Peniel Joseph, one of the nation’s leading civil rights scholars, has studied and written about the history of race and democracy. He has some ideas on how cities and urban areas can begin to dismantle racism.
Peniel E. Joseph, Ph.D., is the founder of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a joint professorship in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, as the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, and in the History Department of the University’s College of Liberal Arts.
Dr. Joseph is the author of several award-winning books, including Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, and Stokely: A Life. His most recent book is The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
The Sword and the Shield, was published in March. He also served as editor for The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level.
Joseph is recognized as the founder of the “Black Power Studies” subfield of American Civil Rights History. He founded the center to focus interdisciplinary research and scholarship investigating how issues around race and democracy impact the lives of Americans. In an interview with Governing, he offers thoughts on the current cultural moment and how local governments might begin to address systemic racism.
Have we reached a moment when we could start to dismantle systemic racism?
I hope we have. I do think we're asking the right questions about wealth inequality, racial disparity, white supremacy, white privilege. These questions, along with defunding the police and prison abolition, are all the right takes in terms of policy.
If you're going to dismantle systemic racism, you have to understand the pipeline and why and how it keeps reproducing inequality and marginalization, unemployment, mass incarceration, poverty and racial segregation.
You’re a historian of Black protest movements. How unusual is what we’re seeing lately?
A multiplicity of events led to the fact that this time is different. We've seen other videos of Black men being killed by the police, but we've never seen this kind of cascading series of events.
There was one protest within 24 hours. The New York Times had a breakdown of how that turned into over 4,700 separate protests, including many areas that are overwhelmingly white, where there are no Black people. States like Washington, Utah, Oregon, which we don't typically associate as headquarters or bastions for Black demographics; or Vermont or Maine, that have all taken to the streets in terms of these demonstrations.
During the largest days of protesting, you had 50,000 to 80,000 people in Philadelphia. It was just truly amazing. Unbelievable.
What’s behind a response on this scale?
It's a confluence, a cascade of events. Obviously, 1963 and 1968 are important, but also the election of Barack Obama. The first Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 and 2014 after Trayvon Martin, after Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The election of the current president. The racial disparities that the pandemics amplify, including unemployment, are very important. The easing of shelter in place at the precise time that the Amy Cooper and George Floyd videos went viral.
The women's marches, the March for Our Lives and the various mobilizations that we've seen are part of it, other iterations of marches and social movements that primed young people to come to the fore. Another thing that's primed people is DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], or DAPA [Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents], people wanting immigrants and undocumented people to be treated well. The cruelty of the treatment of families being detained by ICE definitely struck a chord.
There are also veterans and true believers, marathon runners who've been part of protests and demonstrations and antiracist movements for many decades.
How much are young people helping to move things forward?
Young people are taking the lead. They're out on the streets, they're very excited and inspired. It's definitely something to see. They're making history.
You saw this in the ’60s too, with the sit-in movements and the movement against racial segregation. Young people are a big, big part of it.
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