continues with us today. And so when someone is accused of a crime, they have to overcome a presumption of dangerousness and guilt if they are black or brown. We have a death row that is disproportionately filled with people of color because they've had to overcome a presumption of dangerousness and guilt. And the reason why I think this has a legacy, lynching and the predecessors have a legacy,
00:20:50
Speaker
is that you can be a professor at a major university. You can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, you can be a teacher, you can be a pastor, a deacon, an elder, a church mother. But if you're black or brown, you will go places in this country where you have to navigate a presumption of dangerousness and guilt.
00:21:07
Speaker
And because I'm getting older, I can tell you when you have to constantly navigate these presumptions, it's exhausting. And that is why for so many of us, it is urgent that we recognize that we have to create a new era of truth and justice, truth and restoration, truth and redemption, truth and repair.
00:21:26
Speaker
And I actually think people of faith should be leading because we're supposed to understand the power of truth and justice, truth and repair. And what happens too often in our society is that people don't recognize that truth and justice, truth and reparation, truth and restoration, these things are sequential.
00:21:45
Speaker
You can't skip the truth part and go right to reconciliation. That doesn't work. Just like you can't come into my church and say, oh, you know, I want heaven and salvation and redemption and have all of that good stuff, but I'm not going to admit to anything.
00:21:58
Speaker
In my tradition, the clergy are going to come to you and say, no, it don't work like that. You've got to be willing to confess and repent. But then they say, don't fear it because confession and repentance is what opens up your heart to grace and mercy. And collectively, we have a legal system and a criminal justice system in particular that has never confessed, never repented, never acknowledged
00:22:19
Speaker
The tens of thousands of people who were lawlessly killed under the name of criminal enforcement hasn't acknowledged all of the heartbreak that has been created by this presumption of dangerousness and guilt, and still intends to actually take ultimate power by executing people in the current state. That's why I don't think the death penalty is an issue that you can talk about by asking, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed?
00:22:46
Speaker
The threshold question is, do we deserve to kill when we have not repented for the history and the legacy of slavery and the narratives of racial difference that it created? That when we have not acknowledged the century of violence that we tolerated when thousands of Black people were lynched?
00:23:03
Speaker
And we have not confronted the legal architecture that we created that excluded and disfavored Black people for decades, when we have not owned up to the problems that our system carries. For every nine people we've executed, we can identify one innocent person on death row who's been exonerated. That's in the modern era, in the last 30, 40 years. And in most parts of our life, we would not tolerate that. If somebody said, oh, there's a, for every nine apples, there's a toxin on that apple that if you touch it, you'll die.
00:23:31
Speaker
we would stop selling apples. But the reason why we continue to execute people is because we feel like this kind of punishment, this kind of space is insulated from everything we know and understand about what's fair and reliable and necessary. And that's why I believe that lynching has, and the legacy, this whole history of racial inequality, this narrative of racial difference has blinded us to these really essential truths that I think we are called to confront.
00:24:00
Speaker
I just want to tie together three themes that I'm seeing emerging and then tie together those three themes in your work and have you respond to how you've carried out your efforts to further what I see as these three frontiers in your life. So the first theme we've seen emerging
00:24:17
Speaker
is this focus on the need for, and you've talked about this elsewhere, the need for a spiritual orientation for people of faith that's directed toward hope. But you're also focusing us on the ways in which we have to dismantle structures. It's not enough to go in and pray for people or give them bread or give them some food or minister to them in a pietistic sense.
00:24:37
Speaker
One has to go beyond that and dismantle structures. But then there's a third layer you've talked about, which I think you powerfully addressed in some of the work you've done about narrative in the way that narrative has other black people, has made them different, has justified dehumanization. And through those narratives, we have also, as a society, begun to accept and have accepted probably from time immemorial in this culture that we've inherited over the last several thousand years.
00:25:04
Speaker
The idea that a criminal who commits a crime is marked with the mark of Cain as forever a criminal. There's no distinction between the crime and the person. That's an important thing. But to tie that last point together with the others, this focus on hope, this focus on redemption, the focus on the value of the person, the need to dismantle structures, you're also pointing the way toward the absolute necessity of reconfiguring narratives.
00:25:31
Speaker
so that we have a different orientation to life together, a different perspective on what it means to commit a crime as opposed to what it is to be a criminal. And I see this coursing through a lot of our African-American tradition and figures like James Baldwin and figures like Martin Luther King. And so I would just like you to talk a little bit about how you've now gone on to new frontiers where you are going beyond just legal work.
00:25:58
Speaker
You are now actively making efforts to reshape narratives through work you've done to recapture history. A theme I think that James Baldwin spoke about so well when he talked about how Americans, particularly Americans of the South, just could not come to terms with who they were.
00:26:14
Speaker
if they understood the truth and were willing to accept the truth about how black people have been treated under the racialized white supremacist conditions of American life. Could you please just speak a little bit to us about how you've gone out and you've tried to reshape narratives? Sure, sure. Well, I mean, you're absolutely right that I grew up at a time when the law was the space
00:26:39
Speaker
where liberation and transformation sort of emerged as the most kind of exciting and dynamic space. I'm a product of Brown versus Board of Education. So I grew up in a community where Black children couldn't go to the public schools. There were no high schools for Black kids when my dad was a teenager in our county.
00:26:58
Speaker
But these lawyers came into our community and they enforced the Supreme Court's decision in Brown and that forced the community to open up the public schools to kids like me. And just for the record, the county I grew up in was 80% white. If you had a vote,
00:27:13
Speaker
in the mid-60s, early 60s, about whether to let Black kids like me into the public schools, we would have lost a vote. So democracy, unshielded, unchallenged by a commitment to the rule of law, was insufficient to protect people like me. But these lawyers had the ability to enforce rights. And because of that, I got to go to high school and college and law school. And so when I went to law school, I was very intent on using that same power
00:27:39
Speaker
to help other disfavored groups. And as I've mentioned, I came out in the 80s when this population of people were piling up on death row and in jails and prisons. And so that was where my focus was. And I've done that work for 30 plus years and continue to do that work. But it was probably about 15 years ago that I realized that we might not be able to win Brown versus Board of Education today. There had been a narrative shift in our society where we were once again retreating
00:28:08
Speaker
from a commitment to the rule of law. We were retreating from a commitment to basic human rights to favor political ideas and narrative ideas that empowered some and disempowered others. And that was the same environment that created
00:28:25
Speaker
that limited emancipation for people after the Civil War. It was the same environment that tolerated lynching, the same environment that allowed racial hierarchy to be codified. And I just decided that we couldn't stay in the court alone recognizing this need. And so getting outside the court to take on these narrative shifts that were undermining our society's ability to continue making progress for me became a priority. It was about 15 years ago that I realized
00:28:54
Speaker
that the felon Saul would never have an opportunity to become the Apostle Paul in our society. We're not gonna let Saul out. We're not gonna give him the opportunity to become someone who can actually expand and enhance the gospels and teach and minister. We're too hung up on the things, the crimes that were committed. We can't see past that. And so both as a political and legal strategy,
00:29:21
Speaker
But also as a spiritual endeavor, it became necessary for me to think about, you know, the elements of narrative change. How is it that we create a different environment? And I live in Montgomery, Alabama when I moved here in the 80s, 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy, but you couldn't find the word slave, slavery and enslavement anywhere in this city.
00:29:44
Speaker
And the romanticizing of an era that was so traumatic and devastating for so many was a real threat to creating a healthy environment for advancing racial justice. And so we started doing research on these topics, and then we decided to put up markers, because I think there is something important about changing the landscape, the literal landscape, physical landscape, which is so littered with iconography that is, I believe, false and distracting. And so when we put that marker up, I was really struck by the power
00:30:14
Speaker
of that marker, people came out, they had a very emotional reaction to it. And so I began thinking about public history and memorialization. I've been to the Apartheid Museum.
00:30:24
Speaker
in Johannesburg and was very moved by what a truth telling space that was. I've been to Berlin and Germany and in Berlin you can't go 200 meters without seeing markers or stones that have been placed next to the homes of Jewish families. The Holocaust Memorial sits in the center of Berlin. In Germany there are no Adolf Hitler statues. There are no monuments or memorials to the perpetrators.
00:30:45
Speaker
of the Holocaust in Germany, every student is required to study the Holocaust and go to Holocaust sites. They don't have people saying, oh, we can't teach our children about the Holocaust because they might feel uncomfortable or ashamed. There's a reckoning. And as a result of that, I will go to Germany. If they were silent about the Holocaust, if they were Adolf Hitler statues everywhere, I don't think I'd go.
00:31:07
Speaker
And I come back to our country and I see this landscape. So for me, that has become a priority. And I do see it as narrative work. And I think it is the critical work of our day, because we are in the midst of a narrative struggle. And if we are not careful, the same arguments that apologized and legitimated enslavement will prevail again. The same thinking about codifying a racial and social order that accommodates the needs of the powerful and
00:31:37
Speaker
and excludes and marginalizes the needs of those who are less powerful, it will emerge again. And I just think we cannot claim to be about justice and certainly can't claim to be loving mercy or even walking humbly with God if we are non-responsive in this moment. And I think for a lot of Christians at least, some people have persuaded themselves that if they were alive during the time of slavery, they would be an abolitionist.
00:32:05
Speaker
And if they were alive during the time of mild violence, they would have been crusading to stop the terror lynchings. Had they been alive when people were gathering at Evan Pettus Bridge, they would have been right there with Dr. King and John Lewis and others. But you can't claim.
00:32:21
Speaker
to do that, to be on the right side, if you're silent in this moment when there is so much violence and destruction, when these narratives are emerging that are rooted in such bigotry and discrimination. So yes, I do think this moment, this era requires
00:32:37
Speaker
a deep engagement with a narrative struggle along with the legal and along with the personal. And the personal is key, too, because your capacity to do something for at least for me, when somebody said, oh, when I started thinking, oh, we have to build a museum and a memorial. All you get when you try to do something like that is you can't do it. And there's a lot of reason why people say that. We were a nonprofit law organization.
00:33:05
Speaker
You know, when I was a child, I didn't even get to go to museums and sort of be building ones seemed really outrageous. But we felt like we knew something about storytelling. We knew something about narrative because that's what we have to do when we go to court.
00:33:19
Speaker
And we just believed things we hadn't seen. And I think that's where the personal comes into play. There's never been a transformative moment. There's never been a justice moment where people were able to see in detail and clarity a protocol, a precedent for what had to be done. Often you have to be willing. And for me, that's where the faith part comes in. When integration came, we didn't know what was going to happen. We just had to believe.
00:33:47
Speaker
that we could find our identities in these spaces and learn the things we needed to learn. And I do think that's important for the moment too, because we've gotten very good at protecting ourselves. We've gotten very good at shielding ourselves. We've gotten much better at articulating the challenges that we face and understanding the harms that exist. And I think all of that is positive. I think that's really good.
00:34:13
Speaker
But if we allow our capacity to articulate and define challenge and struggle and harm and trauma and all of these things, to neutralize our capacity, to sometimes stand when people say sit down, to sometimes speak when people say be quiet, to struggle, to fight, to persevere, then that knowledge isn't serving justice, it's actually obstructing justice. And I think we can do both of those things. I think we can actually overcome
00:34:41
Speaker
without being overcome. But that requires kind of an integration of all three of those things. You have to have your hope and your vision and your narrative aligned. I tell my students this all the time. I said, we don't change the world with the ideas in our mind. I want us to be smart and strategic and tactical. But I believe we change the world
00:35:01
Speaker
when the ideas in our mind are fueled by convictions in our heart because it's what we feel, what we believe, what motivates us, what animates us that ultimately gets us to do the things that must be done.
00:35:14
Speaker
It's a quick follow-up. Let me just say that you're exactly right that narrative is the crucial battle of our time. We're seeing that play out as struggles over what should be taught at educational institutions across the country, which goes exactly to the task of reconfiguring narrative, recovering historical memory so that we're not subject to and at the mercy of revisionist efforts.
00:35:37
Speaker
to cast the struggle of African Americans as over, as I've heard you say, elsewhere in three days. In fact, we know that the struggle was ongoing for many, many years, bloody, and continues to this day. So this battle you've identified around narrative is certainly the crucial battle of our time. So as we consider the question that Martin Luther King Jr. asked, where do we go from here? So often people get stumped at where do I start from now?
00:36:06
Speaker
And so I'm curious, you live in a world of many first priorities. Where do we begin to really shape the future of racial justice in criminal justice or the criminal legal system for someone who is not a practitioner? They say, OK, I want to do something. I want to do more than talk. What are the things that would make the most difference?
00:36:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think first of all, we have to get proximate to people who are suffering, to people excluded. You know, proximity is a concept that we embrace entirely in business. Every business person is taught that they have to understand supply and demand, they have to pull things apart, they have to really appreciate what it is they're trying to do. And you have to get close, you have to get in, you have to evaluate all of the forces that will shape whether business will succeed or fail.
00:37:03
Speaker
We embrace proximity in the context of science. Scientists have to understand what they're studying. In technology, there's no innovation until you can pull apart the status quo and imagine doing something slightly differently. And we do appreciate the need for that kind of proximity, but somehow when it comes to justice, a lot of people have persuaded themselves
00:37:27
Speaker
that they can do justice while never getting close to anyone who's suffering injustice without spending time with people who are experiencing oppression and abuse. And I don't think that's true. And we have too many policymakers trying to create policies to advance justice from a distant place.
00:37:45
Speaker
And they fail because when you're proximate, you hear things you won't otherwise hear. You see things you won't otherwise see. And that knowledge gives you insight and wisdom and understanding that allows you to advance justice. It's very easy in the United States to separate yourself from problems that you don't want to have to deal with. And the more you have,
00:38:07
Speaker
easier it is to separate. And we can live in communities where we don't understand the problems of the poor. We can situate ourselves in places where we don't have to see that kind of issue and that kind of, and that's why I think being committed to proximity is for me the first step. And then I think we have to be secondly conscious about narrative change. We have to understand that we can have different opinions about certain issues. We can
00:38:31
Speaker
have different ideas about certain strategies. But we have to understand that there are some narratives out there that are rooted in bigotry and violence and hatred, and those have to be changed. We cannot disagree about the threat posed by these narratives, which I tend to see as rooted in what I call the politics of fear and anger.
00:38:56
Speaker
Because when people allow themselves to be governed by fear and anger, they start tolerating things they wouldn't otherwise tolerate. They accept things they wouldn't otherwise accept. I think fear and anger are the essential ingredients of injustice and oppression.
00:39:11
Speaker
And a person who is committed to doing justice has to reject the politics of fear and anger. Everything we're seeing around the world that is disturbing and heartbreaking, if you ask the people who are perpetuating the oppression, the abuse, the violence, they can give you a narrative of fear and anger that they believe justifies what they're doing. And so there has to be a community of people on this earth
00:39:33
Speaker
that do not align with fear and anger, but align with the narratives of hope and truth and grace and mercy and redemption. And particularly for people of faith, we have to be very conscious of what that means, even as we're talking about what to do about immigration, what to do about climate change, what to do about this issue or that issue. Third thing, I do think we have to be hopeful. I think hope for me is not something you can just
00:40:03
Speaker
you know, hope will happen. I think it is something we have to commit to because I think that hopelessness is the enemy of justice. I think injustice prevails where hopelessness persists. And that means we have to understand our hope quotient and protect ourselves from the things that make us hopeless. We have to fight against those things because without hope, we become tolerant and we become complicit.
00:40:28
Speaker
And we will not deconstruct these challenges that you've identified. If we can't have a view, can't have a vision, can't imagine something that we are reaching for,
00:40:39
Speaker
that we can grasp. And there are a lot of wonderful theorists and idealists and they tell me something, yeah, I'm not hopeful. And they take comfort and hopelessness because that then excuses activism, excuses engagement. It means that they don't have to be strategic or tactical. And I just believe that many of us are called to kind of fill that void.
00:41:01
Speaker
The gospel is a gospel of hope and transformation. And I mean hope in addition to faith, because sometimes people embrace faith, they know the liturgy, they have the habits of a Christian, they go to church, but they're hopeless about what they can do to make a difference in the lives of people who are suffering.
00:41:18
Speaker
And that's why I talk about hope. And then lastly, is this concept of doing what's uncomfortable and inconvenient. So if you show me somebody who's proximate to the poor and the excluded, those who are experiencing injustice, you show me somebody who is conscious of the narratives that they are trying to change. You show me somebody whose life is shaped and defined by hope and who's doing something uncomfortable and inconvenient. And I will show you the kind of child of God that's making a difference that is doing justice and loving mercy and walking humbly. Those are the people
00:41:48
Speaker
who I believe that have the capacity to be transformative at a moment like this when we so desperately need those models. We need that witness. And I feel fortunate because I have been nurtured and raised and encouraged by so many who represented all of those things for me. And that's what sustains and encourages me when I feel like we're trying to do something really hard.
00:42:16
Speaker
So if you could share with us a little bit of how you turn to those resources and what they mean to you, given what seems to be a very dark period in American history, you've said in some places that there are clear indications of darkness, but yet you still remain hopeful and you've talked about faith, you've talked about the legacy that sustains you, and I know your grandmother
00:42:46
Speaker
played a great role in your life. So if you could just share with us some of what, in a concrete sense, it means to draw on that legacy. Because for so many people, especially students that we may speak with, hope is a very elusive thing. Hope is hard to lay a hold of, it's hard to live into, and it's hard to live out from.
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think it's a great question. And I've been thinking about this more recently. So I went to a Christian college, Eastern University. I was a philosophy major. Really wasn't sure what I was going to do. I loved being in college. I was very involved in music, and I was involved in sports. And as a senior, one day somebody came up to me and said, you're a philosophy major. You know nobody is going to pay you to philosophize when you graduate from college.
00:43:40
Speaker
And I sort of panicked because I hadn't really thought about what came after college and, you know, started looking into graduate programs and quickly learned that, you know, to get into graduate school in history or English or political science, you needed to know a lot about history, English or political science. That was very intimidating. So I kept looking. And to be honest, that's really how I found my way to law school, because it became clear to me, you don't need to know anything to go to law school. And so I signed up for that.
00:44:06
Speaker
But when I got to law school, I felt I was interested in helping the poor and dealing with injustice. And when I got there, I went to Harvard Law School. And this was in the 80s when they had been accused of being a pretty rough place. The paper chase and all these popular things have gotten the culture about how abusive the faculty were. And so my first year, they decided to, on day one, create orientation groups to help you
00:44:32
Speaker
feel comfortable being in law school. And I remember they put us in groups of 10 or 11 students and an orientation group leader took us out someplace and was supposed to make us feel comfortable. And we went someplace and the orientation group leader just asked a very benign question. How did you get to law school? Why are you here?
00:44:50
Speaker
And I sat there and listened to all 10 of the other kids in that group talk about how they were the son or the daughter or the grandson or the granddaughter or the nephew or the niece of a lawyer. And the more they talk, the more diminished I felt because I wasn't related to a lawyer. And then about halfway through that, I realized something I hadn't even thought about until that moment. I realized that not only am I not related to a lawyer,
00:45:18
Speaker
I'd never met a lawyer. And when it came to me, I didn't have the hope that I would be accepted if I was honest. I didn't have for that moment the conviction that I should just talk honestly. And so I made up something, I didn't lie, but I distracted them. I didn't answer the question. But when I got home, I called my mom and said, mom, I don't think I belong here.
00:45:42
Speaker
And my mother, of course, was one of these people who was always, and she said, what are you talking about? Of course you belong there. She says, you belong wherever God puts you. And I said, all right. And then she said, but you should be honest. Don't start your law school education doing things that are dishonest and deceptive. And she encouraged me to go find the kids and tell them the truth.
00:46:03
Speaker
It took me a while, but I eventually decided to do it. I don't want to find all 10 of those kids. I grabbed each one. I think they thought it was pretty weird, but I pulled them aside and said, I got to talk to you about orientation day. And I said, I wasn't honest because I didn't tell you that I'm not related to a lawyer. And not only that, I'd never met a lawyer, but I can tell you how I got to this law school. And I told them that my great grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia in the 1850s. And he learned to read despite the fact that there were anti-literacy laws.
00:46:33
Speaker
that meant that he could have been sold or killed or beaten for violating those laws. He learned to read because he had a hope of freedom in 1850 in Virginia when it wasn't rational to believe that freedom was coming. But he had that hope anywhere. And after emancipation, my grandmother told me that he would stand on the porch of their house and once a week, formerly enslaved people would come to their house and he'd read the newspaper to them.
00:46:57
Speaker
so they would know what was going on and she loved the power he had just because he could read and my grandmother said that whenever he started reading she would push her siblings aside and she would get next to him and she'd wrap her arms around his leg because she wanted to learn to read too and she thought that the way you learn to read is to touch somebody while they're reading and he eventually figured it out and he said no Victoria that's not how you learn to read I'm going to teach you
00:47:20
Speaker
And he taught my grandmother to read, even though there weren't a lot of schools. And my grandmother worked as a domestic her whole life. She lived into her 90s. She had 10 children, but my grandmother was a reader.
00:47:32
Speaker
I'd go see my grandmother and sometimes she'd stand on the porch with a stack of books and she wouldn't let you in the house until you read something from a book. She'd make your favorite dessert and it'd be smelling so great, but sometimes she wouldn't let you in the kitchen until you read something from a book. I grew up in a poor racially segregated community. You didn't see much opportunity outside our door. Most of the adults didn't have high school degrees, but my mom
00:47:56
Speaker
went into debt when we were children to buy us the World Book Encyclopedia. And we had those books in our home. And you could mess up a lot of things, but you couldn't mess up those books. And she wanted us to see a bigger world than the world we saw outside our door. And I realized that that was an act rooted in hope. And I didn't understand it at the time, because if you're 10 and Christmas comes, you go outside, and your friends are like, well, I got a bicycle for Christmas. I got a basketball. I got a baseball. And I'd have to say, well,
00:48:24
Speaker
I got volume G of the World Book of Encyclopedia, but now I realize that I am the heir of hopeful generations of people, enslaved people who had a hope of freedom, terrorized people who had a hope of a better day, poor people who had a hope that change would come.
00:48:43
Speaker
And when I understand that, when I think about that, I realize that I have something that a lot of people aren't blessed with having. They don't have the same legacy, it's the rich legacy of hope that I have. But what I tell them is it is available to all of us. And so for me, that's what it means. It means that if you've ever been doubted and you succeeded, if you've ever had to kind of climb up the rough side of the mountain to get where you're going, then you need to understand the power of hope and belief in that.
00:49:10
Speaker
And I do rely on all of that to sustain me. And I'm grateful. In the last 10, 15, 20 years of my life, I talk more about my grandmother, more about my four parents than I ever did in the first 40 years of my life.
00:49:25
Speaker
And now I begin to have an appreciation for who they are and what they did. And my greatest aspiration is to leave something to those who come behind me. And I want them to see in me what I saw in my mother and grandmother and great grandparents, because that for me was the greatest gift I could have been given. And God allows us, I think sometimes,
00:49:47
Speaker
to see through these windows that others are never gonna tell us that should be looked through. And that's the power, that's the beauty.
00:49:55
Speaker
of faith is that you can see something. To somebody else it looks like a clump of dirt, but to you it looks like a diamond. And to somebody else it just looks like a little mud hole, but to you it looks like an ocean of opportunity. And to be able to see things like that in the world for me is just, it gives me joy. It's a great gift and I'm really thankful for that.
00:50:23
Speaker
So your refrain of hope has me thinking of the tremendous gift and testament of hope that Dr. King has left for us. If he were here in the room or in this conversation, what would you imagine he would
00:50:44
Speaker
want to say, what would he be focused on? He didn't talk much in his last book directly about the criminal justice system per se, but he talked a lot about the criminality of racism and segregation and how our housing policy and the urban ghettos at the time, the harsh conditions, not unlike what some people experience in being incarcerated,
00:51:12
Speaker
creates and breeds a kind of violence and criminality in communities because of hopelessness. But what do you think he would, if you were standing here with us or sitting with us and dialoguing, what do you think would be on his mind, top of mind, given what's going on in this country today? Well, I think he'd probably be saying the same things because we still are a country.
00:51:39
Speaker
with tens of millions of people who are poor, who are excluded and marginalized. And I think the need for the Poor People's Campaign that he was organizing when he was killed still exists today, that until we recognize that in a nation as wealthy as ours, where we have millions of people who are food insecure, we have millions of people who can't get the health care that they need, that we cannot claim to be a great society. We cannot claim to be a just society. And I think he would call us to repent for
00:52:08
Speaker
the ways in which we have failed in the 60 years since he last had the opportunity to speak with us, to deal with this inequality, to deal with these disparities.
00:52:22
Speaker
And then to hear some of the rhetoric about race and all of that, to not see more progress, I think he would challenge us to recognize that our work is not yet done. We are still burdened by this history, this narrative of racial difference. People still see through that lens. Our churches are just as segregated today as they were when he said the 10 o'clock hour is the most segregated hour in America. We've made progress in certain places, but we haven't made the kind of transformation
00:52:51
Speaker
that he dreamed about. And then lastly, I think he would talk to us about the burden of violence. I don't think he would shrink one inch from his commitment to nonviolence. And it's the part of the conversation and the part of the King Doctrine that I think we ignore too often. I don't believe in violence and I don't have any problem making that a part of what I articulate as an identity.
00:53:17
Speaker
I don't want to just want to end police violence. I want to end domestic violence and gang violence and drug violence and sexual violence. And I think when we allow ourselves to imagine that we can do violence to another person and still be in right relationship with God or even with our family and with the people we care about, we give into the kind of the lie that has created such
00:53:44
Speaker
such a barrier for human progress. And I think Dr. King understood that in a way that very few people have and his prophetic vision to use nonviolence, to take the moral power that comes with a commitment to everyone's well-being, to loving everybody. And that's what I think the gospels calls us to. I think he'd be saying that louder than ever because this is a time where I think the need to commit to sort of a path to peace and justice that rejects violence
00:54:13
Speaker
is urging in this moment. Thank you so much Brian for your time.