S07 E04: The State of Black Lives

Episode Transcript

Kanya Bennett
Welcome to Pod for the Cause, the official podcast of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund, where we take on the critical civil and human rights issues of our day as we work to save our democracy. I’m your host, Kanya Bennett, coming to you from our nation’s capital, Washington, DC. Today on Pod for the Cause, we will use Black History Month as an opportunity to consider the state of the Movement for Black Lives. For this conversation, we are joined by three committed and courageous visionaries who are at the forefront of the fight for Black liberation, Black freedom, and Black joy. Let me welcome Monifa Bandele, who is on the leadership team for the Movement for Black Lives, and chief operating officer, and senior vice president at MomsRising. Welcome, Monifa. Thank you for joining us today.

Monifa Bandele
Thanks for having me.

Kanya Bennett
We are also joined by my former ACLU colleague, Jason Williamson, the executive director of the Center on Race Inequality and the Law at New York University School of Law. Jason, it is good to see you. Thank you for joining.

Jason Williamson
Thanks so much for having me. Great to see you, Kanya.

Kanya Bennett
And I am excited to have my colleague in the mix, Tierra Bradford, who is the senior program manager for Justice Reform here at The Leadership Conference. Welcome Tierra.

Tierra Bradford
Hi, thanks for having me, and I’m so happy to be amongst Monifa and Jason. This is going to be an awesome conversation.

Kanya Bennett
As I said at the onset, February’s Black History Month, and we want to talk Black liberation, Black freedom, and Black joy. The movement for Black lives, over a decade old now, has been the contemporary vehicle to move us toward those things. So, where are we? Last year, we observed the 10- year anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death, which compelled three Black women to turn a Black Lives Matter hashtag into a social movement. And this year we marked the 10- year anniversary of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which renewed demands for police accountability and reform across the country. In the decades since, we have come to say their names and many more, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the movement has taken on not only police violence but other inequities impacting Black lives, such as health disparities and economic insecurity. Today’s guests have played pivotal roles in advancing this agenda for Black freedom in both personal and professional capacities. And I want to turn to them now. Over the past decade, your work has surely evolved adapting to the changing landscape for racial justice. I want to ask each of you what your work has looked like over the decade. What contributions have you made in pursuit of racial justice and equality? Monifa, let me start with you.

Monifa Bandele
I think when people think about the past decade, they really put it in the context of a protest era, which is true, but there is a multilayered resistance that has been built over the past decade that includes protest and mobilization, but also includes the pushing of a very sharp and bold policy demand, a bold policy demand that has taken the shape of model legislation in the BREATHE Act, which was an omnibus federal piece of legislation that 100 organizations worked on and pushed in 2020, all the way to individual changes on city and state levels where we’re seeing investing in alternatives to community safety and pulling away from partial interventions like policing and prisons. So there’s an important conversation that has happened over the decade, and that continues. We’ve done some research recently that shows what the conversation is, especially in Black communities, about what real safety is. I would say, as important as these mass mobilizations that people have etched in their minds from George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, all the way back to Mike Brown and Eric Garner is The Vision for Black Lives, which is a policy demand that organizations all over the country worked on. That’s where you got the call to defund the police and invest in communities. That’s where you see the training of a new generation of abolitionists studying Angela Davis, no less. This policy demand is also really important contribution to the past decade.

Kanya Bennett
Jason, let me bring you in. You’ve litigated in this space, you’re now an academic in this space. Talk to us about what your journey has looked like over the past decade in terms of advancing the Black Lives’ agenda.

Jason Williamson
Thank you, Kanya. I just want to correct the record a bit. I don’t know that I would consider myself an academic. I am continuing to do racial justice work and the work that I was doing at the ACLU at the law school, and I’m also now teaching an abolition seminar, which I would love to return to given Monifa’s comments, which I appreciate. I think in terms of my work, the trajectory of my work over the last decade or so, I appreciate you mentioning litigation, which was my focus as an attorney at the ACLU, but that has changed pretty dramatically over the last several years, and I think partly because I and others have lost a lot of our confidence in litigation as kind of the primary tool for our efforts here. There are a lot of reasons for that, partly because of what has happened to the federal bench over the last several years, and a profession that is already conservative by nature, I think, has gotten more conservative, at least when it comes to the bench. And we’ve had some victories over the years that have unfortunately turned out to not have moved the needle as much as we would’ve liked. And I think again, there are reasons for that. The good news is that having made this transition to the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, I now have a lot more flexibility to attack these issues from different perspectives, not just filing lawsuits and go into court. And I think a lot of it has to do with making sure that we are in touch with what’s happening on the ground, to involve impacted communities in decision- making, which is a difficult thing to do in the litigation context. I’m just grateful now to have the chance to, in addition to doing litigation, to also do some policy work, do some legislative advocacy, do some community organizing because I think it’s all part and parcel of this fight and making sure that we don’t take our eye off of what’s really important and what people who are dealing with all these things from day to day are asking for. I’d love to come back to the conversation about abolition and alternative ways of thinking about this because I think litigation may be running its course at this point.

Kanya Bennett
Let me ask you, Tierra, about what your work has looked like over this past decade.

Tierra Bradford
It’s so interesting because I was just thinking when Trayvon Martin was murdered, I was still in college, I was still an undergrad, still learning. I knew that I wanted to make an impact to my community, and I knew I wanted to focus on basically improving the lives of Black people because that’s something that’s very close to my heart. And so when all the attention happened towards Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, I was still in a place of learning. And so I’m still in my first decade of my career, and what it has looked like is me putting all my effort and attention into policy work and working on making changes that will impact the Black community. Specifically, for me, it’s with the criminal legal system. I’m very passionate about reforming the criminal legal system, and right now I’m in the inside game, so I’m working on reform right now, but who knows, in the next career of my life, it could be an outside game and doing things that make an impact outside of the system. All of those things can be important, but I think, as something that Jason has mentioned, some pieces of this fight are coming to the end for those pieces and we should start thinking about what are the new ways that we want to push back and fight against what is happening in our society. And I was also thinking about how, yes, the past decade has been a time of reckoning and realization for a lot of people, but in many ways, it hasn’t been for the Black community. We’ve known about this for a long time. A lot of this is rooted in history, how policing came about, how mass criminalization came about, how incarceration came about. I think it’s just remembering where this all came from and continuing to approve upon how we’re approaching these issues and problems.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you, Tierra, and I really appreciate the reflection that you all shared about your work over the past decade. I know, Jason, you are resisting this academic hat, but Tierra’s accounting really has me thinking about the role that you are playing bringing sort of the next generation into this movement, ensuring that this will be work that continues for decades to come. So we’ll get back to that, Jason, but yes, really am glad that we have these different perspectives as part of this conversation today. Monifa, I want to go back to you. You mentioned The Vision for Black Lives platform, and I’m hoping that you can talk about it with a little more detail, discuss where we’ve had setbacks and where we’ve had success. You mentioned it a little bit, but I want you to go a little deeper.

Monifa Bandele
I would love to do that. And also weave in, just touching on a few points, a point that Jason made and a point that Tierra made because I think it connects to it. Our movements and our struggles are not linear. I know a lot of times we talk about our setbacks and where we are now versus where we’ve been before, and we really don’t ever advance in this straight line. Every time we have major advances, especially in the narrative and in the conversation, there’s this backlash because the status quo becomes fearful of the disruption. So I just really want to name that I think that the work that’s happened in this past 10 years is powerful because it has changed the conversation. For anyone that’s been in the conversation going back to Amadou Diallo, which this marks the 25th anniversary of the police killing of Amadou Diallo. And when I, like Tierra, was still in college and was just learning and trying to come up with these demands, and you couldn’t have conversations about abolition, or defund, or invest/ divest. So the way our conversation is moving, the way the minds of our people are really starting to expand beyond what we’ve experienced is a really important, I think, data point to claim and to say we’ve advanced in a profound way. And then the thing I wanted to touch on and agree with both of them 100% is that whether it’s policy or litigation, those are tactics within a larger strategy for Black liberation. And too often, some of our organizations and even some of our great litigators and advocates feel that the litigation is the thing or the law passing is the thing. Those things are just tactics to bring us to a greater political power as a community, not just here but globally. And so when we keep our eyes there, we understand the litigation and the policy advocacy within a larger context, and we avoid, at least we try to avoid putting things in place that kind of actually betray these higher goals. And I’ll talk about that some now with The Vision for Black Lives, because The Vision for Black Lives basically is an offering like a love letter to the Black community to say, we can imagine a place where we can have safety and we can have freedom. We can demand safety without occupation. Those things can coexist even though maybe you’ve never seen it and your parents have never seen it and your grandparents have never seen it. And so we laid out point by point whether it was to child welfare system, whether it’s policing, prison, immigration, it is a large document, but we try to help folks imagine what it would look like if we centered care and we centered public health in those solutions. So for example, with schools, if we want our schools to be safe, then we invest in the things that make children healthy and stable and feel loved and cared for. And so we looked at things like saying we wanted to promote having nurses, counselors, trauma- informed care and not have police in schools, which fuel the school- to- prison pipeline, like really breaking down in ways that people in our community understand, you know what your kid needs in school. You know what you need to see when you go to the hospital. You know what happens when the child welfare system comes to your home. And ultimately, it doesn’t end in safety. It doesn’t end in bettering the situation. So let’s co- create that, let’s design that. The Vision for Black Lives has been used to develop a workshop that became very popular during 2020. People saw the mobilizations, but there were also people’s assemblies all over the country where, when we said defund the police, we also brought together people and asked them to imagine what does safety look like. To close your eyes, to see what it smelled like, what are the memories? When was the time in your life that you felt the most safe? And to go around the room with hundreds of people and have no one say that it was, when I was in a police precinct or it was when the police officer was standing on the corner as I approached, none of that were what people described. It was, when I had safe housing because we lived with my grandmother. It was when we lived in the neighborhood and there was a park, and it was well lit. It was when we had access to help my family member, my uncle, get the services he needed because he would go in and out of being safe and unsafe within the family, named out really, really specific things that described when they felt the most safe. And so bringing that all together and pushing it back out over and over again was what The Vision for Black Lives was designed to do. That’s when you saw city policies, state policies, whether they passed or fail, people were mobilized to say, we can imagine something different.

Kanya Bennett
Absolutely, Monifa. We were at The Leadership Conference, pleased to be a partner in some of that campaign development. And Tierra, I wanted to turn to you to talk about the vision for justice effort that The Leadership Conference pursued alongside this Vision for Black Lives. I want you, Tierra, to talk to us about the Vision for Justice and really how it aligns with the platform that Monifa just described.

Tierra Bradford
I feel like when Monifa was describing The Vision for Black Lives, I was just nodding the whole time because I was like, yes, we want to take pieces of that and also have that in our Vision for Justice platform at The Leadership Conference. So essentially, it’s a platform that covers from police and arrests to reentry. So the broad range of the criminal legal system. We talk about some policy recommendations that can be implemented on both the state and the federal level. And yes, there are a lot of pieces about reform. There are also pieces about what about before people even interact with the criminal legal system. For example, with traffic stops. Do all traffic stops have to involve police? No, they don’t. That’s something that we should consider implementing in our localities. When police respond to certain calls, is there an alternative for a police response? Instead of having police, can we have folks who are trained in handling mental health crises? For example, things like that to keep folks from having to interact with the criminal legal system because the more that you interact with it, the more you’re inclined to be involved in the system. And of course, we dig deep into reform. So there’s a whole plank that discusses the pre- trial phase of the criminal legal system, for example. What does it look like for everyone to have effective counsel during the pre- trial phase? Because effective counsel during that phase matters. The likelihood of someone being incarcerated pre-trial declines significantly when they have someone who is there to advocate for them on their behalf or instead of incarcerating some people because you’re worried they might not show up to court, maybe having email and text reminders that the court is responsible for making sure that people show up to their court date instead of incarcerating them. So we talk about these types of reforms at every stage of the criminal legal system. We originally released a version of this report in 2019, and we’re hoping to release our follow- up 2. 0, hopefully next month, but definitely in 2024. And essentially, this platform is meant to be evergreen and progressive. There are policies we talk about in this platform that we may not see in the next three years, but we’re hopeful that we can see them in our lifetime because they’re important to basically minimizing the presence of the criminal legal system in people’s lives. And specifically, if we’re talking about the Black community. Black folks are six times more likely to be involved in a criminal legal system than their white counterparts. We make up about 13% of the population still, and yet we’re close to 40% of those who are part of the incarcerated population. And so this is very important to Black people, making sure that we can minimize the impact of the criminal legal system as much as we can because we all know the horrible impacts of the criminal legal system from when you’re incarcerated, how your mental and your emotional and physical health is in jeopardy to folks who are on the outside who love you and who are waiting for you on the outside, and the impact that that has on them as well. We just thought it was really important to have a platform that discusses how can we reach the goal of minimizing the criminal legal system in people’s lives.

Kanya Bennett
So Jason, both Tierra and Monifa have talked about the importance of changing policy, again, policy as a tactic to advance a meaningful agenda for Black lives, and we’ve talked about your experience as a litigator. You mentioned some frustration you have with that particular tactic to advance a Black lives agenda. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that frustration? Can you talk to us about how we should be thinking about litigation as we are trying to move forward an agenda for Black liberation?

Jason Williamson
Sure. And I want to touch on a couple of things. One that you said earlier, Kanya, related to the students that I interact with at the law school and also what Monifa said about this really not being a linear movement, which I think is so important because we have to acknowledge that and understand that there are going to be setbacks or things that feel like setbacks, but it doesn’t mean that we’ve lost or that we can approach this thing with any less vigor to try to make it happen. I think the election of Donald Trump immediately following the election of Barack Obama is a great example in the world of politics that folks thought, Oh, we must’ve accomplished something that we’ve elected our first Black president only to then elect someone on the opposite end of the spectrum. I think it speaks to this push and pull that happens when you start to make some progress. One thing that is good news for us to be excited about is that I do think there is a generation of people, not just law students, but people who see the world very differently and understand the need for transformative change in our society beyond just the criminal legal system, which, as Tierra mentioned, is a great place to start. But as we all know, the things that are problematic about the criminal legal system are also operating in our healthcare system, and in education, and in housing, and environmental justice, and so on, and all of these things are connected and part and parcel of the same thing. So I interact with a lot of students who are really hungry for opportunities to think about this work differently, to think about what abolition really means and how can we achieve it potentially, or at least move in that direction. And part of that questioning is about where does litigation fit in the mix. I guess the biggest concern is that I don’t know that we can rely on federal or state court judges to turn this society upside down and give us the kind of transformative change that we’re asking for. And in fact, I’m not sure that the law itself provides that kind of leeway, even if a judge wanted to give us everything we wanted. And part of that comes from, as I mentioned at the top, I’ve been involved in cases over the years where the litigation itself has been successful, the court buys our arguments, we get an order that says, You’re right, you win. There’s some sort of remedial order requiring the government to do X, Y, and Z, as a result. Three or four years later, we’re back to where we started. And so I think it’s difficult to change hearts and minds. It’s difficult to change practice, and it’s impossible to eradicate racism through litigation. Having said that, I think it’s still a tool. As Monifa mentioned, it’s one tactic among many. So I’m not suggesting that we throw litigation to the wayside, but just that it needs to be part of a larger strategy as we move forward. And I’m grateful that there are a lot of young lawyers and law students who have accepted that and who are trying to think creatively about how to use the law differently, including litigation, how to use the other tools at our disposal to try to make some progress.

Kanya Bennett
I want to stay with you a little bit longer. We’re talking about these tactics, and we are talking about the shortcomings with respect to policy, with respect to litigation. So I want to figure out sort of where to steer folks. What tactics are working? Where are we having some success in terms of advancing a meaningful agenda that benefits the Black community as an attempt to make us whole, as an attempt to dismantle and abolish these systems that have caused harm, caused havoc? What should folks be thinking about? Yes, we understand that litigation policy, those are tactics we will continue to push, but what else should folks be doing? Where have you seen some wins?

Jason Williamson
I want to lift up something that Monifa was saying about the importance of having the conversations and creating space for community members, impacted folks, to dream and to talk about, and to engage with one another around the world that we want to create. We’ve talked about abolition and alluded to it in different ways, but to be clear, abolition is not just about tearing things down and destroying the current system and the way it’s set up. It’s also about creating and trying to figure out what does the world that we want look like and how do we get there. So I don’t want to discount the fact that there are conversations happening now across the country that were just not happening 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and that’s true in law school, and I think it’s true in communities and families around this country. I think that’s where our optimism should come from, that there are people engaged in this who were not necessarily engaged before, both lawyers and activists, and people who are not lawyers and didn’t consider themselves activists 10 years ago. I think we should really hold on to that. One of the other changes I think in law students over that time has been there’s just a much greater demand among law students to go into public defense and to try to stand in the gap for folks who don’t have the resources to hire an attorney, but who are facing the awesome power of the state and having their liberty taken away from them. For people and students who think about abolition and wanting to reimagine the system, it can be a difficult thing to then walk into a public defender’s office and, in some ways, be a part of that system and having to compromise some things in the process. We talk about individual harm reduction and how do we address people’s needs in the moment. I think public defenders are on the front lines of that work, and there are conversations happening about the need for public defense and the need to fund the public defense in a reasonable way so that lawyers have what they need to provide the kind of representation that people facing criminal prosecution deserve and are entitled to under the constitution. I think it’s been 10 years, maybe a little over 10 years since we got the decision in Floyd versus New York City, New York, which was a stop-and-frisk case, which I think a landmark case that demonstrated how litigation can be successful. And even though it was now a decade ago, I think we still kind of hold onto that as one example of how it can be done, and we can return to that and talk about it a little bit more, but I think trying to recreate the sort of conditions and approach that went into cases like that as part of our job going forward as lawyers to figure out how we can best contribute to the movement.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you, Jason. I really appreciate that reflection, that acknowledgement that we need to be moving and navigating on a few different fronts. You talked about public defense, and obviously, that speaks to the need to try to pursue reform within the system as a system actor, and yes, I definitely want to get back to that point and some of the others that you made, but I want to go to Monifa now, and I almost hate to ask this given the issues we have flagged around policy reform, but at The Leadership Conference, obviously, where we have been close to the federal civil rights advocacy for almost 75 years, I need to ask what role does the federal government play in all of this? You had mentioned a federal bill earlier. I know that there was opposition to other federal legislation, police reform legislation, that Black lives did not feel went far enough. Certainly, the Death in Custody Reporting Act is something that we work on at The Leadership Conference. It’s a 10- year- old law that has still not been fully and properly implemented. Talk to us about a federal legislative agenda. Is there a utility? Is there value in that? Should we be holding our electeds at this level accountable? How do we do it? Should we just shift entirely focus on the state and local levels? Monifa, talk to us.

Monifa Bandele
No, there’s utility as long as we recognize where it falls within the larger agenda. Again, especially with federal policy, we can’t get this end- all- to- be- all energy behind it without really thinking about all of the ways it either falls short or can lead to some outcomes that we really don’t want. When you are working closely with advocates and with people who are working in communities, you are able to really co- create things that are meaningful. And sadly, too often we have some of our national organizations that will move ahead where organizers have been, where communities that have been talking about these issues have been for decades, and pull things together in response that’s very disconnected. So if you focus on things like, oh, well, we want to ban chokeholds in our federal legislation. We’re like, we banned chokeholds in New York City before Eric Garner was choked to death. In fact, since Anthony Baez was choked to death. We know because we are doing the community organizing, what is really needed, which is that you have to disempower a certain set of folks, the police, the prosecutors. Whatever laws you put in place won’t matter if you still have in place that some people are able to exist above that law. Trying to have these conversations with the people who are in the position to create and pass federal legislation has been the frustration in that process. We knew with Floyd, I’m glad that Jason brought up Floyd because Floyd was a part of a multipronged approach to dealing with stop and frisk in New York City. There was also a set of bills called the Community Safety Act that we pulled together at the time. There was a lot of community organizing that was happening with CopWatch, so there was a narrative campaign that was going, and all of these pieces knew that they were part of an organizing strategy like CCR, Center for Constitutional Rights was like, we got to listen to the organizers in terms of what step we go next because yeah, we want to win the litigation, but ultimately, we want to make this very, very clear dismantling of the current power structure on this. And that’s what’s important. And it falls short because, even with the passage of Floyd, we were just back at the city council trying to pass How Many Stops Act. Why? Because we understand that New York City is in violation of this very important landmark piece of litigation that was won, and if we can get the data down to the level one stops, we’ll see that racial profiling is still happening in New York City even though we passed this now. We won this 11 years ago. So those are the really important lessons that community organizers have. We have it in our minds and in our DNA, and so it’s important that of all the tactics that are very important that they be plugged in, kind of like spokes in the wheel of a community organizing strategy. You have to involve labor. It really has to not move in a siloed way. So if it’s federal policy, if it’s federal litigation, when you’re moving silo, if you’re in the room and it’s all policymakers designing it, it’s going to fall short. But we’re excited because the community organizing strategy put federal policymakers in place who are advancing legislation that we’ve designed. So we’ve got Cori Bush introducing the People’s Response Act. She comes out of Black Lives Matter, she’s trained by the movement. It all has to come together. We have Counseling Not Criminalization from Ayanna Pressley. When the movement has the organizing, the civic engagement, a litigation, a legislative strategy that is cohesive, we really can advance in a way that we cannot without those. And the last thing I wanted to say, even about The Leadership Conference platform. Pre- trial detention has been a conversation we’ve been having. I remember being in meetings 25 years ago where it was like people in Rikers, they’re not charged with anything. Long before Kalief Browder sadly was killed by the experience he had at Rikers Island, folks have been talking about this pre- trial detention issue. I want to do a big shout- out to community organizers because my comrade, Mary Hooks, decided I’m going to organize Black Mamas to do a Black Mamas Bail Out starting back in 2015, and it just shifted the conversation in the community, which then produced the will and the demand to push the elected officials in the way that we needed them to go. We knew, people knew, a lot of this stuff for a long time, but to do a big bold national, it just started off in Atlanta, then it was in Jackson, Mississippi, then it is happening in 12 cities; this Black Mamas Bail Out. And for folks that don’t know, this was essentially as we approached Mother’s Day, a few weeks out, the community would collect funds at one point, especially in and around 2010- 2020, millions of dollars were collected nationwide to bail out Black Mamas on Mother’s Day because they hadn’t been charged with anything. They should be home with their families, and the only reason why they aren’t is because they’re poor. There were criticisms because it’s like you’re flooding the system with money that it shouldn’t get, but how it helped the community understand the injustice of pre- trial detention allowed us to get to the point where we have these platforms and we have the wins like we did in New York State in 2019 with bail reform.

Kanya Bennett
Monifa, thank you for lifting up the importance of the community organizing here, and thank you for also sharing the conversation toward pre- trial. I think, Tierra, this is the perfect time to bring you in and talk about these pieces. I also want us to focus on the media, the messaging, the narrative work that is required for all of this. We know, for example, that police killings have not stopped. In fact, in 2023, we recorded the highest number ever, according to Campaign Zero, but the headlines no longer capture that. And as Monifa was touching on, for a couple of years, there was some interest, some momentum around bail reform, right? There was some recognition that your ability to be in society, pre- trial should not be based on how much money you have in your wallet, sort of what resources you have at your disposal. But we are now looking at headlines that are advancing a crime narrative that has really tempered momentum around all these fronts. So, Tierra, talk to us about some of the pre- trial messaging and narrative work that you’re doing and that we need to do to change the tide here.

Tierra Bradford
As Monifa mentioned, and Jason touched on, the fight is not linear, and so while we were starting to see progress on bail reform and folks finally being aware of the disparities that exist in the pretrial phase of the criminal legal system, now we’re seeing just major pushback, not just with the crime influx narrative, but also on pretrial reforms that folks at all levels have worked hard to put forward. And so we’re seeing rollbacks on pretrial reforms and jurisdictions across the nation, and also attacks on community bail funds. Like there are states, there are localities that are trying to roll back the number of people that community bail funds can pay to let out or regulating them in very harmful ways. And so you could see the changes that were happening, were working, and now opponents are just trying to push all of that back. What can be really helpful at this time is narrative work because, in many ways, those on the opposite end are controlling the narrative and they are centering fear, and they’re using folks’ fear to push forward the things that they want to see and push back the reforms that we have been working on. Some challenges that we are seeing, we’re talking about protecting those reforms and pushing forward more pretrial reforms are around crime and safety. The law and order language is back. It’s not working as well as it used to, but it is back, and there’s a lot of confusion with folks around what the crime rates are. If you asked the average person on the street, they might think that crime is higher than ever, when that’s just not true from a national lens. And even when there are spikes in crime, I know there was one during COVID, but even that has decreased since around 2019. And when folks talk about crime, they think about crime happening in other places too. For some people, crime is very real where they live and in their community, but for other folks, it’s not really a major problem, but they’re like, oh, well, in the city or there’s a crime happening everywhere. And so I think that because of that confusion around crime rates, because many folks see anyone who has anything to do with the criminal legal system as being guilty, even though we’re supposed to be treated innocent until we’re guilty, that’s not the way your average person sees it. And finally, another challenge is folks not being able to see the changes in the reforms that folks on the ground, and policymakers, and other folks have been pushing forward. They’re not able to envision that for themselves, and so that is where narrative comes in and being able to really break down the reforms and changes that we’re trying to make in a criminal legal system when we’re trying to get support for this. What’s really important right now is being able to educate folks and also to be able to, when we’re talking to people who are not in our base, when we’re talking to people who don’t get it and who aren’t in favor of reforms, really talking about fairness. That’s what we’re seeing in research that we’re doing and talking about how no matter who enters the system, specifically, if we’re talking around wealth disparities and not being able to afford things right now, that’s what a lot of people can relate to. And when we’re talking about those pieces and specifically how that shows up in the pretrial system and how people are incarcerated based on how much money they have, we are seeing that those are the things that work for folks who may not already be on our side, but in that persuadable middle. So that’s something we’re seeing that can be really important to protecting and pushing those reforms that we want to see in the pretrial system.

Kanya Bennett
Jason, let me go back to you on this point around change within the system. You were speaking earlier about the encouragement you find with more people pursuing careers in public defense. Monifa, you also gave this great example around Congresswoman Bush and really having a member of Congress from the movement. So there is some acknowledgement again that we need to work within the system, and perhaps by changing some of the actors within, we will see reform. Jason, folks are going to push back, right? They’re going to argue that we’re talking about a system that was intentionally designed to oppress and marginalize Black lives, but again, you’re building this next generation of social justice lawyers, activists, people who want to see change for the betterment of Black lives, and so what advice and counsel are you giving them? Certainly, this is applicable to all of us as we think about how to challenge the status quo.

Jason Williamson
I probably would be one of the people pushing back, even against myself, in terms of this idea of working within the system. I think that there are very real limitations to that approach. I mentioned the public defense piece because I think that’s, to my mind, the best example of a way to participate in the system on the side of the folks who are suffering and fulfilling a role that the system has created that at least ostensibly is supposed to be for the benefit of criminal defendants. I am not a believer in progressive prosecution as a thing, for example. That’s not an indictment on, for lack of a better word, on people who decide to go into prosecution with that mindset, but more just the realization that the law is set up, to your point, is set up in such a way that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for any prosecutor, even one who’s trying to do the right thing, to have a significant impact on the way that people are impacted, ultimately. For folks who find themselves in those positions, which is to say, being part of a system that you know is flawed and problematic, I think being very intentional about the way that you operate in those spaces is important. We talk about that with my students all the time, and to acknowledge all the things that we’re talking about that yes, I’m here. Yes, there’s some urgency to me being here and providing this defense, but let’s not be confused and think that me providing excellent representation for this individual defendant is going to change the system as a whole. I also think it’s important, and we talked about this in different contexts, I think all three of us, but even if you’re working within the system in whatever capacity, it is essential that your work be directed by and to the benefit of impacted folks, whether that’s your client, the person that you’re supposed to be representing, or communities of folks who are going to be affected by the work that you’re doing, and if you’re not getting input from those folks in some way, it’s hard to imagine your work being successful, and that’s from policymakers, to law enforcement, to community organizations that are trying to push for change. If you’re trying to do that in a vacuum without actually listening to the folks who are being affected on a day- to- day basis, it’s going to fail. We all have a role to play, to the extent that we need good people in all of these places. I certainly am still encouraging folks to do that, but again, I just think we all have to walk into it with our eyes wide open and understanding the inherent limitations of the law and what we can accomplish if we only focus on going that route.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you, Jason. Appreciate that guidance and really could spend the next few hours fleshing out some of these ideas more, but I’m realizing we need to bring this conversation to a close. And before I do, though, Monifa, I want to ask you, I feel like I have to ask, it’s an election year. We know that Black lives will be on the ballot. We know that, as you said, when we ignore elections, we enable the conditions that lead to investments in prison, in policing, and all of the inequities that we’ve discussed during today’s conversation. So, Monifa, talk to us about the importance of showing up at the ballot box this November.

Monifa Bandele
One of the organizations in our Movement for Black Lives’ ecosystem that is hard at this every day is Black Voters Matter. I hope that people are following and paying close attention to Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown, who are building coalitions of Black- led organizations in multiple states that are engaging people on the issues. The difference between Black Voters Matter and many other civic engagement organizations that you see that are quite frankly not Black- led, they kind of come around for the election for the sake of the election, and that’s it. Whereas with Black Voters Matter and other organizations like them or within their ecosystem of civic engagement, Black- led organizations, they’re talking to people year- round about the issue we’re talking about, community safety, like what is on the ballot in your state that is also coinciding with the presidential election? We know that abortion access is on the ballot in several states. We know that trying to criminalize not just stop community bail funds, but actually criminalize people who do community bail funds, criminalize people who protest, all of these things are on the ballot, and so it’s really important that we keep our communities engaged year- round, especially in an election year, and that we have organizations that can then activate folks to go to the ballot when it’s important. There are forces that are doing things like creating narratives that are exaggerating differences within our community and where we are standing. There is this unpopular opinion that I have, and I’m going to be vulnerable and share it here on Pod for the Cause is that this distance that the media wants to create between Black women voters and Black men voters and this Black men are moving conservatives, and what I want to say is that I would compare instead Black men voters to every other demographic of men voters, and what you’ll find is that Black men voters are the most progressive voters if you compare them to other men, and that while that group as a whole is moving more conservative because patriarchy is on the ballot and people are going to lean into the patriarchy if that’s what they feel like they have to do, they’re uninformed or they have ill intentions, then we see that moving in that way, but we see that our community as a whole is really holding the line to protect with paid leave, child care, maternal healthcare, access to abortion. We are miles ahead of much of the electorate and really anchoring the national electorate in a space that reduces harm. Again, we’re talking about harm reduction here and not necessarily advancing some of the bold demands that we were talking about across the hour, so absolutely get out to vote. Absolutely support these engines that are out there year- round, like Black Voters Matter, to educate and activate us because we have to get in the practice of self- governing. Even when we imagine these futures without prisons and police and any systems of harm, there has to be some type of democratic rule, and so we can’t encourage people not to participate because now you have a bigger job starting that engine when you do have the systems in place that you want, that will only succeed if we have huge amounts of civic engagement. The people who are impacted by all the issues have to be in the solutions, like Jason said, they have to be very instrumental in those designs and who they’re picking to represent them in whatever structures we have at that time. It’s a really, really hard thing to do to mobilize Black people time and time again for leaders and for institutions that ultimately betray them. It is really difficult for those of us who are doing organizing and for many of my comrades who do a lot of civic engagement because it undermines that work, and it’s not just on the national level. When you think about Bill de Blasio, I’m going to name it, he came in saying that he was going to carry the agenda of the people, that community safety was going to look different, that he was going to close Rikers. I mean, I can list all the things that Bill de Blasio stated to get the movement and the folks behind him during that election, and then it made it difficult to activate people again because they’re like, well, what’s the difference? He got in and wouldn’t fire Pantaleo, who strangled Eric Garner to death, didn’t close Rikers. I mean, we are talking to people in the community, and they know when they’ve been lied to, so I do want to name that this is really hard, this civic engagement, and that probably Black organizers are the best at it because we’re able to do it time and time again in the face of all of this because we know we need to stop fascism, but we know that we have to be engaged at every level, and we can’t leave any tools unused, essentially, in our toolbox. I won’t name all the tools, but definitely voting is one of them.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you, Monifa. That’s an appropriate way to end, and lots of things, Monifa, that you shared that our listeners, I’m certain, will chew on. I may need to have you all back to have a part two of this conversation, but Monifa, thank you for being here with us today.

Monifa Bandele
Thank you for having me.

Kanya Bennett
And Tierra, so happy you could join us and contribute to this rich conversation.

Tierra Bradford
Thanks, Kanya.

Kanya Bennett
And Jason, again, so good to see you. Thank you so much for being with us.

Jason Williamson
My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having the conversation. I appreciate it.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you for joining us today on Pod for the Cause, the official podcast of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund. For more information, please visit civilrights. org, and to connect with us, hit us up on Instagram and Twitter at civilrightsorg. You can text us. Text civil rights, that’s two words, civil rights to 52199 to keep up with our latest updates. Be sure to subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five- star review. Thanks to our production team, Bree Spencer, Shalonda Hunter, Dena Craig, Taelor Nicholas, Oprah Cunningham, and Eunic Epstein- Ortiz. And that’s it from me, your host, Kanya Bennett. Until next time, let’s keep fighting for an America as good as its ideals.

Key Resources:

A Matter of Life and Death: The Importance of the Death in Custody Reporting Act

Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law

Movement For Black Lives

Perspectives on Community Safety from Black America

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Vision for Black Lives

Vision for Justice

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