Race and Ethnicity

Shaun R. Harper, provost professor in the Rossier School of Education and Marshall School of Business, Clifford and Betty Allen chair in urban leadership, and executive director of the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, discusses racial equity initiatives in higher education. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Maureen, and good afternoon, good morning to all of you. Thank you for joining us for today’s Educators Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Today’s meeting is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Shaun Harper with us to talk about racial equity initiatives in higher education. Dr. Harper is a provost professor in the Rossier School of Education and the Marshall School of Business; the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership; and founder and executive director of the Race and Equity Center at the University of South Carolina (Edit: University of Southern California). He is also president of the American Educational Research Association and was appointed to President Barack Obama's advisory council for My Brother’s Keeper in 2015. Previously Dr. Harper served as president of the Association for the study of higher education and spent a decade at the University of Pennsylvania where he was a professor and founding executive director for the Center for the Study of Race & Equity in Education. His research focuses on race, gender, and other dimensions of equity in colleges and universities, businesses and firms, and K through twelve schools. Johns Hopkins University Press will be publishing his thirteenth book, entitled Race Matters in College. So Dr. Harper, thank you very much for being with us. Following George Floyd’s murder, we are seeing a large-scale civil rights movement in the United States and around the world in support of Black Lives Matter. It would be great if you could share with us your perspective and talk about how colleges and universities can take action to work toward racial equity and greater inclusivity and diversity on their campuses. So over to you. HARPER: Yeah, thank you so much, Irina. I really appreciate having been invited to be a part of this important conversation. I almost always do as I’m told. One person has already sent me a text message, who is joining us in this virtual environment today, asking me to tell everyone that I work at the University of Southern California, the other USC—not South Carolina. So greetings from the University of Southern California. I am really thrilled to spend some time talking about, you know, race in America more broadly, and then drilling down into race in higher education. Irina, I really appreciated you acknowledging the murder of George Floyd as being a real catalyst for a movement. You know, let me say, as you might imagine, being the executive director of the USC Race & Equity Center made for a very, very intense five weeks in the month of June, for sure, as, you know, people were really—leaders were really reaching out from all of the areas in which we do our work—K-12 schools and districts, colleges and universities, and certainly businesses and firms. Never in the history—our now almost decade-long history of the center were we so overwhelmed with, you know, a national and, at times, even global outcry for help, assistance, resources, guidance, and so on, than we were in the month of June. I do want to make sure, though, that everyone who is with us fully understands what the uprisings were about in June. They certainly were about the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. But they also were about longer-standing patterns of police brutality and police misconduct in predominantly Black and brown communities. It was about the police killings of unarmed Black people; not just George Floyd. A third thing that the movement is about is, you know, understanding longer-standing systems of racism, both structural and systemic, and cultural racism, the way that racism shows up in policy and in practice, you know, really across, you know, many organizations and social contexts. So it’s not just about policing. It’s not just about confederate monuments, but also about, you know, again, other manifestations of systemic racism. I will say just one more thing about the movement. You know, it took a sudden turn around week four where, you know, it wasn’t just about people marching in the streets. But then people started turning inward in their own organizational contexts. We definitely saw a lot of this in companies and firms across the country where very distressed CEOs were reaching out to us saying, our Black employees are writing these open letters talking about their experiential realities as people of color in, you know, largely predominantly White workplace environments. In some instances, those open letters were not just circulated internally, but also were circulated via social media. We also saw lots of young students of color, both in K-12 and in higher education, make known via these Instagram posts their racialized experiences in their educational context. So the movement also has been really about raising both national and global consciousness about the inaction that has long occurred around racial issues—again, across a multitude of both educational and workplace settings. So, you know, it has been a really fascinating, you know, five weeks for me. I definitely—and so have my colleagues here at the center—we have brought a lot of expertise to the table as we’ve engaged with folks. But we’ve also learned a lot. You know, I’ve been a professor now for—this is starting my eighteenth year. There has never been a time that I’ve learned more than I have over the past five weeks as we’ve engaged in this work. So I wanted to just like set the stage here by helping people understand, you know, really the four dimensions of what the moment and the movement is about. I do also want to take some time, though, quickly here—realizing that we have a higher ed audience, I do want to talk about reopenings, our return to campus. You know, some institutions are, you know, moving forward with their plans to reopen their campuses this fall. I had the enormous privilege yesterday of testifying to the House of Representatives. There was a congressional hearing on campuses reopening, and there were things that I said there that I want to just very quickly recap here because I honestly feel very strongly about all ten of these things because they have, I think, enormous racial equity implications for campuses that are moving forward with plans to reopen. The first is we need to think about the risk that awaits essential workers. You know, essential workers on college and university campuses are food-service professionals, custodial workers, maintenance workers, and so on. Given the stratification of the higher education workforce, it’s primarily people of color who are in those lower-level service roles who will be required to come to campuses. Then those people are going to have to go home to their families, to their children. I think we are taking a huge risk at putting those essential workers—primarily people of color—at risk of, you know, becoming infected with the virus. Another is—you know, there is a looming financial crisis, right, and there will inevitably be terminations and layoffs. It will not be tenured professors like me who are laid off; it will be the aforementioned service workers, and administrative assistants, and, you know, other people who are in positions that have far less protection. Those are primarily people of color who will be laid off and terminated. So we have to be really thoughtful in our workforce reduction plans. We ought not make those plans in a raceless way because ultimately it’s going to lead to, you know, racial disproportionality in who is laid off. I’ve definitely been thinking a whole lot about, you know, the violence against Asian Americans and Asian immigrants in the U.S.—the horrifying violence that we’ve seen since the pandemic began. You know, certainly it doesn’t help when the president of the United States refers to the coronavirus as kung flu and the Chinese virus. I don’t know that college presidents and campus task forces are thinking deeply enough about how do we protect Asian American students and, you know, Asian international students, and faculty members, and employees when we reopen. I’m afraid that those folks are going to be at risk of enormous stereotyping and physical violence. I, you know, thought, you know, well before Monday’s announcement about, you know, visa complications, and ICE deportations—which I just think are just terrible and ridiculous for international students—I predicted ten days ago that there would be some sort of visa restrictions, and there would be some version of a travel ban of, you know, people coming from other countries, and that, you know, it would largely be sinophobic and xenophobic motives, you know, driving those actions, and what do we have now? We have, you know, this crazy moment of, you know, these complications that I don’t think are just about credit hours and, you know, where other people are studying, you know, in an on-campus environment. I think that, you know, there are some—you know, again, some sinophobic and xenophobic undercurrents. I’ll go quickly. There are just a couple more. We know for sure that communities of color, particularly African American communities, have been disproportionately affected by mortality during the pandemic; that COVID-19 has had a disproportionate effect on people of color. As we return to campuses, it is highly likely that students of color and employees of color will have lost family members, friends, and members of their community at rates that are higher than their White counterparts. We have to have more than adequate grief, and trauma, and mental wellness support resources for those students of color and employees of color as we return them to campuses. We also have to think about what it means to return them to their communities. I talked earlier about the essential workers having to go home after work, after having been, you know, exposed to students and other employees, but, you know, let me say for a moment that I’ve been studying these campus reopening plans, the ones that are public facing, and most institutions are planning to conclude in-person instruction by Thanksgiving in anticipation of a second wave of the virus. We have to be thoughtful about—we’re going to be sending all students back home in, you know, the third week of November. But for students of color, if we send them back home, you know, having been exposed to the virus, we’re then sending them back to communities that have already been disproportionately devastated by COVID-19. All right, three more. For some reason, some institutions are foolishly still thinking about playing football this fall, and there all of these like very sophisticated plans about how to assure physical distancing in stadiums. You know, I read one a couple of weeks ago from Ohio State where they were trying to figure out how they could get twenty (thousand) to thirty thousand people into the stadium, you know, with appropriate physical distancing. Those are great plans, but what about the actual people on the field? They are largely Black. They are overwhelmingly Black. Football is a contact sport, right, and you literally have many people passing around a surface, like an object, that germs have been deposited on, and they are passing it back and forth. Yeah, that’s going to disproportionately affect Black people because the players are disproportionately Black on those teams. I worry about that. I worry a lot about, you know, chronically underfunded minority-serving institutions, historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, and community colleges. Those are the institutions that do more than their fair share of educating college students of color. They don’t have the resources that my very well-resourced University of Southern California has to, you know, reconfigure labs, and lecture halls, and so on, to ensure physical distancing. So, you know, unless there are more considerable, you know, both state and federal investments, I am afraid that those institutions that, you know, enroll their disproportionate shares of communities of color and students of color, are not going to be able to protect them in the same ways that well-resourced institutions are able to. We have seen throughout the pandemic, in both K-12 and in higher ed institutions, you know, way too much evidence about the digital access inequities, and, you know, certainly those inequities have fallen along socio-economic lines with lower-income students not having consistent and reliable access to high-speed Internet. But given the way that race and class co-mingles in America, it’s been disproportionately students of color. So as we think about these hybrid models of instruction for fall quarter, fall semester, with some courses meeting in person, and others meeting online, we have to pay very serious attention to getting students of color and lower-income students the resources they need to be able to afford high-speed Internet so they don’t fall further behind. Lastly—the last consideration here is that, you know, over the entirety of my career, I have been studying the racialized experiences of students of color in higher education, as well as the racialized experiences of workers in corporate contexts. But in the higher ed space, we have heard consistently from students of color that the curriculum doesn’t reflect their cultural histories, cultural interests, cultural identities; that faculty teaching practices are largely unresponsive to, you know, the cultural ways of knowing and learning that are important for students of color. We’ve heard from students of color consistently about the racial micro-aggressions and stereotyping that they often experience in college classrooms, and in labs, and in other places. Those are longstanding issues that, you know, were ever present, really, in in-person environments. I worry that, you know, as we upskill faculty members to teach more effectively online for fall semester, it can’t be just about, you know, cool teaching tricks to, you know, keep all students engaged. We also have to think about how do we not, you know, like, exacerbate, you know, longstanding racial climate problems—for in-person learning environments, how do we not exacerbate those in virtual learning environments? I worry, right, that if we don’t pay attention to that, that students of color are going to be even more alienated online than they have been in person. OK, Irina, you asked me to talk for ten minutes or so. That was more like twenty minutes, so I’m going to stop now and—(laughs)—turn this back over to you for some comments. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Shaun. I could listen to you all day. That was fantastic. And my apologies—University of Southern California. I have the wrong glasses on. (Laughs.) HARPER: No, it happens all the time. FASKIANOS: I don’t have my reading glasses on. All right, so this is—we’re going now to all of you. You can click on the participant’s icon, raise your hand, and I will recognize you. And of course, we want to also use this forum to share best practices and think through how to tackle these issues that we’re discussing here. So let’s first go to Beverly Lindsay. And please tell us where—your affiliation so that we know what higher education institution you are representing, and it will give us context. And you need to click the unmute button to open your mic, so don’t forget to do that. (Pause.) Beverly, can you—Beverly Lindsay, can you click your unmute button, accept that prompt? (Pause.) OK, we will try to go back—come back to her. Q: Can you hear me now? FASKIANOS: Yes. Beverly, it’s great to hear your voice. Q: (Laughs.) OK, good morning. Shaun, as usual it was great to hear your cogent comments. HARPER: Thank you. Q: I would like to share a couple of comments and then get your reaction because I was hearing you talk about the issues behind the unrest of Black Lives movement. One of the issues that often happens is African American professors will often discuss issues. For example, a colleague—this is public information, unnamed—was a criminology specialist. He was never promoted to a full professor, yet became an ambassador under a former president. There are also the issues of tenure and promotion to faculty who don’t teach certain issues such as race and race relations. The atmosphere on campus often reminds me of what happened during 9/11, and so department heads, deans, provosts, even the presidents, and sometimes the board will give voice to these issues, but they don’t actually do it. For example, in many universities, the number of tenured faculty is similar to what it was 25 years ago. So how do we begin to address those problems on campuses so that we can also address external problems? HARPER: Dr. Lindsay, I so appreciate your question. I miss you a lot. This is great to kick this off with you. Obviously, I’ve been thinking about this a whole lot. In fact, I’m going to bring together—I know that you asked me a question specifically about higher ed, but I’m really going to bring together my two worlds here. The same thing that is happening in colleges and universities is also happening in businesses and firms. It’s that longstanding neglect and inattention to these issues that you are naming, right, that, you know, have reached a breaking point, really, in most organizational contexts. You are absolutely right. The numbers of tenured professors of color are largely the same now that they were a decade ago or even two decades ago, which is just horrendous, and it’s because there never was a serious strategy, right? There were these random, like, activities, like let’s throw this program together that may, you know, increase the number of faculty of color, like, no, that didn’t do it. Let’s, like, throw some dollars over here; no, that didn’t do it. There has to be—there has to be a strategy, right? At the USC Race & Equity Center, we have a resource that we call the USC Equity Institutes. It is a(n) eight-week professional learning series for very senior leaders at colleges and universities. It’s usually the president’s cabinet and, you know, a handful of other, you know, fairly senior administrators, deans, and so on. But the magic number is twenty. So over eight weeks we teach those twenty higher ed leaders things that they never learned anywhere else in their educational or professional upbringing about how to do racial equity; not just how to message it, not just how to articulate its importance, but how to like actually solve racial problems. So while that professional learning is happening, concurrently we also take them through the exercise of developing strategic racial equity projects for their campuses. Many institutions have taken on as a project increasing the numbers of faculty of color and, you know, miraculously, at the end of eight weeks, they have a super solid strategy with lots of input from us that, you know, is so much more robust, and sustainable, and measurable, and so on, than what they were doing before. And we’re already seeing like serious, serious needle movement on those campuses that have gone through the institutes. I think that we need that kind of effort to be honest. It can’t just be, you know, like a random, you know, grab bag of activities that are not part of a larger strategy. FASKIANOS: Let’s go to Sovathana Sokhom, and if you could identify your institution. Beverly Lindsay is with the University of California. Q: OK. Hi, my name is Sovathana Sokhom. I’m from Cal State Dominguez. And as you—probably you can tell is I’m Asian American. And so I will just—I have a question in term(s) of we are so much consider about how the minority, right, and then being a minority faculty, and there’s some discrimination from the students, like they will say, you know, I don’t understand your English, I—you know, I say this assignment have no merit, and so on so forth like that. Or sometime they just, you know, being rude, but in the class when there’s a classroom right before we were shut down. How do you respond to those, those student? Like, they discriminate against professor. Like, I say, you know, you have the right to not take the class and so on and so forth like that, you know, all the strategy that dealing with—(inaudible)—classroom of sixty students, and just one—you know, ninety-nine are good, but the one or two that, you know, make—how do you deal with them? HARPER: Yeah, this is—this is really good. It’s a terrible thing that happens, but your question is a really good one. You know, I mentioned that Black students in recent weeks have taken to Instagram, and these are Black students both in K-12 and in higher ed. You know, there is a Blacks at USC Instagram page, for example, but lots of other Black students across the country have been creating these, right, where they are cataloguing their racialized experiences. Those experiences have helped raise the consciousness of faculty members and institutional leaders around the racial micro-aggressions and other racialized experiences. You know, perhaps a similar campaign focused around, you know, the experiences of Asian American and Asian immigrant faculty members and students could be useful, right? It could be a useful way of raising the consciousness about, you know, the ridiculous things that students, and colleagues, and others say to you and do to you. That is a very public-facing way, right? I will say that we have a different way of doing this at the USC Race & Equity Center. We have these campus climate surveys that we’ve created. We’ve created one now for students that we call the National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates. It has since been—we launched it a year ago. It has since been administered to more than a half million undergraduate students across the country. Right now we’re hard at work on developing a faculty climate assessment and a staff climate assessment. Having your institution do one of those three surveys, or perhaps even all three of them, could also be a way to get some data about, you know, the experiences of, you know, Asian and Asian American faculty members because the data can be disaggregated by race, and by discipline, and by role type, and so on. I just think—in other words, what I’m saying here is that we need data on these experiences; you know, data that can be sort of outward facing. I think of the Instagram post as data, as a matter of fact. But then also data that are collected through, you know, more expertly validated instruments. That could be a way to raise the consciousness of your department chairs, for example, that these are things that Asian faculty are experiencing in the classroom. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to James Turner next. Q: Hi, I’m with the Daniel Alexander Payne Community Development Corporation. I’m Black. I have a doctorate in physics. And we’ve been very—and we run a STEM program for 501(c)(3) now. And one of the problems has been—with minorities at STEM is that middle school has been a time when many fall out of the STEM pipeline. And so we’ve been working very hard to try to retain those students. About a year or two ago I saw a statistic, though, that really upset me quite a bit, and that was that, for STEM—Black students who are entering colleges with a STEM major, only one-third of them graduate with a STEM major. And so there was no delineation there about whether they left school, or whether they changed majors, or what, but still, though, only one-third managed to finish the process as a STEM major. I wondering, are there some—first of all, are you familiar with that statistic, and secondly, are there some things there are unique to STEM that need to be worked on? HARPER: Sure, James, I really appreciate this question. Yes, I’m definitely familiar with that statistic. It’s even worse, James, when you disaggregate by STEM field. You know, the numbers of students of color persisting are even lower in particular majors. In terms of the things that can be done, you know, I mentioned those USC Equity Institutes that we do with higher ed leaders. We’ve now done those on more than forty campuses across the country. We have adapted that model. We have a proposal to a foundation right now—I’m like 99.9 percent sure that it is going to be funded at this point—to do a year-long Racial Equity Leadership Academy for 250 department chairs in STEM fields at colleges and universities across the country, and what we will be doing is, once a month we will be teaching those 250 department chairs strategies for helping their faculty colleagues better integrate, you know, the cultural interest and cultural identities of students of color into the STEM curriculum; how to understand implicit bias when it shows up in, you know, lab interactions between faculty members and students, or between students and students; how to retain students of color and, you know, understand, you know, like the factors that lead to their departure and academic underperformance in STEM. It isn’t just because they were underprepared for the academic rigors of STEM work. That isn’t—that isn’t the only reason why some students of color leave. They also leave because of the racial climate of the department. They also leave because of the racial stereotypes of their faculty members. So over this year-long academy, we will be upscaling, you know, STEM department leaders on, you know, strategies for engaging their faculty colleagues and, you know, again, like understanding the racialized experiences of students of color, and more importantly, not just the experiences, but also these department chairs will teach their faculties what we teach them during this year-long series. So that’s one part of the academy. The other part, quickly, is that we will bring together all of the physicists, and they will work on a racial equity plan for students of color in physics. All of the mechanical engineers who are part of this academy will work together to create a racial equity strategic plan for mechanical engineering; all of the biologists, so on and so forth. So what we will see come out of the academy is not just 250 department chairs who now know how to lead better on these issues, but they also will have worked collaboratively on field-specific and discipline-specific racial equity action plans that could then be, you know, used by their colleagues all across the country on these issues. Q: Thank you very much, and best of luck to you on your funding. HARPER: Thank you. Thanks. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: Jessica Dawson next. OPERATOR: Irina, if you could go to the next one, we’re having technical issues with that one. FASKIANOS: Yes, I see that. OK, so next we shall go to—let’s go to Kevin Collymore. Q: Hi. Thank you for today’s webinar. I’m Kevin Collymore. I’m an administrator here at New York University on the East Coast. Shaun, thank you for all your contributions to higher ed thus far. My question is, so last week I posted or created an editorial in the Chronicle that pretty much the title is, “Colleges Must Confront Structural Racism,” on campus, and one of the ten steps I put was if you don’t have a chief diversity officer, now might be the time to hire one. Given what you mentioned about staff and faculty, knowing that chief diversity officers, their portfolio is more of a student-facing or student affairs position, what is your advice for those who are in charge of the college’s EDI plan to extend that branch into the classroom, like how you mentioned about—with the previous person about, you know, students leaving their department because of bias and not feeling welcome. How might an administrator who has an EDI title or chief diversity officer break into the silos of the faculty tenure community, if that makes sense? HARPER: It totally makes sense. Let me say quickly here, that—before I answer your actual question—the most frequently asked question that I got from corporate CEOs throughout the month of June as they called, like, you know—like, just like very stressed out, is should I hire a chief diversity officer? And my answer to every one of them was no. No, you should not. If this was not a thing that you were planning to do before the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, like, suddenly, like now you’re like feeling the heat from your Black employees that you need to do something, and this is the one thing that you’re going to do, like, no, you shouldn’t do that. That’s not going to—that is not going to be enough, right? So that’s what I said to them. I’m going to tell you—so I reached—you saw me reach for my notes. I have my actual notes here that are a day old. We are hiring a chief diversity officer here at the University of Southern California, and I am on the search committee. We had our first search committee meeting yesterday; hence these notes. Here’s what I said to my colleagues. We’re not like those corporations who are like just thinking about this for the first time. You know, we actually do have lots of diversity and inclusion work here at USC. We’ve been thinking about potentially having this CDO for a while so, you know, this wasn’t like just sort of a(n) arbitrary sort of thing in response to the moment. But what I said to our colleagues yesterday is that most chief diversity officers at higher ed institutions have very little money, very little power. They don’t have very many staff members. They have no real meaningful access to the president, the provost, deans, and faculty members. So that’s the wrong way to have a chief diversity officer, right? I also said to them that, you know, many institutions will merely, you know, just sort of search around and find the least confrontational person of color who has been there forever, and promote that person to CDO just because they’ve been around, and that, you know, the person isn’t a troublemaker, right? That’s also the wrong way to go about it, right? We need people in those roles who are going to hold us accountable to the values that we espouse in our mission statements, in presidential speeches, in admissions materials, and so on; not just a, you know, nice, friendly Latina who has been there forever or, you know, a nice Black guy who isn’t going to rock the boat. You know, that is not going to bring us the kinds of structural and systemic change that you wrote about in your Chronicle of Higher Ed article. Yeah, I said one more thing to them. You know, many institutions will hire a chief diversity officer who is a mere academician. Now listen: I’m a very serious scholar. I’m a very serious academician. But that, on its own, wouldn’t qualify a person like me to be a good chief diversity officer. We need people who are also strategists, people who can help the institution develop strategies; not just like random activities, or not just sort of theorize about the problem, but can also help an institution identify a set of concrete actions. You know, that’s the thing, by the way—and I know you know this from the piece that you’ve written and from your other work—the thing that people are calling for right now in this moment is action. They don’t want any more statements, any more speeches, any more broken promises. They want actions. So a CDO can’t be just a person who, you know, understands these things conceptually and intellectually. They also have to be people who have a serious track record and some serious expertise on solving complex equity, diversity, and inclusion problems. My sense is that—and I spend a lot of time with CEOs in higher ed. I love them. So many of them are my friends. I don’t mean this so disrespectfully as it’s going to sound, but the truth is most presidents and their Cabinets when they were thinking about creating chief diversity officers, they didn’t take into account all of these considerations. I can guarantee you that we are going to take into account all of them here at USC as we move forward in our search for our first CEO. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Jessica Dotson (sp). We’re having technical issues, but she chatted her question, which is: Dr. Harper, could you speak to cultural ways of knowing, that you mentioned, and the way that the dominant pedagogy ignores these? And just for context, she is at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. HARPER: Thank you, Jessica. I really appreciate your question. You know, I am just about done—just about meaning, like, 75 percent in—with my newest book, Race Matters in College. In the first chapter of the book, which is titled, “Born Racist,” it is about how higher education institutions were racist from the start. Literally the colonial colleges were largely financed by profits from the American slave trade industry. And literally at many other colleges and universities throughout the South and elsewhere it was unpaid labor from enslaved African peoples in the Americas that laid the bricks and built the first buildings on those campuses. You know, those institutions for literally hundreds of years had no people of color. Many of them also had no women. What I’m saying here, Jessica, is that it was mostly White men who determined what a college or university should be, how it should be organized, how it should function, what its curriculum should entail, how that curriculum should be delivered. It was White people in just about every academic field and discipline who determined what counts a knowledge in that particular field of discipline. As higher education institutions have become more diverse, racially and ethnically, since the 1970s, the diversity of the curriculum has not kept pace with the diversity of the student body. And therefore, you know, we are still delivering to students of color—to all students, by the way. Not just students of color; White students as well. I’ll come back in a moment and quick say something about that. But we’re delivering to students a curriculum that was largely sort of determined by White people what it should include. So when I say cultural ways of knowing, that we have to take on as an empirical activity, as an inquiry activity, you know, understanding what it is that, you know, communities of color value as knowledge. We have to ask our students of color and our alumni of color, for example, what’s missing from the curriculum. We have to ask our colleagues who are faculty of color, you know, to provide us some insights on how we might integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion across the curriculum. Notice, that I didn’t say how we add on just on course on diversity and have that be it, right? But instead, how do we integrate these topics meaningfully across the curriculum? It isn’t just that you have the one week in your marketing course where you talk about multicultural marketing, and that checks the box. But, you know, how do you in fact in a marketing course, you know, integrate, you know, the perspectives and behaviors of consumers of color? How do you, you know, help people understand, you know, consumer behaviors, not just in, you know, the particular workplace environments or particular businesses, but, you know, how do you also think about, like, purchasing behaviors in predominantly Black and predominantly Asian American communities? And how do you think about the sustainability of Asian businesses? So on and so forth. So that’s what I mean. I said I was going to come back and say something about White students. So the third—the third chapter in Race Matters in College is titled “The Miseducation of White America.” And it is about how we send millions of college-educated White people into the world every year, without having afforded them a proper course of study on anything racial. We hear almost unanimously in our campus racial climate assessments from White students who are seniors that they know not—very little more as seniors in college than they did four years prior when they were seniors in high school. That unless one trips and falls into a sociology of race course or into an ethnic studies course, one really could go through four, five, or six years of college without ever learning a thing about structural and systemic racism, or about communities of color, so on and so forth. So then we send them into the world. They become leaders across every industry in the economy. It still remains the case, by the way, that in every industry overwhelmingly the people who lead those industries, the executives are White. When we send them into the world without a proper course of study on anything related to race, and racial equity, and racial justice, and so on, and they go and they do racist things, or they create policies that both sustain and, at times, even exacerbate racial inequality and racial disproportionality, higher education institutions are largely responsible for that, because we were the people who underprepared them for citizenship and leadership in a racially diverse democracy. So, you know, making the curriculum, you know, more inclusive of communities of color isn’t just about students of color. It’s also about their White classmates who will go into the world and be citizens and leaders. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Coda Rayo-Garza. If you could accept the unmute prompt. Q: Hi, Shaun. This is Coda. HARPER: Hi, Coda. Q: I am over at the University of Texas here in San Antonio. And one of the things, you know, about Texas, as we are truly becoming a battleground state, and in light of the sort of new force that has—that has come through with the Black Lives Matter movement, we have seen students, you know, step into the higher ed space with that as well. And in particular I’m talking about the defund movement, and the call to defund campus police. And so as someone who’s worked in higher ed—you know, I’m a lecturer at UTSA but also formerly worked in policy for several elected officials—you know, I’m wondering how does that translate over within the sort of, you know, going from municipal and government law enforcement and the defund movement? Some of those suggested policies and strategies, how do they translate into the higher ed space? Is that something that folks have started looking into or talked about—or have been talking about? HARPER: Sure. Coda, I really appreciate your question. I just noticed that we have eight minutes remaining, so I will attempt to be concise in my responses. Here at the University of Southern California, our president, Carol Folt, sent an email to every member of our campus community last week announcing a set of actions that we’re taking in response to anti-Black racism and, you know, actions that we’re taking to better support our Black students, Black faculty, Black staff, and Black alumni. I thought that the list of actions that President Folt announced were fantastic. There have been some people who have written back and said, yeah, but what about the defund the police? We want USC to discontinue its relationship with LAPD. I just don’t know that that is a realistic thing, right? You know, our is an urban-situated university here in L.A. And, you know, I don’t—I don’t know that it’s realistic to expect that we will discontinue a relationship with, you know, law enforcement officers who play a role in keeping us all safe in an environment that, you know, sometimes has crime and violence. Here’s what I will say, though, about the list of actions that our president announced. The first thing on that list, she announced a partnership with the USC Race and Equity Center that entails extending an invitation to every Black person who is a member of our community—students, faculty, staff, and alumni. We will be conducting focus groups separately, you know, with each of those groups. Lots of those. Lots of focus groups across each of those members of our community. Those focus groups are not going to be about, you know, tell us your experience, and relive your trauma, and unpack your racial pain. Instead, they’re going to be about what are some ways that this university can better respond to your specific needs and expectations, you know, as Black members of the community? How can USC, you know, be more inclusive, more equitable, more respectful for you? What are your expectations of the institution, right? So that will then allow us to have, you know, a catalogue—really seriously, a serious catalogue of, you know, articulated actions from Black members of our campus community. And we can then, you know, sort of put those into columns. These are things that we can do today. Here are things that we can do within the next six months, as an institution. Here are things that may take us three years. And unfortunately, here’s a column of other things—like ending our relationship with LAPD—that we just can’t do. So I think that that particular strategy will allow us to do some serious thought taking and crowd sourcing of expectations and actions, then allow us strategically to deliver on those. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Khalid Azim next. Q: Hi, Shaun. I’m from Columbia Business School. And my question is about, you know, changing culture and environment to be, you know, welcoming and safe for everyone in our community. Some things, you know, take time to change. My question is, what can we do immediately? What are some concrete steps that we can take today to make sure everyone feels, you know, good about—and comfortable about being part of our institution? HARPER: Sure. You know, every time I hear Columbia Business School I think of our dear colleague, Kathy Phillips, may she rest in peace. You know, in terms of immediate actions, you know, I think that one thing that you can do is facilitate conversations. We’ve been doing a ton of those over the past five weeks with higher ed institutions, with the Air Force, with companies and firms across every industry. And they’ve been enormously productive. So you know, those kinds of forums, when they are facilitated well, allow you to hear things that maybe you haven’t heard before. There are particular things that we do in those forums. For example, because we’ve been having to do them all on Zoom, we do polling—live polling. One of the poll questions that we almost always include is: My company or my institution has a serious problem with racism. People go in and they do the poll. We did one of these with an insurance company last week with four thousand employees, and like 78 percent of them agreed that their company has a problem with racism. That then allowed us to, you know, like, really open up a conversation that was long overdue in that insurance company, and at institutions when we’ve done that. So that’s one thing you can do right away. Another thing you can do is the activity that I just described, the thing that we’re doing here at the University of Southern California, where we’re starting with Black students, faculty, and staff, and alumni. And we’re asking them, like—just like straight up, like, how can this institution serve you better? If you ask them, I can guarantee you they’ll tell you. And, you know, that is a repeatable process that you can do with Latino and Latinx faculty, staff, and students. Native American faculty, staff, and students and alumni. Asian American, and so on, and so forth. One last thing that you could do right away—sorry if this sounds like terribly inappropriately self-promoting—but, you know, I really believe in the climate that we have created here. Those surveys, they could give you some very serious data on the realities and complexities of race in your institutional context. You know, a lot of times institutions waste a lot of money and a lot of time on just, like, random diversity activity that lead to nothing. Like, imagine if instead you were taking strategic action in the investment of your dollars in response to what your actual diversity, equity, and inclusion challenges and opportunities are. Those are the kinds of things that could actually lead to measurable change. But you can’t—you can’t make those investments until you have done some sort of formal assessment of the climate to understand where the investments—where it makes sense to make the investments. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep, like, wasting money on just, like, random diversity consultants, random people who’ve written interesting books on various diversity things, but aren’t going to make a difference in the actual, like, improvement of our—of our campus communities. Those are things you could do right away. FASKIANOS: And with that will have to be the end of our webinar. I apologize to all of those. There are so many hands in the air. We just could not get to you. But, Dr. Shaun Harper, this was fantastic. We are looking forward to your book, Race Matters in College. Is your congressional testimony online? HARPER: It is online. The recorded version is on YouTube and the actual—the actual written testimony is on the House website. FASKIANOS: Great. We’ll circulate it after this call, so— HARPER: I can actually—I have a link. I’ll put the link in the chat to the testimony. FASKIANOS: OK, great. Great. And we’ll circulate it to everybody. And you can also follow Dr. Harper. He is active on Twitter. So I encourage you to follow him at @DrShaunHarper. And we will also come back to you, Shaun, for other resources we can share with the group. But this has been a terrific conversation. Thank you for all the work that you’ve been doing. And we look forward to continuing to follow what you’re doing at the University of Southern California. We will continue to convene this series. Please feel free to send us ideas of topics you’d like to cover, speakers, et cetera. The next Educators Webinar will take place on Wednesday July 22, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. Eastern time. Preeti Malani, chief health officer and a professor medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Michigan will lead a conversation on campus health and safety. So we hope you will join us for that. We will send out an invitation. Please do follow us on Twitter at @CFR_Academic, and visit CFR.org, ThinkGlobalHealth.org, and ForeignAffairs.com for additional information and analysis on COVID-19, racial justice, as well as many other matters on U.S. foreign policy. I hope you all stay safe and healthy during this challenging time. And thank you again for joining us today. We look forward to your continued participation in the Educators Webinar Series this summer. (END)  

Ambassador Reuben E. Brigety, adjunct senior fellow for African peace and security issues at CFR and vice chancellor and president at The University of the South, Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD, senior minister for public theology and transformation at Middle Church, and Dr. Simran Jeet Singh, visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, discuss religion and anti-racism. This webinar is part of the Religion and Foreign Policy Program's Social Justice and Foreign Policy series, which explores the relationship between religion and social justice.  Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Good afternoon and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you for joining us. Today’s webinar is the second in our Social Justice and Foreign Policy Series, which explores the relationship between religion and social justice. As a reminder, today’s webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be made available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. I’m really delighted to have with us today three amazing people: Ambassador Reuben Brigety, Reverend Jacqueline Lewis, and Dr. Simran Jeet Singh. I will go through their bios and then we’ll begin the conversation. Ambassador Reuben Brigety is adjunct senior fellow for African peace and security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he was just named the vice chancellor and president of the University of the South, so congratulations. Ambassador Reuben Brigety was dean of George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He also was the appointed representative of the United States to the African Union and permanent representative of the United States to the U.N. Economic Commission of Africa. Prior to these appointments, he served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of African Affairs with responsibility for southern African and regional security affairs. Reverend Jacqueline Lewis graduated with an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in psychology and religion from Drew University. She joined the staff of Middle Church in January 2004. And together with her husband, John Janka, Lewis holds annual conferences to train leaders on growing multiracial communities of faith that disrupt racism. She is a womanist whose preaching, teaching, speaking, and activism are aimed at racial equality, gun control, economic justice, and equal rights for all sexual orientations and genders. Reverend Lewis is the author of three books and currently working on a fourth, and she teaches classes on anti-racism. And Dr. Simran Jeet Singh is an educator, writer, activist who works regularly on issues of inclusion and equity. He is currently based at Union Seminary, and he’s the first Sikh wire-service columnist in U.S. history. Dr. Singh is the author of Fauja Singh Keeps Going: The True Story of the Oldest Person to Run a Marathon, which is the first-ever children’s book from a major publisher to center a Sikh story. He is also writing an adult nonfiction book on Sikh wisdom to help navigate today’s—(inaudible, technical difficulties). He is a columnist for Religion News Service and his Spirited podcast, as well as a new Web series called Becoming Less Racist. So tune into that. So thank you all for being with us today. I thought we could begin with you, Ambassador Brigety, to talk about the anti-racism protests we’ve seen in the United States, this incredible moment, and how you see America’s being perceived by the rest of the world and how it affects our foreign policy. BRIGETY: Sure. Well, thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here and part of this very important panel. And let me also commend the Council for convening it, for recognizing the importance of social justice not only for its own sake but also as a—as a core component of our—of our soft power in the world, and therefore as important to our foreign policy. So we are living through an extraordinary moment in American history where, as we all know, the killing of George Floyd at the knee of former Minneapolis police office Derek Chauvin for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, coming during the middle of a pandemic and on the heels of two other African Americans— Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery —they were killed by agents of the state or self-appointed vigilantes of the state in close proximity—touched off a firestorm; not only a firestorm of protests across the United States, but around the world. There is a Black Lives Matter mural in Idlib, Syria, and the Syrians have other things going on right now. There’s a Black Lives Matter protest in Reykjavik. I was having this conversation with a colleague the other day. I literally cannot think of another example of human history where the entire world saw protests linked to a particular event and a particular set of circumstances at the same time. And let me say this as well, because in conversations with a number of friends and colleagues in various circumstances over the years I have often been asked, so, why is it that Black people in America are only upset when they’re killed by White cops and you don’t see the same level of protests when Black people are killing each other in Chicago or New Orleans, anyplace else? And I think it’s actually very important in this forum to address that for two very important reasons. First of all, as we know, most crime is intra-racial, meaning we know that most homicides of African Americans occur at the hands of other African Americans, of White people occur at White people, and every life is precious, and we respect all that. The reason the issue of police brutality and consistent police brutality of people of African descent and also other brown people in America, has been such a flashpoint issue, particularly of late in the era of cellphone cameras and whatnot, so you actually cannot deny the facts of what are happening. It’s because this goes to the foundational question of the republic: What is the relationship between people of African descent and the government of the United States of America? And starting from the first full legal articulation of who we are as a country—you know, of course the famous three-fifths compromise, slavery is allowed in the Constitution, obviously the Civil War, one hundred years of state-sanctioned apartheid principally across the American South only reluctantly fully discharged with the modern civil rights movement—and still we see continued inequities, life and death inequities, of Black people at the hands of the agents of the state. And not only is that, obviously, an existential issue for people of African descent; it is also an existential issue for all of America because it goes—it strikes at the core of who we think we are and who we say we are to the rest of the world. And addressing that and correcting it and being honest about it is not only important for our own—for the sake of those lives that would be saved, it’s important for our own national psyche and it is also important for our ability to claim any level of moral authority when we’re engaging on matters of human rights and other matters in the rest of the world. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We’ll now go to Reverend Lewis. You’ve dedicated much of your career to building faith communities that are inclusive and anti-racist. Can you talk about what you’re doing to bring faith leaders and communities into the movement and what they and their communities can do about this? LEWIS: Oh, I just was saying thank you. Thank you on mute. What a wonderful day it is to share this panel with Ambassador and with my friend Dr. Jeet Singh. I’m glad to be here. Thank you so much for asking me. I think one of the things that I want to say as a starting comment is I’m a Christian pastor. I’ve been a Christian since I was in my mother’s womb. So I didn’t choose Christian; I inherited Christian. And I’m a weird universalist Christian that believes that there’s more than one path to God and that God speaks many languages. I want to say that to say that almost all the world’s major religions share this love-your-neighbor kind of speak. Rabbi Jesus said it because he was a Jew and was really pulling people back into Hebrew scriptures. The place where it is said, I don’t know, sixty-one times—I could have that number wrong—but in the Jewish text, you shall love the stranger because you were once strangers. And so all across the globe where people are doing faith, they are often doing faith in a context of what does it mean to love your neighbor, do unto others, love as a public ethic, a social ethic, an ethic that makes us humanity. The ancient Zulu customs would have said something like sawubonas nkona (ph). And I can’t click, but—(laughs)—but the words there are coming from this Ubuntu principle, which is so beautifully ancient and says: I am who I am because you are who you are. I am human and community. I am human and community. I become a person because I’m in a relationship. So the principle of love your neighbor, the principle of Ubuntu, the shared global sense that we are inextricably connected is the way Dr. King would say it, compels us as people of faith to be political. And what happens in my faith is that there are a lot of Christians who say politics doesn’t belong in faith. And I’m saying, in fact, our mentor, Rabbi Jesus, Yeshua ben Joseph, Joseph’s kid, Mary’s boy, and African-Semitic, brown, poor, itinerant preacher killed by the state for his radical views of love and justice, inspires all of us—should inspire all of us to make anti-racism a part of our political life and a part of our faith life, full stop. That it doesn’t is what’s shocking. That White supremacy is inextricably tied into Christianity in America is shocking. It’s shocking that our framers left religious persecution, left persecution to get on boats, come across the pond, take land from Indigenous people—I will say, because when you look it up you’ll find it my friends, that I am a pastor in the Reformed Church in America and also the United Church of Christ, and I’m also a Presbyterian, so I’m blended—but the Reformed Church in America is the Dutch Reformed Church in America. Yes, those people that came on Dutch ships, and came across the pond, and landed on what was called Turtle Island, and took the land for $27 worth of wampum from the Lenape, and built their church on Manahata, “hilly land,” and built it on stolen land with stolen slave labor. This is the church. This is the church’s legacy, not just mine. So I’m wanting to say this time in our history, as in other times in our history, we’re called to get radical, as in rooted, as in go back to the source. And the source of our faith, again, is an African-Semitic, poor, and once homeless refugee baby only alive because he was taken into Egypt and survived, killed by the state for his acts of sedition. And his acts of sedition were, could we please undo apartheid? Could we please undo state-sanctioned murder? Could we please undo poverty? Could we please undo empire? So I’m in the breaking down empire business as a Christian pastor, and wanting to encourage all of my colleagues of every stripe of Christian—all faith, but let me be particularly Christian for a second—to think if this is the religion we are practicing, then we have to have a hermeneutical suspicion about the way the church is framed by the framers as something for rich White people who own land, as something delivered to enslaved Africans as a way to manage and control them, that the Exodus story is taken out of the slave Bible, and that White supremacy lives inside church even now—even now. When our POTUS pretends to be Christian, and holds up a Bible outside a church, and in the name of God—in the name of Jesus, if you will, in the name of my rabbi—speaks horrible untruth about the intention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his speech at Mount Rushmore, the way he kidnapped/hijacked words of King, hijacked words of Frederick Douglass to indicate that faith means being racist and faith means being anti-Semitic and faith means being anti-Islamic and faith means being anti-poor and that social justice is something that he criticizes and says that the, quote, “far left” has bastardized social justice in the name of something I can’t even quote, I’m here to say if we’re not being anti-racist and pro all the people as a part of our life as Christians we’re in the wrong religion. We’re doing something that is not just Christian lite, but something that’s an abomination. That’s an abomination. If we speak hate speech in the name of Jesus, if we speak against Black Lives Matter in the name of Jesus, if we believe that this nation belongs to the rich 1 percent as opposed to all of us, that’s anti-Jesus. If we believe that people who wear turbans and who wear kippahs and who are wearing—who are covered—are somehow not God’s folks like the rest of us, that’s anti-Jesus. That’s anti-Christ. And that’s an abomination. It has to cease. I’m calling on all of my clergy colleagues who claim Christian as a religion to read deeply what our faith calls us to, to not be tricked and fooled by Americana masquerading as Christianity, to have a deep hermeneutic of suspicion and to resist every lie spoken in the name of Christian that smashes women’s rights, that smashes gay rights, that smashes the rights of so-called religious minorities, that cages children on the border, and that executes Black people with impunity—not acceptable. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And now, Simran, let’s go to you to talk about your work against anti-racism and your thoughts on how we’re proceeding. SINGH: Sure. Thank you. And thank you for having me. And thank you, everyone, for being here. I’m going to start by sharing something I’ve been thinking about the past few days. And Jacqui just spoke to this for a moment. Over this past weekend, the Fourth of July weekend, President Trump stoked racial tensions yet again when he held an Independence Day rally in South Dakota. And native leaders called for Trump to cancel the rally. And more than a dozen indigenous activists and allies were arrested for blocking a highway to the event. And yet Trump came, uninvited, to unceded Lakota territory. And he arrived at the Six Grandfathers, known also as the sacred Black Hills, where he paid homage to Mount Rushmore, a national monument that’s carved into the hills by a man with ties to the Ku Klux Klan. And among the detained activists was Nick Tilsen, president of the NDN Collective and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. And in explaining the religious significance of the site for native communities, Tilsen, in an interview on Democracy Now, stated that more than 50 different indigenous nations actually have origin stories or ties or spiritual connections to the Black Hills and that U.S. law has recognized the Lakota Nation as the rightful caretakers of that land. And so this may seem like a strange perspective. And until this weekend, I, like many of you, perhaps, considered Mount Rushmore as nothing other than a symbol of American patriotism. But in the firestorm that followed Trump’s visit, many have commented on his exceptional insensitivity to indigenous peoples. But the more we see, the more we realize that we’re failing to see that this particular visit is—there’s nothing exceptional about it. There’s nothing exceptional about what he did. It fits right into the long history of racist abuse that arrived with European colonists. And so I want to take us there for a moment as we think about what racism and faith look like when they come together. May 4, 1493, just a year after Columbus’s arrival, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera, which announced that any land not inhabited by Christians was open to be discovered by Christian rulers and that, quote, the Catholic faith and Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for, and that the barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to faith itself. This document, which would come to be known as the doctrine of discovery, was foundational to the European colonization of the Americas and their presumptive claims of Western expansion, which we have come to term as manifest destiny. So my point is, while some ask what religion might have to do with American racism, attending to its conquest and colonization seriously compels us to ask a different question, and that is, is it even possible to decouple religion from American racism? And for the purposes of this conversation, let’s understand racism through the lens of Ibram Kendi, a leading scholar of race and anti-racism, who describes racism as a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities. I bring up the doctrine of discovery because I think it offers a helpful example of how racist ideas of supremacy over indigenous peoples included our religious authorities, whose own biases were not used just to justify but also to sanctify the seizure of occupied lands, to physically remove communities to undesirable reservations, and to engage in systematic violence of genocidal proportions. And in case you’re tempted to think of such racist policies and racist ideas as quaint misconceptions of a distant past, let me be the first to tell you that they remain alive and well today. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of discovery in Johnson versus McIntosh in 1823, which stands as the basis of international law to this day and of United States Indian law as well. Just fifteen years ago, 2005, it was cited in the case of City of Sherrill versus Oneida Indian Nation of New York, which concerned Oneida’s ability to reacquire reservation land that had been sold in the early nineteenth century. So until very recently, we Americans seemed to think similarly about all our racist structures, as part of a past that no longer pertained. We had ended slavery. We had ended Jim Crow. We had no further need for the Voting Rights Act. And yet there’s nothing past about American racism. This is our present. And it will be our future unless we take radical action to break the cycle of exploitation and violence and lies. We can’t speak of America’s past or its present without attending to our sustained and targeted suppression and oppression of Black people. And here too religion has been a driving force in shaping the two complementary ideas of Whiteness and anti-Blackness. Settler colonialists honed the idea of race on this continent to justify the enslavement and eradication of non-White Christians. This is the underpinning of American racism. And Christianity is at the center of it. Early Christian slaveholders used the Bible to justify the enslavement of darker-skinned people. Vigilante groups terrorized Black Americans as they rode around in white hoods with a Bible in hand. Prominent Evangelical pastors spewed racist hate against America’s first Black president. And so the question is what do we do once we’re armed with the knowledge that religious actors have been complicit in forming and upholding American racism? What might we do to correct for racism? The answer isn’t as intuitive as it might seem because most of us have presumed the solution to be non-racism. By not actively being racist, we figured that we were erasing racism. But what we know now collectively is that when we sit by silently and allow racist ideas and policies to function, we’re complicit in racism. Neutrality is neither the opposite of racism nor its solution. And as Angela Davis told us several years ago, and we’ve heard it repeatedly as of late, in a racist society it’s not enough to be non-racist; we must be anti-racist. To be anti-racist is to proactively fight against racism in all its pernicious forms, from the individual level to the systemic. Religious actors are equipped to engage anti-racism because it calls on us to examine ourselves while also engaging with our own communities. And this is what we’ve seen in some of the greatest anti-racist leaders of the present and the recent past—Assata Shakur, Dr. Martin Luther King, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Nelson Mandela, Rabbi Heschel, Malcolm X, Michelle Alexander. The question we must ask ourselves is what would it look like to take on the mantle of anti-racism in today’s age. And we can go through a whole list of that, and I’m happy to, but I think once we understand what racist ideas and racist policies look like, an anti-racist, for example, would be moved to action upon learning of Christianity’s central role in birthing American racism, in seizing sacred sites and land from indigenous communities and purposefully breaking a treaty that honored those lands and imposing White Christian nationalism on the American people. For me, sincerely engaging in anti-racism would be a seismic shift from anything that we’ve ever seen in American history, because up until now we’ve been so subsumed by racism and non-racism that we’re only now beginning to broach the topic of anti-racism. And I think this gives us heart, because this is a path towards a better, more humane, and more sustainable way forward. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And now let’s go to all of you for your questions and comments. If you click on the participants icon and raise your hand, I’ll recognize you. And please say who you are to give our distinguished panel a context for what organization you’re with. So we’ll go first to Annie Tinsley. TINSLEY: Hi. I’m Dr. Annie Tinsley, Shaw University Divinity School. I really appreciate the conversation so far. Anyway, I really appreciate what you guys have been saying. I have been very interested in religious freedom for a while. And this era that we’re going through now has really been important to us, because we have been lulled to sleep in a lot of ways. And I just wanted to ask a question. Anyone can answer this. So as we know that Christianity is complicit in way back, religion complicit in the oppression of people way back, but as Black Americans who have adopted Christianity, what do you think we could do or what should we do to help to redirect this conversation so that we’re now—as they say, we’re woke now. What would you suggest would be the best course of action? Thank you. FASKIANOS: Who wants to take that? Jacqui? LEWIS: Sure. Annie, thank you for that question. Thank you for that. We did hear you. I think African-American Christians especially have a really powerful opportunity to use something that’s deeply a part of our culture, which is story. We are proud bearers of narrative as a way that we teach and train our children. We have honored the griots in our past and in our present. And so I think we have to really believe, Annie, that we can change the story. Look, I don’t exactly know why we who were not Christian, who were, you know, captured and brought to this nation in the middle passage and then became Christian, became Christian. Peter Parrish wrote a really great book called African Spirituality many years ago, a couple of decades ago, that sort of tries to explain how Christian cosmology may be mapped onto some of what was already indigenously African. It was a great book to read. But here’s what we are, that is the religion of Jesus, I think, not the religion of Christian. But we are people who center children. We are people who know how to make the margins in the middle. We are people who know how to love our neighbor. We are people who know how to share the goods that we have. There was something in the religion of the African Semitic one that makes sense to us. And I think if we can excavate the stories of how our ancestors made use of this religion, believed in this religion, and teach that to our children, I think we can disrupt this other Christian that is really the religion of empire. So I’m really talking about putting alongside our Bible really strong, great exegetical work that is done by Black leaders like Katie Cannon, like James Cone, just to name two, so to read the Bible along with great exegetes who break down the text and make sure that we strip it of empire; and then, secondly, for us to use other texts alongside the Bible to help us remember what Black folk religion is; so, like, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have words for us that remind us of what’s good about Christian that we can keep, and we’ve got to be fearless about stripping out what’s broken and let it go. Some of our old Black people will critique us for stripping down the Bible. But I don’t think we can do this work, Annie, if we don’t do it otherwise. That made you smile, right? Ambassador, you know I’m right. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: Thank you. (Laughs.) Reuben, do you want to add anything, or—(laughs)— BRIGETY: No, I was just thinking about the deacons in my Baptist church growing up. LEWIS: With their white gloves on saying don’t take the Bible. BRIGETY: (Inaudible.) FASKIANOS: All right, let’s go to Dr. Traci Blackmon next. BLACKMON: Thank you. I am really enjoying this conversation. And I have a question. I agree with everything I’ve heard, except I want to talk a little bit about Christianity outside of a White colonized context and acknowledge that Christianity existed before that, right. So there were Ethiopian Christians. There were—my question is about how do we deconstruct or decolonize our Christianity, versus saying that Christianity itself is racist? And maybe that’s too fine of a line to tread, but I’m interested in that. One of the ways that I get at this for myself is to remind myself that the Bible, in its construct, is really a people’s book about their experiences with God versus God’s book about God’s experience with all people, right. And saying that with my congregation allows some space for other stories to also be sacred. So I’m wondering about that in conversation with the doctrine of discovery, which indeed is a papal document with religious roots that continue to poison our soil. Is there anything you can say about that for me? BRIGETY: Sure, if I may take a stab at that. First of all, Dr. Blackmon, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for your question. My wife is Ethiopian, as it happens, and was raised and baptized in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. And you can see I wear a Lion of Judah ring as part of my respect for that side of both my wife and my children’s heritage. You know, I think the direct answer to your question, one of the most important things is for people of faith and for Christians of different traditions to be proactively in dialogue with each other, because once the facts of our history are clear, a reasonable person can then be led to a different set of understandings about their faith and their relationships. But I’ll give you a very basic example, since you raised Ethiopia. So Ethiopia Abyssinia is mentioned something like sixty-one times in the Old Testament, right. One of the first non-Jews—in fact, the first non-Jew—to be converted was an Ethiopian eunuch in the court of Queen Candace. BLACKMON: Yes. BRIGETY: And if you were to go to the north of Ethiopia today, the historical north, and visit the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, the eighth wonder of the world, which is referred to as the African Jerusalem, it helps—it does two things. First of all, it, for those that are raised and steeped in a Western and American approach to Christianity, helps them to understand that these faith traditions of engagement with our savior long predate organization of Western churches. And if you start with that assumption, then that frankly goes back to the fundamental question of respect for our common humanity, not that Christianity was something that was given to us as a people of African descent. In fact, many of us—many of our brothers and sisters, our ancestors, were there from the beginning, Which leads to—if I can use it to take a moment just to kind of a broader point. I have similarly been moved by what Dr. Lewis and Dr. Singh have been saying, and it leads to a challenging set of questions of where do we go from here because if you start to pull the thread on the nature of the historical record that is at the basis for not only the White supremacy in the United States but also the role of religion in advancing that, it then makes you ask, OK, so what does one do if you take all those things back to their logical conclusion. There is a school of thought that essentially—and certainly with regard to the genocide of native peoples here in North America—if you’re not native or descendant, we all ought to pack up, and go, and just return everything. And from there to something not that, we have to figure out, as a practical matter, how do we live together going forward into the rest of the twenty-first century. I don’t know what the answers are, but I do know it has to start with being fully honest about our shared history and then figuring out ways in which we can do two things simultaneously: one, make redress where possible; certainly show mutual respect in every case; and then, third, create space for all of us, native peoples, people of non-European descent, people of European descent who are being awoken to this nature of this history arguably for the first time, who see themselves as decent people, who see themselves as people of faith, but who also have feelings of filial loyalty to their own ancestors. And how do we figure out a way together through this? Because if we can’t make space for all those things simultaneously, then we condemn ourselves to a future of just more and more recrimination. But we also can’t ignore those questions either—truly not at this historical moment. LEWIS: I can appreciate that question, and I really— FASKIANOS: Go ahead, Jackie. LEWIS: Yeah, just to really quickly say that I just—I don’t think it’s too fine a point, Traci, and the way you are raising that question is really important. I appreciate the ambassador’s response to what you are saying, and I think I would—I just would join in the sense of, again, really taking a compassionate, spiritual, intellectual rigor through the texts, and to look at what is Christian about Christian. What is Christian about Christian? And to help our people feel—I love the way you say it, Traci—this is, you know, our book about God—to help our people to feel like they are theologians and residents in their own lives—and by our people I mean all the people—so that we can look at the texts that point to what Jesus’ ministry was about, that points to what God is calling us to, but also to be able to say, alongside that are these other texts that have been concretized around the scripture that make it a bludgeon to our spirits as opposed to an invitation to walk in a holy way together. I just think that’s ongoing really important work that we need to do in community. SINGH: Right, and if I may jump in—this is simmering here—I think for me this is where the framework of thinking about racism—especially in a foreign policy context—as a marriage of racist ideas and policies. It becomes really helpful because if we accept the premise—and I do—that racist ideas are so deeply entrenched in our society that they are living and breathing within each and every one of us, it becomes a lot easier for us all to accept our complicity in it and to step out, right, rather than pointing the finger at one another and saying, oh, it’s your fault, right. It’s Christianity’s fault—like, I don’t think it’s that. But I think what it allows us to do is to trace back historically where this comes from as a part of the decolonization process, right? So as a historian, I see the function of history or the value of history in this process as essential. We need to understand where these ideas come from so we can work them out. And as a person of faith, the excavation process of going within ourselves and slowly peeling back these layers, it’s incredibly challenging. And I think that’s why we’re so resistant to doing it. But that has to be part of the process before we can even begin addressing what the policies are all around us, right, and then—and then we can start reimagining what this ought to look like. And this is, I think, what Reuben was talking about in terms of what the future might look like, an anti-racist future. I think this is where Jackie’s ideas of bringing in story telling really comes in powerfully; that to tell the same story without that excavation process will only lead us to the same place, and so I think what you are talking about, Jackie, is reimagining what a decolonized, anti-racist future for us looks like, and I think that’s what a lot of us are looking for in this country right now. LEWIS: Amen to that. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Thomas Uthup next. UTHUP: All right. My question is for Ambassador Brigety. In your international experience, has the United States, as an idea—example, the Constitution—been far more inspiring than the practice of the United States? And secondly, can you comment on the long history of the struggle for independence and the civil rights struggle being inspired by each other—sometimes by religion? BRIGETY: Sure. It’s a complicated question—the first one is anyway. And I’ll answer it essentially from both sides as I understand it. So first of all, the idea of America is profoundly powerful. It’s powerful to our allies, it’s powerful to our aspirants, and it’s powerful to our enemies. Yet the notion that there is a country where, regardless of your ethnicity, you can be treated equally under the law as a matter of equal dignity and respect based on universal human rights in an environment that also allows you individual freedom to seek your own destiny—is something that is the reason why immigrants have flocked to America for generations. And it is also—when we fail to live up to those ideas—why they are so powerfully damaging to our ability to advocate for ideas or positions that we believe are in our interests or our values abroad. Literally, just in the last month, you have seen the government of China essentially using the Black Lives Matter protests, and the continued issues of police brutality and inequality amongst African Americans, Black Americans in the judicial system, as a means of pushing back even tentative approaches by our government to condemn what is happening in Hong Kong—as an example, right? And during the Cold War, the Soviets were master propagandists in calling attention to the hypocrisy of America in condoning and perpetuating Jim Crowe in the American South even as they tried to, you know—we tried to do battle with them in Africa and other parts of the developing world, which is why it is so important for us to treat these matters of institutional equity as the national security matters of which they are. When I was an ambassador, I would often get asked this question: I mean, how can the United States stand for this, that, and the other thing abroad when they are doing all these sorts of things at home. And what I would often say is that at least we actually have values that are the lodestar against which we measure our own progress. That is not true in a number of other countries in the world; certainly not true among some of our other peer competitors. But that argument only lasts so long as we actually are trying to get there. I wrote an article in Time magazine a couple of weeks ago—it was published on Juneteenth—in which I basically said that this generation into the marching in the streets right now in America is done with progress; they want change because they don’t have a lived framework for understanding any more why there should be continued inequities based on race in America, particularly as it relates to treatment by agents of the state as matters of law. And so we have to fix this, and we have to—it will be hard, and we’ll be imperfect. We actually have to take it on with the clear eye and with the urgency that it deserves. Now secondarily, with regard to—as I understand your second question—the relationship between the civil rights and faith movements, you know, one of things—so here I am sitting as the first African American vice chancellor of the University of the South, a university founded over 160 years ago by Episcopalians who would shortly thereafter become Confederates to withdraw from the Union for the purpose of perpetuating slavery in the states who were doing it. And one of the things that I have been consistently struck by as an amateur student of the modern civil rights movement is how patient Black clergy were in trying to have a conversation with their Christian brothers and sisters who were White in the South, and how resistant so many of them were to seeing the shared humanity of their common brothers and sisters that is articulated in the same book, same Bible that they’re all reading. And what worries me most about that is that I don’t believe that we have left that historical relic behind. I worry that, while the hopefulness of this latest protest movement is that it is truly multicultural and multigenerational, that there are still many who are Christians, who profess the same faith that I profess, who nevertheless they literally psychologically cannot embrace the full shared humanity of their fellow citizens who are also Christians, who nevertheless are being treated so fundamentally differently, consistently over time. And I don’t know how to bridge that gap 160 years after the start of the Civil War, two generations after Brown v. Board of Education. I literally do not know what more has to be done in order to bridge that gap, other than—you know, like the Moses generation that was forced to wander in the wilderness for 40 years before they finally reached their promised land, if we simply just have to have a generational change. But here, I’ll say this—last point I’ll say—here’s the one caution about simply leaving progress to a future generation. If you don’t get the narrative right, you will get the same problems or worse in the future. Dinosaurs don’t die out; you just get young dinosaurs. And that’s why this moment of discussion and reflection is so important for our near-term future. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I stopped my video because I’m freezing, so I’m still here. Let’s go next to Dr. Helen Boursier. BOURSIER: Hello, thank you very much. Thank you all for being here. I am Reverend Dr. Helen Boursier. I do research and writing on immigration and gender studies, and I have been working on a book project right now on overcoming the limitations of religious love for refugee families seeking asylum. And I’ve done a ton of interviews direct on the ground with clergy in greater San Antonio which is on the front line for immigration. And I was just reviewing the feedback over this past weekend, and the consistent themes that come are fear of being fired: I need this job, if I bring this up; apathy: it’s really not my problem; self-absorbed: I’m too busy doing regular church stuff, and I’m busy with my spouse and three children; another seminarian who says that she’s told in seminary to walk the middle road. So how do you, on a very practical basis engage clergy people to lead their people—people of faith—and I will say interreligious on this—so that they are on the ground and they are moving their congregations to action? Thank you. (Pause.) LEWIS: Helen, that’s a great question. It’s good to hear your voice here. Hi. I want to start with what you said about the person learning in seminary to walk the middle ground. I was struck that Reuben started his comments about the kind of global uprising of multiracial, international, we-can’t-live-this-wayness. But the church is an institution that likes to be a church, and so global uprising for an anti-racist world is not going to be the church’s business if the church thinks that the institution will die with the uprising. What I think needs to happen is a theological education needs to shift radically from institution maintenance to prophetic resistance. My friend Michael-Ray Matthews would say, are we priests of the empire or are we prophets of the resistance? Christians Catholic, Christians Ethiopian, Orthodox Christians all over the globe pray this radical prayer that, again, if we look at the texts—and I’m a text girl—what Jesus is saying in the Lord’s prayer is just radical. You know, give me enough bread for today; don’t make me a hoarder—thinking about the manna from heaven story—but especially, your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. I’m like, what do we think we’re saying there? It’s a crazy prayer to say make Earth like we think the reign of God is going to be, and make it that way now. Well, that requires a different understanding of what it means to be a clergy, Helen. Are we supposed to pacify people, make them feel good about the little bit they’re doing, be in the middle—which is to say, don’t cause them to break ranks with us or stop paying us, or stop, you know, funding the building, and all that kind of stuff. But if we end up making theological education a project of raising a love army—to quote my friend Valerie Core—a love revolution where we actually are linking arms across institutions with people of other faiths, and people of no faith-humanists, atheists who believe we can save the world—if we stop thinking that our job as clergy is to make sure our church stays alive, but instead, our job as clergy is to save lives and to make life beautiful, thriving, resilience, resplendent, joyful for all of humanity, that is a different job description. That needs a different kind of educational space. SINGH: I’ll offer a remark. As a native San Antonian, I feel moved to respond here. So I think part of what’s happening, and part of what I would recommend to folks just based on observations of what I’m seeing as a professor, is our future is following the young people. Those are the folks who are out on the streets all over the world right now, and those are the folks who are leading us into the conversation around anti-racism. And so the idea here, I think, is we have been so focused on a narrative around neutrality versus racism that we’ve kind of just gotten stuck, right? Our idea of finding a middle path has really been like, OK, let’s not trouble the waters; let’s do nothing. And I think what we’re seeing from young people in the conversation on anti-racism is there is no middle path when it comes to racism versus anti-racism, right? Again, neutrality is complicity. To be silent is to be complicit. And so when you think you are engaging in a middle road, what you are really doing is falling into subservience of the current power dynamics. And so to me, what we really need is to help folks revision this conversation, reframe how we think about oppression in this country. And I think the real opportunity here that’s coming with this pandemic is that we’ve never seen before people feel so viscerally connected to one another in a way that they realize deeply that all of our well-beings are connected to one another’s. And so when we’re seeing that sort of connectivity among folks—this understanding that we all are better when we’re together, and we’re healthy, and we’re safe—I think that’s the kind of intersectional approach that we’re seeing around justice. And so this opportunity to reframe, while people are feeling this emotionally, and deeply, and personally, and spiritually, I think that’s a direction for us to go in this moment. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go next to Reverend Dr. Joan Brown Campbell. (Pause.) PENNYBACKER: Yes, I’m Reverend Dr. Albert Pennybacker. Joan Brown Campbell is my wife. And we’ve been appreciating this together. One of the things I want to say is that it seems to me the religious heritage has the capacity to talk about racism as sin, not as sociological phenomena that’s got to be dealt with. Not only that, but it is truly sinful, as several of you—and I think that I’ll just say a word in favor of the capacity to provide the preaching availability at a pulpit of a preacher who, in the seminary, has been trained to speak to the issue with prophetic clarity. That is an important role; that the gathered congregations across the country have the opportunity to claim. How do you measure that in terms of preparing students for that job? FASKIANOS: Who wants to take that? BRIGETY: You’ve stumped us. (Laughter.) You know—so let me be a bit controversial, what the hell. (Laughter.) SINGH: Go to it. BRIGETY: Yeah. I think you are right—I know you are right about the ability to speak to racism as a matter of sin. I don’t think it matters for those people of faith who still refuse to address it because there are many sins with which we constantly battle—jealousy, sin, avarice, whatever, right? And yet I dare say that there are many who would rather be preached to in the pulpit about the sin of their—pick a thing, right—watching online porn or being too rich—than to talk about their racism because they—I don’t know why. I have my theories. I mean, part because, you know, as Dr. Singh mentioned, it has been so fundamentally ingrained in the structures of American society; in part because it’s not simply about addressing men, but also, in many respect, like generations of lineage, and how do you make sense of that; in part because it can be so painful, so painful to recognize the hurt that one has caused by virtue of holding on to those beliefs and acting on them that it’s psychologically easier to double down or find some other—or assign something else rather than to confront the reality of that. And so while I don’t disagree with you, I do wonder if, psychologically and politically, there are—quite frankly are not other strategies that need to be addressed as a means of—and that’s sort of like what I was trying to talk about before, is that even as we have to be brutally honest about the history of our country as it relates to many aspects of our racism and continued manifestations of that today. The diplomat in me says, you have to give people a way to still have face as you create space for them in the broader beloved community. And so that is the orientation that I tend to take in engaging with students, interlocutors, and others. And yes, it’s a delicate balance, and yeah, but that’s how I think about it. LEWIS: Yeah. SINGH: I would agree with that, and one thing that I would add that I’ve found particularly helpful in opening up conversations like the ones—in opening up space for conversations like the ambassador has referred to has been the practice of modeling. And I think for those on the call, that’s an opportunity we all have. What would it look like for you to speak before your congregations, or your communities, or your students, in a way that’s a bit more vulnerable than we typically do, and to talk about our own process of digging out the racist ideas within us, right? Again, if we accept this premise, that the White supremacist ideas have become a part of our own beings, then there is nothing to be ashamed about, right? These are things we’ve been taught, things we’ve learned over time. But it’s deeply shameful in the way we have set it up in our society where the most offensive thing anyone can ever be called is a racist. And so what would it look like, right? What would it look like to go before people and open up this conversation as these are the struggles that I’ve had; this is how I’m grappling with racism myself personally, and then creating space for other people to do the same and accept these ideas within themselves. I found that incredibly helpful for people and for myself, and I would encourage you all to try it in moments when you can. LEWIS: I really appreciate what Reuben and Simran have said, and I want to add to it this kind of idea of being multi-vocal; like to have a strategy in ourselves, those of us who are doing the work of modeling, of teaching, of training. Like for some people you need to have a language of sin because it will touch their heart in a way that’s different. Jim Wallis did that with White Evangelicals (to target his book ?), you know, America’s Original Sin, right? That’s the audience for whom he wrote that book; to take Evangelicals and say, this is a sinful thing to do. Let’s repent of it. That was a language for that group of people. Awesome. I think some of us are going to have to use psych language. I do a lot of work around racial identity development, and in some ways, we’re therapists, and teachers, and you know, certain groups of people—oh, we have developed, right, a Black identity, or White identity, or Latinx identity in a context where all of race is a social construct. Can we change that identity? Can we develop an anti-racist identity? So that’s a good vocabulary. I think sociology is a good vocabulary, although my mother, Ruby, says to me all the time, don’t forget you’re a theologian, not a sociologist. I think we have to have different languages to use for different people to do anti-racist work by any means necessary. I saw some stuff the other day where some Black scholars were critiquing Ibram Kendi. I’m like, I love that; you know, let’s do that. But his framing is working for a lot of people. Austin Channing Brown’s book, I’m Still Here—it’s kind of light, but it’s working for lots of people. Robin DiAngelo’s book about White fragility—holy cow! That will slap you around a little bit—(laughs)—you know, but it’s working for lots of people. I think we need to have lots of different ways to get at this most horrific—most horrific, foundational wound to the national psyche. It is the problem, the twenty-first century problem for my mind through which all other things go—anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic sentiment, you know, Black trans people getting killed. This is it. This is the thing, people, until whatever it is that gets us up in the morning to say, today I’m going to model, teach, train, exigy (ph), break down, you know, protest. This is it. We cannot survive on the globe without fixing this, and certainly not in this terrified and terrible nation built on this fault line called race. That is a construct for me, but nonetheless kills as racism. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go next to Razi Hashmi. HASHMI: Hi. This is Razi Hashmi. I’m a term member and I work at the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom. Ambassador Brigety, Simran, Dr. Lewis, thank you so much again for this conversation. So a lot of what you’ve been talking about is modeling institutions, or at least Simran had mentioned this earlier. If tomorrow, Ambassador Brigety, you were secretary of state, how would a reformed diplomacy, a reformed State Department, look like? Simran, what would a reformed educational institution look like? And then also, Reverend Lewis, what would the faith community really have to change in terms of modeling what’s inherent in every faith tradition, whether it be Dharmic or Abrahamic? Thank you. BRIGETY: Sure. Razi, good to hear you, brother. Hope you are well. From a diplomatic perspective as it relates to the—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—that are—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—us abroad, I mean, look, I could talk all day about this, right. But, I think issue number one—the two big ones—the two really big ones are we have to recruit and retain a diplomatic service that looks like America, right. I mean, we simply have to do dramatically better than we have been doing and the reason is that when you have a diplomatic service that simply that just kind of looks like America but that actually is full of people that hail from a variety of different upbringings and faith traditions and ethnic backgrounds, two things happen. One, you’re actually able to have a more nuanced take on America when you’re trying to explain it to the rest of the world, and the second thing that happens is that you get different approaches to policy development because you’re having different lenses on a particular problem set. So that’s the first one. And then the second thing is we have to have, not so much in the institution of the department but you have to have a set, a policy orientation, that is geared towards closing the gap between America’s interests and its values, particularly as it relates to these questions of persistent structural inequalities. The reason you have to be able to do that is because unless we have a closer approximation of our values and our interests, then America is simply just another power that for today happens to be richer and have a bigger military than others. That is not, ultimately, in my estimation, what gets the rest of the world on our side on things that matter to us. It is the attractiveness of the overall American model. And what the rest of the world is telling us right now is that we have to move beyond these sort of Western poles that around which the foreign policy and international relations had revolved for much of the understanding of the discipline; and we have to be able to figure out how we create not only in our own society but create international structures that are more inviting rather than exclusionary; and that both of those things but especially the latter are a result of politics, meaning that unless you create an overall national political consensus that this is worth doing—so it doesn’t matter which party is in power, more or less, or you say, fine, one party is going to be for this, another party is, at a minimum, not going to care about it, and, therefore, we have electoral results that come out of that. I would argue that that’s what the latest difference between the administration of President Obama and President Trump represents, and I would argue that is not working for us. What we need is a broad bipartisan consensus that we have to close this gap on equality of treatment, of opportunity, in this country, and regardless of who is in power, overall, our country will be better for it if we do. FASKIANOS: Simran, do you want to go next? SINGH: Sure. Thank you, and thanks for the question, Razi. I think what I would want to say is what it would really take to revision what our institutions look like, educational or otherwise, would be to first understand—and in a critical way, not in a superficial way—but in a deep way to understand the ways in which racist ideas have come to form these institutions in ways that continue to produce inequities. And so the two quick examples from education that come to my mind, standardized testing, right, the SATs, relying—its historical roots are based in racist ideas of biology and the ways in which it measures intelligence across the board, we have debunked these ideas. They no longer apply. We don’t believe that this is the way that we measure true intelligence, right. For example, the SATs. The SATs—when I took them, I didn’t have any training. I didn’t know how to take the test. I didn’t do that well. Did it really measure my intelligence? No, because what happened after that is I went to a Princeton review class, learned how to take the test. It’s not that I was any smarter. I just learned how to take the test, right. And so this very simple example of how standardized testing disproportionately excludes or marginalizes people of color, it speaks to the ways in which these structures have continued to perpetuate inequity. Another very clear example that we have good numbers on as well is the ways in which having police officers in schools accelerate the school-to-prison pipeline, particularly and disproportionally affecting Black students. So, like, what would a reformed education system look like? I mean, I think we have to go back and understand all the ways in which our ideas, our racist ideas, have come to be part of our policies and our systems, and then pushed into our realities. And so let me just say one more thing—and I’m a term member at CFR as well—and then I want to speak briefly about this very strange thing that I noticed recently. If you go to Google and you type in foreign policy and racism or international relations and racism, you will be shocked, or at least I was, at how little comes up. And this is true for many of our institutions. I think we are really starting to grapple with the ways in which racism is systemic. This is a conversation that we haven’t really had, collectively, in previous decades. But if you do that search and the first few hits on foreign affairs will be, like, when did racism become solely a domestic issue. Why is mainstream international relations blind to race. Those are two of the headlines that popped up when I was looking. And I think what we are missing here in this conversation in terms of foreign policy is, again, if racist ideas are entrenched within all of our systems in American history and in the American present, then they are also just as present in the way that we deal with the global community. And so the question we have to ask ourselves is, just as we’re asking everything else, is American foreign policy racist, and it can be so tempting to dismiss this question as rhetorical. In our current moment we could say, you know, President Trump’s explicit comments on shithole countries and trace how his xenophobic view is tied to his racist foreign policy, his anti-Muslim animus, and the resulting travel ban, or his anti-Latinx comments and the expansion of inhumane immigration policies. And there are many of these examples. But I think to stop there is to miss the point because the real question underneath this all is in what ways these racist ideas inform our nation’s approach to international relations, right. And so what does it mean when we have a travel ban, for example, that targets people from seven different countries, and if we go back and look at the data we haven’t had any instances of terroristic violence from people of those countries—immigrants from those countries—in about twenty years. Like, the policies are coming out of racist ideas, not out of actual data. It is not making us any safer. And so the process, and many of you here on this call would already be aware of the issues I’m talking about, but I think what I really want to say to you all is the reframing has to get at how these ideas that are racist in their nature because they are coming from—they have racist histories and they have racist effects and they are moved into racist policies, how they continue to perpetuate inequities in which we are engaged in endless wars against people from Middle Eastern countries or Central Asian countries constantly. And so that’s the kind of thing that I think would also have to be examined as we are examining everything else in this country. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And, Jacqui, you get the last word. LEWIS: Well, yeah. Thank you so much, everyone. I know that we’re out of time. What I would say if we’re going to reform religion, and I want to be particular to say, again, that I am a Christian, a Universalist Christian, but that is more my area of expertise. But when I think about psychology of religion, which is something I study a lot, I want to just say something controversial. I’ll follow Reuben into controversy. You know, I believe there is a God but also this ministry that we would call the Holy Other, or God, or love, or whatever we’d call it, we don’t know, and the space where we don’t know we make things up. We do. We make them up. We’ve been making them up as soon as we crawled out of the water and as soon as we crawled out of the cave and we looked over there and saw the fire and went, oh my God, how did that happen? Thank you. When the crops didn’t grow, we theologized about our lives, and we theologize about our lives at least to a Bible or at least to a Quran or at least to a Bhagavad Gita, the holy books that are our attempt to understand the mystery. And, therefore, even our holiest of holy books can have our own biases in them. Our own biases are in them. The human being biases are in them. Y’all, don’t fire me now. That’s why you have a community. You have a community that reads the texts to say, well, no. Well, have you thought about. That’s why you do it in community so you’re not by yourself up on a mountain someplace having a really racist experience of God and thinking that’s the right one. So even—so if we’re going to reform religion, we have to decenter our preciousness. You know, like, I’ve got it all together and I know all the things, and, therefore, I can’t critique my own stuff. We have to be in a community where we can say to ourselves that we are all trying to understand God, now we see in a mirror dimly and then we’ll see face to face. Can we, therefore, as religious leaders, as people of spirit, engage our religion with hope that it’s got something great for us but also with the suspicion that we’ve inherited something that wasn’t for everyone, and if we want to make it for everyone we have to be comfortable critiquing it and pushing it around. So I want to just encourage people to get a new set of books. If you’ve only read Calvin, get some Tracey West, you know. If you’ve only read White theologians, read some Muhadista (ph) stuff. Like, just think about our faith not as something that is concrete and static and can’t grow, but what might it be for us to have a grownup faith and a grownup God. Because we let God out of the box and maybe we’ll find out that she speaks Sikh and Christian fluently, speaks Islam and Buddhism fluently, and she loves all the people for sure because she made them all in their image. We just have to get God out of the box so we can let religion work for building humanity, not concretizing our racism and our biases, which is what it too often does. Was that controversial good, Reuben? (Laughter.) FASKIANOS: It was great and it was a wonderful way to end this conversation. And I apologize to all that we went over. I broke Council rules. We try to end on time. But I couldn’t stop this conversation, and I’m sorry to all of you that we could not—there were so many raised hands. I apologize that we could not get to your questions. But thank you to Ambassador Reuben Brigety, Reverend Jacqui Lewis, and Dr. Simran Jeet Singh for this wonderful conversation. I encourage you to follow them all on Twitter—at @ReubenBrigety, at @RevJacquiLewis, and at @SikhProf. So those are their Twitter handles. You can also follow us on CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy Program at CFR_Religion for information and announcements. And thank you all. We will be continuing this series. Stay well, stay safe, and thank you all. LEWIS: Thank you.

Danielle Kilgo, the John and Elizabeth Bates Cowles professor of journalism, diversity, and equality at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, shares best practices for reporting on social justices issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement around the world, the protests following the killing of George Floyd by police, and implicit bias in the media. Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach at CFR, hosts the webinar.   FASKIANOS: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. Today we will be discussing the Black Lives Matter movement around the world, the protests following the killing of George Floyd, and best practices for reporting on these subjects with our speaker, Danielle Kilgo. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As you know, CFR is an independent and nonpartisan organization and think tank focusing on U.S. foreign policy. This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you connect the local issues you cover in your communities to global dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues, and provides a forum for sharing best practices. I want to remind everyone that this webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists. We shared the full bio of Danielle Kilgo with you prior to the call, so I’ll just give you a few highlights of her distinguished background. Danielle Kilgo is the John and Elizabeth Bates Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research interests focus on the interactions between social movements, social media, and journalism. Dr. Kilgo received her doctorate in journalism from the University of Texas Austin and was previously an assistant professor in the Media School at Indiana University. So, Dani, thank you very much for being with us today. We really appreciate it. We wanted to begin by having you talk about the Black Lives Matter movement that is—we’ve been seeing in the United States and the support that we’ve seen—the outpouring support around the world. And since our group is a group of local journalists, it would also be great if you could talk about the issue of implicit bias in the media and how to address that. KILGO: So thank you for having me. And I guess I’ll just start with, thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement today, it’s just an unprecedented moment for the movement, for our society, and it’s in a—within an unprecedented moment: We’re in the middle of a pandemic. And so it’s quite interesting the evolution of the Black Lives Matter movement as we’ve seen it today. Black Lives Matter really began in 2013, after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in Florida, and—which happened in 2012. So, in 2013, Black Lives Matter was sort of seen for the first time in the digital space as a hashtag and it kind of picked up since then, after—especially after Ferguson and—Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown. We saw Black Lives Matter sort of take off in conversation because the events were similar. You know, Trayvon Martin was an unarmed teenager. He was stalked and shot because he appeared to be threatening to another individual. And you know, this unjust—or these feelings of injustice in the criminal justice system really fueled protests that were international at that point, too, perhaps not what we had seen in St. Louis before. But the protests around or that followed the acquittal of George Zimmerman were profound and were quite large, nothing like what we saw in Ferguson. We saw the movement explode then or exploded then. We saw much larger crowds, a stronger presence of transnational unity around the world, and people sort of rallying behind the idea that Black lives matter, and that there was an injustice when it came to Black people and police. Importantly, the Black Lives Matter movement is really beyond just critiquing police and police behavior. It’s really about the eradication of White supremacy. And that’s at the core of its—of its—of the movement’s goals and its agendas and its grievance, that White supremacy and racism are still affecting Black communities today. So in many ways, the Black Lives Matter movement is sort of an evolution of the civil rights movement that we saw before without the explicit historical markers that we had when we think about, for example, the Jim Crow South. The Black Lives Matter movement is pushing against, instead, these implicit and systematic consequences—implicit racism and the systematic consequences that we see racism having on Black communities and communities of color. So I have looked at the Black Lives Matter movement in the press since 2013. Trayvon Martin was sort of my George Floyd. And so the Black Lives Matter movement today was—and the reaction that people have to it is very familiar to me. It’s quite different than we have seen in the past, right? George Floyd is not the first man to be killed by police, unarmed. He’s not the first man to have a questionable set of—or set of events that led to his death in terms of police behavior and police actions and police motivation behind these deaths and killings. And so—but what is unique about the Black Lives Matter movement today is that we had a pandemic to sit people down in front of their televisions for extensive amounts of time and pay attention. It was easier to pay attention at this point. So now we have a very engaged audience that have been, for the most part, told to stay at home—although, you know, as we see—(laughs)—we’re loosening those restrictions now. But for the most part have been told to stay at home. The have been sort of immersed in these—you know, habitual sharing of the video of George Floyd’s death. And it’s been able to engage people in, really, the foundation of a movement that started back in 2013 with the acquittal of George Zimmerman. FASKIANOS: And can you talk a little bit about—as you study the implicit bias in media, can you flesh that out for us? What are the things that you’re seeing? And what should journalists be thinking about when they’re reporting on these—on the Black Lives movement and police brutality and whatnot? KILGO: Sure. So my research has really started—it looked at the coverage of the protests since 2012. And over time—over time, both in the coverage of Trayvon Martin’s protests and the coverage of Michael Brown’s protests, of Freddie Gray’s protests, of Sandra Bland’s protests, of the, you know, run of names that we could name off here, that coverage sort of follows this pattern that has been developed by political scientists and communications scholars called the protest paradigm. The protest paradigm pretty much says that protests that push against the political status quo are going to be marginalized or delegitimized by the press because they sort of follow suit with what the government or official stance is on a particular issue. So if the idea is to eradicate White supremacy and a system has built-in White supremacy, a movement against White supremacy would push against the status quo directly, right? So the news coverage that we’ve seen, especially of Black Lives Matter—of the Black Lives Matter movement, has for the most part been what we call delegitimizing. This means it emphasizes the violence or the riots or the nuisance or the confrontations with police. It emphasizes them getting arrested. It emphasizes them being dramatic, maybe wearing funny stuff or acting in a—in a strange way. It emphasizes those things, but it doesn’t emphasize the demands and the grievances and the substance behind a particular protest movement. And here, for Black Lives Matter, that would there is not a robust discussion about racism and its effects on Black communities. There is not a robust allowance for Black people, Black communities, Black advocates, and Black protesters to have space inside press coverage to voice their truth or to say—you know, to be treated as official sources, like we would treat other government or city officials. And that pattern—delegitimizing pattern that we see sort of tacked onto the Black Lives Matter movement is quite stable. When we look at other protest movements, not as stable. So when we look at the protest against—or, the anti-Trump protests that followed the inauguration, those had more emphasis on the protester substantive demands, why they didn’t—why they felt like they needed to be outside the White House that day, or why they felt like they needed to be in the streets that day. Same thing with the Women’s March. There was some substance behind why women felt the need to go out and protest year, after year, after year. And when it comes to—specifically, what my research shows, is when it comes to protests and movements that are related to race specifically—so not just anti-Black racism, but also anti-Indigenous racism, and to some degree anti-immigration—or, I’m sorry—anti-immigration policy protests—these sort of protests aren’t afforded the same legitimacy that other protests are. And so that’s really where my work starts to pick apart these patterns. Why is this happening? Part of the implicit bias that we see that helps create this problem is that we have an underrepresentation of journalists of color in newsrooms. Another part is that we built the whole institution and foundation of journalism on a base within a system that is built with White supremacy in mind. And so we have a racist system, and we built another, you know, arm of our institutions giving some people credibility over others. We have official sources. We teach journalism in a way that enables a system to continue to work in the way that it does. So we, you know, tell our students to talk to police, get their official reports, listen to our politicians, cite people with prominence. Our news values, the things that make news news and that make us think that they’re engaging, are all set, a lot of times, in us talking with politicians, or talking with people who are famous or, you know, saying that official sources are official sources. And really not—undercovering—or, sorry—digging into what those sources are. Until an investigative journalist is able to get on that spot. We also, you know, don’t necessarily afford the layman or just a standard citizen the same space or just specialty in general. So when we talk about protesters, and we think about people that are actively engaging in the political realm, that’s what a protest is. They’re actively engaging in a political realm. I often ask my students: Did you treat them like a politician? Because a lot of times I think that journalists should. So we see this sort of dampening of the protesters’ narratives and then this uplifting of the official narratives. And when there’s officials pushing against, you know, huge protests in their streets, or there’s officials pushing against the idea of—the idea of racism and, you know, that are still sort of engaging with the idea of color blindness and blind equality, then we allow them, just through our norms as journalists, we allow them to have control of that narrative. So there are implicit ways that, you know, come from also our experience, just not being engaged with particular communities, not regularly being engaged with particular communities unless it’s in specific beats, which is where we have, you know, just canons of scholars. I mean, seriously, on the shoulders of giants when I think about the number of people who have said that the representation of Black and brown communities is off and is negative, and routinely reinforces the negative stereotypes that we have—or, that run, especially in the U.S.—our society. And so we have those implicit biases that we have to fight as well. And then, you know, lastly, there’s explicit bias that we see in the media that can’t be ignored. In some of my research with my co-author Summer Harlow at the University of Houston, we’ve recently sat down with journalists to find out how they felt about their protest coverage, what they thought they could do better. And a lot of times we have seen journalists defend their work, even when it had, you know, major obvious red flags in it. The idea of objectivity is—it’s a great ideal if we think about tin the correct ways, but a lot of times people think that because—or, journalists think that—we found that journalists find that just because their job has this ownership of some sort of objectivity, they also apply it to themselves. And so, you know, there’s a checks and balances internal conflict that I think that we, as human beings generally, not just as journalists but as human beings generally, have to do to sort of pick apart our own implicit biases and to build our cultural competency. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Could you also just touch upon the Black Lives Matter movement in other parts of the world? We’ve seen, you know, an outpouring of support. Can you talk a little bit about that? And was there that same kind of solidarity back in 2013 when the movement and the hashtag began? KILGO: Right. The transnational solidarity here is not unprecedented, but it’s amazing help to see the world sort of band together around this idea that Black lives matter. This is—you know, the idea—U.S. racism is unique to the U.S. in terms of its basis in slavery, but anti-Black racism is not—anti-Black and brown racism is not unique around the world. And so there is a sort of international solidarity that we see that is great from a globalization perspective to be able to raise this issue in other countries. You know, if we can fix it here in the United States but we can’t fix it—we can’t fix racism in another country, do we think we can eradicate White supremacy? And the answer is no. White supremacy is everywhere. And so that transnational solidarity is great. You see this—in the Middle East you see this. And of course, in Europe. And then there is—in all of the countries, in all of the continents. So when I think about 2013 and 2014, yes, there was transnational solidarity there as well. We saw protesters in Palestine really sort of connect with the Black Lives Matter movement, and in other places around the world. But it wasn’t quite like what we see today. Today’s movement has effectively shifted a portion of public opinion that we have not seen shifted before. Again, I think a lot of that is because people are paying attention, they have time to pay attention. There is not a whole lot in the news cycle right now, except for COVID-19—(laughs)—and the protests that were there, especially in the U.S. And so unlike other times, we’ve not had a lot of competing things that are happening that are—that rise up to the front of the news cycle. And so we have been able to—or, as a researcher, able to see the palpable difference in what public opinion is, and what it was then and what it is now. And we now see sort of not just transnational solidary, but White solidarity. That is a common theme and thread that runs through sort of this reckoning with White supremacy that has to happen in publics. So that’s a new thing that I—that I see today that is very different than the coverage that I’ve seen before. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you. And of course, with COVID-19 we’ve seen a disproportionate effects on Blacks and Latinos, of it having a greater co-morbidity rate. So that also has been surfacing the inequality. So let’s go now to the group for questions, comments. (Gives queuing instructions.) So great. So Andre Meunier. Q: Yes. And well done on the name. Not many people get it right. FASKIANOS: Oh, thank you. (Laughs.) Q: Danielle, could you expand a little bit on what you were saying about explicit bias and reporters understanding—I’m sorry. I’m from The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon. I’m a breaking news editor who is part of the coordination of our coverage of our protest that have been going on here. And I’m curious if you could expand on what you were saying about explicit bias and how reporters perceive their objectivity in relation to their organization’s objectivity. I’d like to understand that a little bit better. STAFF: So, Irina, this is the operator. We actually just Dr. Kilgo. So if you give me one moment I will get her back on the line. And then I’ll just need Andre to repeat his question. FASKIANOS: Oh, and she’s back. Connecting to audio, fantastic. And you need to unmute. There you go. Danielle, did you get that whole question, or should we have Andre repeat it? KILGO: I’m sorry, would you repeat it? I’m sorry, I just—it froze. Q: Sure. No problem. I was just wondering if you could expand a little bit on, when you were speaking about explicit bias and reporters’ perceptions of their own objectivity in relation to the institutional objectivity. I just would like to understand what you meant there a little bit better. KILGO: Sure. So I guess in terms of the idea of objectivity, I just—a lot of—we asked journalists, how do you think your institution does? And the answer is great. I think we did great covering these protests. And we’re thinking about protests—in this particular study we were talking about protests in 2017. And so the question was, you know, do you think you’re objective? How do you feel about the coverage that you’ve created? And great. I feel great. Right? (Laughter.) And a lot of times we would go back and we do content analyses of these news organizations’ protest coverage and see where they have excluded the demands and agendas for several different entities, or they have failed to give protesters voice. Sometimes they have given protesters more voice than government officials, especially when it comes to right-wing protests. So we are able to actually say, OK, when we talk about objectivity as this idea of, you know, representing people fairly, of representing an idea fairly, of covering, you know, the robustness of an issue, we can sort of quantify and qualify this idea that there’s room for work to be done. And a lot of times when we talk with—in that—sorry, in that particular research study, when we spoke with journalists and got their feedback a lot of times that idea was just a perception of their own objectivity. I feel like I did a great job. There’s nothing I would change. This is something that we heard quite a bit in that particular study. And so some things—like, when I think about the “Buildings Matter Too” headline that went through several editors and made it through, that’s kind of a, you know, explicit bias in terms of I want to go—I need engagement, and I think this will be an engaging topic. It sort of backfired, right? I mean, it really backfired for some people. But it backfired in terms of the awareness of our society and their ability to be able to critique it and have the language and vocabulary they needed to critique that. And, you know, the paper pulled back. But these explicit biases are ones that are also—it’s not implicit to say I do everything right, right? (Laughs.) So I think that’s more what I was trying to get the point on is that, you know, we have even biases towards ourselves that say we’re doing—we’re doing a good thing and we’re doing a good job because we’re journalists, or because we’re scholars, or whatever profession we, you know, sit in the line of duty at. And honestly, you know, that creates an explicit bias towards yourself and really challenges the unlearning and learning process that has to happen as we develop more culturally competent frameworks to create and to write with. FASKIANOS: OK. Let’s go Kala West. Q: Good afternoon. Again, I’m Kala J from WURD Radio. We’re a Black talk station here in Philly. I had the honor and privilege of producing our Happy Hour show, which is a Millennial-focused show, but we have an intergenerational audience. And my question is, with all this, the protesting going on and the unrest, a lot of times in media coverage we just focus on the topic at hand but never the little different protests. And being a Millennial-based show, we like to kind of show what the young people—(inaudible, technical difficulties). And my question is, how do we properly cover those? Because we know that there are children, like the young people who used TikTok to buy all the tickets at the Trump rally. So there are many youth protests going on, even though they’re not of voting age. But how do we cover their voice properly to make sure that people understand that the next generation has something to say as well? We here at Happy Hour, we did a town hall where they were able to voice their opinions. But that’s just one—but that was just one piece of coverage. How do we continue things like that? KILGO: That’s great. That’s an amazing effort. And I’m glad that you’re doing that. Not enough people do that. And so, you know, one of the things that’s difficult for journalists to do is to engage with youth. I mean, that means you usually have to have their parents’ permission first. And that’s a challenge that I expect would continue to happen. But I think one of the other things that journalists can do is engage with youth through their schools. Of course, COVID-19 makes this a really challenging era to imagine what we could do on a regular basis. But you know, news literacy and news engagement are typically lower in terms of these traditional forms of media. We know that younger people, Millennials and Gen Z, like to engage with news and with topics through social media. And so one of the things is to, you know, find ways to encourage them to engage in traditional media outlets. And I think, you know, this town hall is a great opportunity. Here’s your chance to get on our station, or here’s your chance to get on our front page, or special issue, or whatever it is. I think that—I think that bridging those gaps—you know, also you’re going to—it’s really important that you have journalists that are engaged in their networks, that understand and are competent in TikTok, something I’m still learning. You know, that understand and are competent in all of the emerging media that come up. Establishing also, you know, in your communities who some of the thought leaders are, just like in high school and middle school that I remember. There are still opinion leaders. There are still people who do go viral more often than others. And you should be able to identify them and follow them on a regular basis, just like we would do on more traditional social media networks, like Twitter and Facebook. So I think—like I said, I think it’s a great effort to be able to connect, especially with younger people, those under the age of eighteen especially, which I think would include some sort of engagement through the school system to help sort of battle the challenges that would happen with getting parental permission. I think when it comes to people who are over eighteen, I think that engaging with them through the social media channels is imperative and is important. And giving them an opportunity for them to realize that their TikTok video is much more than just a video that they’re submitting to TikTok—(laughs)—if it’s, you know, this cultural critique. And I think that, you know, finding a way to make sure that this community knows that you value that kind of media, that it’s not seen as, I don’t know, frivolous compared to a long-form essay—I think that finding a way to really engage with that community and showing them that you value their views and you value the content they create in the form that they create it, is an excellent way to engage with not just the youth community but really any community. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Lisa Green Kelsaw. Q: Thank you. Lisa Green Kelsaw, Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne, Indiana. I’m curious, and I did get on maybe a couple minutes after you just started, but there were references to research and quantifying things that suggest that sometimes our, you know, self-assessment about how well we’ve done with covering protests doesn’t necessarily match up with the printed word. And so I’m wondering if there are some research papers, some summaries, or something that will be provided on email at the end of this. I would be curious to that—about that. KILGO: Sure. I’m happy to provide any of the journal-published scholarship that I have readily available. Our publication system is so abrasively slow. (Laughs.) But I am happy to produce anything that you’re interested in that I’ve already published and can give you. And for the most part, have gotten permission from editors for journalists that are interested to give you the highlights of things that have not gone officially through the entire peer-review system. FASKIANOS: Great. And we’ll work with you, Dani, to get that. And we can send it out to the group after this so that people have access to it. Dani, have you seen any improvement in the coverage of the past month of, you know, this new swell and support for Black Lives Matter versus 2013, in the media? Has there been any improvement? And is there a difference in the—is it print, broadcast? Or is it the same across the different formats? KILGO: Sure. So improvement, especially when it comes to just digital coverage, anything that comes across a www from traditional media, at first I was quite the pessimist. And I said, oh, it’s just more of the same. It’s a lot of emphasizing violence. There is a lot of talking about buildings and the destruction and the potential need to crack down on protesters. And I was—I was quite pessimistic. But there was—there’s so many things about the protest and the situation that make it different than Black Lives Matter protests that we’ve seen before. One is we—you know, we have the pandemic. And there was some blame for protesters for the potential spreading COVID-19 in the first couple of weeks of coverage. And that was unique, but also negative. And then journalists—several journalists were injured during protests. And that particular assault on journalists was, you know, unnerving for the profession, and rightfully so. But I think it was also sort of an awakening that protests—you know, the press badge didn’t give them a special protection in terms of their First Amendment right. There were lots of First Amendment rights that were being taken away during these protests. And, you know, gave journalists sort of the critical eye and, you know, not that journalists don’t always have the—don’t already have the critical eye, I think they do. I think it gave them the extra set of proof they needed to get it past the editors, right? So I think that they had enough proof to say: The police are acting inappropriately, and we really need to cover this now. And it needs to be on the front page. The protesters didn’t just clash with police. Police instigated this particular, you know, event that escalated into something else. Or police went through and slashed tires throughout cars in downtown so that people were stuck. And so that was that attention to police behavior is something that I haven’t seen before enough to be able to count, and quantify, and put into any statistical model. And this time I’m hoping—now, you know, we’re still in the moment. And I work in patterns not just small, you know, moments of time. But what I’m hoping is, is that this time—I do think we’re seen enough attention to police behavior to be able to sort of unravel a bit more what protests are about, to show that that narrative is unraveling, rather. That the narrative of protest is more than just people, you know, potentially being violent in the streets, or being violent in the streets, or being angry. That this narrative is about people being in the streets for a reason, and that, you know, some of the escalation of the violence is not necessarily—it wasn’t their goal. That wasn’t in their agenda. That wasn’t in their goals. That was something that happened based on a series of things that led to—you know, or a series of things that may have been instigated by other people. And that, to me, is a great shift. Media coverage likes to focus on the actions a lot. And I think that the idea of focusing on all of the actions and not just what the protesters have done will help sort of develop the narrative and legitimize the protesters in a way that can maybe unravel that paradigm a little bit more. You also have, you know, more positive public opinion towards Black Lives Matter than we had before. And so when we start seeing a change in how people think about a particular social issue, we start seeing a change in how press coverage works. That’s what happened with gender issues. That’s what happened with LGBTQAI issues. That’s what happened with antiwar issues. And would love to see that that’s what’s happening here with antiracism issues. That would be truly revolutionary. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Kathleen McElroy. Q: Hi. I’m with the University of Texas at Austin. And to follow up on what you were just saying, I see journalism shifting, and journalists shifting from the objectivity paradigm to something very different. And I have a lot of students asking me about how can we be antiracist? Which under the old school might have been seen as not being objective. But to me, this is part of what we should be doing. If we’re pursuing truth, then we should be fighting racism. But you know, you were talking earlier about how students sort of struggled with this, and how schools struggled with it. I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about the objectivity paradigm, sort of shifting away from that? Which we’ve tried to do here. KILGO: Sure. So yeah, I think, you know, objectivity, the idea that we—it’s more than the idea that both sides should be covered, but that’s kind of how it’s sort of evolved over time is that—you know, that he said and she said this. But I think that we have to go back to the idea of what the press can do and what the press was meant to do. You know, speak truth to power. That is way more important than objectivity. (Laughs.) And you know, objectivity is sort of written in the idea of how do you speak truth to power? Well, you consider other perspectives other than those that are given to you. So I think, you know, to me, I don’t think we’re going to lose the idea of objectivity. I think it’s going to evolve to include the really important parts of the press that sort of get lost when we ball up everything into “the press should be objective.” I think that, you know, the idea of having antiracist policies in a newsroom is not against objectivity. I think that it is for equality for your journalists. I think it’s for equality for your newsroom, for your audiences in terms of how they receive information. I think antiracist policies in newsrooms will also help bring back the idea of a post-mortem. Maybe we should go back and look extensively at our coverage and how we portray a particular group, and make sure that it is representative of our community. And so, you know, when it comes to adopting and developing those policies, I think we’re a long road—we have a long road to travel to achieve both antiracist policies that don’t necessarily advocate for a specific group or a specific cause, but that fairly represent, and accurately represent, and robustly represent a particular cause, or issue, or grievance, or community. Those shouldn’t be hard to develop. But I think that definitely once we do develop them that issue of are we still being objective will kind of be—the blatant answer will be yes. FASKIANOS: Dani, just to follow up on your earlier comment about the newsrooms being mostly White and not being representative of Black voices, Black perspectives, do you have any thoughts on how to change that? KILGO: Hire Black writers. Hire Black photographers. Hire Black editors. I mean, I think that that is the number-one way to do that, especially for the Black community, but all communities. Hire journalists of color. I think part of that also means lifting up journalists of color and mentoring journalists of color, and also allowing them to use their expertise in their writing and trusting that. I know a lot of times journalists are frustrated with the changes that are made in a newsroom, about tokenism, about having their, you know, particular stories changed or, you know, their ideas about a story sort of treated as laughable, and I think that that has to change. One of the ways to do that is to diversify a newsroom. To have more than one person say, no, that’s really important, is a really important—(laughter)—part of building a community. And so I think the only—the best way to do that is to—just to hire people. The other thing is that, you know, we have—it’s not just journalists or a newsroom intentionally not hiring journalists of color. I think this is a problem that stems from our—you know, our academic system as well. You know, we—many of our legacy schools or our large state schools we know we have an underrepresentation of Black students—Black and brown students. And so, you know, universities and journalism programs are responsible to some degree for—to help with this issue, to help think of ways and anti-racist policies in their institutions that will help level this playing field to some degree and unwind the burden that racism has created in their system and in their institution. So the way to find more Black journalists is to support more Black students and to support the organizations that support the students and their unique issues, so the NABJ, NAHA, NAJA. Like, we need to be able to support these institutions so that—these institutions and organizations so that they can also help lift up our students and journalists of color. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question goes to Karen Ocamb. Q: Can you hear me now? FASKIANOS: Yes, we can. Thank you. Q: Thank you very much. Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. I’m a news editor for an LGBTQ publication so I deal with intersectionality a lot. My concern and my question is that—is about implicit bias. I don’t know if I have implicit bias if I don’t know if I have implicit bias. I’m concerned about cultural competency when I’m covering, for instance, African Americans, Black protestors, who are also encountering homophobia and transphobia. I cover in terms of LGBTQ, but oftentimes the people I’m interviewing are Black first, if you will, or Latino/Latina first. And yet, the protest that they’re involved in they’re waving, you know, a rainbow flag or the trans flag or whatever. I’m not sure if I’m covering them properly. And I’m trying to be incredibly sensitive. I’ve brought a lot of people of color into the publication so that their own voices are heard. But I’m concerned that I’m doing a proper job as a professional journalist. Do you have any tips for me? Cultural competency and intersectionality. KILGO: Sure. First of all, I think it’s fair to say we all have implicit bias and we all mess stuff up. (Laughter.) I’ll be the first to say that. I mean, having these conversations is difficult, even for me, because sometimes I get it wrong. I say even for me, but especially for me, honestly. (Laughter.) But, you know, I do understand, as a Black woman, that it is very difficult to cover both issues at the same time without thinking that you’re minimizing one over the other. But I do think that, you know, there’s two things that you can do. If you’re at a protest that’s about LGBTQ issues, they’re there trying to challenge the issues that reflect that community or that identity, and I think that focusing on that particular issue is really important. It’s the same thing with the Black Lives Matter movement. I think that, you know, when we go to a George Floyd protest that is, particularly, about race and Black men and, you know, and police brutality, which happens against people of all, you know, genders. So we have that, and ages. You know, this happens to children, too, and George Floyd is a lot about Black children being killed by police as well or, you know, Black young men or Black young women and Black—you know, the Black trans movement is also something that’s included in that conversation. I think it’s important to acknowledge always that there are other issues and there’s an intersectional system of oppression that is working against people. It’s not just about being Black, being—my sexual identity and—or my sexual orientation and my gender and, you know, there are many things. My class even are working in this system as well. And so, you know, acknowledging that, I think, is important and knowing that at some point, you know, you might need to double back and go and say, what if I took this particular issue and I thought about it from a Black person’s perspective and I included that in coverage. Like, it’s not—this isn’t just about, you know, one issue. This is about the other issue, and you’re able to sort of weave both of them into these master narratives. I think that that is—that is what we can do and that’s how we evolved. I don’t know the perfect answer to what coverage could look like in that particular situation. But I know that we definitely can’t ignore that this issue is intersectional, that some communities face racism or sexism or patriarchy in different ways than other communities, and that when we don’t speak that truth and we don’t bring awareness to those issues we’re doing them a disservice. I also like to think about the—about news not as in a single report but in a package. I study, like I said, overall representations, which is way better than just looking at one article. I could critique what article I wanted to but that doesn’t say what a news organization does on a regular basis. And so I think it’s really important to look at the entire package of information that you’ve put out in a particular—about a particular issue or event or cause over the course of a couple of weeks and say, hey, you know, this is a(n) issue about race. Like, Black Lives—this Black Lives Matter protest is about race but did I cover all of the angles of that? Because racism is a really big issue. It touches—you know, not just a(n) intersectional issue. It is a huge issue. I can’t just talk about media coverage and not talk about—and journalists and, you know, critique them without talking about the fact that the institution I work in is not supporting Black students. And so I think we have to have a—you know, a robust look at everything that we’ve laid out and everything that we’ve put out and say what narratives are missing. And that’s why I hope those postmortems will come back into play and become more important. You know, as we push against this idea that everything—not everything has to be breaking anymore because everybody has their phones, right. If we push back against that idea of news as you have to get it out first, and you have a little bit more time to say let’s look at how we’ve represented this community and this time, I think that we can really develop a—you can develop within your organization some kind of competency and as well develop a, you know, a community that is willing to be engaged in critique. Nobody likes to be critiqued. I’m one of them. That’s why I never watch my videos when I go back and have—(laughter)—conversations like these. But, you know, what I do like is when I have a community of scholars that I trust that can say, you didn’t say that right and you need to think about that again, and that’s fair. And I think that, you know, we can’t see what we don’t know and we have to have other eyes looking out for us. And so I think really part of, you know, learning cultural competency, besides saying read a book, is developing a community that is committed to change, is committed to critique, and is committed to continuing to develop their craft. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let’s go to Phoebe Petrovic. Q: Hi. Thank you so much for this. This has been really great. I work at an investigative newsroom in Wisconsin, and I have not been covering the protests but I have been watching the coverage unfold. And so a couple days ago, a local journalist pulled quotes from a public Facebook page that had been used to organize for the Black Lives Matter protest, and he did so without asking and, in some cases, over the express objections of the people involved and then used them in an article. And the journalist responded to that criticism with, essentially, well, you posted in a public forum, so suck it up, and that, obviously, created a lot of furor. And so when I was talking about that with a senior journalist, she said, well, we’ve done stuff like that before, and cited an article that surfaced, public posts of someone supporting White supremacy and Nazism. So I felt like that was a really problematic comparison because one is a public service. You’re exposing a furtive Nazi. The other one maybe not so because you’re cherry picking quotes from a Facebook group where Black activists are convening in a public space to organize against state violence, especially when they’ve asked the journalist not to quote them because they’re concerned, specifically, for their safety. And when I brought that up I was accused of applying our standards unevenly for causes that I’m sympathetic to, and this is just one of the microcosms of the conversations that I’ve been having about this coverage over the last few weeks. And so my question is—I’m sorry for that background information. But, like, the question that I have is how should our standards evolve. So as we’re reporting on the Black Lives Matter movement and as we’re moving forward, my newsroom specifically is trying to commit to anti-racist coverage. How should our standards evolve so that we are dismantling oppression, we’re holding power to account, while also minimizing harm for those who choose to speak with us? KILGO: Yeah. That situation is not surprising that you went through but, definitely, leads to a good question. As we saw in Charlottesville—the idea that there were good people on both sides—I think that we have to think of our policies as, traditionally, doing that. We say there’s good people on both sides. Same standards for everyone. A commitment to anti-racism does not say that. A commitment to anti-racism says the standards have intentionally oppressed certain groups. They have pushed them down, and if we’re going to build anti-racist policies we’re going to bring policies that are going to pull them up to where we are. That might mean that we have to, you know, take—we have to suppress the other side that’s to power or we give, you know, extra time or space for a particular community that is oppressed. But anti-racist policies, the idea is to try to reach equality by lifting the, you know, the marginalized groups up to the same level that we have in the past lifted White groups. And so that is hard a lot of times because it means that you have to remember that for decades, centuries, there is a legacy of mainstream media pushing a particular group down, and it’s asking you to rewrite the idea of, for example, Black people as criminals or, you know, immigrants as criminals or whatever it is. Rewrite how you imagine in your crimes beats and how you imagine your representation patterns and in way that does not support these stereotypes and implicit (primes ?) that audiences have that will reinforce racism in our society. There is no perfect answer to how we can achieve that goal. I think we’re going to have to do it in a space by space basis. We don’t have a book on anti-racism policies in journalism. But I do think that—you know, in your particular situation I do think it’s a comparison of apples to oranges, to some degree. We do try to—you know, it’s important to uncover White supremacies or neo-Nazism because it’s a threat to a particular community, and I think that resolving that White supremacy and the violence that’s associated with explicit White supremacy is—can negatively affect and terrorize communities around the United States is really important. Black activists organizing in a Facebook—a public Facebook group that say something are not terrorizing a particular entity or group of individuals, and I don’t think that it can be treated in the same way. We, you know, now have a broader conversation about photographing protestors. Should we—because, you know, there are people out there that are pushing against the government and they’re pushing against the status quo, to some degree, should we blatantly put their faces out there. And, I mean, we can take it from our traditional stance. Well, they’re in a public place. They’re in a public street. We have the right to take their picture. But I think, you know, anti-racist policies in our newsroom would say, let’s rethink that. Let’s think about the human condition and let’s think about this human’s condition and let’s think about this community’s condition, and by putting that in the forefront we can better develop policies that will—and just defenses that will help journalists advocate for themselves and to fairly represent their communities. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Jacqui Germain next. Q: Hi. Thank you so much also especially for that last answer. That was really empowering to hear. I’m a freelance journalist based in St. Louis, Missouri, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about or if you had any recommendations from your research about new standards or new ways to kind of build up that relationship between journalists and protestors. I know—I was really involved in the protests in St. Louis and a lot of us are really frustrated not just with the coverage but with some of our interactions or lack of interactions with journalists, be they from St. Louis or folks who sort of came into the city to cover the protests. And so I was wondering if you’ve seen that relationship change over the course of your research, if you can talk about just kind of from your perspective what you see the future of that relationship looking like. KILGO: And you’re talking about between protestors and the press? Q: And journalists. KILGO: Mmm hmm. OK. So when we have these massive protests it’s really hard to get a handle on what’s going on. (Laughter.) No doubt about it. You know, since 2010, we’ve seen this uptick in protest activity around the world, and knowing who is doing what at what time when there is, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the street is not easy. So one of the—and knowing when people will be called, honestly, to stop what they’re doing, go out in the street, and spend their day maybe almost getting arrested, by pushing against—for pushing against, you know, an idea or trying to air a grievance, it’s kind of an unpredictable thing. But what’s not unpredictable is the social movements behind the protests that were there before. And so I would really encourage journalists to actively engage in knowing the nonprofits around your community, to actively engage in knowing the people at your NAACP, to know, you know, your Black Lives Matter chapter, to know that there is a ton of, you know, of smaller chapters of—and organizations, sometimes just grassroots, just a collective idea. Sometimes they are more bureaucratized. But, you know, and especially in a local community. And St. Louis is big and Minneapolis is big. But in smaller networks, too, there are almost always an organization around that is advocating for the equal human rights and those people do that on a day to day basis. They don’t quit doing that. So it would be, I think, beneficial to get to know those organizations. You know, one of the ones that stands out in my mind right now—I was just trying to pull them up—is the Color of Change. It’s a large national organization that’s well known. But there are, you know, lots of smaller chapters that help organize people. They also are constantly putting out communication that is there to engage audiences, to engage people in their issue, to make people aware of their issue. So not only will that help you, like, have a handle on sort of the official spokespeople of protests—you know, they don’t always have all of the information about what a protest is about but they definitely have a core agenda, a great idea. They even have, like, a PR-ed voice, so to speak, of being able to articulate hard things like what a particular social justice is. They can tell you what racism is in their own words. And sometimes that’s hard to do. It’s hard to explain. And so they have this sort of official voice behind a protest. The other thing that I would encourage journalists to do is to let those particular organizations lead you to other people and places. You know, we have—you know, by fostering those connections you learn about the internal and digital networks that perhaps you wouldn’t know before. It helps you become more familiar with their community. I think that, you know, just like we do with some health organizations, as journalists we can do this with these social issues—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—keep the distance that’s necessary to, you know, achieve the idea of objectivity for our newsrooms or just like separation between our public and what we write. And so I think that establishing that relationship is going to be core. The only other thing I can say is that, you know, when you are at a protest, if you don’t have that relationship already established that, you know, one protestor will say something but you should probably talk to twenty before deciding on which quote or which person to put on air or which part of the substance you’re going to exploit in your particular coverage. I think that’s really important because, again, protestors are not professionals. A lot of times they’re treated like they are, or not all protestors are professionals and a lot of times they’re treated like they are. And I think to fairly sort of categorize an entire movement you have to be able to immerse yourself in that protest community and to know who is capable of getting past the grief and emotions that are behind protests and able to articulate their causes and—(inaudible). FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the last question from Leoneda Inge-Barry, who actually attended our inaugural Local Journalists workshop. Q: Hello. How are you? I’m Leoneda Inge and I’m the race and southern culture reporter at WUNC public radio out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the one thing that has definitely happened since these last protests I’m reminded almost daily, like, Leoneda, you’re the race reporter. You’re a senior reporter here. We want to hear from you. I’m, like, really? (Laughter.) So now, in a way, you know, I’m definitely put in a position where, wow, you know, I have to speak for a whole group of people, a whole race of people, also speaking for myself and also, I guess, trying not to totally overstep my bounds because I do have a big mouth. You know, I don’t mind speaking. But I do know that there’s a line there. It’s not just a line of professionalism but it’s also a line of even respect for myself and other journalists like me. Because earlier in your comments you hit the nail on the head. You know, so many newsrooms have so few journalists of color. It’s one reason why some coverage may not have—I mean, some events may not have been covered the way that they should have. But I just—I wonder, do you—can you recommend? I mean, because there’s a new wave going across newsrooms, too. You know, we’re one of the newsrooms that finally decided, you know, we will capitalize the letter B when we talk about Black people and their—you know, so this—things are coming fast and furious and so I’m just trying to make sure, you know, it’s going in the right direction and that it’s going to be meaningful not just today but tomorrow. KILGO: Yeah. I mean, I guess—I’m glad that management of newsroom(s) is beginning to seize the moment. The AP Style shift to capitalize the B in Black was a huge thing, especially for me. I had recently just written in a journal article a defense of capitalizing the B in Black. I have trouble publishing all the time with the capital B in Black. So, I mean, that was a huge shift for me and it’s great to see that kind of progress. But I also think that you’re talking about the pressure that it puts on—you know, on Black journalists or Black people and just that aren’t fairly or accurately represented within an organization in this moment, and that’s a lot and I think that newsrooms need to hear from our voices but I also think—don’t think they need to exploit our voices. And so, you know, I would just make sure that if they—you know, as a Black journalist in a newsroom that if they’re going to give you the opportunity to speak in this moment that they continue to give you the opportunity to speak beyond this moment. If you are willing to speak then make sure that you have, you know, the opportunity to continue to voice your truth. This is not—the road to correcting racism in our society is not solved today and it was not solved with the capital B in Black, and I think that the way that we continue to see progress and continue to work towards an anti-racist society is to continue to acknowledge and request that they acknowledge that. Like, that’s not enough. It’s great. We’re very glad for this issue and I’m glad that you gave me this opportunity to speak, of course, if you wanted to. But I would just make sure that you advocate for yourself in terms of if you have this opportunity to speak and you want to continue to have this opportunity to speak that you get it. I think that also—you know, the more that you’re able to advocate—if you’re the only Black person in your newsroom or if you’re the only person of color in your newsroom the more that you’re able to say, I want to see this hiring board change so that it doesn’t just have to be you in the future. Like, you want to have diversity in your newsroom so, you know, advocating for that at this moment, I think, is a great way to say maybe it won’t always be me that has to talk. Maybe somebody else could have to—could do the talking at some point, too. So, you know, now—so there’s one thing. You could just jump on the bandwagon and continue to try to push for policy changes that you know would help diversify your newsroom and continue to bring race and racism—issues of race and racism to the forefront. But I also think that, you know, there’s also an idea of protecting yourself. And I can say this, I think, just kind of candidly that it sometimes is uncomfortable to have to speak on behalf of all Black people or all journalists or all news coverage because there’s always an exception and not everybody’s the same. And so I think that making sure that they acknowledge that is core. That your news organization can acknowledge that, too, is a core sort of foundation of that’s why we need to hire more people and that’s why we need to include more—you know, have a more diverse editorial board or group of editors or group of columnists. I think that there’s got to be some way—there has to be some sort of self-protection measure in there, too, and I think that this is the time where you can advocate for that as we sort of navigate, and, to me, this is a sort of unprecedented world where people are engaged and listening. FASKIANOS: I know we’re out of time but I just—I can’t help but ask this question—the closing question, Dani. So there are a lot of editors on this call, writers, producers, reporters. What is the one story that an editor should allow to be published that they might, in the past, not? Said, oh, we can’t cover that? KILGO: I think that if there is a—if there is someone who says that something happened to them because of the color of their skin, they should believe them. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. This has been a really wonderful hour. Thank you very much for being with us and to all of you for your questions. I am sorry we could not get to everybody. But I’ve already gone over so I can’t go over much more. So thank you, again, to Danielle Kilgo for your insights. As we discussed earlier on, we will get from Dani some resources and research and send it out to all of you so that you can look at those reports and what not. I encourage you to follow her on Twitter at @DaniKathleen. So please follow her research there as well. And, again, please do come to CFR.org for information on COVID-19. We have a lot of resources now on Black Lives Matter and other issues. Please don’t hesitate to share your suggestions for future CFR Local Journalists Webinars by sending an email to [email protected]. Stay safe and well, and we look forward to reconvening again. So, again, thank you, Danielle Kilgo. KILGO: Thanks for having me.

Drs. Lisa Cooper and Leana Wen discuss the racial inequities that exist in the health care field today and how that impacts the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Ruth Messinger, former president and current global ambassador of American Jewish World Service, Reverend Najuma Smith-Pollard, program manager of the University of Southern California’s Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement, and Ani Zonneveld, founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values discuss religion’s role in social change. This webinar is part of the Religion and Foreign Policy Program's Social Justice Series, which explores the relationship between religion and social justice.  Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Good afternoon to you all, and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you for being with us. Today’s webinar is the first in our Social Justice Webinar Series in which we hope to explore the relationship between religion and social justice. As a reminder, the webinar is on the record. The audio, video, and transcript will be made available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. I’m really delighted to present to you today Ruth Messinger, Reverend Najuma Smith-Pollard, and Ani Zonneveld, three really terrific women. Ruth Messinger was the president of American Jewish World Service from 1998 to 2016 and is currently the organization’s inaugural global ambassador. She spent twenty years in public service in New York City as a city council member and Manhattan borough president. A tireless advocate and social-change visionary, Ruth mobilizes rabbis and faith-based communities throughout the United States to promote human rights. She previously sat on the State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group and is currently a member of the World Bank’s Moral Imperative Working Group on Extreme Poverty. Reverend Najuma Smith-Pollard is program manager for the USC Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement and executive director for the Southern California School of Ministry. She combines her experience as pastor and expertise as a community leader to run programs that train pastors to take on civic-engagement work. She’s a motivational speaker, author, life coach, radio personality, and community activist. Reverend Najuma was ordained as deacon in 1996 and as an itinerant elder in 2000. And since that time she’s held many positions as pastors at various AME churches. She also was in the ministries at Church Our Redeemer AME, pastor of A.K. Quinn AME Church, and pastor of St. James AME Church. And Ani Zonneveld is a writer, singer-songwriter, and the founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values. She spearheaded the founding of the Alliance of Inclusive Muslims, whose members span five continents. She’s on the U.N. Interagency Faith Advisory Council, and was recently commissioned by the U.N. Office of Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect to create an anti-hate-speech curriculum for Muslim communities in ten countries. So welcome, all. Thank you very much for being with us. I think we’ll start first with you, Reverend Najuma. SMITH-POLLARD: Good morning. FASKIANOS: In the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd, can you talk about what role you see the American religion community playing and really bringing about social change, which is very much needed? SMITH-POLLARD: Right. Good morning, Irina, and to everyone else on the panel. Thank you for having me, and I’m really grateful to be in this space, sharing space with you all and looking at how religion plays a role in social change. When we look at the George Floyd murder, his murder is not the first, nor is it unique. We’ve seen this before. And so what I believe religion’s place in this is to help guide communities through looking at the systemic problem from a theological standpoint, because it’s not just about the individual murder. It’s really about the systemic problem and what does, in my case, as a Christian, using the Bible, what does the Bible say about systemic issues that affect the day-to-day lives of individuals? And then what does God say about that so that I’m able to help my community interpret the times and then know how to move forward? So I think also it helps ground people, because this murder, like so many others, it has the ability of really shaking people. And in this particular case, George Floyd’s murder was so otherworldly in the way in which the presentation of a video and the way it came across—and I don’t want to trigger anyone by going into the details—but the way it just came across on camera, it has the ability to really cause people to lose hope, to lose encouragement, to lose grounding. And so the other role that as me as a pastor and the other role that I think religion has is to help people get grounded, to not really walk away from their faith in seeing something that violent. It was just very violent. And so it’s the navigation, but also the grounding. And then there’s the healing, right, because we know that religion has a healing aspect to it. And so, as community members, we have to heal individually, but we have families that we have to help carry through the healing process. And then the truth is America as a country has some healing it has to do. Yeah. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go now to Ruth to tackle the same question. MESSINGER: Thank you, Irina. Thank you to the Council on Foreign Relations. I’m delighted to be on with Najuma and Ani. It seems—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—to me that it’s an all-woman panel. I want to—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—the different roles that Najuma spoke to about healing, stabilizing, and then organizing to make change. But I want to say what I think is painfully obvious, and that is unless we are doing this in every faith community, in every country, and across every possible potential line of racial or religious division, we’re not going to get where we need to get. And so every issue—George Floyd’s one of them, but just one in an unfortunately very long string. Every issue, whoever is targeted and whoever does the targeting or does the attack, if it’s wrong, needs to be seen as wrong by all of us of any faith, and we need to be there to respond. On the broader question, Irina—you know, religion’s role in social change—I need to start by saying that it’s probably impossible to pick a bigger topic than that, but also that there’s none that is more essential right now. We’re in, obviously—Najuma spoke to this—we’re in desperate need of organized efforts for social change. We all on this panel, and hopefully in this audience, know religion as a force in the world and, I want to say carefully a force in the world that we would vastly prefer to have with us than against us, because where religion or religious forces are present, it makes a difference. But it’s not always clear it will be useful, and I think we have to acknowledge that. This is not unique to any religion. All religions have tendencies at various—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—in their history and in their theology to support the status quo, and to be a form of stability, and to kind of not rock the boat. So there is a tendency that I see again and again across all religions to praise the vision of a better world to come, but not necessarily to support the upheaval in the way things are to get us from here to there. So that’s the caution. And on the other side, of course, religions can be extremely useful in mobilizing for social change, precisely because they have this vision of a better world. They talk often about the world to come, using different language and different religious traditions. They can speak to people to convey—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—that a higher force, whatever the higher force is that you believe in, demands action. They have a way of providing people both with the stabilization that Najuma talked to, with the energy and determination to stick with efforts to make change over time. They can make it clear again, whatever their supreme being—God, Jesus, Allah, whatever—that this is a piece of what is expected of each and every adherent is to work toward that vision of a better world to come. So just speaking from my tradition, for the Jewish tradition for a minute, there’s a wonderful rabbinic debate about which is more important, study or action. And the conclusion is study is more important because it leads to action, which is a way of copping out but also saying, like, there’s work to be done, and studying is simply not sufficient. We all, from all religious traditions, have a mandate to pursue justice, something different than a passive state of just waiting for some magic thing to happen that will do the work. And we all have various traditions of prophets and people, again, speaking, on the one hand telling people that what they’re doing is destroying themselves), but again, reminding them that there’s a better way, reminding all of us that we need to go outside ourselves, to be there not only for ourself but for the other, and to act against evil. So I see religion as a potential powerful force, but only if it is willing to step in in all crises, mobilize its adherents, but do that collaboratively with people of other faiths to work for the kinds of changes that all of us want to see. And I think there’s a great deal of text that backs that up. SMITH-POLLARD: Absolutely. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Ruth. And now let’s go to Ani. ZONNEVELD: Hi. I second what Ruth said. It’s ameen to that. In Islam, the concept of justice is fundamental, and it’s mentioned fifty-three times in the Quran. But the mantra that we always hear, Islam is a religion of peace, rings hollow if it’s not being acted upon. And again, going back to what Ruth says, you know, it’s really time to act. And preaching it is just not enough. It’s sort of a copout. And so I think we hear this in the streets, no justice, no peace. It really rings loud and clear. And in the context of Islam as well, it’s quite known that there’s a verse that describes how God breathes soul into the fetus in the womb. And that for me, as a person of faith, is a clear indication that we are all created equal. And so, yes, of course, black lives matter and everyone’s lives matter. But the problem with faith communities is that we tend to behave and only tend to advocate for our personal and our almost tribal rights. So if you’re not black, you’re not going to advocate for an African-American. And if you are LGBT, you’re going to only focus on your LGBT issues, et cetera. So it’s very siloed in our advocacy. And this is the problem with social-justice movements. And I think until we collectively, regardless of what our issues are, we collectively come together and recognize our humanity, then only can we really, truly advance on the intersection of faith and social justice. And I’m really glad, for example, the fact that the Supreme Court made that decision that they did yesterday, a monumental decision on Title VII to defend the civil rights of the LGBT community. That means recognizing that they are also human beings. And the fact that—why their humanity is even asked a question is at the crux of the issue of social justice in the United States and in many other parts of the world, for that matter. So the way religion is used, Sharia law in particular, in the context of Islam and how Sharia law, which is basically 100 percent human-made construct over the centuries, an extrapolation by religious leaders and politicians of their understanding of the Quran with the social norms and culture norms of the day, like child forced marriages, female genital mutilation and cutting. These are social-justice issues that we are battling with even here in the United States, not just in Muslim-majority countries. And the fact that Sharia law and the human-rights abuses justified in the name of Sharia law at the Human Rights Council in the United Nations, it’s really quite appalling. So we have a lot of work to do in the context of faith and social-justice movement in redefining what does faith really mean, and how do we challenge the patriarchy system that has justified a lot of the abuses, human-rights abuses, no matter who that is? FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you all. So that is just the beginning of our discussion. We want to go now to all of you who are on with us for this webinar. If you click on the “participants” icon, you can raise your hand and contribute a comment, a question, so that we can have a very rich discussion. So I’m just going to look now. And, yes, we already have three hands raised. So let’s go first to Helen Boursier. And if you can identify yourself, your affiliation, that would be fantastic. BOURSIER: Hello. I am Reverend Doctor Helen Boursier, and I do research and writing on immigration. I volunteer with refugee families taking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. So with all of the attention that’s been going on this summer, my colleagues, who also are volunteer chaplains in various contexts, have felt like the migrants have gotten lost in the shuffle. And thousands, literally thousands, are suffering at our border. And I’m currently researching a book on overcoming the limitations of religious love for refugees taking asylum. So one of my questions is, what is the culpability that we have for willful ignorance on what is happening in my state—in Texas—the U.S.-Mexico border? And how can the interreligious faith community speak to this, and speak loudly? SMITH-POLLARD: I think something Ani said was very important, is at the base of our faith, I have to see everyone in their humanity first; so where we have a responsibility is to understand that those individuals are as valuable and that cause is as important as any other. But part of it is our faith traditions have to really get back to that core of seeing each other’s humanity above all, above all the different isms and schisms and things that make us different, that those are human beings. And if we claim to be people of faith and people of God and people of justice, then the cause is as important as any other cause. And I think that’s part of the discussion—and I’m so glad Ani brought it up—is that part of what, in the preaching and the teaching, is, like, reorienting communities around humanity, and then from there reorienting our activity to say I’m going to serve. I’m going to work. I’m going to act on behalf of all humanity, as opposed to all that look like me or all that talk like me or all that walk like me. So I think there’s a lot of work. And that’s where religion and faith groups have been culpable and have responsibility, because we have not always taught and preached from a place of humanity, and we’ve allowed our layers to get in the way. I had an experience yesterday. I was invited to be a part of another discussion. And the coordinator asked me, did I have a problem that one of the other guests would be transgender? And I said of course not. I said we’re the cause of justice for everybody. But the fact that he had to ask that question meant that apparently, in his interaction, he had met other pastors or leaders who would have been, like, oh, no, I won’t be on a panel with someone from the trans community. And it was, like, no way; like, who does that? But clearly we know that it has happened. So I would say that one of the things that we have to do is get back to teaching as a starting place about humanity and that our faith is a faith for humanity and not just our personal likes and dislikes. MESSINGER: So I actually want to—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—Dr. Boursier raised two questions. I just want to comment on the second one first, which is that, in this country, at least, America, people have a ridiculously short attention span. And so the children at the border were an issue file that no one paid any attention to. I’m going back about a year and a half. And then there was a picture of a little boy dead on the beach, and all of a sudden it became everybody’s focus and we were able to get out the fact that people were being kept in cages, that this country was violating—our country—violating its own laws on asylum and international law. But I think Dr. Boursier is right to just say that part of the responsibility, then, of thoughtful leaders—I’m going to say both political leaders and religious—is to remind people that at the same time as we’re living through the horror of COVID-19, and at the same time as racism and police violence is exploding across our country, the situation at the border continues. And frankly, out of public view, we have to all assume that it’s worse. But I (inaudible, technical difficulties)—one step further, if I could, and pick up on what Najuma said, because except for the people on this call who are Native American, we are all immigrants or children of immigrants. And I find it staggeringly difficult in my own community to get everyone to understand that virtually everything that’s happening, for example, in Guatemala that makes people flee to the border, it’s happening at the border, it’s happening with confused or destructive or violent U.S. policy against Guatemalan—just using that as an example—immigrants trying to get into this country, is an experience that in different ways, at different points in time each of our families had. If you are person of color here, then you were an immigrant possibly because—or your ancestors were dragged here as slaves, but everybody has a story. And the capacity, I say, in many of our groups and among many of our religious adherents to say, oh, yes, I know that story; but my story is different than the story of the people at the Mexican border, with all due respect, it’s fundamentally not different. You know, it’s really different to have been brought here a slave. It’s really different to have come here under the green card rule, but fundamentally, people should be able to choose where they want to live, to have the right to stay in their own home and countries of origin, and when they need to leave—not because they are being dragged someplace—but when they want to leave to have people pay attention to their situation, their crisis, and not dismiss it as being someone else’s story. So I think we need—and again, faith leaders can do this—to draw some of these connections: how my ancestors, and Ani’s ancestors, and Najuma’s ancestors got to this country. Of course the stories are different, and the stories are powerful, but all involve the question of whether or not people get to choose where they want to live and whether or not people are welcomed when they come to someplace different. And those are teachings in every one of our—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—and we should stop putting people in different boxes. ZONNEVELD: I want to ask people on the call and to also ask their community and institutions to take a pledge, so in our effort to cultivate that culture that is rooted in human rights, we have to overcome our own prejudices, and so we started an initiative called No Hate in My Faith—it’s #nohateinmyfaith—and the pledge is affirming the following: I pledge to refute and combat discrimination against any individual or community, including blacks, the LBGTQ+ community, women, Jews, Shia, Sunni, and Ahmadis Muslims by non-Muslims, atheists, or any other no matter who that other is. I pledge to eradicate all divisive, homophobic, and/or misogynistic teachings in my community and religious institutions I’m affiliated with, and will affirm the dignity of all individuals. What you teach in your religious institutions matter. If you want to address social justice at its core, it has to start with the hearts, and it starts with your own heart. We won’t get anywhere otherwise. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go next to Father Rafael Capo. CAPO: Yes, hello. Thank you, Irina, and to our great panel, as well—great conversation. We have seen recently in the protests and all that’s happening many, many young faces out there, and we also know that many of these young people are unaffiliated, nons that are not connected to institutional religion. Do you have any experiences or thoughts from your religious perspectives on how to accompany those young people and make them realize that their faith gives light to their commitments for social change? ZONNEVELD: If I may something, the youth have given up on religion, and it’s because the religious leaders have failed in addressing social justice issues in the name of religion. As a matter of fact, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is being used by religious institutions to defend their right to discriminate in the name of religion. So the youth are very smart and up on it, and they’re not going to take it. And so the fact that a lot of the religious leaders are absent in the marches, are not marching with the people is indicative of the problem. And until religious leaders take the leadership, and take ownership and their responsibility, and how they cultivate the culture of discrimination within their religious institutions, the youth are leaving faith in masses. So it’s our responsibility as community leaders and religious leaders to redefine what it means to be a person of faith. SMITH-POLLARD: Right. And I would just add to Ani’s point—and because you asked the question—you used the word how, and so the how to is that we have to be where they are. It was important for me in Los Angeles to be present—I couldn’t attend all the protests. I have small children, and a compromised immune system, but I made it a point that on two occasions I would go and be present. And on one of them I had the opportunity to just share a prayer. And let me say this: when young people see people of faith present and accounted for, but also using their voice—there was no, well, she’s praying, I’m not going to pray; or she’s saying God and Jesus, I’m not. They all participated. And I bring that up because I think part of what happens is that we want young people to be where we are, as the faith leader, but we got to go where they are. So I can’t be on my laptop preaching justice—no justice, no peace—and I don’t get out there with them. And I’m not—and everybody may not be called to protest and march, but you have to be where they are. And sometimes, as religious leaders, we’re guilty of operating in our privilege, or operating in our comfort, and saying, well, I’m going to speak from my comfort zone. I’m not getting out there where they are. And the how to is that—(laughs)—sometimes we have to apply the riskiness of faith, and get where the young people are, and go where they are so they can see our faith in action. And to Ani’s point, they just don’t see it. And don’t see it enough, let me say that—not that no one is doing it, but you don’t see it enough. And so what I would offer to anybody and everybody is if you want to connect with young people, go where they are. If they are protesting, find a space in that protest where you can be available and visible. If they are rallying, find a space in the rally where you can be present and accountable. That’s how it happens. But to remain in our comfort and then say, well, come to me, this is—and right now especially, this is a season now where we have to go to them and show them that we mean what we preach and teach. MESSINGER: So I would say amen to that, but it’s even more dramatic right now because at least in some of our cities, not meeting in physical buildings. And so you can be certain that no young person is going to see her or his religious group, or some other religious group, find them online—forget it. So if they want to be moved by religious—if you want them to be attentive to religion and religion speaking for social justice, you first have to get where they are, you have to make it clear that you are on their side and that you are there for faith reasons, and then slowly, over time, the rest will follow. And I’ll issue a challenge—Irina, I promise to be careful now—(laughter)—but in every one of our cities and where every one of our audience people is, an interfaith effort to support voting in November would have an impact on that same generation of young people because they’re not only turning away from some faith organizations, I’m not sure that elected officials or politics speak to their lives. SMITH-POLLARD: Absolutely. MESSINGER: So the responsibility to vote is, A, a democratic responsibility, and B, entirely non-partisan. And I would love to see, from now to November, in every jurisdiction imam, pastors, priests, rabbis standing up and saying, wherever we find you, whatever your orientation, whatever your interests, if American, you need to go to the polling place and put your beliefs into action. And if that was done by faith leaders, A, I think it would inspire more people to actually go to the polls, and B, it would certainly tell young people that their faith leaders—excuse my language for—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—but are operating on this earth instead of on some cloud. SMITH-POLLARD: Yeah. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let’s go now to Tereska Lynam. LYNAM: Great. This is Tereska Lynam from the University of Oxford, and I’m attached—well, first of all, I’m from—my hometown is Minneapolis, and I live part-time in Miami, Florida, and part-time in London, but I’m attached to various religious organizations of various faiths throughout mainly the U.S. and Europe, but also a little bit in like Malaysia—and so really interfaith, right? And what—Ruth Messinger talked about this a little bit—what I have noticed is that people have a very short attention span, as she mentioned, and we tend to get really excited about social justice with whatever is in the headlines. I think one of the blessings of COVID-19, if we’re going to call it that, is that people have had more attention to pay into the news, which is what made the—not just George Floyd, but right before that, Amy Cooper. So it really made white people see—and presumably Christian white people—how psychopathic and sociopathic people can be, right? And what does discrimination—how arbitrary it can be, and there was no deserving of it, or anything—you know, like, really hard. But this— even a few weeks later I’m noticing, even in my Minneapolis groups, people—their attention is like, oh, I don’t want to pay attention to that anymore. Now it’s going to get hard, now we have to figure out what’s going to happen with the police. And in Miami, we’ve had what we call the American child hostage crisis going on—now it’s 801 days of the asylum victims being held in concentration camps for kids, right? And so I was just wondering kind of how you guys think we should address the low attention span and really affect change so that we’re not just another part of the flash in the pan? And I just will add that what I have seen work really well is if the religious organizations have specific arms to stay married to a particular justice issue so they have to go and lobby politicians, and work to get the legal stuff to really help it and keep that sustained attention. So thank you for allowing me to talk so much, and thank you for this beautiful presentation, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts. MESSINGER: So just very quickly, I suspect we might all agree on this, but I think this is another example, as you said, of like attention span or doing the easy thing. And Najuma when she spoke, I think, in the first round, used the word privilege, and this is the part of the issue is that to make the social changes that are needed, everyone is going to have to examine our own privilege and what we’re willing to put on the line to create societies that are more equitable and just. And so it’s one thing to gasp in horror at the murder of Floyd, and another thing to sit down and debate the intricacies of the Minneapolis police department budget and what kinds of changes should be made. And some faith leaders for sure are going to say, I can support these changes—and I think you should all be supporting them—but I can’t support—and then some people will be angry. That’s the process of American democracy. We don’t all agree on every next step, but we have to be willing to hear each other’s point of view, and the message has to go out just—now forget the kids on the border because there is now police violence—you can’t solve police violence by going to a demonstration or holding up a powerful sign that says, “black lives matter.” And for some people, that’s called crossing a huge bridge, as it were, in their minds to say, yes, black lives matter and I understand black lives are under attack. And then the question is, OK, what are you going to do about it? What are we going to do in New York to—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—alterations in our police department budget so that—small example—we cut the police budget enough so that we fund summer youth employment, which otherwise has no money whatsoever in the budget coming—(inaudible, technical difficulties)? But that’s something again that faith leaders—and this raises the issue that I was skirting around before, but speaking out on issues and speaking out on voting is part of how you help a congregation or a community take concrete steps toward justice. It is not partisan activity. There is a difference between political activity and partisan activity, and working to make social change is likely only going to work if it involves some politics and some political effort. That’s allowed. That’s allowed by clergy, it’s allowed by religious organizations. And then I want to say one thing, Tereska—and I don’t want to start a firestorm—but I do know a lot of people in New York who hated watching George Floyd be murdered. They watched that eight-and-a-half-minute video longer than they watched the issue in Central Park because the issue in Central Park is so much more close to home and so much more a question of like, my god, that’s a woman that looks just like me. How could she have done that? Have I ever done that? And so even there I want to say that it’s hard to bring these issues right up for people to look at them, and I actually would urge people that are doing social and racial justice teaching, look at those two minutes and have an honest conversation about what was going on in that woman’s mind, and how dangerous it was, and how likely it is that those who are never going to kneel on someone’s jugular could be in a situation like that and act incorrectly. SMITH-POLLARD: Thank you, Ruth. That was beautiful. And I would just add social change is like—what’s the race where they pass the baton? What’s it called? MESSINGER: Relay. Relay. Relay. SMITH-POLLARD: Relay. Thank you. Relay. And I would say social change is like a very long relay race, and everybody has got their leg. And I think protesters kind of like are that first leg; they give you that first burst, and you get out there, you get ahead of it. And then it’s passed to the next leg, which is those who are going to do the organizing. Now they’re going to organize meetings and conversations. The next leg is those who are going—to Ruth’s point—to have the meetings with the politicians and the electeds and, you know, the stakeholders. And so there’s a leg that’s passed, and then it’s finally passed to the next leg which is now the legislative leg where people who know how to write laws—because most protesters don’t know how to write legislation so that baton has to get passed to the person who knows how to then take the cry of BLM, defund the police, and now write that as legislation, and then lobby for it. But that leg is like two or three legs down, and then it makes it to the courts, and then it becomes policy change. And so I think that’s what we have to all—and I think what’s important is all of us have to identify what leg am I on. What leg do I run the best in? Because I may protest, but strongest run might be in the legislative piece where I’m helping now to take the cry to a legislative bill, to write it up and to submit it, and all that—you know, all that kind of good stuff. That’s—clearly that’s not my leg. (Laughs.) And so I think that’s how it happens, and for those of us that are in those spaces, what we can do is help people identify what leg that they’re strongest in. But social change is long, it’s hard, and no one person, no one group can do it all, so that’s where come back to the interfaith piece is that all of us have to come and be part of this relay race and then pass the baton to the next leg, and the next leg until we get all the way around and win the race. But it takes a long time. And Pastor Murray used to say, catch on fire and people watch you burn. And the trick is not just to catch on fire but to stay lit. And so part of that is maintaining our candles, you know, and maintaining the oil so we stay lit. And then they’ll still—as long as you—as long as you’ve got—as long as you’re on fire, somebody can watch you burn. (Laughter.) ZONNEVELD: I’ll do a quick answer so that we can take on more questions— FASKIANOS: And we have a lot. (Laughter.) ZONNEVELD: Plus, I can add, Tereska, I’m originally from Malaysia, so it was interesting. But to stay lit, this is the thing. So I’ve put up on my Facebook page, when the malls are open, the theaters start screening your much-anticipated films, and the concerts are back on, are you still going to be paying attention and going to those marches? I think it is also the responsibility of religious leaders maybe to put down on their calendars every sermon, every khutbahs that they do, religious services, they include a few sentences, a reminder, this is an issue that—social justice issues that we need to address, pay attention. I think the constant reminder every week is necessary by religious leaders. SMITH-POLLARD: Absolutely. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. Let’s go to Besheer Mohamed next. MOHAMED: Sure. My name is Besheer Mohamed. I’m a researcher at the Pew Research Center. So at the beginning of the year, before these protests, the Pew Research Center actually did a survey, and we found that about four in ten white adults said that houses of worship shouldn’t address topics like immigration or race relations. And only about 8 percent of white adults said that it was essential that houses of worship address them. And I’m curious if the panelists think that recent events will change that, will increase the appetite among certain people to hear this in their congregation because before all this happened we were seeing a lot of people saying that, no, we don’t want this in our church. ZONNEVELD: Well, that’s basically what I was saying. I think it is the responsibility of religious leaders—if they claim to be leaders—then step up and do it. And so I don’t think it’s necessarily the congregation. I think there is an awakening moment for many of the congregation members to understand the issue, for example, of anti-blackness. Even with the Muslim societies and communities it’s terrible. And so I think it is the responsibility of religious leaders to take these issues on and to be brave if they are really standing up for—in the Islamic context of justice. So that would be my response to that. MESSINGER: So I do work training rabbis and rabbinical students, and for me—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—critical which applies across all faiths, and Ani really just spoke to it, but I’ll just give it two words—is moral courage, and you need to have moral courage to be a faith-based leader of value. Along the issues that we are talking about, I am sure there is a way—and I’m sure that Pew itself should be— as a person seriously steeped in ritual and going to what Najuma spoke about right at the beginning—able to offer solace, able to be there for people, and able to be a comforting leader. That is a piece of what it means to have faith and be a faith leader. But I think it has always also meant to prophesy, and to go out, and to act in ways that will make a difference toward justice. And we need to educate our future clergy and our current clergy to be able to do that. And just one point I’d make to you is then the clergy need to be clear about that, you know? And a clergy person of any one faith that we’re talking about needs to be able to stand up and say, I’ve been looking at the current crisis of racism in the United States or the current problems of police violence. I am going to be leading this congregation or this community to take stronger steps to remedy these problems. I hope you will all be with me, and I hope you will be with me for the following reasons. And to quote some text, I have a great text that is a Jewish text but it’s not used very often, but it’s in a—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—and it basically says—I’m now paraphrasing—it’s really nice to get (inaudible, technical difficulties)—of being well off and sit back and enjoy things, and it’s comfortable to look out and—what are those people fussing about? And I don’t want anything to do with them. And then the text continues, but of course if you do you contribute to the overthrow of the world, and it really does say that, so people not hide behind what is comfortable in their faith community. If they are serious, if they are leading faith communities, they have to stand for justice, and that’s not always comfortable. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Mark Fowler next. FOWLER: So I’m the CEO at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, and I thank you all so much for your comments so far. I wonder if you could speak to—so one thing is trauma because, there was a conversation a little bit earlier about tribalism, and I actually have difficulty with that word because people have lived in isolation and segregation so the result of that would be tending to one’s own or tending to one’s self. And I wondered if you could all speak to the work of working around trauma, not just for religious communities, but also religious leaders because the calls I think are important in terms of the role that religious leaders can play, but we’re also—to Ruth’s point—talking about human beings, people who have calls and visions on their life that may not actually, in their own mind, spirit and heart, jibe with what’s being called for today. And also, if you could address the idea of what does the end of white supremacy look like because we’ve talked about—I’ve heard the word patriarchy, and I think there was a mention of the word white supremacy before, but religion’s intricate role, and not just Christianity, and throughout time, the idea of the passing back and forth of power between religious institutions and political institutions, and then societal institutions—but really what does the end of white supremacy look like and what is religion’s role in that? Because I do feel that there is— we often lean into the ways in which we are the same, and the ways in which our traditions call for love, and peace, et cetera—leaving out the whole rest of those sacred texts and experiences where war is justified, rape is justified—like there are any number of human rights violations—which we would call them today—that are justified within our sacred texts and within our teachings. And I would love to have you all speak to what are the—I guess what would be the curriculum, if you will—not in its totality obviously, but what would be the curriculum that we would need to begin to fashion or give more time, attention and money to—of existing programs and policies that are really getting to those questions because we’ve got a fingerprint on all of this, and without a kind of declaration of this is where we—this is where we contributed to the events we see today; this is what we are prepared to do about it now. And we’re going to support clergy, and lay people, and congregants, and members otherwise to enact that change. And we also want to hear how difficult that’s going to be for you to change your heart and mind from where it’s at right now. So if you can all address my mad ramblings to the degree that you feel comfortable, I’d appreciate it. (Laughter.) SMITH-POLLARD: That was great, Mark. So if I heard you correct, the first part was about trauma, what does the end of white supremacy look like, and what does a potential curriculum look like. So I’ll go in that order and just answer what I can. And I’m going to tie this to a little bit to what Besheer had mentioned about congregations that didn’t want to hear sermons around these social justice issues, and part of that is because it is traumatizing. It is traumatizing to talk about a man losing his breath, or an individual—an unarmed person being shot. All that is traumatizing. As one who lost her son—my son was murdered, and I remember sharing that in a space, and somebody came up to me, and they were like, well, maybe you should give trigger warnings before you share that because that’s traumatizing for the listener. And I thought, that’s interesting because sometimes we’re more concerned about those who don’t want to be traumatized than those who have been traumatized. And so part of what this retraining looks like is saying to those who don’t want to hear about trauma, to say, but consider the children at the border who are being traumatized; like, I know you don’t want to be discomforted to hear about my trauma, but imagine what the trauma is doing to me. And so when we talk about religious leaders, I think what—especially in this season, what a lot of religious leaders have to work through is their issues with trauma, you know, and realizing that, if I’m going to live into my faith—I’m going to really live into my faith, it’s not enough for me to just deal with the parts of my faith that are non-traumatizing. If you read the Bible from beginning to end, there are texts that are traumatizing, but the only way that my faith informs me to see about your issue is I’ve got to be willing to step into your trauma, even if it makes me uncomfortable. And I think that’s where a lot of clergy may have to do some work, is wrestling with how they manage trauma, and maybe even go through some informed training around trauma. But to say, I don’t want to hear it because it’s too traumatizing—well, what about the person that’s being traumatized? The second thing about what does the end of white supremacy look like, it’s not just shared power. It’s giving power, right? I remember being in a practical kind of practicum where they shifted the room around, and they put those who were in the front, white, and those who were in the way, way back last row, black. And we were asked some questions. And the reality is it’s not that you share power; it’s actually that you give power, right? And so I think what the end of white supremacy looks like is individuals willing to give up power. That’s the only way that that happens. Part of why there is such a protection—people are trying to protect their power, which also has a lot of psychological stuff attached to that. And then a curriculum, I don’t know if you can retrain—I don’t know if you can—because that’s a part of heart matter. It’s also a heart and mind matter. I don’t know if there is a diversity training for white supremacy. I don’t know if that exists yet. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe Ruth or Ani has that answer. (Laughs.) MESSINGER: Ani, go ahead. ZONNEVELD: So I’m going to touch on the trauma of faith leaders and the trigger issues that Najuma addressed. I think it’s really important, when we address a lot of the social justice issues, we also include maybe counselors. And I think this is an issue that’s often—these individuals, these experts are oftentimes left out of the conversation, which I think would be an important contribution to the discussion and to resolve a lot of the trauma, or trigger points, or what have you. And on curriculum, in my introduction, Irina mentioned that I was commissioned by the United Nations to develop an anti-hate curriculum, and this is in the Islamic context. So the curriculum was basically a workshop on how to retune and how to unwire the prejudices people have towards the other. And so this is on the issue of apostasy and blasphemy laws. But it is really—the structural workshop is basically putting yourself—do unto others as you want others to do unto you. It’s that simple. But then, you really have to actually construct the conversation to question the participants and those whose minds and hearts you need to change to really go through a particular exercise. And the exercises that we have—or that I’ve developed is from the religious and faith context. And so that’s out there. But there’s also ex-KKK members that have come around, so there are programs out there, discussions and forums out there, and there’s also the curriculum that I’ve developed in partnership and with the support of the U.N office. So that’s my two cents. MESSINGER: Just a quick comment. First of all, Mark, congratulations on the ongoing work of the Tanenbaum Center. I think trauma is something you have to acknowledge for everybody, and Najuma talked about it, first of all, the people who are actually traumatized and bringing them front and center through a loving community, but then recognizing that some of these stories are traumatic. I can’t tell you what the end of white supremacy looks like, but I can tell you—and this is the hard thing—that nothing we do in the next three months to change police department budgets, or to control some of the centers of particular race-based violence in our communities right now, is going to end white supremacy because it has been operative in this country for over four hundred years. And so it’s a pretty rough curriculum—to be able to find the right language—I’m not suggesting my language, but the right language to say to people, your ancestors concentrated on brutalizing people; threw the Native Americans off the land that they were farming and stewarding, and that was of religious value to them; transmitted diseases to them that killed them; and then set about systematically bringing people of color over here to be their slaves. Now I am not doing that with my seven-year-old grandson in that language, but I think places like our faiths, and like the Tanenbaum Center, need to think about how do we teach(inaudible, technical difficulties) of our faiths allow, which is a history of error and redemption on some level or another, so how do we say we’ve been wrong on some things and we need basically to reform our ways and the big-picture story. And—the point that each of us has made a little bit—it will involve giving some things up. There are—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—very simple. This probably exists in other cities. There are criteria right now for young people to get into certain specialized schools, and there is evidence—growing statistical evidence that those tests have a race bias that works against people of color. So, obviously, we want to get rid of those things. But if you get rid of those things, you will change the mix of who gets in. Now some of us know that that’s a huge value to the society, but it means that the pie is not infinite. Some people will, quote/unquote—please don’t misquote me on this—“lose” places because we’ve broadened the space for everybody. But where is the greater good, and how do we adjust in our own thinking to accept that? FASKIANOS: We have so many questions and comments. We’re not going to get to them all, so let’s go next to Katherine Marshall. MARSHALL: Hello, and how wonderful it is to see the four of you on the screen. (Laughs.) I’m from Georgetown University, Katherine Marshall. I’m very struck by a number of the comments that you’ve made. Ruth, on the issue of the short attention span, it’s not very long ago that we were struggling with women’s rights and women’s issues, which seem to be completely obscured as well as the refugee issues. And the turning inward in the United States means we’re not looking at so many of the social justice issues in the world that are profoundly affected by the COVID crisis. You have the wonderful metaphor of the relay race. I think we also use the marathon, but I think we need something better, but I’m—maybe in your final comments—because we’re right at the end—you could give us some sense of how we bring these together. How do we overcome the short attention span and the inward obsession—from the religious perspective deal with some of the difficult issues that religious institutions shy away from as we’re looking ahead into the post-COVID dream. MESSINGER: I think we’re almost about out of time, but I’m going to make one counterintuitive comment, Katherine—and thank you for your ongoing work at the Berkley Center. I’m actually going to make two comments. One is we should note that the Berkley Center at Georgetown—Georgetown is the university that has done the most to identify its role in perpetrating slavery and come up with an actual program of reparations. I have no idea how well it’s working, but they are light years ahead of a large number of institutions that a lot of us profess to love. Congratulations. But the second point I’m going to say—the counterintuitive point is we’re going to get there only if we celebrate all the good news. Every time Ani or Najuma’s community somebody stands up for justice, or somebody does something really magnificent, or a young person that some—Father Capo asked about earlier—but a young person that really is there on the front lines doing an act of service, getting recognized. We have to celebrate all of those small victories or we will not be able to sustain the marathon or even bring in the new teams. So I think that’s a piece of the answer. FASKIANOS: OK. Ani, do you want to do next? Because I want to give each of you the opportunity to just wrap up, and then we’ll— ZONNEVELD: Yeah, I think—I’d like to echo, I think, the persistency of religious leaders, community members, institutions—educational institutions like Katherine’s—the one that Katherine is at and others—CFR. I think—I think CFR does a good job about raising issues on social medias through their short forums and also their short summaries of issues that they have their experts write on, for example—and for us to actually share those concerns as well and those issues. And I think the more we work together, regardless of what those issues are collectively, in support of each other’s work, I think that’s the other way to sustain the attention and to also challenge the status quo, that patriarchy, the supremacy ideology, what have you—whatever that supremacy ideology is because it’s not just white supremacy. There’s all kinds of other supremacies, and I think they all need to be challenged. And I think that, at the end of the day, it is how much effort and how are we, particularly the male religious leaders, how comfortable are you at giving up that space or sharing that space with others. And I think this is the challenge, even in the United Nations. Even at the United Nations Faith Advisory Council you have some very patriarchal faith organizations on the committee, and this is a constant challenge that we are chiseling away—(laughs)—let’s put it that way. (Laughter.) FASKIANOS: And Najuma. Go. SMITH-POLLARD: And I will just close with the word accountability. There were a few of us here in Los Angeles who are working together, and what we’ve talked about is if we’re actually going to see the mayor, and the chief, and all these electeds do the things that they have promised in some of these short-spurt meetings up front, you know, doing the urgent things, is that there just has to be a level of accountability. And the only way to see the change is to keep holding people accountable to their words. And one of the things that we’ve asked for is ongoing meetings and conversations because you’re right—and to Ruth’s point about the short attention span, what tends to happen is that everybody swarms in, and then the attention span like a wave just kind of goes back out. But there has to be people, a cohort of people that stay up in it to hold people—themselves—accountable, hold faith groups, hold faith communities, hold electeds, council members, whoever is stakeholders accountable. And so I would offer that everyone maybe try to get with an accountability group, create an accountability group to say we will hold our faith community accountable, or we will hold our electeds accountable, or we’ll hold the police department accountable, or—wherever you are stationed to serve and work, get with an accountability group and make the commitment to hold accountability there. That’s the only way it happens is someone has to do the holding of accountability. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Well, thank you all. We have gone over, and I apologize to everybody who had their virtual hands raised. We obviously should have allotted much more time for this conversation, and we will think about that going forward. But we are going to be continuing the discussion. So a big shout out and thank you to Ruth Messinger, Najuma Smith-Pollard, and Ani Zonneveld for this terrific discussion, and you’ve launched a really great series for us. We encourage you to follow their work on Twitter at @Ruth_Messinger, at @RevJuju, and at @AniZonneveld. And you should also follow us CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy program on Twitter at @CFR_Religion for announcements and information. Also send us your comments, suggestions to [email protected]. As we start developing this series we’d love to hear from you. So thank you all, stay well, and we will reconvene.