On Monday, June 30 we hosted a virtual book talk to mark the publication of Structural Racism: The Dynamics of Opportunity and Race in America, authored by OBI Assistant Director Stephen Menendian. The event opened with some contextual framing by Michael Omi, the author of the groundbreaking Racial Formation in the United States, before Stephen was brought on to give an overview of his book and help us unpack the meaning of structural racism. The event also featured OBI Director john a. powell who talked about how the inherent bias in structures does the work of perpetuating racism, ableism, gender and other forms of discrimination in different contexts. The panel also spent a good chunk of time answering audience questions.
Learn more about the Structural Racism book, and purchase a copy with a 25% discount code, here.
Transcript
Note: This realtime transcript is not a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> MARC ABIZEID: Welcome to our latest virtual event. I'm Marc Abizeid, a member of the Othering and Belonging Institute and we are here to mark the launch of a brand-new book that just came out today by our assistant director Stephen Menendian called Structural Racism. We will have him on to introduce the book and he will be in conversation with director john a. powell and Michael Omi, Professor Emeritus of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley and the co-author of Racial Formation in the United States.
The event will last about 90 minutes. Towards the end we will be answering some of your questions so drop those in the chat box for us. We will be dropping some links in the checkbox to different resources we have including a link to purchase the book and a 25% discount code that we just got created to purchase the book from the publisher. Let me bring on Michael who is going to be framing the discussion. And getting us started. Michael, welcome.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Thank you. Thank you all for joining us this morning. We certainly do live in interesting times. It was just five years ago that we witnessed this dramatic social upsurge in response to the murder of George Floyd. The mass national and indeed global mobilization created a broader dialogue about policing, mass incarceration and the enduring facts of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and contemporary expressions of racial discrimination.
Coupled with the glaring social disparities that were evident at the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, these issues had a profound effect on the popular discourse about race. How we talked about race and racism. Folks, even corporations began talking about systemic and structural racism. While the term structural racism was evoked, its precise meaning and conceptual underpinnings often remain very sketchy and ill-defined. What is a structural understanding of racism?
And why does it particularly matter in these troubling political times? In his new book Stephen Menendian offers us an account of how to understand structural racism and its enduring and intractable character. Stephen does so by challenging existing understandings of racial inequality and provides a sort of illustrative examples of how structural racism works across a broad range of social science, institutions, policies and activities.
As Marc noted Stephen Menendian's assistant director and director of research at the othering and belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. I've known Stephen for many years and consider him a true example of a multitasker who is always involved in several ongoing research and policy initiatives. Welcome Stephen.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: Thank you Michael. It's such a joy to be with you this morning.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Thanks. Why don't we start off and I'm sure as we discussed things, things will get much more we will deal with things much more in depth and complexity. Could you give us a brief introductory definition of what structural racism is?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: Absolutely. There is basically two ways of answering the question. Michael does both. But the first way to understand it is Allison evolution of consumers of insights. In the traditional formation is still prevailing way. The main way of understanding racism and racial inequality is interpersonally. That is between people.
In this mode there's essentially a person who is a bigot, either their prejudiced or if they are not prejudiced, they have racial antipathy or racial anxiety or racial stereotypes they hold and they act on those. Perhaps an employer as a racial stereotype and refuses tire someone because of their race or promote them because of their race. That's the traditional mode and that mode informs how we understand information to occur.
Many people just think that racial inequality is just the sum of those discriminatory events writ large. In the 1960s, Charles Hamilton and Suddenly Carmichael came upon the notion of institutional racism which was really an evolutionary leap and it basically said look, you don't actually need a perpetrator. You don't need a racist actor. But you can have institutions, corporations, governments, universities that can have neutral rules.
Facially neutral rules got even nondiscriminatory rules that operate because of background conditions to disadvantage members of certain racial groups so you can think about how structures disadvantage people. People with disabilities are disadvantaged by stairs. So there's all sorts of structures that are disadvantaging. Stadium restrooms disadvantage women. So there's all sorts of ways that ordinary operation structures and systems and rules can disadvantage people depending on characteristics and needs.
Institutional racism was this insight that facially neutral rules could disadvantage members of racial groups. It was never worked out whether those rules even though they were superficially neutral and fair were designed of nefarious intent or whether there was no ill will or antipathy behind them. That was an ongoing debate. This debate moved forward and forward and there's different scholars and researchers who added to this debate but a critical one was Dr. Kamara Jones who in the 90s published a brief powerful essay called the gardener's tail.
She has a YouTube video that we can link to that's phenomenal as well. But several of her insights, along with Iris Marian Young, articulated what we now call structural approach or insight. What Doctor Jones recognized was that arms could occur not simply from commission but from omission, from inaction, from failure to water the plant. Like the gardener. For failure to give it healthy soil or failure to give it sunlight and nutrients. Could be just as harmful. This is a kind of indifference or callous indifference that can contribute to racial inequality that's not active commission or even antipathy.
It's a kind of failure to care. Fast-forward, work on complex systems theory. Helped us understand how systems operate. And that the organization of a system, where nodes are, the connections between those notes can actually produce what DeNella Meadows calls urgent properties or attrition of them rose calls metaaffects. You don't actually need an intent. Just the operation of the system can produce harm. That's systemic and structural goes beyond that.
Structural racism is essentially the largest recognition of the largest sense possible that the interaction operation of systems, absent antipathy, absent prejudice, absent discriminatory intent, can both produce and maintain and perpetuate racial inequality. That's the first mode of understanding. I have that featured in Chapter 4 of my book. But I think the other way that's easier to enter into and the way that I lean into even more is that there are three structures of opportunity.
What we call local opportunity structures. That depending on your location within them and your proximity to the critical nodes within that structure either facilitate upward mobility -- they put you on the up escalator -- or they inhibit you and constrain you from accessing vital resources, good schools, healthy environments, safe playgrounds and parks. These kinds of investments that help people thrive. The way that I try to answer that question what is structural racism is basically it is the racialization of opportunity structures.
It is the way in which racial advantage and disadvantage affects different racial groups through these local opportunity structures. In Chapter 1, I identify the layers of the opportunity structure that are most important today and the forces that operate across the opportunity structure. The opportunity structure in Chapter 1 I don't even talk about race. I talk about how it works in terms of class, geography and generations and then in Chapter 2 I show how it applies to race once we sharpen that structural perceptiveness. The basic answer I offer is that there are opportunity structures the produce advantage and disadvantage systematically based on where people live and are situated proximately within those structures.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Good. That wasn't exactly brief but you covered most of the questions I had regarding structural racism. Before we go further, I'd like to bring in john a. powell. John is director of the othering and belonging Institute and he wears many hats. He's also professor of law, African American Studies and ethnic studies here at UC Berkeley. As well as being Hassa the chair of equity and inclusion.
And for part of this discussion this was kind of the last in the series of questions I wanted to ask but I'd like to bring in john's perspective on this too. Why is it important for us to have a structural understanding of racism? Particularly at this historical moment? John do want to speak to that?
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Sure. Michael, it's always good to be in your company virtually or otherwise. In some ways I prefer the otherwise. Being in physical company. Stephen good to see you and congratulations. This is a very powerful book. It's important to understand, first of all, Stephen intimated this but I will make it explicit. Structures are not neutral. They're doing work. And they're complex. They are not one person or even one group necessarily. That control the structures. Maybe no one's in control although we are responding and acting with them.
When we see what Tilly calls durable inequality, when we see durable disparities in our society, and we don't just have these disparities. We also have stories about them. Why are Blacks, Latinos and other groups not doing as well? We have some stories now coming out which is part of what's called the dark Enlightenment which basically says it's Charles Murray all over again. These groups are just not connected. It's a culture of poverty. Maybe it's IQ. Maybe it's Manifest Destiny.
But in some ways if you can't find an explicit, nefarious actor to produce racialized outcomes and those outcomes persist, the story is they're just there. They're natural and not only should we not do anything to do something, but actually it would be a violation to be neutral. That's basically the Trump administration's position. The attacks on critical race theory, DEI, the attacks on even racial history.
It has an intuitive appeal in part because Tilly says we are pathological individualists. When we see something, we want to explain it in terms of individual behavior. That leaves us wanting. It actually misses the mark.
I think Stephen says in the book even people who are quote unquote racial justice activists, they end up being pathological individualists which actually so in our society there's this long misunderstanding of colorblindness. Of the work around implicit bias and a society like ours where race is so critical to everything, not just a Black people and People of Color. It structures our understanding of society and institutions. When we say let's be colorblind, let's not look at color, it has an intuitive appeal.
But we can't be colorblind. What we are though is structurally blind. We don't see the work the structures are doing. And again when we see this big spiderweb, we merely say where is the spider? Someone says there's no spider. Then there's no spiderweb. If we're going to correct this, I think we have to be clear about it. And it's interesting to me. Racism almost never in that quote unquote neutral spot so you get something after George Floyd as you mentioned Michael. Let's do something. But what is it that we do?
We spend a lot of time in terms of training to get rid of racial bias, but very little in terms of understanding the racial structure dynamic that's producing these disparities. When we make even the smallest intervention how we get racial resentment. Why are you doing that for those groups? When it's really hard to place in our society and this actually potentially not only gives us intervention for doing something that really might work, but it also gives an understanding of the language that can break that impasse that we've tended to have in discussing race.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: I think it's so important to recognize that despite the attention, despite the media coverage, despite the largest protest in American history, what was accomplished? What has endured from that accomplishment fundamentally in terms of policy change, in terms of reduced reduction of disparities, in terms of outcomes? Many of the policy reforms that were adopted have now been rolled back. Bail reform has been rolled back in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
Decriminalization measures have been rolled back. Even California has more punitive the increased sentencing even last November through ballot initiative. More than that I think to what John was saying, the attention is too off and on symptoms. On a phenomenon and the energy is spent -- I think most notoriously was a San Francisco unified school District school Board renaming buildings rather than figuring out what are the fiscal and structural conditions, environmental condition shaping disparities? There's a focus on epiphenomenon.
If we put 80% or 40% of energy looking for the spider if the web is not built by a spider, then we are mis-allocating our attention and effort and I think a structural analysis is an attempt to refocus our attention to those conditions and structures. It's an attempt to sharpen our perceptiveness of structures and structural arrangements rather than slipping back into conventional ways of thinking and talking.
>> MICHAEL OMI: You provide a lot of illustrative examples of structural racism. I wondered if you might talk about that briefly in order to allow us to understand that. For example, one of the core themes of your book is your focus on the structure of opportunity in the United States across varied domains. You talk about how opportunity is racialized. What's an example of how opportunity is racialized?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: The most easy way to understand this is that if you look at studies that examine the dynamics of upward mobility, socioeconomic transition between generations, you see huge disparities. Even when there are not disparities in terms of income so you for example can look at upper income black families and look to see what percentage of the children and those families stay as adults as upper income or fall somewhere below.
It's shocking. It's not only -- there's this sort of sense that black families are mobile and white families -- sorry black families are immobile, that black children are stuck in poverty to use Patrick Sharkey's phrase stuck in place and white families are upwardly mobile. But when you actually look at the dynamics of opportunity, you actually see a mirror that black children are mobile. They are just downwardly mobile and white children are mobile, poor white children are upwardly mobile and affluent black children are downwardly mobile and it happens at every quintile income distribution.
The obvious way is to look at outcomes. But really what I'm trying to do is unpack why those outcomes exist. What of the structures that facilitate upward and downward mobility by race? When you look at that, what you're really looking at is the provision of public goods, capacity, fiscal incapacity and the emblematic places and municipal fragmentation and the emblematic places of this are places like Ferguson, Missouri, Flint, Michigan, places where you have high rates of concentrated poverty.
You have underperforming schools and you have a fiscal system that essentially preys on the local populace while providing inadequate public services and public goods. Right next to driving communities that are predominantly white. Fiscal distress, underperforming schools, exposure to health contaminants -- lead in the water is just the most extreme example but PM 2.5, a runoff, asthma inducing contaminants, lack of tree cover, heat. All these things are racially related. And you can see it clearly in the data. So those are some brief examples.
>> MICHAEL OMI: John, Stephen emphasized as he talked about just now that place matters. Place matters with respect opportunity. But there's a whole Nest of different kinds of ways people are spatially organized. The role of regions, municipalities, even neighborhoods. In some ways. How do you reflect on the fact about place and place matters?
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Well, as Stephen made reference to and Sharkey made reference to stuck in place. We know about segregation. But I prefer to talk about two things. Segregation of opportunity and how we distribute opportunity across geographic codes. One of the points I think Stephen is making can't be explained in terms of personal animus. It's too much and too big so we have a mechanism that sorts us in a certain way. The mechanism is doing the work. We don't have to think about it.
We don't have to think about how to get from point A to point B. There Street set out and just follow the streets. They are profoundly racialized and gendered as well. Stephen gave the example about stairs. The physical structure of stairs creates an impediment if that's the only way to get from one point to the other for someone in a wheelchair. So the structure matters. The structure is doing work. This person designed the stairs, did they have animus towards people in a wheelchair?
Maybe but probably not. You keep multiplying those and that's why I say it's important to realize the structures are doing work. We design schools not to be neutral. We design schools to educate. But we design them with both in terms of impact and sometimes intent for particular people.
Stephen also mentioned I think it something we will talk about later about the opposite. Love is not hate but indifference. I think that's close. I think it's more pernicious than that though. There was a recent New York Times piece going to great length which I think makes sense about how we need something for boys.
Stephen said this to me. Boys are falling behind. There was no discussion about boys being inferior. There's no discussion about boys just being lazy. There's no discussion about boys being deadbeats. Basically saying we care about boys. We've got to fix this problem. Also Michael in terms of being stuck in the story. The story is that if marginalized groups are not doing well, there's a story. There's an explanation.
It's not structural. It's personal and behavioral. So again, there's something there, but if black boys or Blacks are not doing well, there's a different story. The combination. The structures matter a lot, but also we think about the stories and how we make sense, sense making of this durable inequality.
That's important as well. The final thing I'll say is that if you have a story that black boys are not doing well or Blacks are not doing well because they are whatever then when you do an intervention it's seen as an appropriate. So to be neutral. Why are you putting me out there then? Putting it out there because some people can't get to the third floor using the stairs. What structures call attention to is when you have these durable inequalities, how do we make sense of them?
How do we address them? While personal antipathy maybe present in some sense, it's not nearly enough in terms of the intervention and after George Floyd I noticed a lot of work I don't think it's irrelevant but sometimes it was done in a way that didn't work. But there was little attention to the structures. More attention to the spider. The last thing is who is the spider in the story? The spider is the racist.
The spider is the bad person. Then you also have this thing that no one wants to be the spider. No one wants to be the racist. No one wants to be responsible for durable inequalities so let's put it back on the group that's actually -- let's put it back on George Floyd which is what we're seeing now is they are trying to rewrite the story that it's his fault that he was killed. The poor policeman. Wow, what could he do?
>> MICHAEL OMI: This is interesting about the stories we tell, the kinds of explanations we invoke to explain disparities, situations of very extreme inequality. I'm wondering what is the role of say racial ideology in all of this? We talk about racial structures. How do racial ideologies come into play and are structures and ideology reciprocal, mutually reinforcing or how might we understand that dynamic in the case of the ways we construct those stories and indeed their implications later for policies as well.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: That's a big topic, Michael. I would say two things. I would say the listserv, the reader or the people who care about this, Stephen as a really important element but you bring in another element and what we actually talk about somewhat in the book that Stephen has on his desk, belonging without othering, is there's a racial formation. Michael wrote that book. Racial formation. I'm joking but I'm serious that we are actually looking at something very complex. We're looking at not just a structure and the making of physical space. We're looking at the structure making identity.
We're looking at both an issue about knowledge, how do we build things and an issue about physicality. What do we do but also an issue about who are we? From my perspective one of the limitations of trying to address racism in America especially as it relates to whites and nonwhites or whites and Blacks is we are remaking people.
We're remaking identity and that's part of the will of those stories. That's a complicated topic and I don't want to go too far into it but I would recommend to the listener to read not only Stephen's new book structural racism but also belonging without othering and Michael and Howard's book on racial formation.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Stephen?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: I second that. I think there's a complex relationship but the simple way to understand it is that racist ideas do not perceive racist structures. Rather they and emanation of racist structures, defense of them. I'll give you a couple examples. Richard Reeves has written a book called dream quarters really about class not about race but the analysis is directly applicable.
What he basically argues is that the top 20% of Americans essentially organized opportunity structures across all of our metropolitan areas in a way that systematically advantages them more that they used to pay or get advantage. He says that high opportunity places have become upward income families have become greenhouses for nurturing their youth. When families decide what neighborhoods they are good move into, how they are going to finance schools, how they are going to fund PTAs and supplement school provision, people are making mostly self-interested decisions.
I want to put my kid in the best school. I want them to get the best education. I'm looking not just for a home. I'm looking for an investment. I'm looking notches for an investment. I'm looking for a good investment. I don't just want my property values to go up. I want to maximize my property where we invest our money, retirement vehicles. They all contribute to and perpetuate racial inequality.
Dorothy Brown has written a phenomenal book the whiteness of wealth which I cite in my book talking about the tax code works this way. It's not again as john said there is animus out there. There is antipathy out there but a lot of these structural arrangements are not driven by animus or antipathy. In fact they are driven by self-interest and greed and opportunism and the pursuit of that systematically and collectively has the metaeffect of maintaining and perpetuating racial inequality because of a set of background starting conditions and initial conditions. Ask yourself who wrote the tax code? Who is behind the tax code? There's no one person. It's literally generations of legislators in a decentralized way sprawling from Republican --
>> MICHAEL OMI: You froze a bit there Stephen.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: Can you hear me now? There is no person who has written the tax code and yet who benefits from the tax code? The well-connected, the people who can hire accountants to take advantage of it, affluent businesses who can find tax havens overseas, corporations. It's a structure that exists that supposedly by design seemingly is neutral although we know it's not. It has affectcan be taken advantage of. Contemporary structures are the same thing by race.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Stephen you enter into something which has been a kind of ongoing and contentious debate about the relative merits of race versus class. And it shapes not only I think the analysis people bring to understanding race and racism in the United States but also to the kinds of policy options which emanate from that. What kinds of things we should do. How do you understand the relationship of race versus class or race and class in the United States?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: It's a wonderful question, and a lot of the progressive wisdom among policy heads is let's just focus on class. Let's just do a class agenda, and the sweet spot is a class -based agenda that can reduce racial disparities without necessarily naming it. I think that's largely wrong for a lot of reasons. John wrote a phenomenal article called the raise class nexus and I will let john talk about it in a moment but logically or fundamentally, if race is just reducible to class, then you wouldn't need a race lens to understand racial inequality.
You would just look at class. I argue in Chapter 2 of the book that's not possible. In particular three expressions of class that are so racialized that if you had a colorblind lens you couldn't even see them. One is durable poverty. The second is concentrated poverty and the third is childhood poverty. One of the graphs in my book shows the enormous disparity between black and white childhood poverty. It's 40% to 10% roughly over the last 50 years.
It's such a huge difference. If you were just to look at childhood poverty in a race blind legacy would miss that and the gulf is larger when it comes to concentrated poverty. Basically the experience of concentrated poverty meaning living in a neighborhood where 40% of your neighbors or more on below the federal poverty line is essentially -- doesn't exist for white families. Even poor white families who live in places with the rare exception of places like Appalachia but two thirds of neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are Black and Latino.
The more you dig into it in the way I do in Chapter 2 the more you see it's a nonwhite experience. Low income white people live in middle income neighborhoods. Middle income black Americans are more likely to live in low opportunity, high poverty neighborhoods. Durable poverty which is poverty over 10 years is essentially not experienced by white Americans. It's very, very rare. These forms of poverty, some might say aren't they still class? You wouldn't be able to see them if you didn't have a race lens. There is actually an independent race factor.
Which is racial residential segregation that compounds and concentrates poverty. If you just look at class, you will be completely blind to that reality so you can't use -- race and class, I like Prudence Carter's phrase. They are fraternal twins. They share a common DNA but they operate with distinctive racial elements and therefore race is not reducible to class.
>> MICHAEL OMI: John do you want to speak more about the race class nexus?
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Yes. I said in context that the only thing to probably understand less well than race in the United States is class. We actually don't know what we are talking about when we say class. What many people mean is socioeconomic, but that's not class in any rigorous sense. It's not class in a way that Europeans think about class. It's for the most part not a class identity. Most Americans, those who made $5000 year to those who make $500,000 a year call themselves middle-class.
The phenomenon is also quite different. Guenther Mardial wrote a book in the 1940s with the help of others called the American dilemma and in the book he made it clear that white poverty and black poverty was actually two different things. Think about 1940. If you're white in much of America no matter how poor you are you can vote. If you're in the South and black even if you were not poor in most parts of the South, could not vote. So your group was participating in decisions.
We talk a lot about concentrated poverty. Understand there's also concentrated wealth. How does concentrated wealth get organized? Even understanding big problem now in terms of immigration. The United States never corrected adequately it's early admonition that you had to be white to be naturalized as a US citizen. Without defining what white is. There's a complicated interaction, and really what people are trying to do is avoid the discussion of race because race has been so contentious. But to then put it on class actually is a way about the stating. It's not a real discussion at all.
There's a relationship between them but as Stephen says that the complication that's not straightforward. One of the obvious things is when we talk about race the obvious question is why. Why is this so divisive? I think I would say in Russia, and England, France class is divisive. It's a way oftentimes there's some overlap. Blacks or People of Color are disproportionately poor and yet most interventions based on socioeconomic doesn't solve the structural problem that Stephen was talking about.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Stephen?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: I agree with that. I think if you just do class-based interventions, you can make some headway in reducing racial disparities but you could also widen racial disparities. There is ample examples of the New Deal and elsewhere that if you make an intervention that is insensitive to structural arrangements you can actually make those racial disparities worse. A broad-based class intervention could help but it could also exacerbate racial inequality if it is insensitive to structural arrangements.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Michael, another thing. We talk about in the book belonging people need to have the right to participate. People need tax their stories told. Part of the class effort is actually to silence those stories. We don't want to her about race. It's like saying we don't want to hear about your disabilities. Who is the week? Who gets to decide that the story of loss of land for Native Americans, immigration and internment for Japanese-Americans, slavery for Blacks doesn't get to be told?
That story doesn't get to be told. That's an injury in and of itself. We don't hear this story because it's not a good story. When I talked about American land talk at University of Minnesota awaits student raised his hand and said why are we studying Native Americans? This is an American history class. All you know is that we took that land. That's our story. So there's some subtleties in this as well. Anyway. And especially in this environment. This environment is not a neutral environment. This is a hostile environment. This is an environment where there's perpetrating not just structural arrangements as it takes away money and resources and attacks the idea of disparate outcomes but it also is trying to tell the story about Americans that are not white and Christian.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: That's such an important point which is that it's not just that this issue is so important. It's that we now have a federal government that is not simply on the sidelines, but is actively hostile not just a policies that can remedy these problems but to even discussion of it. And has banned literally the term systemic racism. The moment that we are in is potentially more important than ever to be having this conversation.
>> MICHAEL OMI: For people listening on YouTube and go buy this book because it will soon be banned. John makes a good point in which the ways we remember history and memory is team pulled out from under us as changes are being made to reforms about what kinds of monuments could be in the National Park Service and explanations for different things.
Revoking certain kinds of reinstating some of the names of camps that were formerly the military facilities that were formerly named after Confederate generals to the recent thing Pride Week about the naval ship Harvey Milk being renamed as part of this kind of real assault on our common public history and memory.
Let me extend part of this race class thing in a different direction because I'd like us to move towards what is a structural racist approach? What is taking a structural lens to racial inequality in the United States mean for policies? Stephen, you are quite right about the upsurge we saw a mobilization five years ago around George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement. It didn't result in any sort of permanent reforms or there were reforms and now they are being reneged upon.
One thing that comes out of the race class debate is whether or not a policies that are much more targeted versus universalistic kind of reforms in order to deal with questions of disparities with respect opportunity in the United States. How does a structural lens up us understand some of the things between a targeted approach say affirmative action versus some sort of more broad reform that might result in lessening disparities among all Americans?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: This is a very important and difficult question to answer. I spent the bulk of Chapter 4 trying to distill key principles that would inform a structural agenda, reform agenda and agenda that could dismantle structural racism. I principally talk about three policies. Affirmative action, reparations and disparate impact. I'm not going to recap that here. instead I'm going to try to talk about principles. In one respect I take a sort of extremist view here. This is what I'm extreme on. I think that we have to get away from the idea of good intentions.
When it comes to policy. This is one of the few things that I will agree with Milton Friedman on. You should not judge a policy by its intent but by its outcomes. I think he's right about that. One of the things I think we get tripped up on is we're looking for someone who is empathetic as a policy, looking for someone who appears to understand the issue. What I say is I would rather have a bigot, an interpersonal racist whose public policy position or jurisprudence is egalitarian rather than someone who is interpersonally empathetic and yet supports policies whose effects are to perpetuate structural racism.
The paradigm example of this many people will remember us during Katrina Kanye West asked his George W. Bush racist and part of the reason for that is there seem to be such a callous indifference and slow response to the recovery. Lack of preparation for the hurricane and the pundit class said no, we don't think George W. Bush is a racist is if that's what mattered. We have around this country too many city councilmembers and governors who serve the kind of white suburban constituency.
That reinforce structural racial inequality and many of these people including many people and progressive places like Marin and San Francisco they reinforce policies that are structurally racist. Even though they may be so that's the thing I'm extreme on. I think we've got to get away from looking into people's hearts and really focusing on what is the impact of these policies? I say actually we should be more critical of policies that are ineffective or counterproductive than those that are nefarious.
Nefarious policy we lease know there's a bigot behind it. When the Muslim travel ban was put in place or the border wall was proposed or mass deportations, we can see the bigotry. It's clear. When Stephen Miller calls all these immigrants ordinary hard-working people criminals and insurrectionist we can see the bigotry. But if someone rather does something, policy but it's totally ineffective or even worse counterproductive and Stokes backlash, we should be more critical of that.
Because it means that people will become apathetic. We tried that and it didn't work. My view is the different structural lens gives us a completely different view of what to valorize and what to oppose and my example of this is the first Justice Harlan ...and yet in his writings admitted to being white supremacist that again has a more expansive constitutional vision we can even fathom today. John could talk more about that. I'll stop there but that's I think a big part of or we need to go.
>> MICHAEL OMI: How about this thing about structural racism and policies such as entering into debates about targeted versus universal?
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Again that's an important discussion. I would just say a couple of things. Michael as you know and Stephen is a part of this we have targeted universalism. We say the goal should be universal. The strategy should be targeted based on how people are situated but the goals are universal. And it's for everybody.
But people, groups are situated differently. So you make different interventions not because of their race per se, not because gender per se but because race and gender situates them differently within our society. Stephen and I both talk about plus some strategies saying how do we do something for everybody? How do we acknowledge everybody and everybody's pain?
The particular target is strategy sometimes says we only care about a particular group and can pick groups against each other. Universalist says we don't see groups. We now blind to group situation. Both of those are problematic. Instead we should say we want every child to be healthy. And to go to bed well fed. That's a universal goal. What that means for black children or Native American children or recent immigrants, for white children living in the suburbs may be quite different. The intervention might be quite different.
But we say the goal is to have every child healthy and every child well fed. The strategy has to be targeted based on how groups are actually performing, where they are and what will work for them. Coronavirus is a great example. We want everyone to be safe from the virus. What does that mean? If you're a Native American living on reservation and they say to wash her hands 20 times a day, I don't have running water. If they say stay away 6 feet from people who are strangers who are not part of your family and you're a migrant worker living in a bunk, not possible.
If they say see a healthcare professional if you have any problems and if you're living in inner-city Detroit and there are no functioning clinics you can't do it. The other thing I want to just point out is that when we did tan, we made the racial disparity between white women and Black women worse. Most of the stuff was race neutral so you had to go to work within two years. Some exceptions could be extended to five years.
Two quick things. The two and five years was actually tracking the experience of most white women. Most white women got off welfare in two years and certainly off by five. It was not tracking the experience of black women who often had intergenerational experience of welfare and poverty. But aside from that it said you had to go to work. It turns out that Black women are the least -- have the least access to public transportation.
They don't have cars and they don't have access to public transportation. White women poor white Black woman but they moved places where there was a functioning public transportation system. They could get to jobs. So if they just looked at the women in terms of socioeconomic they were the same.
But they were situated very differently within structures. If you want Black women to be able to get the job so needed to different intervention than you need for white women. Targeting universalism tries to address that and tries to address it for everybody. Not just for the most marginal but for everybody.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: I totally agree with what john just said but part of it is to break out of zero-sum Targeted policies are too easily viewed as a special interest on behalf of a particular group and potentially that breeds resentment and it's really easy fodder for backlash. If you appear to be helping one group a good example of this was in 2021 the Biden administration issued a policy to help black farmers.
Who have been systematically discriminated against. Immediately out of a federal fund that policy was immediately enjoined in federal court and everyone was unhappy. The black farmers felt like they were getting screwed over. The white farmers felt like they were be so what you need are generally more positive sum policies or even more importantly to frame these policies as positive sum because very few policies are zero sum.
But targeted policies are much more easily labeled as such. One other thing. It's not just whether you should choose targeted or universal policies. I think the more important question is is the policy structurally sensitive or structurally targeted? I've got a wonderful book that john and I both thought was really strong by Joseph Fishkin called bottlenecks. A new theory of equal opportunity and one of the things he does really well if you think of getting entire education as a bottleneck. You take a test, graduate from high school, trying to get into let's say a highly ranked or selective university. That's a bottleneck. How do you address a bottleneck?
One way to do it is you widen the bottleneck so more people can flow through. The problem with that is if you just widen the bottleneck, you actually create more competition for scarce resource. If only 1500 people can get into Harvard and let's say remove this discrimination against Jewish people from Harvard like they didn't have in the 20s you have more people competing for fewer slots so it feels zero-sum. It's not positive sum. Affirmative-action is metaphorically a workaround. The bottleneck is still constraining. It's still holding people from getting to the bottleneck but affirmative-action is saying we're going to do this special thing around it.
The Texas 10% plan is kind of the Texas 10% plan is an example of transforming the structure in a sense. It's saying we're going to have a completely different approach to admissions here. Hopefully you can go deeper and do a more transformative approach. I think the key is number one you want to be positive sum and you want structural intervention. One that targets people tends not to be structural. But if you target structures, you will not only serve people but you will serve people outside of the target group. It will benefit more people than just those who are aiming at. Structural intervention is preferred over targeting people.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Stephen you should explain the Texas 10% plan with regard to Texas.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: The University of Texas there was an affirmative action program that they used explicit consideration of race in higher education because of the really extreme disadvantage to Black and Latino neighborhoods in high schools in primary and secondary schools. It continues to this day.
But the Fifth Circuit struck down the University of Texas affirmative-action plan and Hopwood so in a remarkable turn policy development the state legislature not the University the state legislature adopted a policy called the Texas 10% plan that automatically qualified all graduating seniors that graduated in the top percent of public high school class to the University of Texas.
It's since been modified because there was such overwhelming the University found it ended up being 80% of the undergraduate class so they capped it at 75% so now if you are junior at Texas you get a letter that will tell you what percentage you have to fallen it's usually about eight now percent now to get into UT Austin. Remarkably this policy passed the legislature that's described in our Canary because by just a few votes I think even maybe one vote but it passed because of a lot of white rural legislators recognized in their districts no one attended UT Austin. No one got in.
You had this alliance of Black and Latino districts with white rural legislators allied against more fluid white suburbanites. That's an example of a positive sum policy. It serves everyone in a positive way. It can easily be viewed as a special pleader or fodder for demagogic backlash. If you have questions drop them in the chat box.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: One of the things one reason this quote unquote works is because schools are segregated. You have essentially all-black schools and all Latino schools and all-white schools. And so there's some gaming the system where white families would take kids with schools and put them in a black Latino schools say they could be in the top 10%.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: Which might be a good thing.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: It shows how systems are complicated and you make a move and the system makes a move other people make a move. But also we have it got it across the finish line. We have a whole thing on targeting universalism that I would recommend to the listener.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Stephen, you describe in your book about 10 types of initiatives we might embrace in order to deal with this kind of issue around structural racism. Can you briefly give us one example of what that is? Anyone you want to choose from.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: Out choose the first. One of the strong claims in my book is contemporary structural racism which is and I will ask Mark to put the indifference quote out. Structural racial inequality. Part of what we did note as racism is the indifference to it. The quote by Elie Wiesel is the opposite of hate is not love. It's indifference. Part of it is extremely callous indifference. The opposite...This indifference is part of what is so enraging. The indifference to Katrina the indifference during the uprisings, the Kerner commission survey people were just furious at the lack of care, the lack of regard. One of the things I think is central is a lot of these expressions of contemporary racial equality are not legacies of the past.
They are divestment during the Reagan administration war on drugs and mass incarceration during the 1980s and 1990s they are the subprime mortgage crisis fiscal distress so one policy foreground is fiscal regionalism. We have to get away from this fragmentation of our regions where everyone is parochial and we have this local defensive localism and defensive parochialism.
The leading example of this is the Twin Cities texturing policy wearing the 1970s the Twin Cities adopted this state policy that said that all future tax revenue would be growth growth and tax revenue nonexisting revenue the growth in tax revenue would be divvied up equally by all the municipalities in the region. A study done 30 years later found that essentially you have a much more equitable region as a result of that.
80% of the municipalities were winners where you had 20% winners in the past. This fiscal regionalism helps make sure that everyone John and I worked in Louisville Kentucky after the Supreme Court struck down their voluntary integration plan in 2007. One of the remarkable things about Louisville school district is it's a countywide school district called the Apperson County school district and we helped create the integration plan there.
You have countywide district which means that white parents who live in the eastern parts of the county have to care about what's happening in western Jefferson County. Because it's not just divvied up their local school. You care about the whole system. You care about the system as a whole. What we have right now is a system where people live in metropolitan regions where the only care about their neighborhood or their city and are not solving the problems in their region and part of that is because of this both municipal fragmentation but also this fiscal distribution of resources.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Thank you. Before we move on to the questions from our audience, want to ask you one last question, the both of you. I know it's a big question, but I'm hoping for some sort of very pithy kind of soundbite with respect to this. What is the goal of racial justice? And how do you think about that question and what is it?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: I don't want to steal john's thunder but one of the goals that john will say is a world where everyone belongs which I think is very important. I think one of the things we get stuck on, part of it is we want to -- we can't just reduce disparities. Because you could reduce disparities by bringing down the performance of the best-performing group.
We don't -- you could say we've got a five year life expectancy gap between black and white Americans. You could eliminate that by bringing down white life expectancy which in fact has happened in the last 10 years in the case of the work on depths of despair it's been a huge problem. To me the answer has to be basically a world where life does not --wear race does not affect your life chances and where everyone can flourish and thrive and has a range of opportunities.
>> MICHAEL OMI: John.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: I would confer with what Stephen suggested. No surprise there. I think Eric board said the project of like Americans is democracy. Racial justice really is about everyone. Saying everyone has the same thing. It's saying people have what they need to thrive, what they need to belong, what they need to participate or saying the most important right people have is the right of participation.
Because it's through participation that you make other things. (name?) talks about capacities that you have the capacity to live a good life and to fully participate. That may sound way far away from us right now when we are watching life being constrained, people being attacked, the earth being attacked. But we have to state these ideas.
And then move toward them. The concept of equality which was enshrined in our Constitution by Jefferson who had six people enslaved is not just an act of hypocrisy. It's more complicated one to one and we're still fighting about what we mean by equality. The UN declaration of human rights saying this is something that everyone is entitled to. David French wrote a piece in New York Times and he talked about the process and he says due process which is really saying everyone has a right to be heard. That's the heart of what due process is is that before we can deport you or jail you, you have a right to be heard before an official court of law.
What about if you are a criminal? It doesn't matter. What about if you are an undocumented immigrant or Nazi? Doesn't matter. French makes the point is it's universal. The dignity to be heard. We don't live up to it. And we have an administration now trying to cut back and that's playing with it but the Constitution is clear in at least two places that everyone is entitled to due process.
Everyone belongs. No exception. Belonging has been part of our struggle for thousands of years. But we've always graded belonging with othering. We created belonging for some groups and then othering. So we have to move beyond that and have this ideal of belonging without othering. That to me is sort of the heart of racial justice.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: Before we go to the Q&A Michael I want to give you an opportunity to answer that question.
>> MICHAEL OMI: That's a very good one. I certainly like the idea about the goal of racial justice is social order wear race no longer does shape to an ornament degree one's life chances. I think that's extremely important. But I also shared with john and this is drafting on both of you really is to really consider the intense history of the kind of marginalization and othering of different groups and what does it mean to have a kind of different notion of humanity?
That can serve us in terms of both our outlook and our policy consequences in trying to create that social order in which race is no longer utilized to unfairly distribute resources and advantages and actually permits people to develop according to -- and lifts the barriers that we encounter right now by which race is utilized as a device to really structure our life chances.
We should take up some questions from you. Marc are you going to help facilitate us on this? Thank you. We have a question which I think might appear on your screen as well. How do you conceptualize your role in bridging the divide between institutional knowledge and public discourse comfortably among historically marginalized populations?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: That's a perfect question for john.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: I'm eager to see how Michael answers it. Some of you may know and viewers out there that I've written a book with the help from my colleague Rochelle called the power of bridging. And bridging is basically a willingness and the assertion that every human being is deserving of dignity. Willingness to listen to each other's story, willingness to actually challenge the notion that there is an other. There are short bridges and long bridges.
One of the things I say to people when you say how do you convince people to bridge and I say I don't. After you look into it, you have to decide yourself and there may be certain conditions that are preconditions before we bridge. One of mine is what I talked to people who have different views from me, maybe vote for different candidates are live in different communities, no violence.
Usually people agree but sometimes people don't. You asked specifically about marginalized population so bridging is a way in which not just humanizing quote unquote the other but humanizing ourselves. Sometimes people want to give a pass for marginalized groups because marginalized groups often times discriminate against sometimes traumatize, not ready to bridge. Fine.
But be careful because there's a risk of further dehumanizing people by giving them a pass not to bridge. There's an injury, there's a vulnerability associated with bridging, but there's actually injury associated with not bridging. I know that's an odd answer but to add to the books of we've already given to the power of bridging I try to grapple with that in a little more detail.
>> MICHAEL OMI: What frameworks can be used to assess outcomes from a policy directive?
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: I think this is a really important question. We talked earlier -- john brought up but I elaborated on the difference between zero-sum and positive sum both in framing and fax but I forgot to mention the excellent example of this by Angela Glover Blackwell called the curb cut affect. Her example of this is the cut out on curbs was designed for people with disabilities and wheelchairs. But actually benefits everyone.
If you can identify a structural intervention like that that is aimed at one population but has broader positive effects, that's really a litmus test of ineffective structural intervention. We want policies that affect multiple groups simultaneously. The other thing that I think is important in answering this is disparate impact. There's a whole controversy around this that was triggered in part by a proposal from Ibram Kendi around constitutionalize in this.
I think the criticism was way -- of his proposal was way overblown. Andrew Sullivan called it totalitarian. But really if you think about how we do policy, we already look at disparate impacts. What do we think the environmental laws are? MIPA and SECA it's if you are going to do something we just have to assess what the environmental effect is. When Congress is considering a bill they have to take into OMB and get a budget affect estimate. Is this -- even a California ballot initiative there's a little line that says what the budget impact is going to be.
I think it should be de rigueur -- de rigor and a matter of course that whenever policymakers at the local level, the administrative level, the state level or federal level are considering a course of action they should simply ask themselves what is the effect of this on different populations? But jiggly racial populations?
If there is a disparate impact it doesn't mean you can't do it. Just like disparate impact law Judson mean you can't take that course. You just have to weigh the benefits and the harms and at least be aware of it. In my view disparate impact analysis or framework requirement sets the gaze of policymakers to avoid this problem of indifference. To avoid this problem of bearing their head in the sand. All we have to do is pay attention.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Someone asks that they are wondering how this discussion might incorporate the racializing effects of ongoing settler colonialism in the United States. Can you have racial justice without coming to terms with colonialism?
>> JOHN A. POWELL: I guess I would say a couple things. A lot of times there's an assumption of things being sequential which I think is actually -- misses the way systems actually work. We get to tell a story and our story has to include our history and also as Stephen's book suggests it's not just the history we are doing right now. In some ways colonialism and racism were born at the same time.
It's almost like race and class. They are so close together. There are some exceptions. Northern Ireland was colonized, but the major project with England being most extreme example of colonialization was profound racialization of the world. I think there are a lot of complicated question so for example think about the Texas 10% program.
One could argue appropriately that you're making intervention in a system that's otherwise deeply flawed, not changing the segregation of school so the distribution of money in schools or the segregation of neighborhoods. But still that program has had a profound effect that would not have been in place without it. I think we're working on multiple fronts and we have to be willing to take advantage. I say sometimes we put too many preconditions before we do the work.
We have to end capitalism, sexism, racialism. Those things are precursor to the work, we won't do it because those things don't matter. Again I see moving on multiple tracks and in ways which things are not just sequential but things are dynamic affecting each other in ways we can't fully anticipate.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: And may require iterative and continuous monitoring and change to adjust to. I have called myself an extremist in that one particular respect around really moving away from intense. The core is that is really focused on outcomes. To me, it's where do you pour your energy? If you spend most of your energy trying to educate Americans about colonialism and historical racism, you can probably get a lot of awareness around that.
But to what extent will that change contemporary structures? That perpetuate and maintain racial inequality is an open question. If you have a limited number of energy units you can allocate, my vote would be to put them into transforming contemporary structures. And again focusing on things that actually change outcomes rather than epiphenomenon rather than focusing on naming and statues and things like that. It's not necessarily either/or. I realize that. But I think the goal, the situation is so dire. The disadvantages are so deeply entrenched.
We are ushering generation after generation into environments of concentrated poverty, permanent disadvantage, durable poverty. This simply cannot continue and it's why we continue to and will continue to have uprisings like we saw in 67 and 68 and 2020 and 2016. I think the situation is too urgent. I don't mean to be glib about this but to focus on historical seminars. Like what we have to do is transform contemporary arrangements now.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Let me add two things very quickly. There has been a long debate about do you change hearts and minds to change behavior or do you change behavior to change hearts and minds? There's research on both depending on the situation. I say I think what Stephen is inferring and I want to pick up is saying do both.
Stories matter. Symbols matter. Sacred symbols matter a lot but it doesn't do all the work. Stories are about meaning. What do something mean? We can address racism. We can't address belonging without having a better story about meaning. So we going to colonialism but also there is a danger. We don't want to spend too much time focusing on the spider, focusing on the racist, focusing on -- there are spiders out there. There are racists out there.
But what we do when we actually focus on them we don't focus with precision. The colonialists become everybody who's English. The racists become everyone who's white. That's too broad. Not refined enough. I think the challenge is to talk about colonialism, talk about racism but realizing it's really the elites who striving it.
People were complicit in some ways but they weren't driving it. They weren't making laws. When the colonies here in the United States the majority of people didn't vote. The more Geordie people couldn't vote when we became a country. Again they may have participated and benefited in some ways, but I think sometimes as we think of these big ideas like colonialism or capitalism, who is a capitalist? I have money in my whatever.
Retirement. I don't think of myself as a capitalist. I'm certainly affected by so I think there's some complexity that would be useful to draw into the picture and to make sure we are not dismissing a whole range of people who are also in some ways both complicit but also being hurt by structural systems.
>> MICHAEL OMI: I can't find that question that was recently asked about the relationship of racism and settler colonialism. I was thinking once that Angela Davis made this very interesting -- oh thank you. Made this really interesting thing she said that the black demand for 20 acres and a mule had to ask the question whose land was going to be taken for that?
What I think it speaks to is to be sensitive to the kinds of patterns of particularly Indigenous displacement and expropriation. But it gets to something about our vision of racial justice too. Which is to really acknowledge and understand in a racialized hierarchy where different groups are often pitted against each other or placed in different degrees of having access to resources and power and opportunity that we be cognizant of the fact of the kinds of harms that at times racial groups can do to each other. It's to realize those in specific situations as well and understand better the vision of racial justice needs to in fact deal with the kinds of ways in which groups create harms for each other.
>> SPEAKER: Did the DEI and anti-racial seminars designed seminars lead to a distraction of structural racism and focused on individual racism and become more divisive than unifying effort? Insights here White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Like many concepts, racism is incredibly complicated. I sometimes compare race to gravity. We all have weight. We all have the effects of gravity and get some scientists say there are less 10 people in the whole planet to really understand gravity. Cadillac. There's a new version every year. It's not one thing. James Baldwin said there is no hope for us as long as they think they're white. What race really means and the obtuse race puts solidly at the foot of we've been in securing what we mean by race. If we were in a different place we can have a serious discussion with some disagreements.
I have a lot of respect for Robin DiAngelo and yet I think the idea of White Fragility is overstated and it also we have White Fragility at the same time we have Black trauma. If a black person is triggered in a meeting, we are invited to be empathetic. Maybe rightly so. Because of the trauma. But if a white person is triggered in a meeting, we are invited to excoriate them and call it white privilege and I'm not saying there's not such a thing is white privilege.
But if we are trying to as that great philosopher Bob Marley says every person thinks his burden is the heaviest. How to actually bring in our different stories of suffering without giving any story privilege? I think we can have a serious discussion about this but everyone having a chance to participate but it's hard to do this in a backdrop of the National Guard being on the streets rounding people up.
Telling schools that if you say teach about Sojourner Truth we are going to take your money away from you. Having the United States were to it is sleep decide that it's okay to go to war. I think we have a fraught environment. That's what I'm saying and I think we have to be mindful of that. I wouldn't approach things the same way as Robin does, but I would also want to be in discussion with her and at least acknowledge she's trying to move things in the right direction.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: I also appreciate the question. I think that the concern I have with the approach of White Fragility is that again every centers the mind. It really centers ideation. It re-centers intentionality. The whole approach that she takes is to overcome white resistance to conversations about racism and racial remedy. I think that re-centers ideation instead of structures. And again it weakens our structural perceptiveness and structural prescript perspicacity which is the muscle we have to strengthen and I think the same thing. I thought Ibram Kendi's stand from the beginning was a marvelous book.
But the subtitle is a history of racist ideas. Basically. It's ideation rather than structures. What we have to get to what I tried to do is refocus attention on structural arrangements and how they maintain and perpetuate and cause racial inequality. And get away from this focus on ideas and ideation. This does not mean ideas don't undergird and stories don't these ideas don't get into the stories John talks about but we are not gonna solve these problems by simply overcoming white consciousness and resistance to it. We've got to get people focused to see how the structures work and how we can reform or dismantle them so everyone can do better.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Thank you. Should we take up one last question here? Maybe we will take this on last since we are almost to our time. Structural racism discrimination is a global phenomenon. Are there examples of global structural othering and how the policy solutions you mentioned can apply to global issues? Question.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Samir asked that question so we don't have to answer it.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: I'll go first and let you close us out. We do work on a global level. We are concerned about global dynamics. Because these problems are certainly not local. They are patterned across the United States and are patterned locally. The demagogy of the backlash, the gender dynamics, all these things are global. This book is remarkably thin for what it originally was because it was originally twice as long but the editor and publisher wisely insisted on brevity and most of this is end notes.
But one of the things I didn't have space to do is really talk about how did this analysis apply globally? Just because of space limitations. But the truth is that the structure of opportunity, the capacities that are needed, the capacities and capabilities people need in the United States are no different from elsewhere. The investments in education and human capital, the healthy environment, all these needs, transportation, access to good jobs. These are things that are shared globally.
The dynamics that occur in the United States in a sense what happened in Europe if you look at France, Paris, what happened in the (word?) is essentially a precursor to what we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years in the United States. The patterns are largely the same and the groups might be different but the dynamics are very similar. Let's let john give a closing.
>> JOHN A. POWELL: Again thank you Stephen. Thank you Michael. Thank all of you for joining us. We begrudgingly do the new global world now. We're being broadcast via some kind of computer platform. There are I think hopefully 500 people on Sunday have these global mechanisms. We oftentimes are not the authors of them or they are in service of us. We need to change that. We do travel now. We are in communication with people from all different parts of the world.
We have a chance to actually rethink global structures to be participants in that went to Stephen’s point and to the point of this book we have to think in global terms and structural terms. And we have to have better narration and better stories. The world the times require that we can't fix the climate, we can't fix the environment, we can't engage unless we recognize we are in a global world. The pandemic that we are still trying to forget?
Was a global phenomenon. It didn't respect borders and we banned all the planes and grounded everything and it still moved around. I think part of it is we have to actually create these structures and tweak the ones that exist and create new ones but at the heart has to be a deep respect both in terms of everyone belonging but also the effect they have on actual people and people's right to participate in them.
>> MICHAEL OMI: Thanks. On that note we are going to conclude the session. Thank you for joining us. Thank you john and congratulations Stephen on the publication of a very important book.
>> STEPHEN MENENDIAN: What an honor to be with you. Thank you all.
