Dan Snow's History Hit - Racial Injustice in America

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

The protests on the streets of America are a product of 400 years of violence, slavery, coercion and injustice. I took a crash course with Harvard's Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the history that has led to this moment. He stripped me of my illusions about America but also explained why he is essentially optimistic. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got rallies, protests going on in the US, but all over the world, following the appalling video footage, the murder of George Floyd. The police officer who pressed his knee to the neck of George Floyd has been charged with second-degree murder, and his three associates have been charged now with aiding and abetting that by the Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. It felt like an important time to discuss on the podcast where these long-standing issues of justice, police brutality and inequality have come from in the US. And I was extraordinarily lucky to talk to one of the most brilliant contributors I've had on this podcast, Khalil Gibran Mohammed. He's a professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. He's written a huge amount and campaigned actively on issues around incarceration of African Americans and their treatment by the US penal system. We went all the way back to the original sin of slavery, of violence against the indigenous people in America, and the role that violence, conquest, imperialism has played, both expanding America and maintaining the control of a small

political elite within America. He had some tough words for me, as someone who's always looked up to America, American writers and politicians, but he also had optimism as well. He had optimism, and as he pointed out, he has optimism not around the ability of African Americans to diagnose their condition, to come up with the solutions, the policies to right some of these ancient wrongs, but he was optimistic about the ability of enough white people, frankly, to come round to that way of thinking and embrace those necessary changes. He inspired me to donate the revenue that we make from this episode of History Hit to a criminal justice charity in the United States that helps exonerate wrongly convicted people through DNA testing and aims to reform the

criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. So by listening to this and tolerating my annoying advertising at the front and the middle you will be contributing indirectly to that as well so thank you very much you can go to history hit tv obviously if you want to listen to back episodes of this podcast which are only available exclusively on our history hit tv site which is like netflix for history we've got a huge number of documentaries on there new ones going up all the time just made one on the tit and back as the podcast as well as join our weekly live podcast records we had John Nicol on last night British tornado air crew

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please enjoy Khalil Gibran Mohammed. Hey, well, Khalil, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. There obviously is so much context, so much history we need to understand here. I have a feeling that people listening to this podcast might be familiar with slavery, they might be familiar with the emancipation of the American Civil War, but perhaps we could talk about what happened after that. You've written about the building of a carceral state. What happened after the Civil War? What didn't happen after the Civil War? Why was it not carried through in spirit as well as in law?

Well, you can imagine that the nation needed to come back together on some terms. And so the Confederate States wanted those terms to be as favorable as possible, including having complete control over the formerly enslaved population. And so some of the earliest laws passed after the abolition of slavery. So the 13th Amendment ends slavery and creates a gigantic loophole, which is that slavery can't exist except for punishment for a crime. So that loophole is still with us, still on the books, still part of the U.S. Constitution. And what happens is after the 13th Amendment is passed, a number of states, starting with Mississippi,

but almost all the 11 Confederate states passed a series of laws to essentially criminalize Black freedom. And practically, that meant that African Americans could be subject to criminal charges for voting, for breaking unfair contracts, for defending themselves against white violence. They could be accused of parental neglect simply because a former slave owner, a plantation owner, wanted to control the labor of their children. It was so egregious that when these trumped-up charges often were weighed against African Americans, they were then sold at sheriff's auctions, often to the highest bidder and in many cases back to their former plantation owners. So all that was pretty quickly ruled

unconstitutional. Civil rights bill was passed soon after. But it opened the reality to the fact that what chattel slavery and the legality of slavery solved, the criminal justice system would now pick up and run with. And that's effectively what happened. By the 1870s, through the rest of the 20th century in the South, right up to the Civil Rights Movement, the criminal justice system became the primary instrument of racial control. It was also the primary instrument to control the labor of Black people through a kind of coercive political economy that basically said said you either work as a near slave or a peasant or a serf, or you go to prison and work under a private lease contract for

a private corporation in a coal mine where you're likely to die. And when we're looking today at what is going on and calls for racial justice around, particularly in criminal justice and policing, do you think this is the period that we need to be talking more about? Is this a source of so much of today's injustice? Yes and no. So the yes part is that the discretionary use of crime control as a form of racial and social control, that lesson is strikingly clear in the context of what happened in the South after the Civil War. Even in the period of the 1950s, as civil rights activists began to gain traction, they are subjected to a kind of new effort by Southern leaders, not just law enforcement, to create these crime commissions

where they basically look to Northern cities as evidence for what integration and a more open society looks like. And they point out Northern crime rates, which are disproportionately higher for black people than whites. And they use it as evidence to say, like, if we go this way, they're going to become even more criminal because look how they behave in the north. I give that example because it's precisely what's happening in the north during the Great Migration Period, during the early 20th century, during a period when Black people began to leave the South, 6 million leave between World War I and the 1970s. And they experienced systemic racism in the criminal justice system as well. But it's explained away because everyone in the nation assumes that, well, if Black people are committing a whole bunch

of crimes in Northern cities and in the north, it must be about them. It can't be about racist southerners. So racist southerners didn't really care what the north thought about them too much until around the 1950s, when for a number of reasons, geopolitical, Cold War is heated up. The Soviet Union is using propaganda against the nation for what's happening in the south. it up, the Soviet Union is using propaganda against the nation for what's happening in the South. There are a whole lot of big factors that contribute to the unraveling of Jim Crow period. And the South is essentially taking a page out of the playbook of the North by saying, look, you know, your black people up there are criminals too. So it's not just a Southern story, Dan, is my point. It's kind of difficult for us foreigners sometimes to understand the federal nature of the US. And a lot of us struggle to understand whether this is a matter

of federal legislation throughout history. And today, what are the big levers that can be pulled at the federal level? Or is this a problem that is about community to community, different jurisdictions? And so for example, we've been astonished by the fact that lots of the worst police violence seem to be in Democrat-controlled states with fairly progressive governors. Oh, absolutely. And it's always been that case. The highest rates of racial disparity, believe it or not, since the end of slavery have been in the North. Part of it is because you have smaller populations. So when you have a tiny, tiny black population, it's easier to produce gigantic disparities. When your black population is much larger, you're not going to

get the same level of disparity, which was true across the southern states. But to answer your question about the balance between state and federal, our system is thoroughly decentralized. We call it a system of federalism, which linguistically is confusing because you would think that there's more federal control when, in fact, it's just the opposite. Our federalism allows for today 18,000 police agencies to effectively be governed by local and state laws, which means that the federal government only has the power of the purse to incentivize or de-incentivize uniform standards of policy and practice at the local level. Because we now have certain kinds of civil

rights protections, when an officer happens to use the N-word or when there is very strong evidence of an anti-Black bias in the case of some form of police action or other criminal justice action, then the federal government can step in on the grounds of civil rights legislation. But by and large, in the United States of America, we have 50 different criminal justice systems operating at the state level when it comes to corrections, and we have 18,000 police agencies operating to varying degrees under sets of rules governed by municipal codes. Is this a political battle that needs to be fought out in state houses across the U.S.? And is that where the key decisions have been made in this broader historical story?

Yes and no. So it's a really complicated history. So it's a really complicated history. So to some degree, the regional differences between the North and South have represented kind of similar patterns how their criminal justice systems have functioned. So it might be more accurate to say you've had Northeastern and Southern, a Midwestern Great Plains, and a Western system of criminal justice practices, because in each of those ways, they represent geographical variations of both the kinds of people who live in those places, the kinds of conditions that people live on, low density populations in the Great Plains, in the Midwest, rural areas, and a severe congestion in coastal cities, and particularly the oldest forms of bureaucratic policing in the Northeast, in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston. So there's a lot to say for the variations that shape the outcomes that, you know all the power essentially to make the kinds

of forceful changes in policing and in corrections that would be required to change these systems. What have you identified has been the driving motive behind the unwillingness to recognise the personhood, the civil and political rights of the descendants of formerly enslaved people. Is it simple? Is it skin colour? Or is it a more hidden battle for wealth and political power? Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history

and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. every week. Well, it's all of the above. It's a good question. So this is where understanding the origins of racism are very important. So race is the child of exploitation. It is the child of racism. In other words, slavery gave us our oldest form of exploitation in this country to this day. America has lived more with slavery than without in its short 400-year run. on top of that took time. It took time legislatively. Slave codes evolved very slowly to increasingly clamp down on natural forms of cohabitation and intimacy that were the case for landless whites and blacks in the South throughout the 17th century. So one of the things most people simply don't pay much attention to is that the violence and the restrictions of slavery itself evolved over time from the 17th century into the 19th century.

The same essentially is true when it comes to looking at what happened after slavery. Justify why you have a permanent class of people or citizens who are supposed to do the hard work of building the nation needed justification, especially so when they gained constitutional rights, civil rights, amongst journalists, amongst statesmen, politicians, journalists, poets, every aspect and sector of American society joined in an effort to convince themselves and others that the reason why black people were suffering, the reason why their backs were bent more than any other way, the reason why they weren't in places of high learning, commensurate with their rough approximation and population was because something was wrong with them, because they weren't endowed with big brains, because their IQ was low, because they were prone to criminality, because they couldn't delay gratification, because they were sexual beings.

You're in the UK, you know what the range of ideas about the Irish once were, and you know what people there still think about African immigrants coming from other parts of the world. So those ideas are a function of trying to justify and explain why we started in slavery in the first place. Because in a country that proudly boasts of being the first modern liberal democracy, none of this made sense from the very beginning. But they needed it to make sense. You talk about proudly boasting. I mean, I'm a passionate devotee of the founding fathers. I've read my Federalist Papers. And I'm like de Tocqueville. I'm obsessed with the American Republic. I'm one of these European Americanophiles. And I even made a TV show once saying,

God bless America, you know, despite George W. Bush. And it's very shocking for us to see this. How should we think about America now, when we're seeing these militarized police standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? In your opinion, is that just America laid bare? Is that a real America? Are there competing visions of America, competing presence? Well, there most certainly are competing visions of America. But Dan, I hate to burst a bubble, but violence was the key ingredient for the American experiment from the very beginning. How else do you explain the disappearance of the indigenous population? They didn't just die out from European diseases.

We had a series of wars that annihilated as many of them as possible, and then Andrew Jackson moved them off to parts of the country that at the time were devalued and unimportant. American history has been pretty brutal. It's settler colonialism on a grand scale, precisely because of the landmass that represents the continental United States. And the genius of America is not only in the high ideals enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration and many other documents. The genius of America is to sell a myth, a propaganda that that form of exceptionalism did not involve all of this violence. necessary to protect the very basis of the democracy itself. That's it, you know, and a lot of people will disagree with me. That's the great debate that we've been having for a long time, the great debate that Frederick Douglass had with John C. Calhoun and other pro-slavery ideologues. The only difference really between that debate that Douglass was having in the 19th century and

the debate we're having today is, to varying degrees, how many whites and which whites are standing on the sidelines as bystanders. That debate inspired abolitionists who did take up arms and inspire a civil war. Today, it's not clear. We really haven't had a kind of commitment of white Americans to close the gap between the mythology of American exceptionalism and the reality of American violence as a cornerstone of our democracy to say, you know what, I don't want to live in a country that is this hypocritical about how it treats its citizens. As a scholar, as a man, are you optimistic at the moment? I am optimistic because as I just suggested, there are a whole lot of white people on the

streets of America right now. And I'll give you an example of how distorted the image of blackness is outside of the United States. I visited German prisons back in 2015 with an organization that I'm on the board of, the Vera Institute of Justice, leading national organization for criminal justice reform. Why did we go to Germany? Well, we went to Germany because we know that Germans have a much more humane system of punishment. People spend far less time. They have constitutional guarantees against brutality. The corrections officers are much better trained than ours are.

And people go home better often, not so much than when they came in, but they go home better than they do in our system when people are released. So we went to study this system. released. So we went to study this system and talking to some young men in a youth facility there, I realized that they had access to television and images of what was going on in our prisons. And they said, it's unbelievable what cable news shows and these cable documentary programs show about what goes on in American prisons. And so I asked them, I said, well, how many people do you think in America are African American? The estimates ran as high as 50%, Dan, 50%. And then others said 25%. I've asked the same question of even my own students when I taught in Indiana in an overwhelmingly white part of the country. They had no idea. They thought black people were, again, as high as 50%. Black people

are 13% of the U.S. population. So when you ask the question, am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that Black people are capable of diagnosing their own condition. They're capable of providing scholarly and policy answers. They're capable of being elected officials who can lead us to a better future. But they can't solve America's racism problem if enough white people aren't willing to get behind it. Barack Obama got 43% of the white electorate in 2008. He got 39% in 2012. Donald Trump won in every category,

a majority population of whites in every single demographic category that we use to study exit polls by the final tally. So white people have to decide that they want a different kind of America. That's it. Like, it's no rocket science. And until they decide that they want to make sure that their privilege is not secured by violent policing, then we're probably not going to see a fundamental shift in policing. But you ask the question, am I optimistic? Yes. It looks like we're at a moment to see a fundamental shift in policing. But you ask the question, am I optimistic? Yes, it looks like we're at a moment where we've got more white people invested in change

than at any point in the last 50 years. Can we just quickly explore barriers that exist today that stop African Americans engaging in the political process, for example, to vote or to be on the census, for example? I mean, is that something I think that people also in the rest of the world find pretty extraordinary? Well, it's extraordinary because contrary to popular myth, Americans don't have a right to vote. What they have is a right to not have their rights abridged by various categories, as in sex, race, religion, etc. So each state essentially is responsible for the franchise,

and the federal government can either have a much more aggressive system of policing those states to make sure that they're not actively suppressing the vote, or it can have a weak system. We used to have a stronger system that the Supreme Court decided was too strong because it was unfair to former Confederate states. That happened in 2013 in a decision called Shelby versus Holder. So that means that we have a good evidence that in 2016, a lot of African American communities did experience voter suppression because a lot of secretaries of state of each of the states decided that they either wanted voter IDs, or they thought there were too many polls open,

or they wanted to shorten the hours of the polls. A number of tactics essentially suppress the vote. And it's likely that that will still happen in 2020. So the case is that, yes, Black people ostensibly have the right to vote in this country. But there are a number of tactics at the state level that work against those rights, including felony disenfranchisement, the right that a person who has been convicted of a felony who serves their time still doesn't automatically regain the right to vote. They may have to beg for mercy, which has been true in Florida until a recent referendum, which passed and they presumptively got the right to vote again after serving their time, their debt to society. And then the current governor who was elected in 2018 decided that they should pay off their fines first, which is,

you know, the equivalent of debtors disenfranchisement in a country. So I mean, America is wild when it comes to deciding whether or not, you know, we actually believe in democracy. I mean, it's remarkable. You say you're optimistic. In terms of the short term, does it feel over there, just asking you as a witness or someone on the spot, does it feel to you like these confrontations between crowds and the police, is there a partisan, a vicious divide over whose fault these confrontations are? Or does it feel like something has changed and people are focusing more on police overreaction to peaceful protesters? People are focusing more on police overreaction to peaceful protesters.

I think that most people who I've listened to and I've been in touch with some folks on the ground, my own daughter attended a protest this past weekend. The vast majority of protesters are not paying much attention to the broad brush critiques of the violence that is associated with people being outside in the streets. Some of those protesters are putting themselves in between people who would pursue property damage. There is an unstated truth here, Dan, that even at the height of the nonviolent stage of the civil rights movement and those social movements, same with women's movement. Women's movements were burning bras and setting dumpsters on fire. Even back to the suffragist days, there's evidence of women engaging in various forms of property damage. Nowhere in the world do people fundamentally challenge the state without some acts of violence, whether organized by the leaders of those movements or unorganized by elements of those movements. And so this is what comes with kind

of mass demonstrations that we're seeing. And the vast majority of people are not engaged. The vast majority of people think it's counterproductive. That's not necessarily the case, because to some degree, people do become fearful of what this means, and they start coming to the table. So I'm not endorsing violence in any way, but I am diagnosing that most people are not doing it. Most people don't condone it. But the fact that it happens does create a sense of urgency and crisis for a lot of people who have to make some decisions. Well, thank you very much. What a time to talk to you. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me and good luck with everything. I appreciate it. Thank you

very much for having me on. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour,

it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. you