The New Yorker Radio Hour - Looking Back at the Year of Protest Since the Death of George Floyd

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

We look back on the year since the murder of George Floyd galvanized the nation. David Remnick talks with Vanita Gupta, the No. 3 official in the Justice Department, who is charged with delivering on President Biden’s bold promises to address racial injustice. A Minneapolis activist explains why it is so hard to abolish the police. Plus, Hilton Als on why America finally rose up against long-standing abuses of Black people. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This week, we've marked one year since the death of George Floyd. His murder, won in a seemingly endless list of police killings, ushered this country into what seems to be a new era in the fight for racial justice. In those first days of the protests last year, we reached out to the activist group MPD, 1.5.1. which has been looking critically at policing in Minneapolis,

and we heard from a man named Tony Williams about what was happening on the ground there. Now, a year later, I wanted to talk with them again about their push for abolition of the police department. And an organizer named Sheila Najat is affiliated with MPD 150, and she's running for mayor now in the city of Minneapolis. I just a few blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered. So I was out there in the street the first day when people were gathering. And it was people were still unsure this COVID. And we hadn't hadn't been outside, hadn't been to a demonstration.

And so we were standing on the sidewalk, holding signs. I remember the police rolling into this protest. And I was thinking, oh, they're going to be on their best behavior. One of their co-workers just killed a black man. And instead, they came out of their cars with their giant bear mace canisters and these terrifying wooden clubs that they hold. And there were just more cop cars than I've ever seen in my neighborhood, probably 30, just lined up all the way down Chicago Avenue. And I saw a bricks being thrown at a police car, and they attacked protesters. and that's when things sparked off that first day.

The group Najat is part of, MPD-150, has advocated, and this is well before the death of George Floyd, for disbanding the city's police department. It was kind of a startling turn then in early June of last year when a majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to do just that. All eyes were on the city, and it became a sort of test case for how governments would respond to the demands for structural change.

It meant so much. So we had them take this four-point pledge. And we wrote all of those pledges out on banners. And the banners said things like, decades of police reform proved that the MPD cannot be performed and isn't held accountable. And I think that says it all, right? Minneapolis has been a poster child for police reform. And it was community members. It was black, young leaders who stood in front of the city council with these banners, with these demands for the world we want.

And the city council stood behind them and read from behind these banners. And the sun was coming down. It was Prince's birthday, which is a big deal here in Minneapolis. And it felt like anything was possible in that moment that shifted the narrative. It changed the base level of what's acceptable. It shifted from reform to defund. So all of a sudden, this mom, soccer mom down the street for me, is talking about abolition.

And like, you know, this is kind of a crazy concept, but I'm going to read the MPD 150 report. And I don't know. I'm not quite bought in yet, but I'm thinking about it. And that would have never happened without community organizers leading defund. But a year later, the Minneapolis Police Department is still very much intact, despite the pledged by the city council. So it won't come as a surprise that the reason has to do with bureaucracy and politics. It's basically written into the city charter that Minneapolis must employ a certain number of police officers.

Our charter is like our city constitution. And it's governed by this body. That's an unelected body appointed by a judge. and they are very conservative, older, wider, wealthier folks, and they held up a change to the charter. We tried to change the charter to be able to shift away from policing, and they held it up so it couldn't be on the ballot. So that's part of it. Another part was, yeah, shifting these systems that have been around for 150 years, it turns out there's a lot of ingrained barriers. And so the current council, the folks who really have gone to that for changes to policing,

pride, I think they're best. And then there's other council members who decided it was in their political advantage or perhaps just in their worldview to take a hard law and order perspective. And so here we are again. But there's a group called Yes for Minneapolis that I am a part of. and we are trying this charter change again, which is a ballot initiative. So we gathered 20,000 signatures.

The next step is getting our city council to vote to put the question on the ballot. And then in November, we'll have to get 51% of the vote. So the question of abolition, how would a city without a police department actually work, is a long way from being decided. As of now, activists like Sheila Najad

have succeeded in defunding the police, but at a pretty small scale. So my role, my current job is working on the budget and helping community advocate for what we need in the city budget. And this fall, we moved $8 million out of the police budget and into alternatives to policing and violence prevention. And that was the first cut in at least 20 years of the police budget. It has grown every year, except for last year. So we did defunds. I've certainly had my moments of sadness. We fought tooth and nail for that $8 million we moved.

We should have moved a lot more. And after that happened, MPG killed another black man on December 31st, still all eat. And that was a moment for me. of, wow, we've been fighting every single day since May 25th. And still, this just happened unapologetically. So to me, those moments of discouragement don't come from these trying to shift to bureaucratic systems, because I know that will take time.

It comes from watching officers' behavior be unaffected. their co-worker being convicted of murder. None of it has impacted that behavior. And so that's terrifying. But more people than ever seem ready for really transformational change. The work we've been doing has helped offer some concrete vision. So now people are saying, oh, yeah, of course, mental health responders. Those are a part of us transitioning. away from policing. We can do that. That's a thing I can, you know, see. So I don't know, I have hope. I hope that we can keep that momentum going and build her something better, because if we don't, we're just going to end up in the same place over and over again,

and people deserve better. That's Sheila Najad, an organizer in Minneapolis. She's also running for mayor. And this takes acknowledging and confronting, head on. systemic racism, and the racial disparities that exist in policing and in our criminal justice system more broad. You know, state and local government and law enforcement needs to step up, but so does the federal government. A president who is bluntly speaking about the reality of systemic racism, that would have been very hard to imagine before George Floyd's murder and the movement that's followed.

Biden has said racial justice would be a defecutive. finding element of his presidency. He was motivated to run in 2020 by the white supremacy openly flaunted at the 2017 Charlottesville rally, he said. And yet his administration's criminal justice plan calls for an additional $300 million for police departments to hire and train officers on community policing. For those in his party looking to defund or reallocate public safety, that is not entirely promising. One of the key people who's going to be guiding the administration here is Vanita Gupta. She was confirmed in April as Associate Attorney General, the number three position at the Department of Justice where she oversees the Civil Rights Division.

I spoke with Gupta last week. It has been an extraordinary year for protest, for the criminal justice system. We've seen upheaval, unlike any, maybe, since the 1960s. What is the Biden administration determined to do to make clear that it's fighting for racial equality and that this is a priority for the administration? Well, it has been an extraordinary year, and in a lot of ways, the protests were not just about policing and criminal justice, but actually, I think, touched every part of American life. And in a lot of ways, the administration's response has mirrored that the equity agenda of the administration, I know. think has been a demonstration that every part of the government has a role to play, that it is not

just the purview of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure racial equity, but that the Department of Transportation needs to have a racial equity impact, that the housing and urban development agency needs to have a racial equity impact, that this is, that everyone in government actually has a role to play to ensure that we're fighting in trench disparities. Let's talk about policing. You led the federal investigation into the Ferguson Police Department when you came to the Department of Justice during the Obama administration. We've heard a lot about defund the police, reforming police, and we've seen very, very different ways of going about that. What approach does the Department of Justice want to see enacted in cities throughout

the country? What do you want to see happen in police departments in Minneapolis, in New York, in San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and all across the nation? So just to start, I think it's important that the Attorney General named civil rights as his top priority along with the fight against domestic terrorism. And I think what's really interesting about some of the conversation we're seeing in policing today is that there's been a push to recognize that policing alone cannot keep communities safe, that it has been a mistake to rely simply on criminal justice models and not be thinking about community-based mental health, community-based substance use, programs and services so that people can, especially in low-income black and brown communities,

have access to other interventions besides the criminal justice system. And the tools that the Justice Department has are actually broader than what sometimes people understand. So the pattern of practice investigation tool is often the tool that gets the highest profile in the most media coverage. That's the tool that the Civil Rights Division has. But the justice Department actually touches a much broader scale of police departments through the grantmaking, through the Office of Justice Programs, through the Cops Office, through the Office of Violence Against Women, where we can both innovate pilot important programs where we can emulate and propagate some of the best practices in consent decrees and help support police reform,

help support law enforcement. So I think the Justice Department needs to do this work at higher scale. I will also say, David, look, the last year, I know people, there are a lot of people in a lot of parts of the country who feel like, well, nothing has changed. We continue to see tragedy after tragedy. But I think it would be a mistake. We do. We do. We do. And I think it's a, the tragedies are, one is there's a higher level of awareness. We are seeing more of it because there's more on video than ever before. But I also think it's really significant while recognizing how much work we have to do, that 30 states and a lot of local governments around the country enacted a series of reforms this past year that I don't think

would have happened, but for a real demand for it by communities. You have states that are banning or limiting the use of neck restraints. You've got states that are increasing funding for body cameras that are now requiring de-escalation. I mean, five and six years ago, there were, really wasn't very much awareness, even in law enforcement, or a real kind of mainstream push around the duty to intervene when people see fellow officers using excessive force. Sure. But this on the level of awareness, but in terms of policy, President Biden's criminal justice plan calls for an additional $300 million for police departments to hire more officers, to train them on community policing efforts. And for decades, we put more and more money

into these police departments, years of retraining. And yet these hideous police killings keep happening. Can you spend your way out of a problem like that that seems really systemic in the end? Well, I don't, you know, the administration has been, or I should say, let me speak about the Justice Department. When we look at the work that we have been doing the last few years, there has been a need, of course, to provide resources for law enforcement.

I remember going into the T1 and going into the Baltimore Police Department and finding a room of file cabinets with paper forms on stops that had never been analyzed, digested. They had no data systems even to self-study. And we literally had to create data systems to understand the patterns of stops and searches. That actually cost upfront money to build that infrastructure. The money that there's officer wellness and safety programs that we know have determined. better results on reductions of use of force. But there's a big, big push through our consent decrees and through our grantmaking to actually also support programs that would reduce criminal justice interaction and do exactly

what people are calling for, which is to increase community-based solutions. So this has got to be part and parcel. So Merrick Garland has talked openly about the deleterious effects of criminalizing low-level drug offenses. Is the administration going to denounce the war on drugs as a failure? Well, I have spoken a lot about the problems of enforcement priorities, as has the Attorney General. And, you know, there has been a lot of focus on priorities, and I'm recognizing that enforcement of low-level drug crimes at the expense of focusing on violent crime, that that is, that that actually takes away the focus of law enforcement and that police community trust

is actually essential to the ability to fight crime. And I think the lesson in some ways that we are learning and seeing for the last year is that law enforcement alone isn't going to be able to reduce violent crime, that communities, that social service providers, that local governments all have a key role. And at the Justice Department, there's an important role of enforcing the law, that's through criminal accountability and through the pattern and practice authority that we have to investigate police departments where laws are violated, and then through grantmaking and to seeking diversion and alternatives to arrest and incarceration and to not use arrest and incarceration as the metric, but actually lives saved.

Your confirmation hearing was, I think it's probably accurate to say tense. Republicans like Ted Cruz called your record one of an extreme partisan. ideologue. Did the tone of that confirmation hearing make you concern that criminal justice reform is no longer a bipartisan matter? Is it a bipartisan matter? So I don't use my confirmation hearing as much of a litmus test for anything. I think it is what it is. Why not? Well, because I actually think that criminal justice reform remains a very strong bipartisan issue. Often policing tends to not be bipartisan and kind of sentencing reform has gotten a lot more traction, reentry, pre-trial reform. But I think that that is changing, you know, of the states that have actually tackled policing reform over

the past year, in a lot of places, that was actually a bipartisan effort. But it's going to take a lot of pushing. We still have to ensure that the First Step Act is fully implemented. That was a, you know, bipartisan law passed in the last Congress, and the Attorney General is really committed to ensuring its full implementation. And I think that people are already talking about the second step and all of the remaining reforms that need to take place. And so I remain very optimistic about the prospects for criminal justice reform, for bipartisan criminal justice reform around the country and here in Washington. Let's talk about a second step to the First Step Act. Trump pardoned a very small handful of people in the end.

And it's being reported that Biden is planning on using his clemency powers much more broadly, working to designate whole classes of people who could be free potentially. Can you tell me anything about who those people will be? I can't speak to those specifics right now, but I do know that there is a commitment to ensuring that clemency will help advance the racial equity interests of the administration. that the Justice Department will play a role in that process. But that's probably all I can say about it right now. What would that mean?

If you're going to try to ease racial inequity through clemency, what would that mean? Well, I can speak on, I can say on what it meant before and what I think it, you know, what that would demonstrate for now, which is when Attorney General Holder and President Obama announced the clemency initiative in 2014 to really seek to address, unjust sentencing, particularly where Congress had changed laws that had not been made retroactive, you know, crack cocaine sentencing and the Fair Sentencing Act, it wasn't perfect. It did not reach, you know, I think everyone would agree. There were too many people left behind, but the effort to ensure clemency for folks who had felt most severely the impact of those laws, I think, is kind of of the flavor and of the flavor that we could expect moving forward on clemency. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you, David. Vanita Gupta oversees the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. She was confirmed in April. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're looking back this hour at the protests of last summer and the ways that America has changed. or not in the year since. In the weeks that followed the killing of George Floyd,

the New Yorker published an essay about another uprising, one that followed another tragic death, and it took place more than 50 years ago. We grew up in a two-story house in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The house had a balcony, and in the summer, we were able to sleep out on the balcony in the cooling air. The essay is by Hilton Alls, a staff writer and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Hilton's essay is called My Mother's Dreams for her son and all black children. The Brownsville summer of 1967 was like every other Brooklyn summer I'd experienced, stultifying. Relief was sought at the nearby Betsyhead pool and at the fire hydrants that reckless boys opened with giant wrenches. The cold water made the black asphalt blacker in the black nights. Gossip floated down the street from our neighbors' small front porches and from stoops flanked by big concrete planters full of dusty plastic flowers. Nursing or beer or Pepsi, the grown-ups discussed far-off places like Vietnam. So-and-so's son had come back from there all messed up, and now he was on the methadone. Then the conversation would shift to the kids.

Every kid in our neighborhood was everyone else's kid. Prying, caring eyes were everywhere. Sometimes the conversation stopped, but just for a moment, as girls in summer dresses passed. Men and women alike looked longingly at those girls for different reasons, as they amble down the street, pretending to pay no mind, to the fine-built boys who called to them from a distance. Hilton, you grew up in Brooklyn with your sisters and brother

and your mother who had immigrated from Barbados. Can you tell me about that environment? And your mother, she was politically active, right? Yes. Even though I don't think that she would ever say that she was an activist, she just kind of was active. She was a person who sort of found. the political and the everyday, meaning believed very strongly in the possibility of the Black family

and doing better and having better. My mother was a proud member of Mary McLeod-Bathune's National Council of Negro Women and had attended Martin Luther King Jr's 1963 March on Washington. When she reminisced about that march, it was with a vividness. that made her children feel shy. Sometime in the long ago, Ma had been part of history. Nonviolent organization, picket lines, and marches. All these strengthened our mother's conviction that inclusion worked, that civil rights worked, that the black family could work,

especially if welfare officers and other professionally concerned people, journalists and sociologists say paid attention to what a black mother built rather than to how she failed. Hilton, in 1967, something happened that really changed the neighborhood. There was an uprising or what was then called a riot. And it started in a way that was all too familiar.

What happened? There was a... First, a demonstration, and then a riot when a young boy named Richard Ross was shot in the back by, as it turned out, a black police officer because it had been thought or assumed that he had mugged an older white man. And that event, that murder precipitated a two-day period of discord and sadness. standing by my mother's living room window, I tried tentatively to ask her why our world was burning, burning. She gave me a forbidding look.

Boy, be quiet so you can survive, her eyes seem to say. Did I want to be another Richard Ross, one of the hundred or thousand Richard Rosses out there? So many questions I could not ask. Among them, had our desire for community also been reduced to rubble in ash, The chaos that night, it would last for two days before life went back to normal, was more vivid to my burgeoning writer's mind than what I could not see. Our mother's vivid memories of King's promise of a promised land. Where was that?

You write in your essay about the riots and the question of masculinity. You said that to riot was a rejection of maternal silence. Talk to me about that and how you yourself fit into it. I think that a lot of black men who are raised in matrilineal societies have to figure out not how to be men, but how to enact masculinity. And one of the things that they, and certainly I was taught, was how to be silent in order to save your life, which is don't question or contradict authority to its face because you might get smashed, you might be sent to jail, you might be killed. And I think that one of the things that happened and happens in riots is that boys are given an opportunity to imitate the sort of violence and freedom that they see their white counterparts having. It's a way of not only separating from the mother, but a way of competing with male whiteness. There comes a time in your essay that you or you,

You're the adult you. You're Hilton Al's who's a successful, celebrated writer, living a decent life, a creative life. And yet, even from established people in the cultural world, there's one slight after another. And I wish you would talk about experiencing that, how often it comes. And is it totally expected by you? It's very interesting, David, that it's the writer's ego and egotism that believes that once you write something like this, that all racism will disappear and people will behave decently. But I came to visit some friends in Connecticut, and I got out of the car to go to the grocery store, and I had my mask on like everyone else. and there were two elderly white women.

And I was sort of coming up the rear, and one of the women sort of flinched. She was startled by my presence, and she was making an effort not to be afraid. But still, in that effort, I felt great sadness because I wouldn't be afraid if she came up to me or my mother wouldn't be afraid. what is it in the white body that I really want to ask the question,

what is it in the white body that produces that response? It is very curious to me. I've never understood it. It has nothing to do with, you know, if you want to talk about the relationship of black violence and white violence, I think white people, you know, have us beat by a mile. I don't understand why. It sort of feels like I have to ask.

asked the question back to you, I don't know why it's in that culture and in that body. It's sort of like that wonderful exchange with Tony Morrison had with Charlie Rose, where he says, well, you're, you know, you're celebrated and do you still experience racism? And you can see her face turn into granite. And she says, that's not the right question. The right question is, why does it exist in you? So I'm sort of in that school. I feel it when it happens. I don't expect it. I don't go looking for it.

And I think that that's partly what's assaulted is my relative innocence. My belief that as human beings we're going to go to the supermarket together or sit down together or have a meeting or lunch together and no one leaves the table feeling slimed. It's really there's that wonderful public enemy album, Fear of a Black Planet. but I don't know what the fear is. Why wouldn't you want a white planet? I'm talking with the New Yorker's Hilton Knowles.

We're at a moment when a lot of white people finally seem to be recognizing the persistence of racism and the dehumanizing effect it has. And Hilton concludes his essay by speculating on why a national uprising followed George Floyd's death and what changes in American consciousness and reality it might lead to. You get it only when the shit happens.

happens to you too. We all know that. And now the effects of our segregated democracy are happening to you. And now you can see or understand that all along. I've been trying to get along just like you. The way Ma taught me to be independent and help my chosen family. I've tried to make a living at something I love and to explore the intricacies of love just like you. I've lost friends and forgotten to pay a credit card bill just like you, but I wasn't allowed to be like you. And now my other is happening to you. Now degradation and moral compromise and your body breaking down are happening to you. Because Donald Trump has happened to you. Oxycontin has happened to you. Broken families have happened to you. Gun violence in schools and supermarkets and movie theaters at

concerts has happened to you, along with riots and frustration and cops who can't pass up an opportunity to flash their guns and their batons in your presence. Even as you search for home, even as the dream comes tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, tumbling down. Hilton All's Reading from his essay, My Mother's Dreams for Her Son and All Black Children. You can find it at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for this week. Thank you for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Corrieu, Riannon-N-Corby, Cala, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabel Bacon and Stephen Valentino with help from Alison McAdam,

Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. Our show this week was engineered by Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.