—EDITED TRANSCRIPT—

and the CENTER FOR NEIGHBORHOOD ENTERPRISE present a discussion entitled

A Post-Racial America?

Thursday, January 15, 2009 ▪ 12:00 to 2:00 p.m. Hudson Institute ▪ Betsy and Walter Stern Conference Center ▪ 1015 15th Street, NW ▪ Suite 600

“It’s been said that the ascendancy of Barack Obama signals the beginning of a ‘post-racial’ America. I wish. What we have witnessed, I think, is something less profound but still hugely significant. Obama’s election means that in America, including at the highest levels of our politics, race is no longer an automatic deal-breaker. That’s a major step forward in the thinking of white America.” So begins a November 11 piece by retired Washington Post columnist WILLIAM RASPBERRY entitled “A Path Beyond Grievance.”

Whether or not America has entered a “post-racial” era and what that might mean was the topic of a January 15 panel discussion co-hosted by Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal and the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE). The panel featured RASPBERRY and three other long-standing writers, neighborhood activists, and community leaders who have been eloquent spokesmen both for the nation’s obligation to address its racial divisions and for the positive steps that minority communities can take on their own behalf: the Reverend DeForest Blake “BUSTER” SOARIES, Jr., attorney EDWARD W. NORTON, and CNE founder and president ROBERT WOODSON, Sr. The Bradley Center’s WILLIAM SCHAMBRA moderated the discussion.

PROGRAM AND PANEL

12:00 p.m. Welcome by Hudson Institute’s WILLIAM SCHAMBRA 12:10 Panel discussion ROBERT WOODSON, Center for Neighborhood Enterprise BUSTER SOARIES, First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens (Somerset, NJ) EDWARD NORTON, attorney WILLIAM RASPBERRY, formerly with The Washington Post 1:10 Question-and-answer session 2:00 Adjournment

FURTHER INFORMATION

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS PREPARED FROM AN AUDIO RECORDING and edited by Krista Shaffer. To request further information on this event or the Bradley Center, please visit our web site at http://pcr.hudson.org, contact Hudson Institute at (202) 974-2424, or send an e-mail to Krista Shaffer at [email protected].

HUDSON INSTITUTE

1015 15th Street, N.W. 202.974.2400 Suite 600 202.974.2410 Fax Washington, DC 20005 http://pcr.hudson.org

Panel Biographies

Edward W. Norton is a Washington-DC based attorney with a long history in race-related issues. He served as general counsel for the New York City Housing Authority from 1973 to 1977, and as deputy general counsel at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1977 to 1979. Next, he was general counsel for the US Small Business Administration (SBA) until 1981. Norton also served as the chair of the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics, a post he held from 1982 to 1989. He was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University in 1989 and 1990, where he taught a seminar on race, ethnicity and public policy. Norton’s primary focus since 1989 has been minority business access to government contracts.

William Raspberry is the president of Baby Steps (http://www.takebabysteps.com/), a parent training and empowerment program he created in his hometown of Okolona, Mississippi. He was a columnist for The Washington Post for nearly four decades, as well as Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy Studies at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. He retired from the Post at the end of 2005, in part to devote more time to Baby Steps. Raspberry’s commentaries, often on public policy concerns such as education, crime, justice, drug abuse, and housing, earned the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1994. Raspberry’s newspaper career began with a summer job at the Indianapolis Recorder in 1956. His duties there as reporter, photographer, and editor inspired him to join The Washington Post in 1962, after serving two years in the US Army. At the Post, he was hired as a teletype operator, and quickly advanced to general assignment reporter, copy editor, and assistant city editor. His coverage of the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles earned him the Capital Press Club’s “Journalist of the Year” award. Raspberry’s column first ran in 1966 in the local section of the Post. In 1971, his column was moved to the paper’s op-ed page. Syndication by The Washington Post Writers Group began in 1977; at its peak, the column appeared in more than 225 newspapers.

William A. Schambra is the director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. Prior to joining the Hudson Institute in 2003, Schambra was director of programs at the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. Before joining Bradley in 1992, Schambra served as a senior advisor and chief speechwriter for Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Director of the Office of Personnel Management Constance Horner, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan. Schambra has written extensively on the Constitution, the theory and practice of civic revitalization, and civil society in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Policy Review, Christian Science Monitor, Nonprofit Quarterly, Philanthropy, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and Crisis, and is the editor of several volumes, including As Far as Republican Principles Will Admit: Collected Essays of Martin Diamond.

Dr. DeForest B. Soaries, Jr. is the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey. A pioneer of faith-based community development, Soaries has led First Baptist in the construction of a new $20 million church complex and the formation of many not- for-profit entities to serve the community surrounding the church. In addition to his pastoral duties, Soaries is a popular speaker at colleges, universities, conferences and churches around the world as well as a frequent advisor to major corporations in the areas of diversity, philanthropy and community relations. From January 12, 1999 to January 15, 2002 Soaries served as New Jersey’s 30th Secretary of State, making him the first African American male to serve as a Constitutional officer of the State. Appointed by former Governor Christine Todd Whitman, he managed one of the premier departments of state government and served as a senior advisor to the governor on issues that transcended traditional departmental lines. In February 2003, Soaries was appointed by President Bush to serve as a public director of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York. He was a member of the affordable housing committee of the bank. Soaries is also the former chairman of the United States Election Assistance Commission, established by Congress to implement the “Help America Vote Act” of 2002; in November 2004 this Commission was the first federal agency to oversee a Presidential election. Soaries has also taught courses at Princeton Theological Seminary, Drew University Theological School, Kean University, and Mercer County College.

Robert L. Woodson, Sr., is founder and president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE, online at http://www.cneonline.org/), which he founded in 1981 with the name National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. Often referred to as the godfather of the movement to empower neighborhood-based organizations, Bob Woodson’s social activism dates back to the 1960s, when as a young civil rights activist, he developed and coordinated national and local community development programs. During the ’70s he directed the National Urban League’s Administration of Justice division and then served as a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. For more than 40 years Woodson has been a source of guidance and support for grassroots organizations around the world. He was instrumental in paving the way for resident management and ownership of public housing, and brought together task forces of grassroots groups to advise the 104th Congress, the Pennsylvania Legislature, and the Wisconsin Assembly. He is consulted by cabinet officials, numerous governors, members of Congress, academicians, business leaders, and the news media. In 2006 he received a Presidential appointment to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Woodson has worked with youth intervention and violence prevention programs since the 1960s and has written several books on the subject, including a Summons to Life. He is also the author of The Triumphs of Joseph: How Community Healers are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods, published by The Free Press in January, 1998, and as well as many articles. Woodson is a recipient of the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the “genius” award. In 2008 he received the prestigious Bradley Prize and the Manhattan Institute’s Social Entrepreneurship Award. And most recently, Woodson was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George W. Bush.

Proceedings

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: My name is Bill Schambra, and I’m director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at Hudson Institute. My Bradley Center colleague Krista Shaffer and I are pleased to welcome you to today’s panel, entitled “A Post-Racial America?” which we’re proud to co-sponsor with Bob Woodson and his Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE, online at http://www.cneonline.org/).

We’re now less than one week away from the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama, the prospect of which brought nationally syndicated columnist William Raspberry out of retirement to write a Washington Post op-ed on November 11, 2008, entitled “A Path Beyond Grievance.”1 In it, he suggested that while it may be too much to say that the ascendancy of Barack Obama signals the beginning of a post-racial America, it is not too much to say that we are entering an era in which the problems of black community demand something beyond, as he put it, “civil rights – or grievance-based – solutions.”

Are we indeed entering such a period – and if so, what might such solutions look like? This is an issue that Bob Woodson’s Center for Neighborhood Enterprise has been wrestling with for over a quarter of a century, now. I’ve been privileged to sit at Bob’s feet over those years, to try to learn what I could from his vast wisdom on the subject, and more important, to try to catch and convey something of the passion that he brings to this topic. So it seemed to me that this was a superb time to explore the argument in this column by Mr. Raspberry by bringing together today’s distinguished panel of community leaders, who have labored long in this particular vineyard. We will begin with some thoughts by William Raspberry, for nearly four decades a columnist for The Washington Post and today president of Baby Steps (http://www.takebabysteps.com/), a parent training and empowerment program he created in his hometown of Okolona, Mississippi.

Next, we’ll hear from Pastor DeForest Soaries, “Buster” Soaries, senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey and former secretary of state for the State of New Jersey. Pastor Soaries as well has been a source of wisdom and inspiration, I know, for CNE as well as for the Bradley Center. Next, Edward Norton, a DC-based attorney with a long and distinguished career in race-related issues including especially minority business opportunities. And to wrap up our opening presentations, we will hear from Bob Woodson. Then we’ll have a bit of an exchange among the panelists, and then we’ll open the floor to questions and comments from the audience.

First, Mr. Raspberry!

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: Good afternoon! I’ll just sit, if it’s okay – because standing (at the podium) suggests more formality than I feel, now. I’ll make a few rather rambling remarks and then turn it over to the orderly mind of Buster Soaries to straighten things out. (Laughter.)

1 A copy of this article can be found online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/11/10/AR2008111001544.html.

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I was thinking of a couple of things. One is an exchange that I can’t swear happened, but supposedly around 1961 or 1962 – somewhere in there – Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, was making a speech in which he was being very upbeat about the progress Negroes – that’s what we were in those days – were making in America. And in what we thought was a flight of fancy – or fantasy, he said that it was quite likely that within fifty years there would be a black president of the United States. And we sort of laughed. And we especially laughed when Malcolm X pointed then out that in the fifty years of the NAACP, they hadn’t had a black president yet! (Laughter.) And it was true – until Montague Cobb was elected in 1975. Prior to 1975, all of the presidents of the NAACP had been white.

So we laughed at Malcolm’s wit – but we also bought Malcolm’s premise that while there was incremental progress happening and it was to be applauded, there was lots and lots of work to do, and it was sheer fantasy to imagine that in less than half a century there could be a black person ascending to the highest office in the land – and some say the most powerful office in the world.

And yet, if it was 1961 when this exchange supposedly happened, it took rather less than the fifty years Roy Wilkins mentioned for this to happen. I think Roy himself might have been a bit surprised!

What to make of it?

In terms of this ushering in a “post-racial America,” I don’t think so. My thought is that ending racism in America – getting to post-racial America – is like global warming. You can believe that it is underway, but the evidence is so herky-jerky. It gets warm over here for a while, and you get hurricanes, and then it gets cold as hell. (Laughter.) Some places are having record cold temperatures today. That doesn’t dispute global warming, but it says that you can’t really predict an orderly transition from where you are to where you imagine you will someday be. So I don’t take the election of Barack Obama as evidence that we have taken a great leap and landed in post-racial America. It does renew my hope that we can get there – that we will get there – if you are careful to define what you mean by “post-racial America.”

Sometimes we think that “post-racial” means getting beyond your ability to see me as a black person. If that’s what it means, I guess I don’t really want post-racial America. I think about that. During the early days of school desegregation, there’s a story I must have heard a dozen times in different settings, but it was always the same old story. A little girl, white, goes to a newly integrated public school for her first day of school. Her anxious mother is waiting for her when she gets home – or comes to pick her up – and asks, “Honey, how did your first day of school go?” And the little girl says, “Oh, it was great! I made a new friend.” And the mother, anxious as adults will be, says, “That’s wonderful! Is she white or black?” And the girl replies, “I don’t know – I’ll look tomorrow.” (Laughter.)

As I said, I must have heard that story a dozen times – as an authentic story. And it’s always told to me by white people. (Laughter.) And the assumption that I got from it was that they considered it rude to notice my skin. They were happiest – and thought I would be happiest – when they simply did not notice that I was black, the way you do when somebody you just met is

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missing a leg or an eye; you look all around and pretend that you don’t notice the missing appendages. Well, they know you see it!

To me, “post-racial” was sort of summed up – and this is my last reference to the 1960s – in a 1963 speech that Haile Selassie made before the United Nations in which he was talking about what it would take to usher in a peace particularly in Africa but in the world. He laid out some conditions that he thought were necessary for that happy end, and that I think are perhaps necessary for getting us to post-racial America. We can’t have this happy outcome until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; until the dream of a lasting peace, world citizenship, and the rule of international morality are achieved; and until – this one I liked – the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes. You are not forbidden to notice that my eyes are brown and yours are a different color. Taking notice of that is not offensive to anybody, nor should it be.

The point that we have difficulty getting to is when nothing of great importance turns on my chances or your assessment of me based on the color of my eyes or of my skin – or one might go further and say, the shape of my genitalia. These are things that we increasingly come to believe ought to be irrelevant in making deep and powerful conclusions about one another. We always assert those things long before we get to the point where we can practice them. We are now asserting – and underscoring, with the election of Barack Obama – that race way down deep in the American psyche doesn’t matter. It does. But the assertion I welcome with wide open arms, because I think our thoughts are always ahead of our ability to deliver on those thoughts.

We first start to cite things because we know they are true, and later on we start trying to live up to what we believe to be true. This as much as anything, I think, accounts for what we used to call the Bradley effect, or the Wilder effect. People were upset that Doug Wilder’s victory, when he ran for governor of Virginia, was less than the polls indicated it would be – which “proved” that those rotten white people were lying to the pollsters. Well, I thought, Hallelujah! In Virginia of all places – the capital of the Confederacy – people have learned or have convinced themselves that what they ought to do is out ahead of what they may actually do. So to lie to the pollsters, to tell the pollsters what they thought ought to be the truth, I thought was (laughing) a sign of important progress!

I’ll stop now. Buster, could you please sort all of this out?

(Laughter.)

BUSTER SOARIES: I, too, will sit to avoid the temptation to preach. (Laughter.) I wasn’t invited to do that. So first, let me thank Bill (Schambra) and Hudson Institute for hosting this, and Bob (Woodson) for organizing the panelists and paying for my train ticket down here.

Somewhat in miscellaneous fashion, let me say that there is an inherent contradiction in, on the one hand, calling Barack Obama the first black president of the United States and, on the other hand, claiming that because he is the first black president, we are now entering what some call “post-racial America.” Every time we call Barack Obama the first black president, we are buying into one of the deepest racial flaws of our history – and that is that a drop of black blood makes

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one black. This notion – that one can have a Caucasian mother and a Kenyan father, and the outcome is what we historically have called “black” – really harkens back to a time when the notion of someone being bi-racial was impossible for our racial consciousness to conceive. So it’s somewhat oxymoronic to claim both in the same frame. That’s just a conceptual notion that I want to throw out. One could call Barack Obama a Kansan. But our history is such that if color is injected into the relationship, the color dominates. That’s an interesting kind of historical, psychological reflection, and I don’t think we can forget it.

I think Bill (Raspberry) is right; this notion of defining “post-racial” is critical, because if we fail to do that, then I think we end up with a kind of Pollyannaish dialogue relative to race. I completely agree with Bill (Raspberry) that when I hear the term “post-racial” and I attach it to the Barack Obama phenomenon, what I’m sensing is our national expectation that his election demonstrates a new willingness in this country, with the highest office in the land, to look beyond race, and for race not to be the most significant factor in shaping our decision-making process. If you notice, when Obama first announced, most of the people who are considered leaders in the African-American community did not support him precisely because they assumed he could not win. Now, not all of those assumptions were rooted in race, but certainly many of them were. After (the) Iowa (caucuses), black people began to look at Obama in a different way because the new description of him was that white people would vote for him. The exit polling on November 4 suggested that whites were more concerned about the economy than they were his ethnicity. So it kind of brings together this notion that we should be thinking about race.

But Barack Obama really wasn’t the first example of America’s willingness to look beyond race in making certain decisions. When hip hop music became more popular in the suburbs than it was in the cities, you could have called that a post-racial development. When Snoop Dogg started selling millions of records in Iowa, it was as significantly post-racial as Barack Obama getting votes in Iowa. When MTV first started, they wouldn’t play Michael Jackson. And BET’s business model was based on the unwillingness of MTV to play black music. Today, white children wear baggy pants, call each other “dog.” Black children like Pink. When Bill (Raspberry) was writing for the Washington Post in the 1960s, I was in junior high school, and I listened to the Temptations and my white friends listened to the Beatles. Today, my children who are nineteen have more in common with their Caucasian and Hispanic and Asian counterparts in ways that defy the notion of race as we understand it. And so, the post-racial phenomenon didn’t really start with Obama. I think he is another example of how this new generation has begun to think about other things before they think about race – which is somewhat new, but it didn’t start with him.

But I don’t want to lose this definition: For me, “post-racial” gives us permission to see our reality without looking through the lens of race – so that it is not, with my children, “Is she black or white?” And it’s particularly important for the black-white discussion because there are so many others here now that the black-white question has hampered our ability to deal with multi- racial, and not just black-white.

I also want to say that I have been more impressed by other aspects of Obama than I have been his ability to attract white votes – again, because I’ve seen so many examples of blacks being embraced by whites in so many ways. One, for me, more important than his being the first black

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president is his being the first president who raised money from small people. Anybody who can raise that much money from that many people is someone worth studying, whatever color he is.

The second is, Obama is the first technology president. He is the first president who understands YouTube and Facebook and all of those tools that made him a stealth candidate for such a long time. By the time the mainstream politicians saw it, it was too late. They cut the Clinton campaign off at the knees because they were talking to my sons on Facebook, which the Clintons didn’t know at all. For my son to leave his dormitory room in the Bronx and take a train to New Jersey to vote for Obama in the primary – without knowing anything about his foreign policy; he knows nothing about his economic plan; he knows nothing about – all he knows is that he met Obama on Facebook. (Laughter.) And Obama was sending him text messages. And my other son voted for Obama because any president who is going to put a basketball court in at the White House is all right with him. (Laughter.) And so neither of them caught the significance of voting for the first black president. He is the first technology president.

In conclusion, let me just say – and this is miscellaneous – is it true that African-Americans, that members of the black community, represent a disproportionately high percentage of people in the negative column – high school dropouts, unemployment, foreclosures? The answer is, yes. Is it true that the reason they are there is because they’re black? That’s where the post-racial dynamic becomes important. In 1950, if we were in trouble, we were probably in trouble for reasons related to our race. In 2008, if we’re in trouble, it’s probably for reasons much more complicated than race – and while the roots may be racial, the realities today are much more complicated. I am focused intensely on the foreclosure crisis in New Jersey; the people who are in foreclosure are not in foreclosure because they are black. They’re in foreclosure for much larger reasons. And so if I approach this as a racial problem, then I am going to end up doing a bait and switch, which is the problem of the civil rights strategy in 2008. If I use the conditions of one group of people to argue for resources, and then those resources end up in the hands of other people, I’ve done a bait and switch; I’ve used race as a “whiner” to address problems for which racial solutions don’t fit.

Well, that’s all I have – and now you (Ed Norton) can sort it out!

(Laughter, cross talk.)

EDWARD NORTON: The only way I could sort this out is to say that I agree with both of you! Now I have to figure out what exactly it is that you said. (Laughter.)

First of all, as to Bill (Raspberry)’s point about progress, it has occurred for sure from when I graduated from high school a month after Brown v. the Board of Education, but it is also a fact that progress is not orderly. It goes in fits and starts, and sometimes it reverses. And so we have to proceed with that understanding. Both Bill (Raspberry) and Buster came up with a definition of what “post-racial” means – which I think come to the same place, namely that race should not be outcome determinative. And if we don’t see things through the lens of race in all instances, that is – to use a phrase – a consummation devoutly to be wished, if we could get to that point. As I said, in the 1950s and 1960s you could not avoid that reality. After I graduated from college I went to the Navy’s Officer Candidate School, and the number of black officer candidates not to

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mention black Navy officers was so few at that time that on the officer’s form they had pre- printed the letters cauc, which stood for Caucasian. I drew a line through it and put neg. (Laughter.) This is reality. I think there were probably about fifty black officers in the Navy out of 60,000 at that point. So things have come a very, very long way since then, and we have to acknowledge that.

The challenge is how we move forward, because as Bill (Raspberry) so eloquently pointed out in his article “A Path Beyond Grievance,” which is really well worth reading – the day it appeared in the Post, I sent it around to many of my influential white friends so they could read it, and one of them who will go nameless said, “I read his stuff all the time.” So Bill is getting the message out, and that message is, we need to ask how we come to solutions as opposed to asking how we deal with claims based on historic wrongs. The country is no longer guilty about 1910, not to mention 1875 or 1850. So what we face and hope for with Barack Obama, given his skills and articulation, is that he will advance programs which seem to affect outcomes that to a certain extent are tied to race.

I am optimistic about his skills because they are extraordinary. For him to have become president given where he came from – and I like to point out to people that when he went to Chicago, he didn’t know a soul – for somebody to in a little more than twenty years become first a senator and then president of the United States makes him a rather unusual person! He was able to transmit his values and goals beyond the prism of history. So there is great reason to be optimistic. But that doesn’t mean that the challenges are not going to be substantial.

As may have been indicated in my biographical material, since the late 1980s I have been involved in minority business contracting. There are two outcomes that flow from when minorities get government contracts: One, it’s a source of income and a source of wealth, which can enable them to participate in the political system as contributors. It is also the possibility, the hope, that minority businesses will hire minority employees – not on an exclusive basis, but that is an important development. One of the major economic challenges we face today is unemployment. This contracting employment situation is dramatic, and we have to work through that in addition to working through the housing crisis and the foreclosure crisis, which are going to take at least a couple of years to bottom out. And so we have some very serious challenges.

One thing I do know is that Barack’s plan to have the federal government provide money to state and local governments for infrastructure projects might increase the job potential and minority business participation because they’ve got to make sure, in order to run these programs, that the distribution of the contracts is not done on a racially discriminatory basis. So there is much that can be accomplished through that process. I’m always reminded – we did a study in Nashville in the mid-1990s about what was happening with Nashville’s government contracting processes. The reason they wanted the study was because the then-mayor, who is now the governor of Tennessee, wanted to bring the Houston Oilers to Nashville, and in order to bring them the minority legislators told him to do a study. So they did the study, and we then were able to put in place programs that increased the likelihood of minority business participation. So there is this synergy between the political-economic interests and the possibility of increased minority business participation.

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I could not talk about this subject without talking about what is incredibly important, and that is early childhood, another issue that Barack Obama is dedicated to dealing with. We have to get into the lives of our children, and by “our” children I mean the minority community not to mention all communities, but the lag in terms of minority child development is really substantial, and it is hugely disadvantaging as you go forward. So that’s another issue to which we individually and as a political matter need to pay attention.

I don’t know that I’ve sorted out what Buster and Bill (Raspberry) have said, but I know Bill is very much on this issue with Baby Steps, and I know that Buster is very much on the issue of foreclosure and its consequences for the economy and for the circumstances under which minorities live. But I will conclude by simply saying that the task is daunting, but it’s not reason to not push forward.

ROBERT WOODSON: I am going to take a little different tack, and that is to build on something that Buster was saying about the whole bait and switch.

I have been for most of my adult life active in the civil rights movement, and as you were saying, Buster, prior to the 1950s you can generalize about the black community because we all shared in – we couldn’t stay at the hotels or eat in restaurants, and they didn’t care what your education was, or about your family background. So in that sense, you could generalize about black America. However, I think there are some myths that continue to survive. For one, many people, black and white, look at the conditions – a 70 percent teen pregnancy rate, high violence among teens – and they draw the conclusion that that’s the consequence of our racial past, and slavery is responsible. This myth pervades our society; it’s just not true.

What I’d like to present is a brief overview of how our forebears survived and thrived. Right after slavery, we know that marriage soared in the black community. It just soared. And so did business. That’s because we knew that the moral and spiritual principles that promote thrift, discipline, and the foundation of Judeo-Christian values helped construct a wall of protection against the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism even in the face of lynchings and segregation. Cultural decline did not occur in the black community. It is assumed that racism and poverty are the cause of single out-of-wedlock births. Again, in the ten years of the Depression when we had a negative GNP, marriage formation rates were higher in the black community than they were in the white community. The longest sustained reduction in poverty in the black community occurred between 1940 and 1960. We had very rich institutions. Our business formation rates in the 1920s were higher than whites. We had a real estate firm in Harlem that employed over two hundred individuals. They had $600 million worth of capital, and they purchased all of the buildings from whites and then made them available to blacks. We had a series of banks. We had all of these rich institutions. And up until 1962 82 percent of all black families had a man and a woman raising children. And in fact, in 1920 it was a scandalous headline that 15 percent of black families had out-of-wedlock births – 15 percent, and it was considered a scandal in 1920!

So what we’re witnessing today is something that occurred at the point of the civil rights movement. And talking about this – what were the unintended consequences of the civil rights movement, and whether or not we engaged in a kind of bait and switch – is very difficult because

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race is to blacks what the state of Israel is to Jews and what abortion is to the religious right; people began to look strangely at you if you challenge or question it in any way. It’s very difficult to have a rational discussion. But challenge it we must.

In fact, I have a prop I use to show what turned me away from the civil rights movement, and it’s an article by William Raspberry. (Laughter as Woodson holds up a large placard showing a reproduction of a newspaper article.) The article is from October 31, 1965, and the headline is, “Civil Rights Gains Bypassing Poorest Negroes.” In here, Raspberry writes that low-income blacks not only in Washington but around the country were saying that a lot of the strategies being pursued in the name of all blacks were only benefiting the middle- and upper-income groups, and that a huge bifurcation was occurring in the black community. Only two out of six whites with a college degree work for the government, but six out of ten blacks with a college education work for the government. So we are manning the infrastructure of those poverty institutions that are poorly serving black people, and therefore those institutions thrive as a consequence of having the presence of poor people there.

These are the kinds of issues that I believe we must discuss, and I’m thankful that hopefully Obama will move us into a post-racial America not defining it the way you are, but in the sense that – a lot of people demand goods and services and money from government, and then they run these corrupt and incompetent institutions that poorly serve poor people, and race is used by them both as a spear and as a shield. It’s used a spear to compel corporations and foundations and government to provide money in the name of poor blacks, but then it’s used as a shield to protect them against any charges of corruption and incompetence. Having Obama in place will hopefully remove this shield, and also prevent even people like Ronald Reagan and others who ran for office and campaigned in Philadelphia, Mississippi. When Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich wanted to pull an end-run around the Democratic Party, what did he do (to fill the vacant seat in the US Senate left by Barack Obama)? He appointed a black! He was going to sell it before – to anybody. But when it was in his interest, he gave it to a black. And when Nancy Pelosi wanted to talk about health care, she flanked herself with black people – as if we have become the symbol of dependency and therefore the object of charity.

It seems to me that if we are to move to a post-racial America – and I thank God that we are realizing this – any group’s participation in the American economy is not measured by what government does for them; it’s their small business formation rate. Healthy communities generate three businesses per thousand people per year. The black community’s business formation rate is more like three per hundred thousand per year. So economic development is crucial, and we must develop an entrepreneurial spirit the way our forebears have done.

But we also have to understand that it is not the sex of the ruler that determines who wins, it’s the rules of the game. If you just be content that all we have to do is put a black president in, or a black mayor – if that were the case, Washington DC should be a mecca for social reform. We lead the nation in twenty-one separate categories on government-funded poverty programs. We have the highest black median income for our middle class anywhere in the nation. You have two black Americas here. Black Enterprise says that this is the most prosperous place for middle- and upper-income blacks. Or you can talk about the blacks who are catalogued in the Centers for Disease Control; in Washington DC we have one of the highest mortality rates for black children

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in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti. So I believe, and I pray, that by moving into a post-racial America we will be able to hold public officials accountable and not let somebody use race to exempt them from personal responsibility.

We talk about Hurricane Katrina, but no one says that Congressman Jefferson was putting money in his freezer at a time when people were on the streets. He is supported for reelection and it doesn’t create any national outrage on the part of everyone. If white officials do things that are hostile to the interests of their people, we expect other whites to distance themselves from them; but if black officials commit these kinds of atrocious acts, we expect other black politicians to support them. Hopefully by moving into a post-racial America, we will have a standard of excellence and competence that will be based upon the content of your character, not the color of your skin – see, people say that, but once you use the “character” measure as a barometer of their performance, they say, no, no – let me put race back on the table. I hope that by Barack Obama emphasizing his desire to change the rules of the game, and de-emphasizing race, perhaps it will remove the shield and the spear from those who would exploit race to protect themselves from accountability for delivering for the least of God’s children.

I believe that the true character of a nation or a leader is measured by how you treat the least of God’s children, not how many middle-class people – I was on a panel one time with Jim Lehrer, Mary Lee Eggers (ph), Buster (Soaries), John Jacobs (ph), and Charlie Rangel. At the time, the Urban League was issuing its State of Black America report, and they asked me what the state of black America was. And I said, “For those of us on this panel, life’s pretty good!” (Laughter.) “My income hasn’t gone down in twenty years regardless of which white man was in the White House. My kids go to private school. I’m driving a pretty good car.”

So you cannot generalize about the state of black America, and those who continue to do so exploit the race issue. Hopefully this will cause all of us to step back and give serious consideration to how we change the rules of the game so those who are dispossessed regardless of their race will get a chance to participate in the mainstream of the American economy.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: I have a question or two, but first, would anyone on our panel like to respond to anyone else on a freestyle basis, here?

EDWARD NORTON: This is not a response, but I’ve known Bob (Woodson) for over twenty years, and he has been saying the same thing. This is a fearless man who is committed to low- income people.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: I thought you meant that he’d been ripping off me for twenty years.

(Laughter.)

EDWARD NORTON: That, too.

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(Laughter.)

BUSTER SOARIES: I want to say that Bob (Woodson) made it clearer, I think, than the rest of us on this issue. When we say “post-racial” or think “post-racial,” we’re generally thinking about Bill (Raspberry)’s point, looking past race. I think the issue of accountability within the race, and moral consistency, is as critical a notion to post-racialism as anything else.

I’ve been the pastor of my church for nineteen years, and we’ve only had one march, although in the last nineteen years I’ve had plenty of invitations to march. The one march we had was to an Indian-owned gas station because a young African-American went into the gas station and robbed it, and after he got the money he shot the Indian at point-blank range. The next day he went across the street to a Chinese restaurant and did the exact same thing. And my position was, had the Indian store owner shot the black kid, everybody in the country would have been there marching.

It is incumbent upon those of us who have been trained to react to be as passionate about our own flaws and about our own vision, which is post-racial, as we are passionate about protecting ourselves. And so I do feel, Bob (Woodson), that we’ve got to hold black officials as accountable as we would white; black fathers as accountable as we do white politicians; and that, too, is a post-racial vision. It’s not just being respected by others, but having respect for ourselves.

ROBERT WOODSON: The other piece is, we certainly get outraged when we think about the three thousand people who died on 9/11. Also, our history teaches us that the Klan lynched and slaughtered about three thousand people over the course of thirty years. But we lose more black kids in six months than we lost on 9/11. We have a 9/11 every six months in the black community. And many of those deaths are occurring in cities run by black elected officials.

This isn’t to blame anyone; it’s to say that applying – looking at it through a racial prism is incomplete, and if that person is incompetent, they ought to be removed or held accountable for what they do. But it’s very difficult if they pull the race card and they can rally people on the radio to protect them when in fact they are – well, I have one other quick example: In Cincinnati, Ohio, you had a thug who was shot to death by a white police officer, and there was a boycott of the whole city by black middle-class people. And then there was police nullification; the white police said, well, since we’re going to get accused of racism, we’re not going to make any more arrests in that community. The murder rate went up 800 percent in that community. But it was not the sons and daughters of those pastors or those civil rights leaders who were killed, because they don’t live there. And this is what we have to be able to confront if we’re going to change the rules of the game and move toward a post-racial America. We should not allow people to come in and build their careers on mobilizing people to protest when the perpetrator of evil wears a white face. It redounds against the interests of poor people – and that’s what I hope Obama’s election will help us move beyond – race.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: In Mr. Raspberry’s column, it is suggested that after twenty years of the Woodson message – and the Raspberry and Soaries and Norton messages – maybe now is a time, for the first time, that the nation will be prepared to hear a message that isn’t entirely

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wrapped around race but is in fact addressing grassroots efforts to solve problems, efforts like the one Mr. Raspberry founded and the many that Pastor Soaries has attached to his church. Is there some optimism on this panel that after all of this time, and after Bob Woodson’s and Mr. Raspberry’s relentless preaching of this message, this is a moment in America’s history where that grassroots message will in fact be heard?

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: Let me suggest that this message has been heard the whole time, here and there right across this nation. There have always been people doing things like I am doing now, and things like Buster is doing, and things like Bob is doing. There have been grassroots activists – there have been people doing all kinds of things from education to job training to entrepreneurial development.

The peculiar thing is this group they call “black leadership.” It probably doesn’t exist for any other group in America right now – I think we’re the only ones who’ve got leaders. (Laughter.) And that leadership has a specific kind of history. We look especially now to Dr. King. What was Dr. King’s genius? It was his ability to articulate the grievances of African-Americans, to put them out there in a way that white America could hear and feel and sense, and then to kind of heat up things enough. You can’t reshape metal until you heat it up first. He heated things up to the point where they were able to affect some change. And that movement that he was such a central part of is the crucible out of which black leadership grew. And the kind of tactics it undertook then – the marching and the singing, the identification of grievance – was necessary to get some of the things done that had to get done. We wouldn’t have had voting rights if it had been left to the ballot alone to do. There are lots of things that simply wouldn’t have happened except by making this strong appeal to the conscience of white America. The leadership that has followed that leadership has tended to try to do the same things, to present all problems as grievances to be resolved by the greater society. It worked then, and if you’re going to be a successor to those for whom it worked, then you tend to do the same thing.

We didn’t notice that about twenty years ago, it stopped working. It’s not that those who did it in the 1960s were wrong; they were powerfully right to do it that way. But there were always – there are always both – internal and external barriers to our well-being, to our progress. In the 1960s, the major barriers were external to us. It didn’t matter what we did, where we went to school, or how Ralph Bunche-like we were (laughter), we couldn’t live in the white neighborhood because it was white – not because we were rowdy. And so a certain kind of approach had to be taken. Today we still have problems, but by my reckoning the most powerful problems confronting black America are internal and demand internal solutions. There are still some external issues, but they’re not the predominant ones, and we can’t keep forgetting that, so when a Jena, Louisiana, happens, we all get in busses and cars and planes and go running down there as if, if we can settle Jena, we will have made some enormous progress. Why? Because Jena looks a little bit like Montgomery and Rosa Parks. We’ve got these little templates, and we keep trying to create 1960s templates in 2008 and 2009. And it doesn’t fly anymore.

We’ve talked about these (inaudible) as being hypocrites, and that’s maybe partly it. But part of it is a failure of analysis. We simply haven’t done the proper analysis of what it will take to do the next work that has to be done. This is what I’m hopeful will come out of the Obama presidency – the fact that if you do what you need to do yourself, the ceilings start to recede and

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disappear, and you can say to your children not what a jam white people have put you in, but how endless are your possibilities. And that’s what we need to learn to say to our children. The middle class already say it to their children – let me say that. The middle class already talk to their children about great possibilities. We go into poor neighborhoods and poor schools and we talk to groups, when we want to appear to be benevolent, and we tell them how pitiful it is that you are stuck in this situation where you can’t possibly get out, and what these mean white people have done to you. We’ve got to stop talking that smack to our kids even if it makes wonderful headlines in the newspapers. We’ve got to learn to say to our children that their future can be what they want it to be and need it to be, and that we can help them to achieve that future. That’s the only thing that’s worth saying. It’s no good holding them up as a grievance model the way we’ve been doing. It just doesn’t help anything.

BUSTER SOARIES: I’m not optimistic, because everything that Bill (Raspberry) said is exactly right, and the coconspirators to this anachronistic strategy are the press. The media will cover the Jena situation as if it’s the second coming of Dr. King.

My frustration – let me list a few things we’ve done: We have trained 300 families to be licensed foster families. We’ve taken in 500 foster children. We’ve adopted 200 children. We’ve built 125 houses. We took over a housing development that was so dangerous, no contractor would work there. And so we did it ourselves. Over the last nineteen years we have done work that the mayors and the governors said would never happen.

During one week of my ministry, I was on the Today Show twice. I was on Larry King. I was on Good Morning America. I was on every major network – they were just lined up at the church. But it was not in response to anything I did. It was in response to the fact that Don Imus called some young people who go to my church “nappy headed hoes.” And because Don Imus called my church members nappy headed hoes, every media organization in America wanted to talk to me. They didn’t want to hear about foster care. They didn’t want to hear about housing. They wanted to know what we were going to do about Don Imus. And as long as the media has that predisposition, then I’m not optimistic – because it’s like a drug, and those who would seek to become Dr. King are addicted to the cameras who want to help them. And so I’m not optimistic.

ROBERT WOODSON: I would add to that list funders and spineless corporate leaders who provide guilt money to these hustlers. And I think Buster and I and this panel ought to get together and draw up something that absolves white people of guilt for racism. We absolve you! (Woodson makes a sweeping gesture over the heads of the audience. Hesitant laughter.) Bill (Raspberry), would you agree with me? We absolve you – if it means that you are going to then change and support the kinds of things that Buster is talking about, just like what we did taking those same principles.

My staff is here. We are now reducing violence in some of the most violent schools in various cities. We operate in some of the most dangerous ZIP codes. We have a report just released from Baylor University2 that shows that for the past year we’ve been in eight of Milwaukee’s most

2 Johnson, Byron R. and William Wubbenhorst, Neighborhood Enterprise Violence-Free Zone Initiative: A Milwaukee Case Study (Waco, Texas: Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, January 13, 2009). This report can be

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dangerous schools, and violence is down 30 percent. Non-violent incidents, 25 percent. Attendance has soared; the schools can provide 9,000 more teaching days than before. These are kids who would be in prison. We’re doing the same thing in Atlanta.

I would hope that in this new era it would be the rules of the game – we would get behind strategies proven to be effective to elevate those who are at the bottom. I think it takes a combination of changing the culture in the media but also the people who write these checks. Use competence, not political ideology or politics, as the measure. What are you doing, measurably, to assist the least of God’s children? If Obama being in place can accomplish that, then I am optimistic.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Here’s another question – because there is way too much agreement on this panel, so I am going to have to ask this question. (Laughter.) In addition to a student of Bob Woodson’s, I’m also, of course, a conservative. I’ve often thought that insofar as conservatism or the Republican Party ever has a possibility of opening itself to parts of the population that it hasn’t been able to reach, the Woodson model – the support for grassroots groups back home doing terrific work – is the way. And Bob, of course, you have been very active with President Bush, and Pastor Soaries, I know you’ve been even willing to appear in public with Republicans from time to time. So this is the question: What are the chances of bringing together the Republican Party, or conservatism, and some of these voters that have typically been closed to us, especially after the election of President Obama? Is that now just a pipe dream – should the Republican Party just say, as we’ve heard them say, “Okay, that’s it – the Bush strategy, the faith-based initiative which was meant to open to these voters, didn’t work, so forget that. Just write them off and go after more lower-income white voters in the future.” I don’t think it’s a healthy situation when only one party is in play here. How do we deal with that problem?

ROBERT WOODSON: First of all, I was attracted to the conservative movement and came to the American Enterprise Institute in part because I reasoned that the Republican Party is the party of business, and therefore it has no proprietary interest in maintaining large groups of poor people. And so there is hopefully some predisposition to want to join, to support these efforts – because after all, if you’re running a business you need reliable employees; you need lower taxes; you need to locate your business with trustworthy employees who are reliable. So they have a proprietary interest in wanting to have a good educational system. So, all of their proprietary interests line up with the interests of poor people.

By contrast, a lot of the Democrats represent people in the social-service industry – the teachers, the counselors, the social workers – a lot of the people who make their living off the presence of large numbers of people. It’s more difficult, I would think, for a Democratic mayor to take issues that may be in the interests of their low-income constituencies but hostile to the teachers unions or all of those others.

So if you look at the landscape of what is possible in conservatism, it’s there. But what bothers me about conservatives is what happened to someone like Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis. He

found online at http://www.isreligion.org/pdf/case_milwaukee.pdf (last accessed January 22, 2009). For further information on CNE’s Violence-Free Zone Initiative, see also http://www.cneonline.org/pages/Violence-Free_Zone.

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was a conservative former prosecutor running for office in a liberal, Democratic city who got elected twice – why? It wasn’t because he appealed to people based on politics or ideology. He delivered for the people who were suffering the problems. Steve put in place the privatization of public services so that churches and indigenous organizations could get contracts from the city and hire local people, young people, to run the parks and keep them clean. He put a lot of money – a half billion dollars – into infrastructure improvement. He reached out to the sixty-five indigenous small businesses in that community and let them bid on contracts for the city. And so Steve Goldsmith’s success as a conservative Republican was based upon what he did for people. Most grassroots people are non-ideological and non-political. They don’t care who you are or what your color or political party is. They just want to know who is going to deliver the goods for them. And Steve Goldsmith delivered the goods. And yet he was marginalized by the Republican Party. He was never held up as a champion, and therefore the Republican Party is paying the price. If I’m a Republican leader, why would I want to do these things if my own people are not going to embrace them?

So until they confront that reality and support people who are doing all of the things and have demonstrated that they can get people to vote for them, they’re going to always stay on the sidelines politically.

EDWARD NORTON: I agree! That speaks to it. The Republican Party has gone where they thought the votes were. And that has to do with the Nixon “Southern strategy,” going back twenty years.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: The Southern strategy – that’s right.

EDWARD NORTON: Until they give that up – and it seems like they’re going to have to give that up – they’re not going to be able to make that connection. Indeed, we did some work in Indianapolis and I did encounter Steve Goldsmith, and he was outcome-focused.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: That’s right. But to the extent that he was outcome-focused, he was a mayor who had a vision for his city who happened to be Republican. Bill (Schambra), you’re asking a very different kind of question. You’re asking how the party as an institution – and not how individual officeholders – can do these things. And I really think that it may have to lose a few more times before – (laughter).

The Southern strategy was deliberately, calculatedly undertaken, and whether or not there were people who said that they would exclude blacks, the understanding was that this strategy would (exclude blacks). And now to say that you got your butt kicked a couple of times, and why don’t you black guys come back and help us – for what?! (Laughter.) And it doesn’t mean that it’s because blacks are liberal and all of that. There is a strong conservative streak in black America and especially in poor black America. If you want to hear the conservative position on abortion, on same-sex marriage, on a lot of these hot-button issues, go to an inner-city Baptist church. In terms of personal responsibility, you get the old grandmothers talking as conservatively as Newt! But don’t ask them to buy in philosophically to a movement that in its recent mode was calculated to disavow you. Not for nothing does Philadelphia, Mississippi stand out. And when you launch a campaign from there, you deliver a message.

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Can a new breed of office-seekers who happen to be Republican change all of that? Probably, over time. You can look forward to a post-neocon America, I guess. But I think most African- Americans who are politically active have found a home in which they feel very comfortable, and you’re going to have to do more than parade Colin Powell and Michael Steele across the stage at the quadrennial convention to change that.

ROBERT WOODSON: But I really think that it was been to the detriment of the black community that we have been monolithic, politically. It’s important for the progress of low- income people for both political parties to be competitive. I just think it is hostile to the interests of black Americans to say, well, we’ve been with Democrats all these years – because in the spirit of competition is when people are held accountable. If you feel as if no matter what we do, no matter how ill-served this community is, they’re going to still vote for us – that’s why they put their time elsewhere, and they campaign more among Hispanics than they do blacks. They say, blacks will whine and complain but they’re not going anywhere. For the future, it is important for people who are concerned about the welfare of black America’s low-income people to spend some time trying to figure out ways that they and those who support them can be more competitive for both political parties.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: I think this is the only context in which the question would be raised this way: It is typically not the case that one asks voters what would entice them to join a political party, and then ask the party to be welcoming to them. Typically, parties form and attract people to whom their platforms make sense. We’re asking something in the reverse to happen now – that you join the party now and hope like hell one day the party starts to make sense. I don’t think it works that way.

ROBERT WOODSON: I agree with you. But in other words, it ought to be done on the battlefield. Like Steve Goldsmith. I see a connection between what Steve did and the party. If the party had followed him and used him to teach others how to govern in ways – Bill (Schambra), do you remember when we had that big conference with George Will and Grover Norquist – and Pablo Eisenberg was there, I believe? Do you remember, Pablo (looks to Eisenberg, seated in the audience), when they had that big conference to celebrate the conservative victory? And I asked one question; I asked, what does the conservative victory say to low-income people? How does it speak to the needs of low-income people? And there was silence in the room.3 And I just sat down. Until conservatives and the Republican Party can answer that question, they cannot expect to be competitive. They’ve got to come up with ways to answer that question: What does it mean for the last of God’s children for us to be in power?

Once they get in power, unfortunately – a lot of times, people, once they get in power, concentrate not on governing in a way that reaches out, but rather on figuring out how to stay in power.

3 The commissioned essays and complete transcript of this discussion, the 2005 Bradley Symposium entitled “Vision and Philanthropy,” can be accessed online at http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=hudson_upcoming_events&id=245. Woodson’s question begins on page 69 of the PDF document. Hard copies of this publication are also available; please contact the Bradley Center’s Krista Shaffer at [email protected] or Hudson Institute’s Grace Terzian at [email protected].

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WILLIAM RASPBERRY: Are you saying it’s illegitimate for a party to be interested in the well-being of entrepreneurs, business operators, and the well-to-do?

ROBERT WOODSON: It’s not expansive enough, because America consists of more than just that group of people.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: I understand. It consists also of more than just poor people.

ROBERT WOODSON: Right.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: You’re suggesting that it should be the test of every political party how it treats the least of these, the poorest Americans. And I’m asking you, how reasonable is it to expect there to be no party representing primarily the interests of the well-off?

ROBERT WOODSON: No party that represents one segment of the community will retain power –

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: The Republicans did it for a little while!

(Laughter.)

ROBERT WOODSON: But again, for a little while. For a little while.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Part of the reason, I think, Republicans had some success, of course, was that they had a critique of massive federal social service programs that pointed toward civil society; it pointed toward enabling grassroots groups to solve their own problems. Mr. Raspberry, at this point in the transcript we will provide a link to a very fine article that you wrote in 19964 talking about a speech that my former boss, Michael Joyce at the Bradley Foundation, gave to some Congressional Republicans – a speech that Bob Woodson passed to you.5

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: You’ve been using me for a while, haven’t you!

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: That’s right! Exactly. Absolutely. (Laughter.) But in that speech, Michael Joyce suggested that Republican congressmen, if they were serious about this renewing civil society and enabling private-sector initiatives to solve social problems, go back to their districts and find the Woodson groups – find the leaders – and hold them up. And in your article you pointed out, Bill (Raspberry), that if this were to happen, conservatives and Republicans could possibly become competitive for the votes of those folks. Was that just a brief, crazy

4 William Raspberry, “Grass-Roots Problem-Solvers,” The Washington Post, February 16, 1996, A21. Online at http://www.hudson.org/files/pdf_upload/1996_02_16_Raspberry_OpEd_on_Joyce_Speech.pdf (last accessed January 22, 2009). 5 Michael S. Joyce, “Remarks to the Congressional Class of 1994,” Heritage Foundation event in Baltimore, MD, January 26, 1996. Online at http://www.hudson.org/files/pdf_upload/1996_Joyce_Speech.pdf (last accessed January 22, 2009).

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notion back in 1996, after the Newt revolution? And I want to hear from Buster Soaries on these questions, too.

BUSTER SOARIES: Well, my opinion of politicians is so low that I –

(Laughter.)

BUSTER SOARIES: What I found in New Jersey among Democrats and Republicans, and in Washington, was that even those who start out with noble intentions, once they get into office, confuse their goals with their strategy. And so what happens is, people assume that going into government and politics is a strategy to accomplish some of these things, but when they get there they become intoxicated with their own power, and they become preoccupied with getting more power. It becomes a drug. And they become useless, irrelevant, and corrupt. And I think that the Republican Party had so much power at a critical time in history that it was just an orgy of irrational behavior. You can see it in a powerful committee chair going to jail and the like. And when the Republicans took over in Washington, much like when the Republicans took over in New Jersey, they only difference between them and the Democrats was that they were Republicans in charge.

I think, frankly, that Newt Gingrich was one of the great minds of the Republican Party who even when I disagreed with him thought strategically and concretely. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any successor to Newt Gingrich on that level.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Let’s turn to questions from the audience.

LISA RICE, National Fair Housing Alliance: I’ve been sitting here chomping at the bit! I just want to make a couple of comments and then ask a question. The first is regarding a statement that Pastor Soaries made regarding how we tag or identify Barack Obama. Personally – I can only speak for me; I don’t know about anybody else – I identify him as being black or African- American, because that’s how he self-identifies. And I think that it is rude to not identify someone the way that they identify themselves. So, speaking as an African-American person who also has multi-ethnic heritage, I identify myself as being African-American and I respect it when other people identify me as the same thing. So I think that we can call him our first black president because that’s how he identifies himself – as being black – and we’ve never had a president of the United States who self-identifies himself as being black. Now, according to some historians we have had black presidents. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

EDWARD NORTON: Warren Harding, supposedly.

LISA RICE: Supposedly. But none of them ever self-identified –

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: Would you make us a better offer than that? (Laughter.)

LISA RICE: – as being black.

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BUSTER SOARIES: I agree with you completely. I identify him as black, too. But I was just talking about why we all, including him, identify him as black. If it was South Africa, he’d be identified as “colored.”

LISA RICE: Okay. Mr. Woodson, regarding a statement that you had made about the Cincinnati incident, I’m from Toledo, Ohio, and I was actually living in Ohio when that happened. And I think that the outcry – because I participated in the boycott – was a little more complex than that. Part of it was that the gentleman – you described him as being a “thug” – was shot in the back because he was running from the police. Now, let’s say that he was engaged in criminal activity, which he may have been – he was never tried so we don’t know that for sure. He was running from the police; he didn’t have a gun on him as the police officer asserted; and he was shot in the back. And I think that our outcry was born out of the fact that every single year – not haphazardly or occasionally but every single year – at Ohio State University, which is in Columbus, about an hour away from Cincinnati, there is a huge rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan State. And every single year at that rival football game that is held in Columbus, predominantly white students riot. They burn cars. They burn police cars. They burn pedestrian cars. They turn cars over. They throw bottles at people. They hurt people. They engage in criminal activities. And the riot police are called. But those children, who are by and large Caucasian, are handled with kid gloves. They are never shot at. They are never handled very strongly. And so the boycott in Cincinnati – it actually was a broader boycott but it focused on Cincinnati – was largely centered around that, about how police treat young African-American children as opposed to how they treat young white children. There is a huge difference there, and so that’s what the boycott was about, primarily.

ROBERT WOODSON: Well, let me just say that I spent time in Cincinnati meeting with people who are waiters, waitresses, taxi-cab drivers – people who are in those communities. And they said they are the ones who were losing their jobs. When that murder rate went up 800 percent because we engaged in police nullification, it was the sons and daughters of the people with whom I met and whom I serve complaining that they need police services. None of those preachers, none of those civil rights people who were activist had their children dying on those streets. And I’m not too sure that I ever heard one of them refer to what police did with white kids or didn’t do in another city. All they were concerned with was the fact that they didn’t have jobs, and their kids were being killed. They wanted greater police protection. And so I’m just saying that I have more confidence in the people suffering the problems – what are their views and opinions of these issues – rather than those who are so-called leaders and come in and use a situation like that to advocate strategies that are not going to affect them personally at all, but are going to adversely affect the other people. That’s all I’m saying.

LISA RICE: Well, my follow-up question is sort of related to that. Because I’ve heard you guys complaining about the status quo civil rights strategy, if you will, and I’m gathering from your comments that you don’t hold a lot of promise in the status quo civil rights strategy. And so, coming from a person – I am a civil rights activist, and I work for a civil rights organization, and if I can tell you anecdotally a story, we several years ago received a number of complaints from African-American homeowners who were not able to get homeowners insurance. We conducted an investigation, and our testing investigation found that white, similarly situated homeowners could get homeowners insurance, but African-American homeowners who were situated the

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same could not get homeowners insurance. And so we used the civil rights laws in order to attack those practices, and we gained a lot of ground and a lot of remedies not just for African- Americans and Latinos who had been discriminated against, but also for low-income whites who were finding themselves in the same situation.

So we used the civil rights laws, some of them very, very old – the Civil Rights Act of 1866 as well as other civil rights statutes – to address those illegal discriminatory issues. So my question is, if we have been using the wrong approaches by attacking these kinds of issues from a civil rights perspective – the marches, the boycott of Cincinnati, using the civil rights laws to sue corporations that engage in discriminatory behavior, the busses down to Jena – I am interested in hearing what is the right approach.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: You threw a lot of things in there together, which is very interesting. You talked about working for the enforcement of civil rights laws, which is a very different thing than a grievance – than marching and singing. You’re saying, you know, let’s have a march about what the banks have been doing to this neighborhood. There are laws that speak to that, and you insisted on the enforcement of those. That’s reasonable and rational. (Panelists voice agreement.) But then you threw in Jena. Now ask yourself, what is the outcome from a Jena that you think was worth the price of a half a dozen bus tickets to Jena? And yet this Jena created much more of a splash than even Cincinnati did, and certainly more than bank real-estate redlining did. This was big stuff. And yet ask yourself, what was the outcome?

LISA RICE: But I’m interested in hearing –

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: What was the outcome that you anticipated from it?

LISA RICE: But I’m interested in hearing what should be the approach. What approach should be –

ROBERT WOODSON: Enforce the laws. Fight to enforce the laws. As I said, we all agree. Racism is still alive and well. And when someone violates the law, they should be sued; they should be held accountable. No one is denying that.

LISA RICE: What can we do when the white police officer shoots the black young person who is suspected of –

(Cross talk.)

ROBERT WOODSON: We should react the same way as if it were a white kid shot by a black guy. We should have a single standard to say we’re against police abuse. But we should not just, uh –

LISA RICE: It’s not the same proportion as the black –

(Cross talk.)

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ROBERT WOODSON: You know, the Greeks had a way of conducting a trial sometimes. They did it in the dark so that the jurors, the judge, and the prosecutor couldn’t see and had to deal just with the facts. We ought to deal with police abuse and not only get animated when the perpetrator is a white and the victim is a black.

LISA RICE: But disproportionately this happens to –

ROBERT WOODSON: Let’s move on to the next question.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: This gentleman right here (points to a man in the audience).

LISA RICE: I guess we ignore it, then.

ROBERT WOODSON: No, you’ve had a lot of time to say what you believe. I think other people will have things to say, too.

LISA SALES: But you’ve given me the answer – we just ignore it.

ROBERT WOODSON: If that’s your interpretation, that’s fine. LISA SALES (simultaneously): We act like it doesn’t exist.

LISA SALES (repeating herself): We act like it doesn’t exist.

ROBERT WOODSON: No, you just do what you do.

BYRON JACKSON, Alliance for Children and Families: Hello?

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Yes, next question – please.

BYRON JACKSON: First off, I would like to commend the panel for speaking on an issue that I feel got kind of lost – I say “lost in the sauce” (laughter) – during the whole Obama election. The issue became race, and it was addressed as, the races are black and white. What I feel the Obama election brought out was how we within the African-American community deal with race, and especially how there is a disconnect between black “leaders” and everyone else in the community. I myself have been involved in grassroots movements to address the issues, and we didn’t receive much support from our predecessors in the civil rights era because I don’t want to march. I don’t want to boycott. I’ll give a real example: I’m from South Carolina. A very powerful black institution which I will not name told everyone to boycott my state because of the Confederate flag. And people listened. But who were the people listening? Not white people. Not people of other races. Black people listened. And because of that, a lot of locally owned mom- and-pop black businesses lost a lot of money that they would normally make during the tourist season, and a lot of kids didn’t get their jobs at the beach –

ROBERT WOODSON: Exactly.

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BYRON JACKSON: – in the low country, and in Charleston. So, to tie my question in, do you feel, with the election of President Obama, we’ll see a move from these symbolic issues – from the flag, from slavery, from apologies – to addressing actual social and economic issues?

BUSTER SOARIES: Well, I think that’s what we’re trying to say – not to ignore your issues, but, you know, the Japanese reinvented themselves, and they never marched on Washington to try and get Americans to like them; they just made better cars. You know? They started selling them. The Chinese did not start a Chinese Association for the Advancement of Chinese People. When I was growing up, if someone gave you a gift that said, “Made in China,” you were insulted. Now we’re borrowing money from China. So I think what Obama does represent, to go back to Bill (Raspberry)’s point, is an opportunity to symbolize what the possibilities are when we focus on building a better mousetrap, creating a better product, starting our own businesses, competing. And when we find ourselves on an unlevel playing field because of the movements that brought us here, there are laws in place that we can use to respond to injustice. And I think that’s what we’re trying to say. It’s not that we ignore injustice. It’s not that we ignore unfairness. What we don’t do, however, is send a message to ourselves that suggests that because injustice still exists, we’re stuck.

I’ve got a church with seven thousand members, and I’m always invited to everything. And a lot of my friends want me to participate in things that appear, to me, that we can’t do anything at all in any area. We can’t raise our children and we can’t own a house because racism is alive and well. But that really plays into racism, because it suggests that we are really inferior. And that’s what I think Obama has just smashed. And I think we have to take that very seriously.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: And there’s one more little thing. I know you think your whole question and approach was being ignored – at least not by me. The warning is against defining what are our interests, our priorities, based on whether we can find a white culprit in the mix somewhere. (Panelists voice agreement.) One of the reasons, I think, the education of our children – particularly the early education of our children, what happens in our homes – has been ignored is because there is no white culprit around to lay this on. That’s why Jena jumped into the news. Except for the race piece of it, it’s not an interesting story – which is not to say that if there’s a race angle in it, we shouldn’t be concerned. I’m not saying that, and I don’t think anybody up here is saying that police brutality should be condoned or ignored or anything else. I’m saying that we have problems, though, that don’t necessarily play out as racial problems, and we fail to prioritize them because our model has been racial confrontation.

BUSTER SOARIES: Well, even Al Sharpton will argue that police brutality is not simply racial, because you have black police who are as abusive as white police.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: But you don’t get a demonstration.

BUSTER SOARIES: No, you don’t.

ROBERT WOODSON: And that’s the danger, too, because it means that a black culprit can escape responsibility.

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BUSTER SOARIES: That’s the shield.

ROBERT WOODSON: That’s pulling the shield out. And that’s the danger of it.

QUESTION: Good afternoon, greetings! I would especially like to say hello and greetings to Mr. William Raspberry. You were the speaker at my graduation in St. Louis at Harris Stowe State College in 1989. It’s a pleasure to see you again!

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: Could I see your notes from that speech? (Laughter.)

QUESTION: You know, if I looked in my storage I might have them! My question is for the whole panel. You seem kind of pessimistic about politicians. I had the pleasure of serving as an elected official in St. Louis; I was a school board member. And it was a horrific experience in terms of being in the political arena, a small fish among barracudas. Now, in terms of hope for President Obama, he is on the level where he is the new commander in chief, but he is surrounded by the questionable, ethical issues that you have to deal with. He is the first African- American president. My question is, is there hope when you realize that you are surrounded by people who do not have integrity; people who may not share the same religious beliefs or faith? No one is monolithic; everybody has different views. Could each panelist please talk about how Obama as president is going to be able to face these issues, and what kind of buffer is he going to have – a think tank like AEI, which Robert Woodson has participated in – to support him? Because when you’re an elected official, the whole world is on your shoulders.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: It’s a great question. I’m –

(Cross talk.)

EDWARD NORTON: Okay, let me respond first. We have to hope that he is who he appears to be. It’s also the case that, you know, he is a barracuda now! He is not a minnow in this ocean of sharks. So we have to count on his authenticity and judgment to have him do the most that his position enables him to do.

BUSTER SOARIES: My concern is a little different, although I share the exact same concern you do. I was secretary of state in New Jersey for three years. I was chairman of the United States Election Assistance Commission and was in charge of the 2004 presidential election. Let me tell you what I learned in those two positions that is somewhat intimidating. When you’re a high-ranking government official, you know stuff, and you can’t say everything you know. And every day – if I had said everything I knew about the 2004 election and our lack of preparation, people would have just not voted. So every day you have to balance how much of what you know do you say. That doesn’t have anything to do with corruption. It’s just responsibility. And that’s my concern for anybody in charge of everything – because if he says everything, he is a fool. If he says nothing, it challenges his integrity and he’s weak.

My hope for him is that, first, he raises his own money. That helps. Even when I disagree with him, at least he is freer than he would be if he had not raised his own money. Second, he has learned how to stay in touch with us through technology, so he’s not filtered through mainstream

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media. So if he really believes something and wants to say it, he has figured out ways to say it. And finally, I think he is married to a woman who is phenomenal, who is rooted in reality, and who came up through the ranks. He and his wife have been in the basement of tenements with people who were being ripped off by slumlords. And for me, it’s refreshing to know that there is a president who at least knows some poor people and has been in environments where the world is not perfect. So I’m hopeful.

ROBERT WOODSON: Let me just say quickly that I, too, share that. Dr. King said that the highest form of maturity is the ability to be self-critical. And Obama seems to be secure enough to surround himself – or at least seek out – people who disagree with him. And also surround himself with people who have no political advantage. I think the appointment of Sanjay Gupta was a non-political kind of – he chose someone based on competence, and that’s refreshing.

QUESTION: I’m pleased by the fact that each of you in your own way spoke to the pathologies in our communities being pretty much self-inflicted. You spoke to the responsibility of all people. Barack Obama has in fact spoken to the responsibility of people. That I find very, very refreshing. Bill Cosby, in fact, has done likewise. If we ever are going to advance, we’ve got to do it ourselves – which I think is really a part of your message here today. With respect to Republican Party and conservatives, I’ve got to ask, why do I want to follow in J. C. Watts’ footsteps? There is a lot of work that needs to be done within that party. But I want to commend this panel for the great job that you’ve done. Thank you.

PANEL: Thank you!

ETTA KING, Washington Semester Program: I’m originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan; I’m student at Brandeis University outside of Boston; and I’m doing the Washington Semester Program, so I’m here with some of my peers from that program. I am an education studies major, and I’m here hoping to work in education and pursue my interests in urban education as a means of social change. And I identify as white female, which may be surprising. (Laughter.)

I’m wondering, because I’ve noticed that there are a lot of white, upper-class people who are interested in change. Huge amounts of us were mobilized by Obama’s candidacy. I always ask myself, what is my role in the change Obama is working for and the change that all of you are clearly working for? I’m wondering if you could maybe speak to that – because I know that you said that a lot of the problems are internal. So how do we empower communities to fix themselves, and what is my role and my peers’ role in that?

BUSTER SOARIES: We find ourselves connecting with young people like yourself, and I appreciate your question and your being here, on a number of different levels. There are policy issues that require thoughtful people who can look beyond political preferences and really help shape policies. In New Jersey, a whole group of young people like yourself work with us at the Governor’s office to take our program and make it public policy. The Governor signed a bill last week. So that’s one. Then there’s practical. We have a lot of mentors and tutors and people who work in low-income neighborhoods with groups that serve members of my church and the surrounding areas. We need people with your passionate perspective to run for public office; we

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cannot allow the political community to be dominated by self-centered, selfish, corrupt politicians –

EDWARD NORTON: Careerists.

BUSTER SOARIES: Yes – who do it as a career. We need idealists and not careerists, people who stay rooted. So what is your role? It’s be light where you go. Be light where you go.

ROBERT WOODSON: But I think also you can understand that a lot of young people who fit your profile are in a moral and spiritual freefall as well, and they’re making bad decisions that can destroy their lives, and there is a desperate search for meaning in the lives of young people.6 So what you can do is equip yourself with that understanding. Your education should expand beyond that which you get in the classroom, and begin to look, morally and spiritually. And also, approach help with a servant’s attitude and not as someone who is smart, who has something to give these poor kids. If you approach them with the attitude that you expect something from them as much as you have something to give to them, then you’ll be an effective change agent.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Let me just follow up on that. Bob (Woodson)’s last point is, I think, an incredibly important one, especially for young people who have been to college and are entering professions, especially helping professions. There is that temptation to think that because you are a professional, you know better. And I think that the essence of the message here is that you don’t know better. The folks in the neighborhoods you’re dealing with, the folks in the community, should be the first judges of what they need and how they should go about that.

It’s incredibly important to have professionals who understand the limits of their expertise, who are willing to say, “I’ll bring my expertise to bear on this, but only after I’ve consulted and talked to and gotten to understand this neighborhood and what it needs, and incorporated the leadership of the neighborhood into my thinking. The one thing I’ve learned from Bob (Woodson) over the years is that there is a proper role for college training, but if it leads you to think, “Now I’m trained to know better how to solve these problems,” that’s the wrong lesson.

QUESTION: I’m from Ohio as well, and therefore a long-time Republican (laughter) – but also I’m quite a long-time friend and associate of Bob Woodson. And so I wanted to ask Bob and Rev. Soaries this: As he goes out the door, is there anything we can say about George Bush and his approach, his appointments, and his relationship with the African-American community?

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: That’s a great question. You can say what you will about George W. Bush, but one of the things that was clear – and I think Bob (Woodson) and Pastor Soaries would agree with me – was that he did in fact, at least initially, make an effort to talk to folks like Bob Woodson and find out what might be a way for the Republican Party to incorporate the Woodson

6 On May 15, 2008, the Bradley Center held a panel discussion of William Damon’s excellent book A Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life, in which Damon addresses this problem using several case studies. A complete transcript of that discussion as well as further information about the book can be found online at http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=hudson_upcoming_events&id=541.

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approach. Now I know that Bob has had mixed experiences with that, but it’s a great question. What can we say?

ROBERT WOODSON: Well, I guess I can’t be totally objective because when my son died six years ago in a terrible traffic accident, it was President Bush who called me from Air Force One and prayed with me for seven minutes, and then he called my son’s wife and prayed with her. And that, to me, spoke to the character of that man. So, personally I just think that he is a man of stellar character – warm, generous. When it comes to his policies, unfortunately I think he surrounded himself people who ill-served him, and they never shifted out of campaign mode. They campaigned for eight years, and never shifted into governance. And I think, therefore, that he was ill-served. But as far as the character of the man, I respect him and I expect to be doing some things with him after his presidency. Again, it’s very person.

BUSTER SOARIES: I agree with Bob. I think that on a personal level, he is decent, outgoing. We were in New Jersey sometime before 9/11, I think. He came in, and I flew with him on the helicopter to the next stop, where we landed on a ball field. And it was raining outside. Well, when the helicopter landed, all of these firefighters were there – about twenty of them – lined up on the side of the ball field. And then from the helicopter to the limo there was a tarp for us to walk on. And when he saw the firefighters standing over there in the rain, he walked off the tarp – and I’m with him, and I’m saying, you know, I don’t know about this – I only brought one pair of shoes! (Laughter.) But he walked off the tarp, over in the rain to shake the hand of every firefighter standing in that field. His feet got wet. And when we got into the limousine, he said to me, “You know what? The American people love their president.” And it was just crazy, because he didn’t have to do that. And his call to Bob from Air Force One suggests, too, that as a human being he’s just a great guy. He surrounded himself with some hacks and some incompetence, and when you’re president you have to take the advice and read the speeches of the people around you. And he made some bad decisions. I mean, he really thought “Brownie” was doing a good job in New Orleans! He wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t believe it; he thought that. And so, in that sense, it’s a tragedy.

ROBERT WOODSON: It really is.

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: I don’t have any personal stories like you and Bob, and so I’m stuck with having to assess the eight years based on what he did as president. (Laughter.) And I, fortunately, can’t – it’s sort of a cop-out to suggest that the problem is, it is inadequate people with whom he surrounded himself. I mean, he did the surrounding! As the kids say, it is what it is! It has been eight pretty awful years!

BUSTER SOARIES: It’s okay; we’re compassionate conservatives. (Laughter.)

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: I’d probably like it if the guy lived on my block, because he’d be good. He’d have good cook-outs and keep his grass cut. It’s not personal. I just think he has been a disaster as a president – that’s all.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: That was our – we really have to wrap it up. (Laughter.)

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WILLIAM RASPBERRY: I’m didn’t mean to –

(Laughter.)

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Last comments?

ROBERT WOODSON: I’m just pleased that I’m not the skunk at the garden party this time – that’s all.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Let’s try and wrap it up – any last thoughts?

WILLIAM RASPBERRY: That gentleman there is trying really hard to have a question heard.

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Okay, one last question.

EDWARD ROEDER, Sunshine Press: Hi! I wanted to ask the panel in general, including Bill Schambra, about racism. Where is a racist to go, if not to the Republican Party. And hasn’t that appeal to white racists brought the Republican Party its present isolation and defeat? That appeal really began after the 1968 election with the Southern strategy. And also, where is a black racist to go in the post-Obama period, when it doesn’t look like black racism is politically acceptable any more, let along politically correct. To clarify on the first part, for the Republicans, how can they possibly reach out to black America and get more benefit from doing that, given what’s already been said today on this panel, than the loss of the white racist vote?

ROBERT WOODSON: Well, first of all, let me just say that one of the reasons that I left the National Urban League and went to the American Enterprise Institute was that I got tired of liberal bigots who didn’t respect me enough to debate me but would go behind closed doors and vote against me. And so I reasoned, give me an honest bigot. When I went to AEI and I was uncelebrated – I hadn’t written anything – they treated me like a stranger and I found that refreshing, as a black person – to go someplace where I didn’t know any white folks and they treated me like a stranger. Liberal bigots surround you with praise while they vote against you, and they use pictures of black kids on their brochures – like the Unitarian Service Committee that I worked for – to raise money, and 80 percent of the money goes to themselves. That kind of bigotry drove me away from the liberal camp. So I would expand your definition; don’t assume that all white racists are Republicans. Liberals and Democrats have a good share of them. But again, give me an honest bigot – because once you change an honest bigot’s mind, you’ve got a terrific friend. That may sound strange, but that has been my experience.

WILLIAM RASPBERY: It’s a hell of a question you ask! It’s a pair of questions, really. And I’m not sure that the answers are the same, or that I can answer the first question at all. It does seem to me that they way our party system is structured now, a white racist doesn’t have much choice – in terms of national politics, at least – beyond the Republican Party or a third party of some formulation. Black racism is an interesting take-off on this thing, because unlike white racism it doesn’t proceed from a position of power. I don’t deny that it exists. I’m simply saying that it’s a different animal. And I guess – I’ve just been looking at this book called My First White Friend. In it, this bright young woman is talking about how she grew up hating white

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people because of things that happened in her life. That’s harder to account for. But when she is redeemed, she is completely redeemed. And I think black Americans have been brought up in a funny way to both hate and embrace a kind of racial attitude and racism; to think it’s stupid and naïve to trust white people under any circumstances, on the one hand, and on the other, to know that people are people and you’ve got friends of all complexions. There is a lot of confusion about that. For those who simply order their world based on whether you are black or white, maybe the Nation of Islam is the only place for them to go, where you could be happy with that. But the reason I’m rattling on is because I think it is precisely the kind of question we need to be asking ourselves across all color lines. What do we do now? What do we do with the people who want change? Who want to be comfortable with their peers? Who want all of these things that we want? What do we do, now that the whole political scene seems to be changing? I’ll ponder that question for a few weeks now.

ROBERT WOODSON: Thank you, Bill (Schambra)!

WILLIAM SCHAMBRA: Yes, well, thank you all for coming, and let’s thank our panelists.

(Applause.)

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