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Social Justice - A Conversation
Announcer 0:00
You're listening to local programming produced in KU NV studios. The content
Wesley Knight 0:06
of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 jazz and more the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
Charles Stanton 0:18
Good evening. This is Professor Charles Stanton. I'm a professor of Boyd School of Law,
Blanca Pena 0:23
and my name is Blanca Pena. I am a third year law student at the Boyd School of
Charles Stanton 0:26
Law, and this is social justice, a conversation,
Blanca Pena 0:30
a conversation.
Charles Stanton 0:33
Well, good evening, everybody. It's good to be back with all of you listening tonight. I'm here with my partner, Blanca, Pena, and we were on kind of a hiatus for a little bit, but now we're back with you tonight. I'm going to talk for a few minutes about something. While we were not doing the show, I was making a list of all the different things that were going on in the country, and I figured that some or most of these things would be a major part of our broadcast. And I'm going to, I'm going to mention a few of them, but that's not really what the our broadcast is going to be about tonight. The first thing I was going to get into was Jerome Powell, the man that was the head of the Federal Reserve Board, the attempts to intimidate Jerome Powell from keeping his job and all the rest of that stuff. And of course, that was an interesting story, as was the response of Jerome Powell, which was, basically, I'm not going anywhere because I have a term to fill out. So that was so that was one story that was kind of interesting. Then there came the story of the pardons for sale. Now this is going to been going on for a while where people who have a certain amount of financial assets are able to buy themselves pretty much out of any crime that they commit. In one case, actually, someone who paid for a pardon wound up in prison, and then was pardoned again. So there were two pardons for the price of one. So that was another, like, you know, really disturbing thing. Then there was the whole story of the 14 million people or so now that are off being able to get health care, and then all the people who have health care, but their health care has been diminished. And of course, while all these bad things are going on, the banks made record profits, close to $100 billion so you know, as Alphonse Kara said, the more things change, the more they remain the same. More stories about how, even though we know our food prices have gone through the roof, we're being told that the prices are actually coming down. So all those things were, you know, sort of possibilities to talk about, but I don't want to, I don't want to talk about with my colleague tonight about any of those things. What I really want to talk about is where this country is headed, and the, I guess, the event that happened, or the events that happened in Minnesota over the last few weeks are, I think, the subject of what I want to talk about, and hopefully what you want to talk about out there, and what we as a as a country want to figure out what we can do. The situation in Minnesota has many echoes of what started happening in Nazi Germany, where the rule of law slowly but imperceptibly slipped away, and that whole, that whole situation, was building up to something really terrible happening, and something really terrible happened twice, but those two, those two events, did not happen just on their own. They happened as a progressive situation where the rule of law was repeatedly ignored, where people were not safe in their houses, people were subject to warrantless searches.
Blanca Pena 10:00
Framing certain systems or branches of government, I think we need to completely abolish ice, abolish all of these systems that were put into place for reasons of racism, of bigotry. Because let's be honest. Let's be honest here. If this country was just only made up of white people, this entire time, the police department wouldn't exist. The profit prisons would not exist. This, this modern day slavery, scapegoating, all of the things would not exist. It only exists because white people cannot bear to be around other people that are not like them. And it's, I mean, I've, I've been living in this country for over 20 years now, and I've seen how things go down whenever it comes to some one of color that dies. I mean, breonna Taylor was just in her house sleeping, doing nothing, and she was killed, right? And even at that moment, people were trying to justify and now you have these videos of white people dying, and you still have people who are blindly agreeing with Christy nome, and it's just yeah, I mean, I agree that this is a major red flag for the country, but in the same breath, I will say that this has been happening this entire time, and it's frustrating to know that we as people of color have been screaming this for years, and it doesn't matter, up until someone that's that's White says something.
Charles Stanton 11:29
It may, it may. So it may, so have the benefit finally, that went that it's reached, that it's reached the white community that more people now will start to look at generations late, I might add, as to Well, this was happening in the Hispanic community. This was happening in the black community for so many eons, and and we for whatever reason, because we were ignorant, or we ignored it, or what, what, what the reasons were. It didn't bother us. But now it's come into our home, into our neighborhoods, into our schools, into our institutions, and maybe people, maybe these, these, these tragedies, will be a kind of shock treatment for people. People will be able to see, listen, you know that the rule of law exists for everybody. It's not just that we have we have two laws. We have one law for people of color and another law for white people, which, which, which, it never should have been in its in its inception, there's a very fine book called contradiction, which I read. The man's name is Ellis. He's a scholar who was involved in working with Ken Burns on the American Revolution program. And he talks and writes very, very interestingly about the inception of the country, and how the country was compromised from the beginning. Because when Franklin, who was an opponent of slavery, and the Quakers, who were opponents of slavery, they came to get to the point where they had to, you know, verify the Declaration of Independence and make us a nation. They would not would have been able to do that without the support of the southern states, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina. So they made, so they made this, this bargain, this terrible bargain, where to get the nation off the ground, they had to tacitly go along with the subjugation and murder and all the rest of the terrible things that happened to people of color the and then the book goes into, which is very fascinating, is how the American Indians had all their land taken from them. But what was interesting to me was there was a treaty that the United States government signed with the Indians that the Indians would be able to preserve, you know, their tribal, tribal lands. The problem there was, though, was the question of, how would it be enforced, and how monetarily the government would be able to afford keeping these areas sacred when there was an enormous amount of people flooding into the country and moving on past, say, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, into the Midwest, and then it going into the land, going into the land of the native, the native people. So it's always been, it's always been a scourge on America. It's always been a scourge on America's reputation. But a lot of that. Lot of that has to do with the people in our country who are not black or not Hispanic or not Asian or what have you. The idea that you accept something as right without questioning it or questioning yourself is really at the heart of it that you don't think, you don't think, because you're a white person, or whatever you are, that that makes you better than anybody else I know. I mean, I've, I've said it in my teaching, and you've, you know, you've, you've heard me say it there were. I believe we're all our brothers and sisters, because I have white skin, doesn't make me better than anybody else. Dr King said, The only thing that makes a person better is by their by their good deeds, and how they, you know, try to help other people. And that's the way you measure a person. But it's, it's a behavior that is deeply ingrained in the whole American history. Now, the question is, though, the question is, though, accepting that that's all true, though, do we? Do we want to have a country in which it's not even what it is now. It really, it really deteriorates into an almost unlivable country, because you don't all those freedoms that you took for granted are gone, and it'll be, it won't just be black people, Hispanic people, Asian people. It's going to be everybody. Everybody's going to be denied. This is what happened. This is what happened to Nazi Germany, though, in a difference, in a different context. Because, of course, it was a different. It was a different there were different ethnic groups, but the institutions in our country are failing us, the the the two other institutions, well, the one institution, the executive branch, that's that's not even, that's not even a question, that they're fit, that's failed us, that's a lost cause. That's a lost cause. But our legislative branch and our judicial Ranch have failed us. They have failed us because the people who are supposed to be serving us caught on to the idea that we are their servants and they're not ours. So basically, whatever they do in Washington is basically to feather their nest in the case of the judiciary, these are people who, I'm sorry to say, a lot of them, I don't think, believe in anything. They believe in retaining their seat. They retain. They believe in retaining their powers, and so that the decisions that they make are not decisions based on what's good for the country. The decisions that they make are good for a certain small group of people who who have nurtured them for years, from the time they were in law school to the time they joined the Heritage Foundation, to the time they joined the law firms on K Street. And this is that they were all indoctrinated, and they have a script, and they follow a certain script that leads to a feeling of superiority, that they're superior to all the rest of us, and that superior superiority is one of the ways it's best exemplified is in the shadow docket, where they reach decisions. There's no reasoning. It's one sentence. You don't have any kind of legal basis for it, but because we're the Supreme Court, we can do whatever we want, just as they gave the president the power, you know, with this immunity thing, that the President can do whatever they want. But in Germany, in Germany, they knew. They knew a lot of these people. They knew it was wrong. You know, we went through the judgment of Nuremberg movie, the movie about, you know, all the judges who are being put on trial. They knew, they knew what was going on, but they lacked the courage or moral fortitude to do anything. The end of the movie is very profound, because in the end of the movie, the man who was looked up to as an iconic figure in the German legal process, he asked to see judge Haywood, and judge Haywood comes to see him, and he says, you know, Judge Haywood, he says,
Charles Stanton 19:45
I know I did wrong, and I'm so sorry, and everything. I never knew it would come to this. And Judge Haywood looks at him and says, He said, when you put the first prison, first person illegally. Prison. That was the start of everything that happened. That was when the whole thing began, and that one person became 100 1000 and ultimately millions of people. So there's a responsibility there, but there's also a responsibility of us, of ourselves. You make the point about, you know, you know the fact that you know that white people were killed when Black and Hispanic people had been killed for generations. Yes, yes, and that, and that should, and that should activate, that should activate us all to look at what we are doing, not to just go with a script that's been written for us hundreds of years ago, but say, Listen, you know all these things are going on. And you know, Jacob sober off, the guy that's on MSNBC who's done some really remarkable work about, you know, how these people are being treated. They are us. They are us. These these people who are they're trying to support. They are us and we are them. This is what. This is what. If we believe in religion, if we believe in God, if we believe in all these different things, then that's the proof of it. The proof of it is not just, Well, you know, you know, you go to shul, you go to services, or something like that. No, it's what we do. It's how we treat other people, it's how we treat it. That's the ultimate thing. But we got to look at ourselves. We lack as a country, introspection, and we lack, as individuals, a good look at ourselves, almost like taking an x ray of what we are. Yeah.
Blanca Pena 21:50
I mean, it's clear as day that the people in power don't care about us. I think, I mean, there's, there's quite a few examples of that. I think one of the first things I can think of is how quick Zora Mamdani was in fixing certain issues in New York City already. I mean, he's only been in his position for not even a month yet. I don't think like he was just sworn in, and I keep seeing these videos of him just, you know, already fixing issues that had been issues in New York for a really long time. Like he opened up a bunch of public restrooms for people, and there's like, the free daycare and things like that for people who need it. And he includes undocumented immigrants in that too, because he understands that it doesn't matter whether you have a number attached to your name or not. You deserve resources too, especially because we all pay into the system. I think one of my biggest frustrations with the government right now is that I see specifically people of Congress on Twitter, way too much writing strong worded letters, way too much, and not enough action. I mean, I remember watching that video of the mayor of Minneapolis saying the F word, and for some reason that, like, I think to him, he thought he was doing what he was supposed to do. Like, oh, yeah, get the f out of here. Ice, no. Like, that's not, that's not how things change. That's not how systems change. And we have seen it in the history of literally everything, that systems are not changed by strong worded letters and saying, Please don't become a dictator. It never happens in that way. And I at this point like I don't I don't care for Democrats as much as I don't care for Republicans. I think they've both been such disappointing parties on both sides of the aisle. I mean having the seven democratic representatives voting in favor of increasing funding for ice just this past week. And I mean, thankfully, the Senate was able to put a pause to that. But, like, why did it even get that far? Why did it get that far? Why did those people vote for something like that? And I understand there's context, and there's this, that, and the third, it doesn't justify any of it. We shouldn't be doing those things. And it's, it's just, there needs to be something different. You know, something different needs to happen. We can't continue this cycle of Trump or someone in the government does something very terribly wrong. It costs the lives of someone. It costs, it costs things that you just simply can't replace and there's these breaking news, and then you have these people on interviews lying about what happened, and then it kind of dies down, and then nothing. They're still they still have their jobs, they're not in prison. They're not, you know, taking accountability for what they did. They're not standing trial. It just keeps happening over and over. I can't even tell you how many times I'm on Tiktok and people are like this. This is a turning point for the country. No, it's not, no, it's not, because we're still here and nothing has changed, and our representatives are telling us to call our senators or or to, you know, be be peaceful. I'm sorry. There's, there's just no such thing as peace ever actually fixing such a corrupt and violent system that never happens. And it's, it's frustrating to watch it all go down. And even the the courts are very they're, it's like, they're unenforceable, you know, it's like, it's like when a parent says to their kid, you know, like, if you do that again, I'm going to take away your iPad, and then they do it again, but then they don't take away the iPad. What does the kid start to think, Oh, I could just do what I want, because I still have my iPad, right? How many there have been so many orders out already from from courts to DHS saying, release, you know, these people, or don't deport these people. You have Liam Ramos still in ICE detention. Apparently, there's been reports of him vomiting in detention. He has a fever. He's throwing up the water and the baby formula. I mean, the fact that there's even baby formula in detention centers, that is heartbreaking. It's it's just. And the courts write these orders and these dispositions, and they hold certain things, and then they pass the paper over, and then nothing changes. So what is there? What is there to do? And I agree with you that we need to look back on ourselves, because clearly those these people don't have our bags. We need to stand with our neighbors. We need to make sure that all of us hear people that we can see day to day, right, not just people on the internet or people on the news, people that we see interact with, doesn't matter where they're from or what they look like. We need to stand with each other, yeah? Because if we don't, then no one will, yeah, yeah.
Charles Stanton 26:32
Well, that's, that's exactly, that's exactly my, my sentiment. I think we need, I think the first thing we need to do is to was saying about looking at ourselves. We need for those people who it applies to, for those people who it applies to, the acceptance and the acknowledgement that people who don't look like me are my equal. I think this is an enormous step that needs to be taken where people have to reassess their ideology. I think that's the first thing. But I think the second thing that needs to be done is massive nationwide protests in every major city in the United States, major strikes and doing everything that can be done to shut the government down. Yep, violence is not the answer, because violence is what these people want. They want. They want violence because then that will give them a justification to bring in the military and say that there's an insurrection going on in India and South Africa, which where there were very terrible situations. Gandhi and Mandela changed to the people those countries, and he changed it because they had an overwhelming support from the population that basically said, This cannot continue. They pulled strikes, they did all kinds of stuff, and the economy was going to crater. And if the economy is going to crater, and the people in power know that there will be change because their priority is money.
Blanca Pena 28:25
Yeah, I agree it's really important to stay organized, stay connected with everyone, and make something something different happen, because what's been going on cannot go on for much longer. And if people claim to be patriots and Americans, they will, they will work hard to save their country. If not, I don't know what's going to happen. Thank you all so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
Charles Stanton 28:50
Thank you will. God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai