Joshua Shurley: All right. Welcome to week for civil rights. So we're a month in graduations for making it this far. So last week we left off talking about the concept of civil liberties right restrictions on government as espoused in the Bill of Rights.
Joshua Shurley: This week we're going to take that a step further and we're going to talk about somewhat related concepts called civil rights so
Joshua Shurley: Let's get started.
Joshua Shurley: So it's been quite a week. It's interesting that civil rights is
Joshua Shurley: Our topic this week, so we just came off of the you know the DNC and the RNC conventions just happened. And then these, you know, the very disturbing ugly events of Kenosha Wisconsin just took place right just very fresh days old, and
Joshua Shurley: That in many ways is a reflection of some of the things that we're going to be talking about this week so
Joshua Shurley: We're not really spending a whole lot of time looking at these these current events per se.
Joshua Shurley: But we will be looking at sort of the historical context that leads up to them and hopefully this will
Joshua Shurley: Provide some of us a baseline understanding of the why why things are the way they are, how they got to where they are and maybe some some
Joshua Shurley: possible avenues of what to do about it.
Joshua Shurley: Um, alright, so let's bar.
Joshua Shurley: PowerPoint here which is handy dandy guide.
Joshua Shurley: There we go. Okay, so
Joshua Shurley: Some right so um
Joshua Shurley: Let's get to it is our learning objective. So we're going to be talking about idea civil rights, what the civil rights mean, how's the difference of liberties.
Joshua Shurley: And where it comes from, which is the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. So we're going to mostly be looking at pretty much primarily looking at the development of civil rights.
Joshua Shurley: In the historical context into the modern day through the lens of the African American experience right now, the actor American population is not the only
Joshua Shurley: People that are associated with civil rights.
Joshua Shurley: And we will expand on other civil rights movements in a later module. But for this module, we're going to stick to some basic concepts. And like I said, use the, the African American lens as a framework of understanding so last week civil liberties.
Joshua Shurley: We've been sort of, you know, talking about some of these foundational values right you know what do, what does America stand for you ask these questions.
Joshua Shurley: And invariably, some of the things you get democracy, liberty, or get different things. Last week we talked about liberty.
Joshua Shurley: The principle that the value of liberty, the value of freedom and how how that's Paramount that's that's really, you know, it's essential to our DNA as Americans, or at least that's what we tell ourselves.
Joshua Shurley: But there's another value that kind of goes along with that, if you think that pledge to elite pledge of allegiance. For example, liberty, and what for all that were justice.
Joshua Shurley: And so that's going to be our, our, sort of value this week so liberty goes along with civil liberties, then it's the value of justice that informs civil rights.
Joshua Shurley: Right, so we can see Lady Justice here, the iconic sort of image of justice. And what does she have in her hands on one hand, she's got the scales of justice balance fairness fundamental fairness. She's got the blindfold around the eyes symbolize what Justice being blind.
Joshua Shurley: Impartial right it doesn't matter who you are, the same justice for all people. At least that's the idea. And then down in the other hand when she has. She's sword right not waving it around, not up high, but she's got it down, sort of low at the ready
Joshua Shurley: And that is that is the part that
Joshua Shurley: Is a little bit different than the value we were talking about last week where it's all about liberty and keeping government away, keeping government you know the potential for government tyranny, you know, out of our lives as much as possible with justice.
Joshua Shurley: We now have the sword and the sword represents force right government. The ability for governments to do violence and
Joshua Shurley: The idea here is where there is injustice, we will correct the situation and we will bring justice so now government is sort of empowered is is the is the underlying message here.
Joshua Shurley: So what is justice basically fundamental fairness right and the relationship of justice and power does justice rely on power to to to enforce justice course just power sometimes die justice, it can
Joshua Shurley: So it's, it's always important to know that central concept of power. Right, whether or not we have liberty, whether or not we have justice.
Joshua Shurley: Or your democracy, all of these, all these values that we've been talking about where the power is located is always a really important part of these conversations
Joshua Shurley: So what are the differences between these two concepts civil liberties and civil rights. So there's a couple ways. I'll put up a few slides here just to basically say the same thing, but in different words with civil liberties, we're talking about
Joshua Shurley: What you might describe as a negative freedom. Okay, negative for you to meaning civil liberties is about the absence of government intrusion, right, the absence of too much power in the hands of government because that is a threat to our liberty.
Joshua Shurley: And civil liberties comes from where from the Bill of Rights. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: This is a little bit confusing at times, because the terms right liberties and rights are often used interchangeably.
Joshua Shurley: But the term civil liberties and civil rights have specific meaning. So it's important to kind of get these
Joshua Shurley: Distinctions so it'd be a lot more helpful if they would have named the Bill of Rights. The Bill of civil liberties, make a little easier.
Joshua Shurley: But they didn't so civil liberties related to the Bill of Rights.
Joshua Shurley: Now civil rights is a little bit different. This is what we call it positive freedom, meaning it's not about the absence of power, the absence of government civil rights is about the presence and the actions of power of government.
Joshua Shurley: Protection by the government, as opposed to protection from the government. Right. So with within the concept of civil rights now government is being empowered to act and on whose behalf on whoever is is denied liberty, so
Joshua Shurley: Let's see if we go back
Joshua Shurley: You know, to the founding to the idea of limited government
Joshua Shurley: This is our, you know, our primary value right as the as the United States, we wanted to limited central government wanted to protect ourselves from the potential of tyrannical government. Okay. All that all that sounds great. That makes sense.
Joshua Shurley: So we got the Bill of Rights, which is an expression of natural rights right to me from the enlightenment.
Joshua Shurley: Of course the problem that we've already sort of pointed out is that we never really had in actuality, we had, we had the words down right recognizing the natural rights of all people.
Joshua Shurley: But in actuality, it was a very small segment of population that actually had political rights if you were not a landowning white male, you know, you
Joshua Shurley: Didn't really have power in any real sense, you didn't have legal personhood, you were not a person under the law, meaning you could not invoke your civil liberties, you could not say look, my rights are being denied, whatever.
Joshua Shurley: Rights listening to the Bill of Rights.
Joshua Shurley: So if you don't have personhood, you're out of the equation, right, and that sets us up for
Joshua Shurley: Civil rights to come in and sort of correct the situation. So if we would have had my nose. Kind of a pipe dream. But if we would have had, say, you know, universal suffrage, men, women, rich, poor black, white, whatever. Everybody, everybody has the same vote, everybody has the same power.
Joshua Shurley: You know, the Constitution, then there may be wouldn't be a need for the civil rights movement. Okay, that's important. But that's not what we had. We started off with a very, very skewed system, a very rigged game and then a few generations later in the following century.
Joshua Shurley: That that begins a new process to counter that right to expand personhood. So the history of the United States has been
Joshua Shurley: A great deal of hypocrisy in the beginning, but also it's been the march towards expanding personhood. But along the way.
Joshua Shurley: Expanding freedoms expanding legal personhood. There's always this there's always this force that wants to wants to stop that that wants to stop the expansion of personhood.
Joshua Shurley: And and the and the realization of justice. That's essentially what the idea of civil rights is here to do so.
Joshua Shurley: Civil Liberties comes from where the bill of rights, civil rights comes from where meaning, whereas the Constitution.
Joshua Shurley: It's the 14th Amendment. We'll get to that here. Just a minute, expand on that civil liberties are restrictions on government things that government cannot do civil rights are obligations of government what governments must do to protect people
Joshua Shurley: So civil liberties is sort of protecting all of us from government intrusion civil rights is protecting
Joshua Shurley: The vulnerable from the powerful. That makes sense. And it requires some government action. So I hope we kind of see the differences there.
Joshua Shurley: All right.
Joshua Shurley: Civil Rights guarantees of political equality civil liberties protects us from government interference. That's, that's fair to say.
Joshua Shurley: Right. So you get the idea. So
Joshua Shurley: Hopefully that helps
Joshua Shurley: If there are any questions about this, we can cover it in the live session on Wednesday.
Joshua Shurley: Okay, 14th Amendment. So really comes down to this. It really comes down to equal protection under the law will expand on 14th Amendment in just a minute but
Joshua Shurley: We're now using the language of the state no state shall make or enforce any law which denies to any person any person within the jurisdiction.
Joshua Shurley: equal protection of the laws and this was specifically written at the end of slavery right slavery was just abolished with the previous amendment. The 13th Amendment and the idea here is, is that we are now saying it's doing a few things. Number one, it's giving
Joshua Shurley: Citizenship to people who were born in the United States, but not recognized as persons. In other words, slaves and it's saying, These people are our full citizens and they are required, or I should say they are
Joshua Shurley: They, they fall under the, the protection equal protection of the law.
Joshua Shurley: Okay.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so a lot to cover here. We're going to blow you know blow through some of the stuff in the interest of time, but there's a long history.
Joshua Shurley: Here, just to set things up and and this will hopefully make a lot more sense. By the time you get to the end, it really all starts with. I mean, even just in the very beginnings, the very invention of race invention of whiteness as a racial concept right
Joshua Shurley: Medically you know scientifically speaking. There's one race, the human race. Right. And there are different tones of melanin in human populations, depending on on where they originate from
Joshua Shurley: But this invention of whiteness and of races is in many ways a unique to the United States. It was in America and the new world that
Joshua Shurley: You know whiteness took route as opposed to one's national origin.
Joshua Shurley: We've got slavery.
Joshua Shurley: The long history of slavery, which predated American independence, then we've got independence, fast forward through to the American Civil War 1314 15th amendments, the long history, known as Jim Crow.
Joshua Shurley: And then the erosion of Jim Crow and the beginnings of what you could call the modern civil rights movement, which is generally accepted to have begun in the mid 1950s and basically continues on through today.
Joshua Shurley: So we'll sort of touch on these things as we move along. So one of the things I want to talk about really quick is the notion, because it's important to define our terms. Right. And, you know, anytime you start talking about
Joshua Shurley: Racial matters or racial justice or any of these things, you get a lot of people who get up in and they get a lot of anxiety and I will, you know, warning, a lot of the stuff we're going to be talking about this week is
Joshua Shurley: Upsetting
Joshua Shurley: Troubling. You know, I don't know what are the words to us right and I get that, but so is so is reality and you look around the world we live in, especially the events of the past week, and really the fence of the past few months, and the past. Well, several years.
Joshua Shurley: But, but let's talk about what we mean by this. So, for a lot of folks and oftentimes there are people who kind of look like me.
Joshua Shurley: People have a hard time
Joshua Shurley: Talking about this stuff. Right.
Joshua Shurley: You know, I don't want to hear about racism. Racism is a talked about too much. It's it happened a long, long, long time ago has nothing to do with today.
Joshua Shurley: That, that stuff is all over with. Now, okay, well, we'll explore some of that stuff. So first of all, what do we mean by this term racism or racist structures. So a lot of times people conflate two sort of definitions, with the same word racist or racism.
Joshua Shurley: One definition, which a lot of people have in their minds is the idea of sort of a
Joshua Shurley: You know, personal bigotry personal animosity right I feel superior to these other people because they are not like me and I don't want to associate with these other people. That's a, that's a personal attitude, it's a personal
Joshua Shurley: You know that yes it's personal discrimination personal bigotry, all of that. Right. But it's on an individual level.
Joshua Shurley: Not a lot, we can really do about that.
Joshua Shurley: And that used to be pretty routine pretty normalized culture, religion, all these things really programmed that kind of individual racism in people for for many years.
Joshua Shurley: That's not so much the case today. I do believe that we do live in a society that is far less full of people with those attitudes or at least openly right
Joshua Shurley: Although they put any of them, they still exist, but that is less the problem rather than the other definition of racism which is not about our personal attitudes of what personal prejudices, we may or may not have but about the structures that have been built long before us.
Joshua Shurley: A long, long time ago when it was very common to hold those bigoted attitudes structures were were constructed were were put in place.
Joshua Shurley: With the intention of keeping one group of people on top and other groups of people on the bottom. And that was, that was the intention that was by design, it wasn't an accident.
Joshua Shurley: Fast forward to today, many of those same structures still exist, they're still in operation and
Joshua Shurley: Those of us who are the caretakers of these institutions, in many cases, people don't have any personal animosity. I don't have any personal racist feelings. You can be a lovely person and not have any prejudice or any
Joshua Shurley: You know, any prejudice in your heart. But you can still just be doing your job and be a part of a very racist system that has outcomes that are negative and violent outcomes to certain groups of people. You can be a person of color and you can
Joshua Shurley: Get a paycheck and work in a system that oppresses people of color, right. You don't have to necessarily be aware of it for that to be true. Just like you can be a woman.
Joshua Shurley: And you can work within structures and be very successful, even though those structures you work within
Joshua Shurley: Our patriarchal and oppress other women. And this is something that is a real problem right in our, in our society. We often down to. So my point being that
Joshua Shurley: We're mostly we're talking about the second version or, you know, the second, I should say, definition of what we're talking about with racism and this kind of thing. So that sort of
Joshua Shurley: Close this in
Joshua Shurley: I found this little cartoon to be somewhat interesting and kind of fitting for this story and it breaks down in a pretty
Joshua Shurley: Simple manner.
Joshua Shurley: You know, you've got to two boys looks like right in there. And this is, you know, obviously meant to be symbolic
Joshua Shurley: One is one is black, white, one is black. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: The darker skin. Boy, he's literally changed his chained
Joshua Shurley: You know, to a to a heavy ball. He's got the ball and chain, obviously that's going to civilize you know legacy of slavery.
Joshua Shurley: The boy is white. What is he doing. He looks like the object here for whatever reason is to get up onto this platform. Okay, that that symbolizes where we need to go.
Joshua Shurley: And so what does he do, he literally uses the other boy as a platform. He steps on them and pushes them down and and even though he protests DOESN'T MATTER, BOY on top is using him.
Joshua Shurley: Using his, his body to get himself up over the ledge and get up there as he finally gets up there. The boy in the bottom says enough is enough. I'm getting up breaks this change now he's free of his chains. So he's free only now he's down here and the other boys up here.
Joshua Shurley: That's, that's where the one on top turns around and says, I'm really sorry about being racist before I know better now. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: Great times have changed. Okay, so the one in the bottom says will give me a hand up and
Joshua Shurley: The boy on top says I can't do that. That would be reverse racism.
Joshua Shurley: Look, I got up here by myself. Why can't you
Joshua Shurley: You know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, like I did.
Joshua Shurley: So oftentimes what we see what we think
Joshua Shurley: You know, depends on where we stand. And so the idea here is just to imagine yourself.
Joshua Shurley: In the shoes of others. Right. And when those kind of mainstream
Joshua Shurley: I guess white society.
Joshua Shurley: Has these attitudes that any kind of acknowledgement of racist structures that have created this this worked imbalance that we see today.
Joshua Shurley: That you have to be living under a rock, not to notice.
Joshua Shurley: That this is somehow natural well it's not and that you made it in your people made it because of your hard work and your industrious nature as opposed to those other people
Joshua Shurley: Know Nothing could be further from the truth. You didn't succeed because of your work. You literally used the bodies of other people to get where you are.
Joshua Shurley: Not you, personally, but that's what the street that's that's what's happened within the structures. Okay, so a lot of people you know their reaction is
Joshua Shurley: Hey look, I wasn't a part of slavery. I am. This was a long time ago. Why should I be made to feel guilty for it. Okay. And it's, it's not about guilt or making people apologize for what their ancestors did or any of that that's that's a whole other thing. And that's not really what
Joshua Shurley: Any of this is about. It's about it's about equity and just fixing thing of dismantling the structures that your ancestors did build that have these very racist and violent outcomes today and the hypocrisy to say I made it. Why can't you pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Joshua Shurley: Is is a very disingenuous and very
Joshua Shurley: Toxic attitude and it's no wonder you know that we are where we are today. You look at these
Joshua Shurley: Ugly events that are going on in many ways, they are not. They're not new. It might be new for some younger people who are seeing things blow up. But this is really just a long historical process. These are cycles that come and go every so often.
Joshua Shurley: Like a, you know, I don't know, a volcano or something you know there's pressure, pressure builds pressure builds and then there are these explosions that are these releases and sometimes there is some change, but then it kind of palms back down and and and the
Joshua Shurley: Things everything sort of solidifies again for a while and builds up more pressure for another generation. And so we're experiencing one of those
Joshua Shurley: outbursts, one of those explosions right now. Alright, I hope that made sense. Someone another interesting piece to what we're going to be talking about is the story of the United States in terms of
Joshua Shurley: Tyranny right what where the tyranny lies. And where's the source of tyranny. And where's the source of liberty. Now if you go back to the original
Joshua Shurley: In the foundation of constitution.
Joshua Shurley: And all this the the story was, you know, states, go back to the Articles of Confederation state governments, people were primarily citizens of their states first
Joshua Shurley: And then after that, you know, recognizing that yes, they're a part of this this thing called the United States.
Joshua Shurley: But there's a lot of skepticism of this federal government this national government.
Joshua Shurley: Too much tyranny, because this the government that is closest to us should reflect our, our will. So that should be we would assume you know more
Joshua Shurley: reflective of the People's will whereas that far away federal government is where the tyranny will come from there the potential tyranny. Okay. And that's, that's kind of the, the, he said the original the original story, if you will.
Joshua Shurley: With the
Joshua Shurley: End of the Civil War with the past to the 14th amendment on through to the Civil Rights struggles that we are still seeing today.
Joshua Shurley: In some cases, that that script has flipped a little bit right in some, in some ways, meaning that it has been in some cases, the state. The state governments that have been
Joshua Shurley: That have been heavy handed that have been tyrannical according to some right and it's been the national government that's had to step in and prevent abuses.
Joshua Shurley: By the states. So it's not necessarily true anymore that it's the national government that's always tyrannical
Joshua Shurley: I mean, that's still true in many cases, but in other cases, it's not so I'm just pointing that out that there is now some ambiguity in that in that situation. It's not just, it's no longer just reflective to go out federal government bad state government better
Joshua Shurley: If you're a person of color in the Jim Crow South, you are not a fan of your state government, probably. Why would you be and it's the federal government. Although plenty problems there that's at least trying to do something to get the state to remove the boot from your neck.
Joshua Shurley: Okay, so
Joshua Shurley: That's, that's what I mean by that. The story is somewhat changing a little bit
Joshua Shurley: Ambiguous. Okay, so we're going to go through some of these things. So a lot of this material. I'm going to go through really quick because it's in the book. It's an other readings and where that is the case, we will
Joshua Shurley: blow through it. I'll just, you know,
Joshua Shurley: Raise your bring your attention to a few of them. So the policy case plus EV Ferguson. This is an important one.
Joshua Shurley: What does it establish right. Plus, he basically was a man of color in Louisiana late 1800s, who does an act of civil disobedience against
Joshua Shurley: The Ferguson railroad company so railroad company is segregated. This is after the Civil War. They've got the you know the
Joshua Shurley: Real rail rail cars for whites and it got rail cars for everybody else. Plus, he is it. He's a mixed race, but he's he's not considered white by the
Joshua Shurley: Law in the cold culture of the day and he sits in the whites only car on purpose. Much like Rosa Park Rosa Parks did many, many years later.
Joshua Shurley: Same kind of idea and he does this, this is what is known as an act of civil disobedience meaning he's breaking the law on purpose because he feels the law is unjust. Okay, so
Joshua Shurley: Because he's, you know, sort of beholding to a higher law right I either Bill of Rights.
Joshua Shurley: Okay, and it goes all the way the Supreme Court takes many years and the Supreme Court comes back and says,
Joshua Shurley: Look, you had your political rights have not been denied. And this was this was about social equality and so that the court makes this argument. And basically, it becomes known as a separate but equal doctrine. Okay, that
Joshua Shurley: We're not denying equality to people of color, we're just, you know, in some states. So if state or local community wants to maintain racial segregation
Joshua Shurley: That's not for the federal government of the course to get involved with, because if you were denying them and saying,
Joshua Shurley: Non White people can't ride the railroad. Well, that would be one thing, but they're not saying that they're saying you can you can ride the railroad, you just can't sit with white people.
Joshua Shurley: That'd be segregated and so separate but equal becomes sort of the standard the legal framework for what will become known as Jim Crow laws so understand Plessey understand separate buddy.
Joshua Shurley: And the challenge being made here is really again comes back to the 14th Amendment and this is this is the entire first section of the 14th Amendment. There are other sections, but this is the one that's really got the
Joshua Shurley: meat of what we're talking about today. A lot of important stuff in here and again this is talked about at length in the book, what the different clauses mean
Joshua Shurley: The privileges and immunities clause.
Joshua Shurley: You know, no state. And now we're using the word state, whereas the original bill of rights never mentioned the states. So now we're talking about. There's this idea called incorporation where the
Joshua Shurley: Bill of Rights is now beginning to apply to the states that that's sort of a thing that starting here and that that proceeds well in the 20th century, we might talk about that later when we get into the courts but
Joshua Shurley: Needless to say, the 14th Amendment is basically it's it's coming out very you know clearly and saying state governments, you cannot deprive people of their life, liberty, or property without due process. You can't just
Joshua Shurley: You can't do that. And you can't deny people equal protection under the law. Okay, so this was sort of a
Joshua Shurley: You know, the federal government saying all you former slave states, you're on notice right you know treat people these freed slaves. Now, as a citizen, excuse me.
Joshua Shurley: Okay, so yeah, we've got civil rights, the rights and privileges guaranteed to all of us under the equal protection clause and the Due Process Clause of the 14th amendment also the Fifth Amendment but 14th amendments, again, specifically invoking the states.
Joshua Shurley: And we're protecting discrimination. This is all stuff that's come about from the courts court interpretations over the, over the years.
Joshua Shurley: Protects discrimination on the basis of what we would call inherent characteristics. These are things that we are born with that we can't control our race, religion, sex, national origin, those are the original for the courts have recognized others. I think we're up to nine.
Joshua Shurley: To include gender, disability, age.
Joshua Shurley: Sexual orientation.
Joshua Shurley: Like Apple has one which get the idea that
Joshua Shurley: The number of inherent characteristics have has expanded over the years. And the idea with inherent characteristics. These are things that you can't really choose you can't choose to be these things.
Joshua Shurley: It's just, it's a part of who you are and therefore it's especially you know egregious to discriminate against groups of people because of these inherent characteristics. Okay, and
Joshua Shurley: And the 14th Amendment is leading to that right it's outlying discrimination based on these inherent characteristics and saying States are responsible, not just us, the feds but the states to we've got to protect the rights of all people.
Joshua Shurley: Basically, we've got to protect the civil liberties of everybody, as if they are all equal. That's, that's really the crux of civil rights is that we all have the same access to civil liberties. We all have the same person.
Joshua Shurley: Or we should end up like again, like I mentioned earlier, if we had that in the first place, we wouldn't need a civil rights movement, but that's not what happened.
Joshua Shurley: This cartoon sums it up pretty well right equal justice got people doing the same activity, but
Joshua Shurley: Oh, it's interesting that one group of people seems to get targeted right for certain things. I don't know. Does that ever happen is that, or is that a real thing some people would deny that that ever happens or that it must be for a good reason. Always under percent of the time.
Joshua Shurley: Or is discrimination sort of baked into the system. The question is for some of these things. Alright, so again, books, talks about a lot of these things. Jim Crow.
Joshua Shurley: The basically that the caste system of white supremacy that existed from the well there was the reconstruction period. About a dozen years or so after the end of the Civil War, where the northern
Joshua Shurley: Northern troops actually occupied the southern states.
Joshua Shurley: Once, once that protection left it basically went right back to where it was before except now slavery was not slavery was gone, but
Joshua Shurley: Structurally speaking, it was a very, very
Joshua Shurley: Racist and white supremacist society. I mean all of America really was. But especially in these places where the law itself mandated racial segregation
Okay.
Joshua Shurley: So take a look at Jim Crow and that existed well into the 1950s, 60s, even the 70s, which we'll get to depending on where you work.
Joshua Shurley: So there are two different types of racial segregation. Again, this is in the book, you've got segregation, as a result of some kind of a law.
Joshua Shurley: Meaning the government itself is passing laws, saying, you know, only white people are allowed to do this not these other people and that kind of thing that's does your
Joshua Shurley: And the fact that would be the kinds of segregation, you had everywhere else other than the Jim Crow South so to include right here in Fresno, California. So
Joshua Shurley: What, how has, how have these these kinds of
Joshua Shurley: Forms of Discrimination affected. For example, this city president, where most of us live or we live near so there's an article about that.
Joshua Shurley: So figure out that article. What's, what's it about, and how does it tie into one of these types of racial segregation
Joshua Shurley: Okay.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah.
Joshua Shurley: This is a sort of Jim Crow and touch shell right see some of these sciences disturbing. Like I said, some of these things are hard to see. For some of us,
Joshua Shurley: And it's easy for people to go well that was gosh that was so long ago. It's good that we don't have, there's no lingering effects of this that we still have to deal with.
Joshua Shurley: That was just a really, really long, long time ago, wasn't that long ago. And that's what I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding
Joshua Shurley: That these things aren't as ancient history as much as people would like to think, right, this idea of segregation. Now, the way that you had things like separate instances into businesses and whatnot. For non white people.
Joshua Shurley: That existed in the Jim. Jim Crow South. Okay. It was enforced by law, but it also existed everywhere else. It existed right here in Fresno well into the mid 20th century and beyond where
Joshua Shurley: Same thing, right.
Joshua Shurley: There were white people's entrances and everybody else and that existed here as well. But it wasn't there wasn't necessarily a law that said, so it was just sort of culturally, socially enforced.
Joshua Shurley: Again, what's the difference there to tour de facto and all that the idea of the Green Book interesting
Joshua Shurley: There's a movie about that if anyone's seen the movie The Green Book. Check it out.
Joshua Shurley: Okay. So fast forward after World War Two.
Joshua Shurley: Where
Joshua Shurley: Lots and lots of African Americans are drafted into the army military to to to serve and in some cases to go to fight in combat and World War Two.
Joshua Shurley: After that, and this is the same thing, the same dynamic happened at the end of World War One where you've got these folks who are
Joshua Shurley: wearing the uniform of our country. They go overseas to fight. They're exposed to different lands different
Joshua Shurley: Societies different cultures, right, to some degree, and then they are brought back to the United States to what to Jim Crow. And so for a lot of folks you had some
Joshua Shurley: You had a raising of consciousness, especially among African Americans during both of these posts for periods, and this was also a periods of
Joshua Shurley: Lot of racial tension that went on and so that within the military. That's kind of interesting, just a few years after the end of World War Two.
Joshua Shurley: President Truman against the advice of a lot of people, a lot of people were very unhappy about this, especially within the military.
Joshua Shurley: issued an executive order which we'll talk about later. We'll get into what those mean
Joshua Shurley: But basically declared that the US military will no longer be segregated. So prior to that it was a racially segregated military the military was basically for white men to serve and you did have, you know, special units.
Joshua Shurley: Where you had, you know, black units. There was a Japanese American unit, for example, entire regiment that was
Joshua Shurley: Taken mostly from the concentration camps in America and sent to fight in Germany, which is a whole Italy in Germany for 42nd infantry regiment that was Japanese American regiments. So you had these
Joshua Shurley: racially segregated units well in 1948 the
Joshua Shurley: White House says yes no more racial segregation US military everyone together. So this is a picture of Korea, the Korean War, which was the first time that
Joshua Shurley: American soldiers went into combat you know as an integrated force. And that's not to say that there was not still all kinds of troubles. There were but
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, that was a it's ironic that some of the first the first sort of forced integration happened within the US military rather than, you know, out in society.
Joshua Shurley: Okay.
Joshua Shurley: And you start to get in the 1950s, the beginnings of what we call the modern Civil Rights era.
Joshua Shurley: people protesting people standing up for their rights and what are they saying they're saying
Joshua Shurley: Look at these protesters in the bottom left here. I am a man
Joshua Shurley: This was kind of the message of I believe this might have been the Memphis sanitation strikes where they're just what are they saying they're saying, I am a man. I want to be treated like
Joshua Shurley: I want personhood. I want personhood, just like you. Other people have personhood, just like you can invoke
Joshua Shurley: Your rights, you can assert your rights under the Constitution. Why should we be denied. We are people to we built this country to and we don't want special privileges. We just want to be equal. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: You have this dangerous criminal here in the top right. She did a lot of really dangerous criminal activity. Obviously this is Rosa Parks I Rosa Parks, the woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus.
Joshua Shurley: And she wasn't just some, you know, upset domestic markets, the way I learned it when I was a kid in school that she was
Joshua Shurley: It was just sort of an individual act that turned into that propelled her to be some kind of a civil rights icon. Now she. This was an organized and an intentional act of civil disobedience. She had trained for this for a long time to do these kinds of actions and and
Joshua Shurley: Thankfully it work has sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which were very effective.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, here you have right, gentlemen, on the left, saying, give us American rights, we just want to be included.
Joshua Shurley: In the American dream. Now, is that so radical is that so crazy is that such a wild concept. And how was that met by mainstream society did most people support his wish to have American rights. Most people did not
Joshua Shurley: Most the vast majority of white people at the time were absolutely against this kind of thing.
Joshua Shurley: Or if they were, for they were for it in the abstract sometime in the future, I would like to see more equal, not fully equality, I mean. Let's not get carried away. But I would like them to have better conditions someday.
Joshua Shurley: There was always about the but I don't like the way they they're doing this the marching the signs the getting in the streets, they're blocking traffic.
Joshua Shurley: Blah, blah, blah. The same kind of stuff that sound familiar. A lot of people might might hear these things today. When you've got this Real classy gentlemen to his left.
Joshua Shurley: With his side. Right. And this sums having this little smirky face and this sums up most of white society's sentiments at that time.
Joshua Shurley: And it's important to remember here. The distinction between two concepts, right, what is moral and what is legal. So legality.
Joshua Shurley: Something that's legally permissible does not always mean mortality meaning something that is just sort of the right thing to do and moral sense some kind of higher truth.
Joshua Shurley: You know, is it is it legal to
Joshua Shurley: I don't know poison the environment and search of profit. Well, in a lot of instances. YES, THAT'S ABSOLUTELY ILLEGAL. Is it moral to do that.
Joshua Shurley: Though, I mean, I don't think so. I guess that's up for everyone to to judge for themselves and slavery. Remember slavery was slavery on moral thing to do. I would argue know most people would probably say no slavery wasn't moral
Joshua Shurley: But was it legal, yes. Slavery was legal.
Joshua Shurley: And people said, well, just much the same economic arguments that are invoked today for all sorts of economic exploitation, well then labor and we had to do this and that sucks that people make minimum wage, but hey, you know, the economy shrug.
Joshua Shurley: It's not illegal. We're not breaking any laws. Okay, well you know there are a lot of things that go on right to this very day that are perfectly legal.
Joshua Shurley: But they're not moral okay so slavery was legal genocide was legal. If you go bring up Nazi Germany, the Holocaust. If you are a German that was legal. These were these are lots of things are legal Jim Crow laws were legal
Joshua Shurley: This was not people breaking the law, the people who who changed things were the law breakers. They were the ones who were willing to put their necks out and break the law and
Joshua Shurley: And you know and have unlawful assemblies, which is a whole other question of whether you know under the First Amendment.
Joshua Shurley: You know, government can continue to can just declare an assembly unlawful.
Joshua Shurley: This is now an unlawful assembly disperse
Joshua Shurley: That's essentially what they did a lot of civil rights marchers and a lot of times they said no we're not going to disperse. We have American rights, we have a right to be here and then they were beaten up and jailed and all sorts of horrible stuff.
Joshua Shurley: And this distinction, this, this idea that these two things don't always overlap. This is just as much a thing today as it was 50 years ago 100 years ago. There's still plenty of things that are legal today that are very morally questionable that's putting it kind of
Joshua Shurley: Civil disobedience. Again, this is in the book. This act of intentionally disobeying unjust laws for some higher purpose.
Joshua Shurley: You know there are people who will say, Well, you should just follow the law always obey the law, follow the law. He broke the law. Okay, well, you know, that's
Joshua Shurley: That's how that's how thing. That's how progress has always been made progress has never been made personhood has never been expanded because people ask nicely for permission to please grant us more rights.
Joshua Shurley: I don't think that's ever happened in in history that I'm aware of. It's always been because people are willing to take risks and to put themselves out there and to break the law.
Joshua Shurley: To shine a light on injustice and eventually there's caving in. Okay, fine. Your will actually live up to the principles that we speak about
Joshua Shurley: So, you know, whether it's MLK, whether it's Gandhi, whether it's the row, whether it's Thomas Jefferson, whether it's I don't know Jesus right civil disobedience.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, you know, obeying a higher law and not the the you know the law of the Romans. Okay, so some of there's a long rich historical tradition of civil disobedience being the catalyst for change.
Joshua Shurley: Okay, so we talked about the Plessey case earlier establishing separate but equal the other court case, you're going to need to know about is the brown case the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, to be exact. So what are the brown case, do the brown case.
Joshua Shurley: For the first time, and this is really an innocence, the first shot in the struggle for civil rights supreme court under now the Warren Court that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren is very different than the court that existed, you know, 60 years prior. The policy case.
Joshua Shurley: Now, the Court is looking at this and saying, you know, looking back over these past decades separate is not equal. If you look at the facts of the case, you know, you'll see what this was all about.
Joshua Shurley: What this gentleman Brown was arguing or what his attorneys were arguing, but this really is kind of seen as the beginning
Joshua Shurley: Why, because it overturns separate but equal. Now you've got the US Supreme Court supreme law of the land saying separate but equal is done, can't do it anymore.
Joshua Shurley: Southern states, no more separate but equal. That means no more Jim Crow don't the whole framework that you've built up of institutionalized segregation is no longer lawful. Okay. And so, of course, the South.
Joshua Shurley: You know, being the dutiful law biters that they are, they immediately integrated their institutions.
Joshua Shurley: And everything was great. Oh wait, no. That didn't happen of course. No, quite the opposite. They dug in their heels and said, absolutely. We will not do that. We will defend our freedom.
Joshua Shurley: Okay, so from the points of view of the governments of the state governments and and most you know much of the the
Joshua Shurley: The concentration of power, right, which is white wealth in the southern states.
Joshua Shurley: Know you're infringing upon our, our freedom, this is this is government tyranny. This is federal tyranny telling us what to do, it's our right to oppress African Americans in our state. They don't tell us what to do with them.
Joshua Shurley: If that sounds like a weird argument to make, that's because, well, maybe it is
Joshua Shurley: Needless to say, this, this really
Joshua Shurley: I mean, I mean, this was the first time the federal government really, other than passing the 14th Amendment 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.
Joshua Shurley: At the Civil War. This is the first time the federal government really
Joshua Shurley: took a stand on behalf of African Americans. And so it's a big deal. And so this emboldens leaders to start these movements actually shouldn't say leaders started movements, oftentimes, leaders like Martin Luther King and others get, you know, credit for being
Joshua Shurley: The heroes of the struggle and they certainly were great. And they organized and did a lot of wonderful things. But it was it was the masses of people themselves who went out and did this stuff went out and and put their lives on the line, quite literally, and a lot of places.
Joshua Shurley: That did this. So people are now going out there masses of people remember power in numbers and you know whether it's the Montgomery Bus Boycott, whether it's the Memphis sanitation strike Bloody Sunday and Selma.
Joshua Shurley: Throughout the 1960s. Now the federal government is enforcing schools in the southern states to integrate. So
Joshua Shurley: 1954 was the brown case saying no more separate but equal, get your act together Southern states, you need to start integrating
Joshua Shurley: Okay, go ahead, you know, we'll give you a little time, but this needs to be done, chop, chop. Get to it. Okay, well, what is the what is the state's do they drag their heels, they say no, we're not going to do it. They prevent
Joshua Shurley: racial integration from happening. So at some point.
Joshua Shurley: President Eisenhower even sent in federal troops in a few cases where where US Army soldiers went into the certain places and you know enforced the desegregation of schools. So that's what I mean by flipping the script of who's
Joshua Shurley: On the side of expanding personhood. He's on the side of liberty and he's in the side of you know privilege and power state government or the federal government.
Joshua Shurley: Alright so here you got Earl Warren with his, uh, you know, famous conclusion right separate is not equal.
Joshua Shurley: Separate but equal is is bad, bad law and it's gone.
Joshua Shurley: Right. So this is the basis
Joshua Shurley: Of civil rights sort of struggle or this modern phase of it and
Joshua Shurley: And it's interesting that this came from the Supreme Court, this came from.
Joshua Shurley: You know, nine old men and black robes right didn't come from notice where it didn't come from. It didn't come from the legislature didn't come from the people and we'll get into the branches of government and all that.
Joshua Shurley: In a few weeks, but Congress wasn't passing these laws, Congress didn't pass any any law to to integrate
Joshua Shurley: And why Congress was the voice of the people. Well, it's because the people didn't really want this to happen. So in and this is the this is true in many cases it's been oftentimes it's been the courts.
Joshua Shurley: The courts that that that push progress right even when the people are not yet ready for it. The courts are the ones, saying, our job is to interpret the Constitution, and yes, sorry. It's pretty clear here that what you're doing is wrong and you need to integrate and Get over yourselves.
Joshua Shurley: And then society has to kind of say, Oh, fine and and do what they do. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: Whoops also around this time you've got, well not around this time. Now, a decade later, a decade after the round decision. You get the Civil Rights Act of 64 which
Joshua Shurley: Was not the first Civil Rights Act or plenty of Civil Rights Act that go back a long ways, but the one in 1964 was the big one. This was the, the one that basically said
Joshua Shurley: You know, let's no no mistake about it in the United States of America. There is no discrimination based on inherent character characteristics, period.
Joshua Shurley: That was a very comprehensive and forceful civil rights piece of legislation and then a year later, they followed it up with the Voting Rights Act, which
Joshua Shurley: You know, basically, if it wasn't clear enough last year and the Civil Rights Act of 64 let's be absolutely clear here that voting.
Joshua Shurley: There's no discrimination and voting and it will not be tolerated. So there's a lot to say about voting and civil rights.
Joshua Shurley: And and we're going to, because there's so much material to get through. We'll come back to that a little bit later when we talk about elections, and it's a separate module.
Joshua Shurley: But we're not. We're not done talking about voting as a civil rights issue. So that, that's another thing we're going to come back to that. That's a, that's a big part of this.
Joshua Shurley: This movement. So you see these pictures here big backlash, you see the sign here whites have rights. So there was a lot of sentiment, not just in the South, but across America.
Joshua Shurley: You know that white people's rights were being infringed upon you're taking away our power you giving it to these non white people. And that was very
Joshua Shurley: It gave people a lot of anxiety. A lot of fear. You know what's going on. You're changing my country, you're ruining our country. These people are going to ruin everything.
Joshua Shurley: And and i i'm not i'm not going to make any RNC jokes, but
Joshua Shurley: Some, some of that fear mongering might sound a little bit familiar today, I'll just, I'll just leave it at that.
Joshua Shurley: You've got Governor Wallace in the State of Alabama.
Joshua Shurley: Himself, because he's the, you know, the symbolic head of this
Joshua Shurley: Segregation now, segregation forever, right, that was his that was his motto, and he's physically blocking
Joshua Shurley: The school that was to be integrate. I'm not sure what exactly what school. This was it. This was the University of Alabama.
Joshua Shurley: I think it was, but I'm not positive about that. And he's being confronted with the
Joshua Shurley: The military commander of whatever force was sent, and you know, and he has to be sort of, you know, physically removed to force integration.
Joshua Shurley: And so for a lot of white Southerners, you know, this was the. This was that this was the beginning of the end tyranny. The Tyranny is upon us, you know, America that we that we know and love is over.
Joshua Shurley: You know, in a sense, maybe it was if you mean a white supremacist society. Yeah, it was starting to it did take a hit. And, you know,
Joshua Shurley: Is that a good thing is that a bad thing. I guess that's up for for people to decide.
Joshua Shurley: So when we talked about the political art and beginning of the class, a few people did.
Joshua Shurley: A piece of art that Norman Rockwell was. It was an artist. He, he had a
Joshua Shurley: famous painting that he did in the 1950s 19 early 1960s, I don't exactly remember when but of this little girl Ruby Bridges and
Joshua Shurley: Who is Ruby Bridges Ruby Bridges was a small child who
Joshua Shurley: Because of integration.
Joshua Shurley: She was the first girl to go to what had been an all white school and
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, and for whatever reason she was the only
Joshua Shurley: Girl, the only child. I think there may have been others. I'm not positive on this, but
Joshua Shurley: The mobs of angry white people that gather day in and day out for weeks and months, throwing things
Joshua Shurley: You know, yelling racial slurs promising violence, all this stuff at this little child for going into what had been an all white school
Joshua Shurley: It was so ugly that she was escorted to class every day by a small group of US Marshals who were there to sort of protect her her teacher
Joshua Shurley: It was one on one teaching. She had a teacher and her why, because there were no other white students allowed because every other you know all the white parents would not allow their kids to be in the same classroom as Ruby Bridges.
Joshua Shurley: This didn't happen a long, long time ago and some, you know, it's not that these people are long gone and dead Ruby Bridges is still around. I think she's in her 60s today that's not that old. She's
Joshua Shurley: You know she's, she's a grandmother
Joshua Shurley: And this is what she remembers. So there are people alive today who went through this and the, the part that's really interesting to me personally is
Joshua Shurley: The white mobs the angry people who were so overwhelmingly against that a lot of those people are still around today too. And you know, that's
Joshua Shurley: Well, maybe we'll talk about that later. That whole dynamics, but a Bloody Sunday. Right. So another crazy example Martin Luther King leading his followers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Joshua Shurley: Which the, you know, law enforcement head law enforcement official Bull Connor told them not to do if you do this, it will be an unlawful assembly and we will, you know, we will teach you a lesson basically don't come marching into this town with with that.
Joshua Shurley: Kind of stuff. And so it
Joshua Shurley: It happened. And you can see the result. Right.
Joshua Shurley: water cannons were shot at people attack dogs and what were they doing, what are they doing it was so extreme.
Joshua Shurley: You know they were dressed in their Sunday best they were singing songs they were marching peacefully. They carried American flags. They carry Bibles to carry constitutions.
Joshua Shurley: They wanted. They wanted American rights. Right. Okay. And that was, that was just too much. That was too extreme and that of course had to be declared unlawful, which then allows law enforcement to come in and beat the crap out of people. Because you know America.
Joshua Shurley: It kind of backfired the images that were taken pictures that were taken were in newspapers across America and
Joshua Shurley: People you know across America started to really see this, say, Wow, that is a really ugly system, maybe we do need to
Joshua Shurley: Think about this, you know, racial integration thing, maybe we do have a problem with racism, maybe, I don't know, but a lot of people also were
Joshua Shurley: Were uncomfortable, they would say things like, as I've already mentioned. Yeah. You know, I want them to have rights and
Joshua Shurley: Better conditions, but I don't like the way they're going about it they're being too obnoxious all this marching in the streets being highly visible. They're just antagonizing people I don't like it. They're blocking traffic.
Joshua Shurley: I was late to work.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, what's what's progress and justice when someone's you know inconveniencing you
Joshua Shurley: Okay, so let's take a look at some of the
Joshua Shurley: History of those institutions that I mentioned that institutions that
Joshua Shurley: Were built were designed to have sort of racist outcomes and they still are racist outcomes today, even though we like to think that that design never existed in to kind of follow that trajectory really quick.
Joshua Shurley: So interesting color eyes picture here of of slavery. So slavery was still around. When the camp when cameras when modern day photography was invented. So this is a color eyes picture makes it look like it really wasn't that long ago. This could have been
Joshua Shurley: This could have been not that long ago, a few decades ago this was probably
Joshua Shurley: During the Civil War, somewhere around that period.
Joshua Shurley: And so you've got this period of time, you know that slavery at 65 Civil War, the end of slavery 13th Amendment abolish slavery.
Joshua Shurley: We've talked about the 14th Amendment 15th Amendment gave African American males, the right to vote.
Joshua Shurley: But let's focus. Let's go back to that 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.
Joshua Shurley: This is so I mentioned a book. Slavery by Another Name by by professor named Douglas black men from the University of Virginia.
Joshua Shurley: This came out several years ago and very interesting book and some other work has followed up on this. What he's arguing and it's hard to argue it because it sort of historical fact.
Joshua Shurley: Is that you had you had this you had slavery right basically millions of black Americans forced to do free labor. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: All of a sudden, that's gone. Slavery is abolished with the stroke of a pen 13th Amendment. So now what
Joshua Shurley: Well,
Joshua Shurley: In a sense, what what Blackmon is arguing to put it in a nutshell. He's saying the slavery never went away, it just changed names. So the labels changed, but the slavery itself never went away. For example, slave plantation that may have existed, right, you'd have the
Joshua Shurley: plantation owners and you'd have the slaves that the plantation owner owned living on the property doing what they do because they're slaves.
Joshua Shurley: After the 13th Amendment. What happened, did anything fundamentally really changed. Now if you looked at it from the outside, you would have said it looked exactly the same, only now.
Joshua Shurley: Only now that people aren't slaves, they're technically free, but where are they going to go. There's no jobs. There's nothing for them. Oh, and by the way it's been illegal to teach things like literacy
Joshua Shurley: The families have been destroyed generations of people being, you know, the children stripped away women being raped all sorts of horrible things
Joshua Shurley: No literacy no education.
Joshua Shurley: horrible stuff and and only now you've got the what would have been the slaves in the past. Now they're now they're tenant farmers right there.
Joshua Shurley: sharecroppers, they're living on the land and we now they have to pay rent. They have to, you know, they get, they get to stay and still do the same work that they always did when they were slaves.
Joshua Shurley: Only now they have the ability, you know, to, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, right, sounds good. But what was the reality. The reality is that didn't really happen.
Joshua Shurley: The system was always rigged to where they were always constantly in debt and they never could quite pay off the debt. And when you grew old and died that debt went on to your children and your children's children and so
Joshua Shurley: You were still in many ways beholden to that plantation owner and this is partly why a lot of African Americans. This time, leave the South, and they go to industrial cities across America.
Joshua Shurley: New York, Chicago
Joshua Shurley: Detroit, you know, you get the idea. Los Angeles all all over the place.
Joshua Shurley: And the other big part of Slavery by Another Name is is this is convict leasing. So what was convict leasing convict leasing so let's let's back up 1865 slavery is is done with at that time there was no, there was no such thing.
Joshua Shurley: As a criminal justice system in America, anything like what we see today there was not. I mean their records and there might have been some magistrates here and there and populated areas.
Joshua Shurley: Some police. I mean to say
But
Joshua Shurley: There wasn't you know this this organized system of policing in prisons and jails.
Joshua Shurley: When does that become institute that that happens almost overnight in 1865 you see suddenly there's erected this this huge system of
Joshua Shurley: Criminal Justice why because overnight. You've now got millions
Joshua Shurley: Of African American people who are no longer slaves, meaning they are no longer under the control of white society. What are we going to do with them. They don't have jobs, they don't have any way to take care of themselves.
Joshua Shurley: Things are going to happen. People are going to do what they have to do to survive.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so, so, you know, to maintain law and order, we need a system to police these people to keep them under control. This was the beginning so convict leasing becomes a thing. So suddenly now you've got jails. You've got prisons and
Joshua Shurley: To the extent that jails and prisons existed before they were small, and they were they were white people, you know, in very small numbers overnight after 1865 now you've got massive networks of jails and prisons and they're 99 plus percent black
Joshua Shurley: So it's not that you had to lock up every African American person but you got enough of them enough of the population to send a message to the rest right
Joshua Shurley: And so with convict leasing let's say you are a person who I don't know you needed labor for your farm, you need to labor for your business, whatever. In the past person might have bought slaves.
Joshua Shurley: I know this is this is tasteful subject, but a person may have bought slaves to do this.
Joshua Shurley: Now you don't need to. You can't buy slaves, because it's illegal. So what do you do, you know, you call
Joshua Shurley: You know, cousin baba over at the jail and say, yeah, I need this many people to do this amount of work for this amount of days and you basically rent your labor you rent your convicts up. It's basically rent a slave, but it's
Joshua Shurley: You know it's technically they're they're convicts who've been convicted of a crime. And this is because in the 13th amendment.
Joshua Shurley: The 13th Amendment mentions, you know, no involuntary servitude.
Joshua Shurley: But, but there's an exception. People duly convicted of crimes and so overnight. We've got to make
Joshua Shurley: Being black as illegal as possible. You've got to criminalize
Joshua Shurley: Black folks as much as possible so that we get as many of them as possible right back and change and change because we've got to keep the economy moving. We've got to keep
Joshua Shurley: You know, we don't want to disrupt the economy. I mean, that's some things are human freedom is great and everything, but let's not let it get in the way of the economy. Does that sound familiar
Joshua Shurley: Going 19 response. Okay, so yeah convict leasing and it actually ends up in many ways, being more brutal and oppressive even than slavery, because if you look at the
Joshua Shurley: Hard facts of incentives.
Joshua Shurley: You know, slaves had to be they were expensive and so they had to be cared for, you know, for a long time, as he could get your
Joshua Shurley: recoup your investment right with convict leasing, you could work. People literally to death. And if they died.
Joshua Shurley: That's okay. Just chuck them in a mask Raven and Linton, and another one is they'll desert plenty of bodies to be provided and that's and that was the system and that lasted well into the 20th century. And it wasn't until
Joshua Shurley: The killing of a young white man named Martin Tabor
Joshua Shurley: Extremely rare for white people would be caught up in the system young white man and was killed in a in a Florida.
Joshua Shurley: prison camp. He was horrible story contracted malaria. He wouldn't get out of bed one day and he was whipped to death.
Joshua Shurley: Which is really ugly, but this happened. This was not, you know, unusual happened all the time to prisoners of color, but when this happened to Martin Tabor
Joshua Shurley: It became a national scandal, there was. It was all across the front pages of newspapers across America and why society couldn't believe that these kinds of conditions existed.
Joshua Shurley: And I can't believe what happened justice for Martin. Oh, you know, if they would have had hashtags in those days. And so that led to the end of the convict leasing system at least formally
Joshua Shurley: No one said a word when it happened to 10s of thousands of African American so
Joshua Shurley: But once it happened to the white man, and rightfully so. I mean, it shouldn't happen to anyone, of course.
Joshua Shurley: What were the crimes that people were being committed were being convicted of
Joshua Shurley: Things like vacancy things like what we're called pig laws petty theft very petty theft. So people are starting people who literally can't feed their kids so stealing a farm animals stealing eggs, this kind of stuff.
Joshua Shurley: You know, trespassing on private property, even to hunt or something like that, or to gather food.
Joshua Shurley: These were crimes and you know 10 years hard labor. I mean, this would be horrible draconian sentences passed down for the, for the most trivial offenses.
Joshua Shurley: Vacancy statutes, if you couldn't. If you were a black person and you couldn't and you were found.
Joshua Shurley: You know, being idle, meaning you're not working under the direct supervision of a white man you could be labeled a vagrant if you're walking down the road and you are not under a white person supervision.
Joshua Shurley: The new thing. This new institution called law enforcement, which was a new thing.
Joshua Shurley: Could say, Well, you're a vagrant 10 years hard labor, you know, now you're in that system of convict leasing
Joshua Shurley: For for simple things like vacancy, who were the law enforcement officials and where did they come from, because it like I mentioned, this is kind of a new thing.
Joshua Shurley: Because you need these law enforcement officials to maintain this criminal justice system, which is brand new.
Joshua Shurley: They are the slave patrols the slave patrols that existed before. In many cases, the same people doing the same job only now they're not called slave patrols anymore. They're not called overseers. They're called
Joshua Shurley: Police and you know prison guards and whatnot. So you get the idea. And Black Codes refers to during the days of slavery. There were over called the slave codes. For example, it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write it back, it was illegal to teach any person of color literacy
Joshua Shurley: In most states.
Joshua Shurley: And that's just one example, after the end of the Civil War, the slave codes become the Black Codes, which were basically you know the laws that that pertain to what African Americans can or can't do across the Jim Crow South so
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, it's, we're not talking about a lot of, you know, serious, serious crime.
Joshua Shurley: There's a great documentary by Ava DuVernay called 13th. If anyone's ever had a chance to highly recommend it. I think it's still on Netflix. I know it's been a while, but it was available on Netflix.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, and she's basically taking the book by Douglas Blackman and expanding on that thesis, it's it's it's really well done and
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, it just expands on a lot of what I just talked about this idea that the 13th Amendment. Yeah, yeah, it's created abolish slavery, but
Joshua Shurley: It turns what used to be slaves basically into criminals and so this mass incarceration of black people, the criminalization of black bodies to control them.
Joshua Shurley: Just this was a real thing, this, this, this is what happened with the 13th Amendment, the 13th amendment.
Joshua Shurley: Yes, that abolish slavery, but it really does it because it just allows slavery to be rebranded by another name criminal justice.
Joshua Shurley: Okay.
Joshua Shurley: Right. So you get the idea. And then this you know the legacy of this
Joshua Shurley: falls right into today.
Joshua Shurley: criminalizing the behaviors of African Americans, even though they're not they're not doing anything, any, any more criminal than any other group of people
Joshua Shurley: But yeah, it allows for folks to be
Joshua Shurley: folks to be controlled and combine that with convict leasing
Joshua Shurley: disenfranchisement meaning lack of a right to vote. So in Jim Crow states, you know, black people couldn't vote in most cases, there were all sorts of it will get to this, like I said in the later module.
Joshua Shurley: tactics to suppress votes from African Americans outright lynchings by vigilante groups racist terrorism from groups like the KKK which weren't just a bunch of
Joshua Shurley: You know, local yokels oftentimes the KKK were comprised of people that were leaders in the community. So, you know, officials mayor's police chiefs police officers judges business owners.
Joshua Shurley: These weren't just fringe wackos. These were the people who had power by day. We're also wearing the Hoods by night and and leading these these
Joshua Shurley: Terrorists lynchings. I don't know what else to call it and and of course you know what happens when you become a felon in the United States, at least in almost every state. What do you lose, lose the right to vote and in many states you lose it for life.
Joshua Shurley: So that's convenient. That's a convenient way to make sure that political power never really finds its way to these this group of people
Joshua Shurley: It's almost like a system was designed to keep people marginalized and oppressed. It's almost like that. It's almost like that system was never dismantled and it still exists today, but we're just in denial of its design kind of seems like that. Maybe it's just me.
Joshua Shurley: Okay.
Joshua Shurley: I mean, I don't know. I would hope that people kind of know this by now. If you don't know these things.
Joshua Shurley: You really should
Joshua Shurley: If you look at you know
Joshua Shurley: If you break it down by by race. This is just three categories, white, Latino, and black.
Joshua Shurley: Your likelihood to be incarcerated.
Joshua Shurley: Right, so why people are incarcerated to but they're incarcerated a far lower rate than other people of color, right. The tinos are good example, right, there's kind of somewhere in the middle. And then if you're African American something like six times more likely
Joshua Shurley: To be incarcerated and
Joshua Shurley: Crazy statistic to this day more African Americans are under Carson will control in the United States, meaning either jail prison probation or parole some kind of partial custody, more, more black people are under incarceration today then slaves lived in 1850
Joshua Shurley: Because obviously, for one. There's a lot more people yes population has grown, but I mean that's staggering. That's how many that's the scale.
Joshua Shurley: Of how many people are are in this system in this criminal justice system today, which we just talked about what that was really designed to do and why it exists today.
Joshua Shurley: Okay, the war on drugs is another big one. I won't get into this because I will go down a rabbit hole and talk for half an hour. But, needless to say the roots of the war on drugs are absolutely rooted in
Joshua Shurley: The same idea, the suppression of power going to African American communities, not just African American communities other undesirable communities as well, but mostly African American communities.
Joshua Shurley: There's a guy Harry as linger. If you look up this this name Harry, as a in s Li N G are
Joshua Shurley: In many ways, he's the one
Joshua Shurley: very influential person in history that people often know nothing about. He's almost single handedly responsible for what we
Joshua Shurley: Have for the roots of what we call the war on drugs. Today, which maybe isn't a term that's used as much now that we're in 2020 if you go back when I was a child in the 1980s, the war on drugs was just blasted everywhere.
Joshua Shurley: That phrase doesn't come along until 1971 but it really gets it. Start the 1930s and Harry ends linear was a virulent racist. You can read his quotes here. I won't repeat some of this stuff, but he's you know he's a he was a prohibition agents that
Joshua Shurley: This is during alcohol prohibition alcohol prohibition goes away. He needs to maintain his agency's budget and mandate as I wanted to go wait as want to lose power.
Joshua Shurley: And prestige. So what does he do, he sets a site on this new thing drugs.
Joshua Shurley: Specifically, marijuana, which was, you know, evil. It was known to be. It was known to be smoked by jazz musicians and we all know how, you know, we all know how those jazz musicians. Get down. Right. And who were jazz musicians African American people, primarily
Joshua Shurley: Angelica had this extremely disturbing personal obsession with jazz singer Billie Holiday a successful black woman in her day
Joshua Shurley: You know, but really had it in for her. There's a great book about this called chasing the scream by an author named Johann Hari
Joshua Shurley: Wonderful, wonderful book. Wonderful.
Joshua Shurley: very educational. I highly recommend it. It's, it's disturbing in places, but also just mind blowing, and even entertaining. In some ways it's, it's, I mean you couldn't make up
Joshua Shurley: Some of the stuff in fiction better if you try to the weird things that specifically Harry handling, or did that links that he went to, to create
Joshua Shurley: Mass hysteria about drugs and not just about drugs, but to tie drugs to the darker people and and that this was a threat. This was a threat to the white race, so be careful because pretty soon. If you don't, if you don't empower me and my agents.
Joshua Shurley: You know, people of color are going to be hopped up on marijuana and they're going to be, you know, just tearing this country apart and if people believed it, and they believed it. I guess maybe some people still believe it. I don't know.
Joshua Shurley: Not sure that that hysteria is still entirely gone yet. I think it's on its way out. But yeah, if the idea. This is a great quote by
Joshua Shurley: A former policy advisor to Richard Nixon. This would have been in the well you served in the late 60s, early 70s 1994 john Ehrlichman gave an interview.
Joshua Shurley: You know 20 plus years after he was no longer in government. He's long retired now and any makes this quote right he talks about the fact this is this is when the war on drugs became official 1971
Joshua Shurley: He's talking about, you know, we couldn't make it illegal to be African American, or to be against the war so Vietnam war was going on at the time, there was an anti war.
Joshua Shurley: Movement. There were a lot of other social movements going on. Those are the biggest ones civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. So by associating, you know, blacks and hippies with marijuana and heroin and then putting this stuff like propaganda on the nightly news.
Joshua Shurley: Regular you know America Middle America square society, whatever you want to call it, they're seeing this stuff every day.
Joshua Shurley: And so they're they're seeing these very disturbing images. Oh wow, you know, the more that people of color get freedom. Look what they do. Oh, they turn to drugs and they're destroying these communities and all this stuff. And, you know, in many cases, it was, it was sort of an intentional.
Joshua Shurley: We get some of that later, but
Joshua Shurley: The point being, yeah. This quote we can arrest their leaders. We could read their homes. We could break up their meetings and vilify them every night did we know we were lying about the drugs. Of course we did.
Joshua Shurley: So what's the point
Joshua Shurley: Remember last week pretext.
Joshua Shurley: The excuse given to remove personhood or to deny personhood from a group of people, not just the person that's you know there's evidence against the person that they committed a crime but but all people who look like that person.
Joshua Shurley: That's, that's where we're in, you know, civil rights territory.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so the war on drugs was basically that and the war on drugs comes along. When right about the time that Jim Crow is on the way out.
Joshua Shurley: So you've got slavery then slavery is no longer legal legal. So you've got the new criminal justice system.
Joshua Shurley: And the convict leasing and the debt percentage and institutions like that that control black bodies in America until you get to
Joshua Shurley: You know, throughout Jim Crow until you get to the brown case and you get to the end of separate but equal
Joshua Shurley: And now, those things are a lot more harder to justify. So what do you have, you have this new law and order push criminal justice.
Joshua Shurley: The war on drugs because we've got to save gotta save the children and save our communities and all this.
Joshua Shurley: Kind of rhetoric, which sounds great but it's really just a pretext to criminalize people of color, mostly and anyone else that we don't like.
Joshua Shurley: Anyone who steps out of line. Anyone who's basically in the way of the status quo, who's trying to change the status quo. That's not acceptable. We will tie you to this drug war and he will be dealt with. So the removal of
Joshua Shurley: personhood on a mass scale.
Joshua Shurley: Look up the Philadelphia move bombings. If you want to be shocked and disturbed. If you've never heard of the Philadelphia move bombings. This happened in 1985 I was 10 years old when this happened. This was not that long ago this was a
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, just look it up. Look, it's what the Philadelphia Police department did against a group of, you know, black radicals that they had some issues with in Philadelphia.
Joshua Shurley: It ended with the police dropping a bomb on the house and killing all the people inside, including the children.
Joshua Shurley: That live there and then the mayor and police chief blocking the fire department from from putting the fires out letting the whole area burn to send a message to the black people who live in the community. This is what happens when you mess with us law and order.
Joshua Shurley: Okay, so we got the system today of mass incarceration, and this might shock. Some people if they don't know this, but should know this.
Joshua Shurley: There's a lot of talks and times about those those bad countries and other parts of the world. Those authoritarian countries where they don't have a lot of freedom.
Joshua Shurley: And that's tempting, I can see that. Because in America. We do have a lot of freedom, right, you have the freedom to buy all kinds of consumer goods, you have the freedom to drive all kinds of nice cars and all sorts of great gadgets and
Joshua Shurley: whatever you can afford you got a lot of freedom, but when it comes to certain kinds of freedom certain kinds of freedom, we're a little bit lacking. We have more people incarcerated, by far than anyone else in the world.
Joshua Shurley: In modern history that's that's a huge that's a huge thing. And a lot of that really comes goes back to this, this, you know,
Joshua Shurley: Having to take over from slavery in the and having to control those
Joshua Shurley: Those bodies that cannot be, you know, without without control as law and order.
Joshua Shurley: So mass incarceration or 4% of the world's population. We've got 25% of the people on planet Earth that are locked up right here in the United States of America, that is that is the definition of mass incarceration.
Joshua Shurley: That's another book. There's another book goodbye by a blockbuster Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. And she's, she's essentially arguing
Joshua Shurley: Much like
Joshua Shurley: Ava DuVernay and Douglas Gladwin were arguing that slavery never really ended it just kind of changed labels.
Joshua Shurley: Take down the sign put up a new sign fresh coat of paint, but the business going on, never changed the actual operations, day to day never changed. Well, she's kind of making the same argument and saying that the system of Jim Crow segregation
Joshua Shurley: Yes, it was, it was kind of taken apart by the brown case and by the civil rights movement and gradual change in the legislation that was passed that was all great, but
Joshua Shurley: As Jim Crow went away. We got increases in what mass incarceration, right, we got the the drug war comes along and then fueled by the drug war.
Joshua Shurley: Mass Incarceration essentially becomes the new Jim Crow. So we've just got again that same process of the same day to day stuff still going on. But we're just removing the old label and slapping on a new label right we have essentially the same thing.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so as she says here, we've not ended the racial caste system we have just redesigned it so
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, that's what that is what Michelle Alexander means by The New Jim Crow that you know this new system of social control has been ushered in under the guise of drug law enforcement mass incarceration.
Joshua Shurley: Mass Incarceration has replaced the structures and functions of Jim Crow don't need Jim Crow anymore because now we've got this
Joshua Shurley: Yeah. So yes, there's been a lot of progress, but at the same time, has there been
Joshua Shurley: A question.
Joshua Shurley: And there's there's no greater symbol of this than a little piece of ground in the State of Louisiana, known as Angola, maybe some people have heard of it. So,
Joshua Shurley: There's a its largest maximum security prison in the country is is Angola Penitentiary Angola prison farm in Louisiana and it's it's overwhelmingly populated by African American inmates.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah. And this is again and I'll say, Louisiana. Now the ground that angle the prison farm rests on prior to it being a prison was the end goal a plantation. It was one of the largest plantations that existed in those days, going back to the early 1800s.
Joshua Shurley: So if you were to go by down the road and you pass by Angola plantation in say the 1840s 1850s before the Civil War, while slavery existed.
Joshua Shurley: You would look out, you would see cotton fields for miles. Miles, you'd see you know farms farm operations going on, you'd see thousands and thousands of black men laboring out in the sun chained together under the supervision of armed overseers right
Joshua Shurley: That's what you would have seen that's that's what the scene look like in the days of slavery.
Joshua Shurley: Come back a couple generations later maybe in the late 19th century slavery is long gone slavery's been gone for one or two generations. And what does it look like then
Joshua Shurley: looks exactly the same. It's still the same. It's cotton fields for miles and miles farms thousands and thousands of black men chained out there doing the work being overseen by armed guards.
Joshua Shurley: Fast forward to, I don't know the 1940s, the 1960s, or let's say 2020 go there today. And what do you see
Joshua Shurley: Fields for miles and miles farm operations thousands and thousands of black men chained up out there doing the work overseen by armed men.
Joshua Shurley: You know, supervising them.
Joshua Shurley: Only in 1901 the plantation became became a prison became a penitentiary. It's still a farm. It's still a plantation. To this day, but it's a it's also a maximum security prison.
Joshua Shurley: I can't think of a better symbol of
Joshua Shurley: Of this sort of legacy of institutional racism. Oh, and by the way, why is it called Angola prison or angle the plantation Angola was the West African country if you go back to the early days of the plantation.
Joshua Shurley: It was called Angola, because the slaves that work there came from the country of Angola and it took the name and the name has never been changed. So it's still still there today.
Joshua Shurley: Testament to the to the history of the structures that still exist.
Joshua Shurley: So yeah, but, but, oh, it's so much changed so much change.
Joshua Shurley: Alright, so this is what we mean by, you know, going back to this cartoon by this legacy of
Joshua Shurley: Of the chains of being stepped on and being used while someone else gets
Joshua Shurley: You know, gets elevated in society because of you because of your, your body because of your labor and then being told.
Joshua Shurley: I can't help you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, like we did
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so that's disturbing stuff. So, I mean, I don't know. I hope that
Joshua Shurley: You know, helps to sort of paint the picture if people are not aware of why some of these issues exist today. This is a little bit of why
Joshua Shurley: This timeline is really telling
Joshua Shurley: Goes back about 400 year now 401 years now.
Joshua Shurley: 1619 to 1865 slavery. Then you've got this period of segregation Jim Crow, which it only really takes the 1954 which is arguable I would
Joshua Shurley: Maybe move that up a little bit, but fine and then that that last little green bit that's that's the, that's the period of time where we've got, you know, freedom, all that freedom, you know, The New Jim Crow mass incarceration, the legacy of
Joshua Shurley: You know, broken families.
Joshua Shurley: You know, lack of education that was enforced for hundreds of years. You know, I mean,
Joshua Shurley: And then you can turn around after basically sabotaging a group of people
Joshua Shurley: And making sure that they are
Joshua Shurley: As downtrodden as can be. Then, turning around and saying, Oh, look at the there, they're just all messed up. And that's why we need to control them and prosecute them and police their communities and put them away when they act up
Joshua Shurley: Here we are in 2020
Joshua Shurley: Alright.
Joshua Shurley: Alright, so let's talk about the Black Panther Party is great video. I won't elaborate too much only say
Joshua Shurley: Curtis Austin in the video does a great job of talking about some of the myths about me. I remember being a kid and learning about the Black Panthers, or at least, you know, supposedly learning about them as this violent
Joshua Shurley: terrorist group of scary black men that wanted to hunt down and murder white people and burn down America that's that's the way I learned about about this group.
Joshua Shurley: Nothing can be further from the truth. I mean, that is one of the most vicious and ugly lies and it's still perpetuated in some certain circles in political discourse today. You still hear that
Joshua Shurley: It's complete garbage.
Joshua Shurley: Educate yourself on who the Black Panthers actually were and what they actually did they were they were called a national security threat. What were they doing
Joshua Shurley: really horrible stuff like the first free breakfast programs free lunch programs for school children free medical clinics for poor people.
Joshua Shurley: You know, literacy programs and all sorts of things to help the community really bad terrorists stuff.
Joshua Shurley: But what are they, known for their remembered for being armed and patrolling neighborhoods on the lookout for police brutality.
Joshua Shurley: Anyway, check out the video by Curtis Austin, it's, it's pretty great. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: Last week we touched on the issue of race and the second amendment.
Joshua Shurley: The idea that the second amendment exists to prevent tyranny. Right. That sounds great in armed populace with sufficient arms and ammunition can
Joshua Shurley: Protect ourselves from the abuses of government. Okay, I can personally dig that I can understand that the problem is is that, well, there's a whole other debate about whether the second was ever really about that or how much it really had to do with
Joshua Shurley: You know, protecting a slave owners, but we're not going to get into that, let's talk about the modern day interpretation of the Second Amendment as being a
Joshua Shurley: You know, a buttress against government tyranny. Okay, well,
Joshua Shurley: Yeah. How are we doing with that and kind of alluded this last week, we've got, you know, mass incarceration mass surveillance.
Joshua Shurley: All sorts of erosions of civil liberties and where are all the Second Amendment advocates.
Joshua Shurley: And also, who, who gets Second Amendment rights. So if someone who looks like me and they wear a cowboy hat and they drive a pickup truck and they live out in the country.
Joshua Shurley: And they carry guns. A lot of people will look at that and say, well, yeah, that's just that's American that's right there. That's, that's how it's supposed to be.
Joshua Shurley: But if you're a person of color, let's say, let's say you you talk in an urban vernacular, and let's say you were, I don't know, kind of urban fashion and you live in the city.
Joshua Shurley: And you've got a gun. Oh man, call the police. Right. You know threat threat. Everything is a threat. Wow. I mean, I think the where the country that loves the second amendment.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah i mean it's it's just
Joshua Shurley: Is there a double standard.
Joshua Shurley: So what happened when the Black Panthers arm themselves California used to be an open carry state, just like a lot of states are. It was perfectly legal to carry weapons in the open, as long as you weren't threatening people yeah this is still true in a lot of states.
Joshua Shurley: When did California become not an open carry state and must have been all those all those gun control people right to come in and want to take away our Second Amendment rights. They got rid of open carry in California.
Joshua Shurley: Now, who got rid of open carry in California.
Joshua Shurley: The Republican Party, which is a party that very much supports you know gun rights and the NRA, the National Rifle Association big gun lobby group republicans in the NRA backed
Joshua Shurley: Getting rid of open carry this is one one piece of gun control legislation that they were in favor of in California, why
Joshua Shurley: Because Black Panthers were invoking their second amendment rights. They weren't going out and attacking people, but they were arming themselves.
Joshua Shurley: In defense in defense of what in defense of government tyranny indefensible government that might abuse them or people in their community. They were invoking the very same logic that the founders used to resist British tyranny.
Joshua Shurley: And. And so what happened where they welcomed with open arms. Welcome to America. Brothers and sisters, and welcome to the club and we're all going to sing Kumbaya and be good Americans get no of course not.
Joshua Shurley: No, they had to be criminalized and targeted to take their guns away at all costs because it was more important to disarm them than to allow second amendment civil liberties. So what's the second amendment really about
Joshua Shurley: You know. Anyway, that's, that's a good question. So look at the Milford act. There's great article about this. What was the real crime that's Black Panthers were engaged in now. They were doing some other dangerous stuff to you, they were they were building multi racial Coalition's
Joshua Shurley: Align with all sorts of other marginalized groups as well as poor white people is kind of what was called a Rainbow Coalition.
Joshua Shurley: And and that was a big threat that was something that could not be allowed by the powers that be was threatened the status quo and so many of their leaders were targeted.
Joshua Shurley: A young man named Fred Hampton was assassinated. There's no other word for it was executed in asleep by Chicago police and the FBI and 1960s.
Joshua Shurley: And, you know, allow a lot of the details about that came out later.
Joshua Shurley: Due to some reasons. I think that's actually mentioned in the Curtis Austin video. I think he talks about that a little bit.
Joshua Shurley: Anyway, so yeah, that's the idea of the Black Panthers there.
Joshua Shurley: This is interesting. This is just a headline that I found this was from
Joshua Shurley: Earlier this year, and this is pre Kobe right so this is before code just yeah February February 2020
Joshua Shurley: Gun rights activists are open carrying their rifles with masks again pretty coded so wearing masks was still a little bit weird.
Joshua Shurley: And where they going, they're going into the state capitol in Kentucky, just like the Black Panthers did in California 1966 67 whatever year they did that, that thing.
Joshua Shurley: So 50 plus years later, you've got white second amendment activists doing the same thing.
Joshua Shurley: Only did Kentucky pass laws to outlaw open carry. No, they didn't. Of course not, where they tackled where they shot where they immediately disarmed.
Joshua Shurley: Know, because they were exercising their, their constitutional rights and you know I not necessarily against people exercising their constitutional rights, all I'm pointing out is
Joshua Shurley: Can you imagine if these gentlemen did the same thing.
Joshua Shurley: IN THE KENTUCKY STATE CAPITOL only, only they were black.
Joshua Shurley: They're black and they're wearing arrays and they you know all that. How would that go over. Do you think the response might have been different.
Joshua Shurley: You think the assumption might have been different. What if they were in traditional Muslim garb and speaking Arabic walking in openly carrying. Do you think the difference do you think there might have been a different response.
Joshua Shurley: Where's that allowed for in the Bill of Rights.
Joshua Shurley: How does that jive with civil liberties. Exactly, so that's that's that's the crux of civil rights, not everybody is is is getting the same civil liberties not then and not now.
Joshua Shurley: And so that is why that is why there are
Joshua Shurley: Letters. That is why there are protest movements. That's why there was a Black Panther Party for Self defense, and that is why the
Joshua Shurley: You know the descendants of those protest movements are still here and they're still with us today. The civil rights movement, never went away. It's still here. It's still alive and well. Things didn't magically change and
Joshua Shurley: You know, today the protesters are bad people today. A lot of people would have you believe that. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, there were there were riots back then, there was a fraction of people that that burn things and let's stuff on fire. They did property damage in response to mass murder and there were a lot of people that justify murdering people based on property damage.
Joshua Shurley: So,
Joshua Shurley: Property damage to protest murder. Not okay murder to protest property damage. Okay. I guess that's the message that seems to be said. Then and Now in 2020
Joshua Shurley: Right. That takes us to Angela Davis Angela Davis, she's the kind of the subjects, the discussion board for the week.
Joshua Shurley: There's a great documentary about her. I highly recommend it on Netflix. I know I plug a lot of movies and books, but what can I say
Joshua Shurley: It's what free Angela Davis and all political prisoners and it's exceptional Angela Davis comes from the Jim Crow South from Birmingham, Alabama, she becomes a scholar brilliant young woman, she goes and studies, you know, in Europe.
Joshua Shurley: Professor of Philosophy, she gets appointed to the to UCLA at something like 2526 years old. She has her PhD becomes a professor and she had some very radical views.
Joshua Shurley: At the time, and state officials, including Governor Ronald Reagan at the time who would later become President Ronald Reagan in like this wanted her fired
Joshua Shurley: There's a little thing called academic freedom. Long story short, she gets wrapped up in this bizarre kind of
Joshua Shurley: Been a prison break in in the Bay Area. Not even close to where she lived that she got somehow associated with supposedly and she was wanted for her ties to it.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so she ends up spinning
Joshua Shurley: Being in prison from 1970 1972 and and she's just got this massive following around the world. And it really backfired. So they thought they were you know controlling just another
Joshua Shurley: Outspoken black radical leader. And what they did is they they pour gasoline on a fire because the
Joshua Shurley: Movement that coalesce around Angela Davis in the early 70s was monumental celebrities people across Europe all across the world. There was just a huge push to free Angela Davis people saw her as a political prisoner.
Joshua Shurley: You know, in a corrupt. It was obvious that you choose not guilty of the crime that she was charged of that that this was obviously a political, you know,
Joshua Shurley: Retribution kind of thing.
Joshua Shurley: She eventually is acquitted on all counts, even though they moved the venue to a wealthy white area. So that would be an all white jury.
Joshua Shurley: Which would hopefully convict her. She still of course was found not guilty and walk free and she's had a long life as a
Joshua Shurley: Professor of Philosophy and activist and author ever since. And so this is Angela Davis then and now, right, she's still around. She's I think in her
Joshua Shurley: early 70s. I do believe that's right and that remarkable person, but then they in the video that you're going to be asked to respond to, it's a it's a clip from an interview, I think it was a Swedish journalist interviewed her in prison, and I believe was 1972
Joshua Shurley: And the reporter, much like white society of the time is kind of obsessed with, you know, the violence.
Joshua Shurley: You know, black people are arming themselves. Some of them are are rioting in some cities. There's fires and there's property damage and this is just, oh you know that everyone's beside themselves.
Joshua Shurley: You know, forget about the violence that they've endured for how long, and a tiny fraction
Joshua Shurley: You know, react to it and some people aren't themselves and self defense and now the narrative becomes African Americans are dangerous and scary because they have because they're agitating for rights. I mean it was just a
Joshua Shurley: It illustrated the
Joshua Shurley: how out of touch a lot of mainstream white thinking was in those days. And it illustrates how out of touch it still is, to this day, because how far we really come how
Joshua Shurley: How much better. Do we see things today. I mean, I think you could argue it's a little bit better but
Joshua Shurley: Anyway, that's, that's the idea. So respond to that and I hope that's self explanatory.
Joshua Shurley: Cohen tell Pro. This is another one. This was a program
Joshua Shurley: Basically a secret program run by the FBI, it's, it's sort of stands for Counter Intelligence Program counterintelligence program Cohen tell pro
Joshua Shurley: This was an off the books illegal series of activities that the FBI undertook from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Joshua Shurley: It was considered a conspiracy theory for a long time. Right. Totally denied, you know, the government would never do this, the government would never violate the law to target people
Joshua Shurley: For political reasons we don't do that, go after bad guys criminals well come to find out in the church Commission search committee in 1975 named after Senator Frank Church that yeah, it actually was a real thing and that's exactly what they were doing. They were illegally going after.
Joshua Shurley: What they deem subversive groups not people who broke the law wasn't about law breaking it was about people who were
Joshua Shurley: challenging the status quo. So it was about civil rights leaders groups like the Black Panthers people like Martin Luther King also feminist groups folks like Cesar Chavez and the UFW right a little closer to home.
Joshua Shurley: All sorts of things are anti anti Vietnam war protesters, all that kind of stuff was was all kind of lumped in here and really ugly stuff. So one of the readings. I posted has to do with a letter that was anonymous anonymously sent to Martin Luther King during his life.
Joshua Shurley: And it was one of many letters guy got a lot of vicious hate mail from all over the country.
Joshua Shurley: It was found later that the person who sent that letter was the Deputy Director of the FBI.
Joshua Shurley: That didn't come out till years later, so that letter that you're going to real just read it. Check it out. It's, it's telling and it's just
Joshua Shurley: one small example of the little things that were that Cohen tell pro was about. So it wasn't just about making high profile arrests. No, it was about infiltrating groups.
Joshua Shurley: You know, discrediting them turning them against one another.
Joshua Shurley: bribing people to sell out their comrades and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
Joshua Shurley: There's, there's a long illustrious history of infiltrating protest movements and even sometimes inciting violence or undercover agents doing the violence themselves. And if you still see this, to this day.
Joshua Shurley: Some of this has happened right here in Fresno local law enforcement has engaged in this. We'll talk about that we talked about other social movements later in the course.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, and even some of these recent protests, a lot of the damage and property damage that gets done. Oftentimes, it is not just you know vigilante groups that are actually against these protest movements that are doing it that happened in Minneapolis.
Joshua Shurley: And this happened, not, not just recently. What happened in the Occupy protests and all this long history this like I said of undercover law enforcement officials.
Joshua Shurley: You know, going into these protests and doing property damage and throwing bricks at police
Joshua Shurley: Why, because then as soon as violence has been initiated. Now, the police can crack down and declare an assembly unlawful. So one crazy guy does something over here that's violent, even though he's not associated with the movement.
Joshua Shurley: What can they now do they can now turn and start beating the shit out of thousands of peaceful protesters and that was always the point
Joshua Shurley: That was the tactic 50 years ago and I'm sad to say it looks like that's the tactic today don't take the gay. I don't think that the playbook has changed one iota from what I can see
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, there's an actress. There's a movie about this that just came out.
Joshua Shurley: The women, you see here feature. She's an actress named Jean seabird American actress. He spent a lot of her time in France. He was well known and in the US and in France.
Joshua Shurley: A very vocal and outspoken ally of the movement so rights movement. She was an ally of black panthers, and she was viciously targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director by Cohen tell pro carried out a
Joshua Shurley: Just a really ugly campaign to terrorize this woman for speaking out and others, and you know ended in her taking her own life at a pretty young age. It's pretty ugly stuff. And this was
Joshua Shurley: You know, a lot of this really likes that goes back to Cohen tell pro and to these really ugly.
Joshua Shurley: Campaigns like they were doing to Martin Luther King, like they did to a lot of these folks and it even affected, you know, Hollywood actress, the young, young up and coming Hollywood actress who who
Joshua Shurley: You know challenge the status quo can't have that.
Joshua Shurley: Alright myths of the civil rights movement, check out that article it lists six things that are myths. There are some others that I would add to it, but you know, you get the idea. There's a lot of
Joshua Shurley: There's a lot of whitewashing that gets told right like, you know, Martin Luther King was all about the I Have a Dream speech. That's what most people that's that's what I always learned about Martin Luther King until I was much, much older.
Joshua Shurley: Martin Luther King was a lot more than that.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah. So anyway, it's all in there. The idea that that civil rights movement was was
Joshua Shurley: Supported by most Americans that people like rosa parks were publicly. Appreciate it, though they weren't. They were hated. They were hated by most people.
Joshua Shurley: Civil Rights Movement was not simple most white people didn't support it, even if they said, Well, yeah, you know, we don't like Jim Crow it's ugly but
Joshua Shurley: I don't like the way these people are doing it. I don't like the way they're protesting. Does that sound familiar. I wish they would do it more peacefully and then when they did it peacefully. They didn't like that either. So, you know,
Joshua Shurley: You know what happened when they peacefully marched across the bridge to Selma. They were attacked. And bit by dogs and beaten and thrown in jail.
Joshua Shurley: So, so then you know new generation of civil rights people a little bit more assertive, little bit more militant and then people are shocked and clutching their pearls. I can't believe that there are people
Joshua Shurley: Who would who would do this stuff. Why don't they be peaceful. What did you do when they were peaceful. So anyway, you get the idea. All right.
Joshua Shurley: Check out the myths of the civil rights movement, you might come across that again. I say all this because it's fair game for the test.
Joshua Shurley: And I know we've got a lot coming out of this particular unit. But I think it's an important one. All right. Intersection ality that's mentioned in the book.
Joshua Shurley: This is associated with a scholar named Kimberly Crenshaw. You want to look into intersection ality, you have to be careful researching some of these things on the internet because there's a lot of just crap misinformation depending on what pops up. I've done the Google searches and
Joshua Shurley: You get some voices that are, let's just say not.
Joshua Shurley: not accurate. Okay, that they really you know mislead people about what some of these things mean. I would suggest look look up, you know, source material from Kimberly Crenshaw the person who actually
Joshua Shurley: Talks about this. There's a great TED talk of her talking about intersection ality. So the book mentioned this, but it's basically the intersection of different ways that people can be discriminated against, or oppressed, for example.
Joshua Shurley: You know, sexual orientation, and race right if you've got both of those things for LGBT Q and you're a person of color that's sort of a
Joshua Shurley: Sort of a double whammy against you in a way. Right. And she uses the example of a court case, I want to say, I don't know if it was General Motors with some kind of a car manufacturer
Joshua Shurley: Were a group of African American women were fired and then they filed a discrimination lawsuit and the judge throughout the case, why because his reasoning was, well, it's not a gender discrimination case because there are other women that were not discriminated against.
Joshua Shurley: And it's not a racial discrimination case because there were black men that were not discriminated against. So you claiming that just because you're black women.
Joshua Shurley: You're in some special category, you know, and then. So basically, there was no justice. There was no you know he was unable to determine that any discrimination happened what Crenshaw argued, was that is
Joshua Shurley: You know, a classic example of intersection ality of multiple forms of oppression intersecting simultaneously and you know with with extra
Joshua Shurley: negative results. That makes sense. So anyway, yeah, check out Kimberly Crenshaw you know more. So like I mentioned the struggle for civil rights is not just about the African American experience. There are lots of other movements that have to do with civil rights.
Joshua Shurley: Women's rights 2020 the year that we're in right now. This is the 100 year anniversary of the women's women having right to vote in this country and
Joshua Shurley: Who granted women the right to vote, nobody did they took it. They fought for it generations and generations of them going out making noise. Sometimes being obnoxious.
Joshua Shurley: blocking traffic being disruptive, you know, doing things that people can't stand to this day. They're doing it. Back then, too. That's why.
Joshua Shurley: That's why women have the right to vote. That's why we have an eight hour workday. That's why six year olds don't work in coal mines, to this day, all these things happen because people went out in the streets and did the same damn thing that they're doing today.
Joshua Shurley: That
Joshua Shurley: All right, the American Indian Movement. That's a big one.
Joshua Shurley: Aim became a coalesced as a movement really in the early 1970s, but it's nothing new. I mean, it goes back to
Joshua Shurley: It goes back to treaties with First Nations people that have been violated. Well, ever since tea United States started started to expand westward or ever since really the first
Joshua Shurley: Colonies arrived and to this day you fast forward to 2016 to the Dakota Access Pipeline, you've still got treaties with sovereign nations being
Joshua Shurley: Just disregarded by the government disregarded by corporations that want to build pipelines, or don't nuclear waste. It's not just about the Dakota Access Pipeline. There are other similar projects in Louisiana and Florida in Nevada and across America. This is a big problem.
Joshua Shurley: Just recently, I mean, the amount of indigenous women that have been that have disappeared or been murdered in recent years, just in the last few years, it has skyrocketed. It's something that that that is rarely talked about. So anyway, that's a big
Joshua Shurley: Push in the civil rights movement about our indigenous sisters and brothers, so
Joshua Shurley: LGBT civil rights. That's another big one.
Joshua Shurley: You know, it was a little over 50 years ago that the Stonewall Riots happened and they were riots. They were people who went out in the streets and
Joshua Shurley: Yes, they were frustrated and they and they did some damage. Why, because they were violently violently targeted and suppressed, not just by law enforcement by sort of mobs of homophobic.
Joshua Shurley: vigilantes that just did a horrible violence. That was a that the government, you know, local law enforcement in courts just turned a blind eye to some horrible horrific violence was visited on LGBT people for many, many years. And it was just tolerated.
Joshua Shurley: Harvey Milk, was it was an iconic figure in 1980s, who would have been the first openly gay mayor of a major see San Francisco, he was assassinated.
Joshua Shurley: So, this is this is this horrible tragic history of civil rights violations of LGBT folks, this is one area where there is some good news. I mean you fast forward to today.
Joshua Shurley: Since 2013 you know there's marriage equality is the law of the land. I wouldn't have believed it 1500 years ago or so if you would have told me I would have been skeptical that this would actually happen, but it has. And I think that's that deserve. Oh.
Joshua Shurley: Bravo. You know, that's, that's great.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so
Joshua Shurley: That's one, I guess.
Joshua Shurley: I don't know, bright side, there's been some progress there still still a ways to go.
Joshua Shurley: Religion, the idea of religious discrimination are some religions discriminated against, some would say, some would say so. Especially, I mean it's not it's not just people in the Islamic faith, but there's a special
Joshua Shurley: Scorn since 911 2001 you know against Muslim people in this country. There's a lot of
Joshua Shurley: A lot of virulent racism in religious bigotry that still exists.
Yeah.
Joshua Shurley: What about immigration status.
Joshua Shurley: Are there mass deprivations of civil liberties without due process. Yes, yes, there are just, just like all those other groups. I just mentioned, still the same.
Joshua Shurley: immigration status is still one of those things. Remember personhood under the Constitution, the Bill of Rights isn't citizenship. You don't have to be a citizen or have your papers to be
Joshua Shurley: You know, to have basic natural rights natural rights are for all persons and this has been upheld by the courts for years.
Joshua Shurley: Unfortunately, the executive branch has a lot of power these days. And yeah, that that interpretation is is under fire so
Joshua Shurley: It will talk more about this later. Then you've got, you know, not only do you have the
Joshua Shurley: Folks who are undocumented to come across the border, but you've also got legal asylum seekers people who go through the legal process.
Joshua Shurley: Arrive at a port of entry and declare that they request asylum and there's a process that we're supposed to follow that we've been doing for decades and all of a sudden now that's just not possible, right, that's
Joshua Shurley: Yeah so mass deprivation of civil liberties people in concentration camps, just like they were in the 1940s and they are concentration camps look up the definition
Joshua Shurley: Look up scholars, whose purpose is to research concentration camps, they will agree, yes, that's exactly what they are concentrating
Joshua Shurley: A group of people, not because of some individual crime that there's evidence that they committed. No, no, an entire group of people based on their classification on their characteristics.
Joshua Shurley: And then concentrating them in camps taking away their freedom imprisoning them basically and that includes small children.
Joshua Shurley: In America, freedom, freedom.
Joshua Shurley: What about the poor. This might be maybe the most overlooked segment large segment of the American population that struggles that find equal protection under the law.
Joshua Shurley: You know, we've got a lot of freedom in this country. But try accessing those freedoms, when you don't have any money. It's next to impossible.
Joshua Shurley: There was this idea of a second bill of rights that came about in the FDR presidency in the 1940s. This was not a real set of laws or anything, but it was just an idea just a concept.
Joshua Shurley: That people have a basic right to human dignity to to work, they have a right to to to have a job and a living wage a decent education and to basic health care.
Joshua Shurley: These things are not unreasonable most pretty much all civilized countries in the world.
Joshua Shurley: Guarantee these things. The United States doesn't. We do have public education these days. That's good.
Joshua Shurley: Medical care. We don't do that yet right to work. We don't really do that living wage. We don't really have that these are not rights. These are things that you can maybe get if you're lucky, and you pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
Joshua Shurley: Can you imagine if we didn't have public education today and someone suggested it would go crazy and they did back then to. It was a communist plot to destroy America back then, too. So with social security.
Joshua Shurley: Everything is always a plot to destroy America. If it helps poor people. Isn't that interesting.
Joshua Shurley: So anyway, get the idea. What if I, what if we didn't have public libraries. Someone suggested that today in the age of Amazon, right, that would never be allowed to spend my taxpayer money so that some poor person can read a book.
Joshua Shurley: What, why don't they order their books from Amazon like everyone else.
Joshua Shurley: Anyway,
Joshua Shurley: April 4 1967 Martin Luther King gives a speech called the triple evils speech where he talks about
Joshua Shurley: The triple evils of racism.
Joshua Shurley: militarism and capitalism. Right. And, you know, economic exploitation, the Vietnam War civil rights movement, all these things.
Joshua Shurley: And this was really Martin Luther King didn't just talk about racial equality, you know, he was talking about the status quo and how all of these systems intersect. It's not just about
Joshua Shurley: You know race based civil rights. It's also about economic justice for all people. And so anyway, he kicks off this thing called the Poor People's Campaign.
Joshua Shurley: A National Call for moral revival. I love that tagline moral revival and and he's essentially bringing back that call for an economic Bill of Rights. There was a march on Washington
Joshua Shurley: Unfortunately, exactly one year. One year after he gave that speech to the day on the anniversary of that speech April 4 1968
Joshua Shurley: He was shot and killed by an assassin.
Joshua Shurley: So the March on Washington did happen in 1968 but he was, he had already been killed and that that was a big blow to the movement.
Joshua Shurley: But the Poor People's Campaign has been revived as a
Joshua Shurley: Under the leadership of Reverend William barber and so it's still around, they're still doing really good work. They even came through Fresno. Last year I had the pleasure and privilege to even a little speaking there when they march through West right now.
Joshua Shurley: Is quite a time and they would have been back this year but coven unfortunately knock that out. But there is a new
Joshua Shurley: The poor people's campaign is back and it still exists. And that's it's pretty great. So, I mean, look it up for people's campaign. There are all sorts of online ways that people can get involved.
Joshua Shurley: Anyway, we'll talk about some of the stuff we get into social movements later on the new have already said that. All right. One other thing I want to talk about really quick. This idea of social justice. This is a concept that
Joshua Shurley: Has some I guess controversy because depending on where you get your information and who you listen to social justice is something that a lot of people kind of mock or they roll their eyes when you hear this term social justice warriors.
Joshua Shurley: Meaning you know people who who talk about social justice and anti racism and equality, equal protection under the law. These are just a bunch of naive.
Joshua Shurley: You know, idiots. They're probably college kids with pink hair or something that don't know what they're talking about. And, you know, get a job, or whatever it is that this is the stuff you hear from certain segments of society. Okay, as if it's some new
Joshua Shurley: Fashionable idea. It's not social justice, social justice is a bedrock principle goes back to the enlightenment.
Joshua Shurley: I mean, it's a cornerstone of Western civilization. If you and these same people optimize western civilization so
Joshua Shurley: It's just to simply the idea that we promote a society with human values with tolerance with the diversity with fighting injustice and these are
Joshua Shurley: These are kind of those. This is like the wish list of all that good stuff. We're supposed to have right respecting natural rights that we all have a right to live.
Joshua Shurley: Right so life. Life is a big part of social justice. You know, it's this shouldn't be that extreme. The fact that it's marked
Joshua Shurley: As an idea as a concept says a lot about those who would engage in such mockery 50 years ago if you were
Joshua Shurley: An ally the civil rights movement, and you were not a person of color, you know, what would you have been called, there's a lot of a derisive terms, you know,
Joshua Shurley: In Word lover used to get thrown around a lot, heard that a lot in the 80s, you know, you hear these things get thrown around. Well, today it's not so
Joshua Shurley: Nice to say that kind of ugly stuff. But there's there's a new there's new terms that have taken over and social justice warrior is one of those ways of discrediting people who care about a lot of no just, you know, basic humanity, those kinds of ideas. So anyway,
Joshua Shurley: Social justice. That's, that's all it really is not a big deal. Just a little thing like promoting fairness in a society.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah.
Joshua Shurley: Right to human rights a fair allocation of resources I seem to remember the Constitution said something about that promoting the general welfare. It's right there in the preamble. So, yeah.
Joshua Shurley: Founding Fathers were big on on this idea of social justice. Not that they really implemented it, but
Joshua Shurley: But they they got the ball rolling right they they sparked a revolution of ideas. I think that's fair to say.
Joshua Shurley: So there's been there have been backlash against the Civil Rights Movement historically
Joshua Shurley: You know, we've seen some of these pictures here you get some protesters that a segregated lunch counter that's
Joshua Shurley: That sat there anyway. And look what look. Look how all the mobs of good old fashioned regular Americans are reacting right there. They're putting stuff on them. They're putting out let's cigarettes on their bodies and all sorts of horrible stuff happened at these kinds of protests.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah. Real classy. Good thing this stuff never happens anymore the backlash against civil rights is not what it used to be right or is there still a backlash against civil rights.
Joshua Shurley: As the backlash continue
Joshua Shurley: You tell me.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so
Joshua Shurley: Things change, but they also stay the same, you know, the again the basic structures have never changed the basic structures remain the labels, change the facade changes fresh coats of paint, you know, slap on a new label.
Joshua Shurley: But what's really different. What has really changed the underlying message is what
Joshua Shurley: You know, so the backlash continues work needs to be done. Civil Rights Movement ain't over
Joshua Shurley: All right, if no one's ever heard of a guy named James Baldwin, I suggest you go right now and read about James Baldwin. He's a civil rights icon that didn't get a lot of
Joshua Shurley: Credit in American history that's mostly because most of his adult career was actually spent in Europe and I admit I didn't know. I've never heard of James Baldwin until I lived in England and study there.
Joshua Shurley: He was the son of Port sharecroppers in Jim Crow Mississippi poor black and gay in the 1940s and, you know, as a young man, he, he left he left the brutal conditions that that that produced him and
Joshua Shurley: You know, showed up in Paris, France with, you know, no money in his pocket. Just, just on the hope that he can make it.
Joshua Shurley: He had a he had a brilliant intellect, he became a playwright and an author, he wrote all sorts of
Joshua Shurley: Books and it's very well known in Europe in London and Paris. He really made a name for himself as kind of being the face of the civil rights movement over there, if that makes sense. And I think he's got some great quotes. There are some great video clips, you can find a James Baldwin.
Joshua Shurley: On YouTube, you know, or look up some some of his writings, there was a documentary made a few years ago called title was, I am not your negro, which was the title of a book that he was working on when he passed away in the 80s and
Joshua Shurley: They turned it into a documentary is really well done. I highly recommend that as well. But he talks about justice.
Joshua Shurley: And do we have a system of justice and, you know, this is a great quote. He's basically saying, if you want to know if your country.
Joshua Shurley: Loves justice or has justice or wants justice. Don't ask the Don't Ask, the, the police man, the judge, don't ask the the wealthy protected members of society, or even the middle class. No, you go to the
Joshua Shurley: You go to the least among us, right, in the Christian vernacular, you go to the the racial minorities, you go to the people the most poor and you ask them how they fare in the halls of justice and then you will know whether or not your country doesn't just
Joshua Shurley: Has any love for justice, but does it have any concept of justice, you know, and that's where you really, really get the, the idea and and he's got this great line at the end ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy that justice can have. Wow, that's just a powerful stuff.
Joshua Shurley: Rings, very true to this day.
Joshua Shurley: Yeah, so another great quote by James Baldwin.
Joshua Shurley: Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed, until it is faced
Joshua Shurley: Have we really reconciled with the sort of original sin of, you know, not just slavery but genocide against Native people in this country, not really. Have we really reconciled with the original sin that we
Joshua Shurley: On the one hand, are founded on
Joshua Shurley: universal rights and and natural rights and civil liberties and all these great ideas that are wonderful concepts, while at the same time having a society where white male slave owners, not just label it but white male property owners who tolerated slavery if they weren't slave owners.
Joshua Shurley: You know, had had all the political and financial control.
Joshua Shurley: We have not really reconciled with that yet. And, I mean, we still haven't really acknowledged that there is a problem that that structures that exists today are are the are the same structures that were designed with a very
Joshua Shurley: racist and classist agenda hundreds of years ago, and nothing has changed all that's changed days the labels, the facade and
Joshua Shurley: Nicer tones right nicer people operate those systems, sometimes very nice people even, you know, women, people of color immigrants all this stuff. We can all be a part
Joshua Shurley: Of these systems of oppression now. So we've got a lot of diversity in the systems of oppression but the systems of oppression nevertheless still exist. We haven't really faced that so anyway. Something to think about. I would say that, you know, going back to Justice
Joshua Shurley: True justice means
Joshua Shurley: You know, not just liberty for you and your people but liberty for all its liberty and justice for all. Because it's just liberty and justice for some than it ain't liberty and it's certainly justice and, you know, it requires a certain amount of empathy and imagination, sometimes to really
Joshua Shurley: Promote justice and not all of us are real always equipped with that society beats us down and tells us that we're just individuals that there's nothing that we can do that.
Joshua Shurley: You know, just keep your head down and take care of yourself.
Joshua Shurley: Or that there's this other these these other groups that people don't care about you. They, they want to know it's all, it's all hype. Right. We are all in this together and
Joshua Shurley: You know, we're all on the ship or on the on the sinking ship or wherever we want to ship to to thrive. That's the question. He asked him, So anyway.
Joshua Shurley: Alright, so that's all I got for this week. Have fun with the discussion boards. I think we've talked about all of the different
Joshua Shurley: Readings and videos. Yes, yes. I think we have okay well that's pretty much it. There's a lot this week. Next week, we're going to get into
Joshua Shurley: local and state government, which is always a fun one. It won't be as heavy use this week and it won't be as much stuff.
Joshua Shurley: But I think it's also kind of thought provoking in some ways that actually picks up where we're leaving off because it's it gets into this, you know, we're talking a lot in this class about the national government but
Joshua Shurley: Next week, we're really focusing on on actions at the local level, at the city, county and state level and and that's really where we're a lot of these fights take place for a lot of the progress or lack of progress happens. Okay.
Joshua Shurley: Good stuff.
Joshua Shurley: Keep your keep your minds and your hearts open and I hope y'all have a good week. And hopefully we'll see some of you on the Wednesday.
Joshua Shurley: live session. I mean, I put out an announcement in the next probably tomorrow, which is Tuesday about that and take care. Everybody see ya. See you next time.
