- [Woman] This is Duke University.
- Good evening
and welcome to the 2018 Terry
Sanford Distinguished Lecture
and Boyarsky Lecture in
Law, Medicine, and Ethics
called Poverty, Health, and Social Justice
with Reverend William J. Barber II.
It takes a village to
bring in Reverend Barber.
I'd like to acknowledge some of the folks
who've been involved.
I'm Dr. Jeff Baker,
director of the Trent Center
for Bioethics, Humanities,
and History of Medicine
within the Duke School of Medicine.
Our center brings together
faculty and associates
interested in the insights provided by
the medical humanities on
all aspects of healthcare
especially the actual
practice of medicine research.
Our mission includes teaching
and exploring the questions of
bioethics and social justice
within the broader matrix
of medicine's history in social context.
Our event tonight is presented jointly
by the Trent Center and the
Sanford School of Public Policy.
The Sanford School has more
than 80 faculty members,
multiple research centers,
several master's programs here and abroad,
a PhD program in one of Duke's
largest undergraduate majors.
Our event is also co-sponsored
by the Center for Child and Family Policy.
POLIS, the Center for
Political Leadership,
Innovation, and Service, and
Sanford's Bridging Communities.
The Terry Sanford Distinguished Lecture
is made possible by a
gift to the university
from the William Kenan Charitable Trust
in honor of the late Terry Sanford.
Terry Sanford would've turned
100 years old in August
and is a much beloved and respected figure
in North Carolina.
He dedicated his life to ethical
leadership and public life.
During his tenure as
governor of North Carolina
from 1961 to 1965,
he focused on strengthening education,
combating poverty, and
expanding civil rights.
He supported desegregation
when other governors were blocking
African-American students from
entering university gates.
In keeping with examples
set by Terry Sanford,
the purpose of this distinguished lecture
is to bring on campus men and women
of the highest personal
and professional stature
to speak to the Duke community.
And tonight's event is also
the 2018 Boyarsky lectureship
in law, medicine, and ethics,
created through a gift from
Dr. Saul and Rose Boyarsky
to bring distinguished
lecturers to Duke University
who can inspire achievement
in social justice
and public health through science.
We are delighted to welcome
them here this evening
on this the UN's World
Day of Social Justice,
along with their children
and grandchildren
who have come from far and
wide to join us tonight.
And thanks to all of you,
students, faculty, and
members of the community alike
for coming to this very special event.
Please silence your cell phones
and note that we are
streaming this event live
to a Sanford School of
Public Policy Facebook page.
I'm going to return the microphone
at the end of Reverend Barber's talk
to moderate an audience Q&A,
but for now I would like
to welcome Kelly Brownell,
the Dean of the Sanford
School of Public Policy
and director of the Duke
World Food Policy Center
to introduce our distinguished guest.
(audience clapping)
- Thank you, Jeff,
and thank you to the
staff of the Trent Center
for working together with
our most capable team
at the Sanford School of Public Policy
to present this special event.
The Reverend Dr. William J Barber II
is the president and senior lecturer
of the non profit organization
known as Repairers of the Breach.
He is a minister, an
author, and a professor,
above all he is an inspirational leader
Reverend Dr. barber served as president
of the North Carolina NAACP,
the largest chapter in the
south from 2006 to 2017.
In this role, he started and led
the Forward Together Moral Movement
in which many people in
this room participated.
The movement gained national notoriety
with its Moral Monday protest
at the North Carolina General Assembly.
These protests drew tens
of thousands of residents
and over the course of the campaign,
police arrested more than 1200 protesters.
In 2014, Reverend Barber
led the largest Moral March
in the state's history with
an estimated 80,000 people
calling on North Carolina's
elected officials
to embrace a moral public policy agenda.
inspired by events in North Carolina,
grassroots Moral Movements grew
in a number of other states
such as Georgia, Florida, and Missouri.
Reverend Barber has been a
powerful and tireless advocate
for voters rights, fair
legislative districts,
healthcare reform, labor
and workers' rights,
immigrants' rights,
reparation for women
survivors of eugenics,
release of the Wilmington
Ten, and educational equality.
In 2009, the Governor Beverly Perdue
presented Reverend barber
with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine,
North Carolina's highest
citizenship award,
Some of his contributions
to the state include
helping win same-day registration
early voting in North Carolina,
the only state in the South,
helping secure passage of the
Racial Justice Act of 2009
to protect wrongly convicted
African-American men
from death row.
The North Carolina General Assembly
subsequently repealed that act.
Reverend Barber is pastor of
Greenleaf Christian Church,
Disciples of Christ in
Goldsboro, North Carolina.
He is a graduate of North
Carolina Central University,
the Duke Divinity School,
and Drew University Theological School
where he earned a doctorate in ministry,
Since stepping down from
his leadership of the NAACP,
Reverend Barber became president
of the Repairers of the Breach
and co-chair of the
Poor People's Campaign,
a national call for moral revival.
We are honored and
humbled by the sheer power
of tonight's guest to
lead North Carolinians
and now the country toward social justice
and I can say there's no warmer man
that I believe I've ever met,
please help me welcome
the Reverend Dr. William J Barber II.
(people clapping)
♪ Everybody's got a right to live ♪
♪ Everybody's got a-- ♪
- So, this feels like
the old mass meetings.
We're here in all of our diversity,
we're here in the human family.
- There is a fire raging now
for the poor of this society.
They are living in tragic conditions
because of the terrible
economic injustices
that keep them locked in.
- We have to deal with our war economy
and systemic racism and systemic poverty
and ecological devastation
and finally we have to deal
with the moral narrative.
This wall, this is sin
of the highest order.
- We are traveling around this country
building this Poor People's Campaign,
a national call for moral revival.
What we wanna do now is hear a little bit
from the local community who
are a part of this campaign.
- I've spent five years, five
or so more years homeless.
- Living on minimum wage has cause me
to have to figure out on a daily basis
how to afford basic necessities.
- While the US sends trillions abroad,
my friends, family, and fellow veterans
suffer the economic
consequences of the war economy.
- I have two children
and I enjoy raising them
while acknowledging that being poor
is a struggle of human rights,
but when I lost my housing,
healthcare, and income
all at the same time, I
was terrified, panicked.
- I wanna stand here and reclaim
the power and dignity of
the mujeres in my life.
- I can't afford to pay a cab.
- It is one thing to know
that you didn't have water
and you couldn't afford your water,
it's a whole 'nother to find out
that they shut off your entire community
and none of you matter.
- And in the aftermath of
climate change disasters,
poor people and people of color
are the ones to lose their homes.
- Who can survive with 7.25?
- No parent in America should
have to bury their child
for a lack of Medicare especially.
- Being poor is not a
sin, poverty is a sin.
Being homeless is not a
sin, homelessness is a sin.
(people cheering)
- And we are here and it's
time for us to be the remnant
that can transform the nation.
- We are calling for a
season of moral resistance,
a season of organizing,
a season of nonviolent,
massive civil disobedience.
- There will be a movement
that will break through the con
and cut through the lies
and bring people together to
save the heart and the soul
of this democracy and this world
♪ Everybody's got a right to live ♪
(people whistling)
- Hello, home, hello, North Carolina.
Forward together.
- [Audience] Not one step back.
- All right, it's good to be here tonight.
I'm so thankful to God and for his grace,
I've been under the weather
with a bacterial infection
and had to come off the road a bit,
but I'm so thankful to be
here tonight with all of you.
I see so many folk if
I start naming people,
that's going to be the next three hours,
so I'm gonna do like we do
down south, what up y'all?
If the light folk could help me
on these lights a little
bit, I'm getting a shadow,
but I'll do the best I can tonight.
I'm so thankful to this great family
that has sponsored this
event, to the Trent Center,
to the great legacy of Terry Sanford,
to the School of Public Policy.
It is such a humbling reality
to be invited to be here
and to see all of you out on tonight.
I want for a little while
tonight to talk about SOS.
Saving Our Ship of State,
the saving of our ship of state,
and I want to suggest
that in order to do that,
there are some things we
must first see clearly.
There's some organizing
we must do intentionally
and then we must stand together.
We must see clearly, we
must organize intentionally,
and we must stand together.
Since the rejection election of 2016
when in many ways white
rage propelled the candidate
who was even endorsed by the KKK
to the Republican National Convention
and onto the White House,
race has been ever before us in America,
but our national conversation about racism
has many times become confused
in the post-Charlottesville debates
in a struggle of whether
or not we define racism
through the lens of personal biases
or the lens of public policy.
Now, make it be clear,
every politician in America
condemned hate after Charlottesville
or at least those who had
any kind of political savvy,
but racism is not about hate alone.
Did you hear Richard Spencer
who spent some time here at Duke?
The white supremacist.
When he went back to
Charlottesville a few weeks ago,
he said, "We came peacefully
"and we will come peacefully again."
He said that when he endorsed
the current occupier of the White House,
it was after he heard his
positions on immigrants.
Racism isn't about whether
you have a black friend
or even use the N-word,
institutional racism is about
what's written into policy.
It's about power.
I would even go further to say
it's not so much about the statues
as it is the statutes.
For instance, my good
friend Dr. Tim Tyson and I
have conversations
often and how in a rush,
many of the people in the media and others
got it wrong about the statues.
They ran out and said these statues
were put up to honor the Civil War.
No, they weren't, 90% of them weren't.
Robert E. Lee said he
wouldn't even be buried
in a Confederate uniform.
In fact, if you had tried
to put those statues up
immediately after the Civil War,
you would've been locked up for treason.
90% of those statues were put up
after Plessy versus Ferguson,
between 1898, I represent
the black, and 1924.
And in fact, the one in Charlottesville
was commissioned in 1919.
More to pay homage not to the Civil War,
but to Woodrow Wilson's election
who was a white supremacist,
who when he got into office,
he immediately stopped the desegregation
of the federal government
and he had his entire staff
100 years before Bannon
was ever in the White House
to watch Birth of a Nation,
that was written by a playwright
from Shelby, North Carolina
who used to be a member of
the North Carolina senate,
and the book was called the Klansmen
and it was turned into Birth of a Nation.
So, that statue was commissioned in 1919
as white nationalists were saying,
"We have control of the laws
again, the policy again,"
could it be that that's why they chose
that statue to march around
because in the mindset
of a white nationalist,
it's not about just
hate, it's about policy.
What is racism?
Racism is what happened
after the Civil War.
By 1868, black and white
people came together
and they formed fusion
coalitions all over the south
and they rewrote constitutions
like the one here in North Carolina.
They put this in the preamble,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident
"that all persons are created in equal,
"endowed by the creator with
certain unalienable rights
"among which are life, liberty,
"the enjoyment of the
fruit of their own labor,
"and the pursuit of happiness,"
or our constitution, Article
11, Section 4, that says,
"Beneficent provision to
the poor and the unfortunate
"and the orphan is the first duty
"of a civilized and a Christian nation."
That's 1868 constitutional language
being written by black and
white people coming together.
They rewrote the voting laws
and made sure that all,
at least men could vote.
They rewrote laws about wages,
they provided healthcare.
By 1877, you had 40
hospitals, free men hospital
that were providing healthcare for blacks,
former slaves, former freed
blacks, and poor whites, free!
By 1872, you had the 13th
Amendment ending slavery,
the 14th Amendment, equal
protection under the law,
the 15th Amendment providing
protection for voting.
Public education in
these fusion coalitions
of black and white people coming together
by 1868 was a public constitutional right.
A constitutional right.
Something we still do not have
in our federal constitution to this day.
What is racism?
Racism is when 1872, the Klan was founded
to scare white people
and make them stop
working with black people.
Racism is Governor Holden,
the governor who led us
in the Reconstruction
being impeached because he
dared to taken on the Klan
and dared to push forward progressive.
Racism is a group calling themselves
the Redemption Movement, but
what they meant by redeeming
was redeeming America from the sin
of black and white
people working together.
Racism is in 1877 a guy
running for president
and losing the popular vote
and getting elected anyhow.
In 1877.
By the electoral college.
And making a promise that if
the electoral college won,
most of us can't get into that college,
but those who are in that college,
if they would give him the presidency,
he would give them the federal courts.
He would pull the troops out of the south.
They said yes, he said yes,
he became president even though
he lost the popular vote.
He turned the judiciary,
attorney general's office
over to the racist extremist
and by 1883, the 1875 Civil
Rights Act was overturned
with only one dissenter,
Justice Holland out of Kentucky.
By 1896, you had Plessy versus Ferguson.
By 1898, you had the Wilmington riot
that were designed to
take back the government
and put it in the proper
hands of the white man
and by 1901, the last
elected black congressperson
was put out of office, George
White from North Carolina,
and it would be 90 years
before North Carolina
had another African-American,
that's racism.
It's about policy.
What is racism?
Racism is like what happened
after the Civil Rights Movement
when extremists who happened to be white
were afraid of losing power,
they learned how to perpetrate
the culture of racism
without appearing to be racist.
So, they used codewords and whistle words,
the southern strategy is
the former name for it.
It was a strategy deliberately designed
to play the race card in a
way that didn't sound racist,
but it would make southern whites
vote against black and brown people
who should've been their natural allies.
GOP strategist Lee Atwater
told us what it was like.
He was on tape, but he kept talking,
so the tape is out there.
This is what he said,
"You start out in 1954
"and you wanna get elected,
"you say things like
nigger, nigger, nigger,
"but by 1968, you can't say
that 'cause it'll backfire,
"so instead you talk about stuff
"like states rights, forced busing,
"and then you get real abstract
"and you say the only thing
you wanna do is cut taxes.
"And that doesn't sound
racist to the untrained ear,
"but it's codeword because
it sounds like all the things
"you're talking about
are totally economic,
"but the byproduct of them is that blacks
"get hurt worse than whites,"
and whites are taught, and
particularly in the south,
to blame their problems
not on the oligarchy
or the aristocracy, but
black and brown people
who are getting quote unquote free stuff
and using their tax dollars.
The target of the southern strategy
was initially the states
of the old confederacy
with the goal of developing a solid south
because the extremists knew
that if black and brown
and white people ever formed
coalitions in the south,
they could not win, they had
seen it before in the 1800s
and so they said, "We'll lock up
"the 13 states in the south."
If you lock up the 13 states in the south,
that's 171 electoral votes
before you ever have an election,
you only need 270 to get elected
which means if you can lock up 13 states,
you only need 99 electoral
votes from the other 37 states.
If you lock up 13 states,
you can control 26 members
of the United States Senate
which means you only need 25
from the other 37 states,
you can control 31% of
the United States House,
that means you only need 20%
from the other 37 states
to hold a majority
and if you do it right, you
can also win in the Rust Belt,
you can win in the Wheat Belt
and you can win in some
of the ethnic enclaves
of the north.
And they learn this by
watching as Wallace,
George Wallace was called the
greatest loser of all time
because he taught folk
that if you can find a way
to use codewords to split people,
you can get them to vote against
their own self-interests.
So, if you know this history,
the first thing we have to see
is that the problem is not Trump.
Don't let anybody tell you right now,
make you think a problem is that strong.
Yes, he embraced and
embolden white nationalists
and this southern strategy
that was designed to last 50 years
and this is the 50th
year by the way, 2018,
but long before Trump mastered
the con of the southern strategy,
he had an audience that had
been cultivated for 50 years
and many other people that
have been using this strategy,
we are seeing right now
what Nell Painter calls
the iconography of an
American call-and-response,
the call is racial progress
and the simultaneously
or short thereafter,
the response is as Carol Anderson
has aptly named regression or white rage.
Trump and those that support
him in policy driven racism
are symptoms, are symptoms
of a deeper moral malady
and we must see this and
we, not just black people,
but all of us must see this.
We misunderstand the
challenge of systemic racism
if we think is just about
dislike of black people.
No, systemic racism is
dislike of democracy,
truth be told, you can
be black and embrace
and encourage white nationalism.
You can be black and be
so fooled by the system
that you end up
participating in the system
and become a cheerleader if you will
for the very proponents
of institutional racism.
Systemic racism is simply the perpetuation
of a system where the ideal
of whiteness and white power
are the norm in our common life
and it must be challenged
by blacks and whites
and Jews and Christians together,
it is to accept the
heresy that some people
were not made in the
image or likeness of God,
therefore you can write them
out of your public policy.
Now, to see this up close,
let's look at a particular
instance of racism
and white supremacy which
is voter suppression.
Before Trump, since the US Supreme Court
gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013,
there has been an assault on voting rights
in this country.
Actually, it began long
before that in 2010.
Let me give you some numbers.
I know everybody talking about Russia,
but here is the most unreported story
and by underreporting it
and not dealing with it,
America is once again making a mistake
and not dealing with this issue of racism,
would rather deal with Russia, should,
but there were 868 fewer voting sites
in the black and brown and
poor community in 2016.
22, that's the number of states
that have passed voter
suppression laws since 2010.
22 states, that's 44 senators
and 50% of the United States
House of Representatives
come from states that have engaged
in proven voter suppression
more than four years or nearly 2000 days,
that's how long it's been
since the Supreme Court
gutted section 5 of the Voting Rights Act
Now, I want you to put that
in context Strom Thurmond
was a sure enough racist.
He only filibustered the
1957 Civil Rights Act
for 24 hours.
Ryan and McConnell and Boehner
have participated in filibuster
and fixing the Voting Rights
Act for nearly 2000 days.
We talked about a person winning.
Trump for instance is winning
by 20,000 votes in Wisconsin.
There were 250,000 votes
suppressed in Wisconsin.
We won in North Carolina,
We beat back Tom Farr,
the white supremacist
and yet in 2016 in North Carolina,
we had over 150 fewer
sites doing early voting,
this is the election hacking
that no one wants to talk about
because it would force us to deal
with systemic racism in America,
not whether or not someone
has a black friend,
that's not even an issue.
Tim Scott whose back is
against the restoration
of the Voting Rights Act,
so he is an enabler of white nationalism
and white supremacy and he's black.
I don't know how much
Trump got help from Russia,
but it's manifestly
clear that he could not
have stolen the election
without the help of systemic racism.
Whether the tactics are
partisan gerrymandering,
a discriminatory voter ID,
the rollback of early voting
same-day registration,
the place and the places
where we see the attack,
we wouldn't have the Senate we have today
or the Congress we have today
or the General Assembly that we have today
without voter suppression.
We're not talking about
something we have heard,
we're talking about that
even this Supreme Court,
the Robert Supreme Court,
even Clarence Thomas had to
vote unanimously on the case
we said and agree that what
happened in North Carolina
that began under the
leadership of Thom Tillis
was surgical racism.
Now, watch this, you say,
"Well, I thought he was gonna
"talk about health and poverty,"
I'm getting there,
(audience laughing)
but the problem is so many neoliberals
want to talk about poverty
without dealing with race
and you can't do that, you can't do that.
Because here's the trick and the hook
that you must understand
if you put up a map
the same places where we see
the attacks on voting rights the most
are the same places that have
the highest level of poverty,
the highest level of the
lack of living wages,
the most attacks against healthcare,
the greatest attacks on
immigrants and the LGBT community,
that the states that have
the lowest funding of public education
and the lowest labor
rights and union density
are all the same states where politicians
have engaged in voter suppression.
Now, what does that mean?
Politicians who use surgical and targeted
racist voter suppression,
then when they get use it to get in power,
but once they get into power,
they promote and codify
policies that hurt all Americans
especially poor and
working-class white people.
So, the very people that use gimmicks
to fool certain people to vote for them,
once they get into office,
they pass policies.
For instance, we have a General Assembly
that use voter suppression
to get into office,
once they got into office,
in the first 15 days or so
of being in office in 2013,
they denied Medicaid
expansion to 500,000 people.
Now, if you heard them talk about it
and understood the codewords
they were kind of suggesting,
we don't need to give healthcare
to these quote lazy folk
who aren't doing something or
i.e black and brown people.
Well, in actuality, 346,000
of the 500,000 people
denied Medicaid expansion are white.
And 30,000 are veterans.
So, they got elected
through voter suppression
and racist gerrymandering,
but then used the power
to hurt poor people and sick people,
many have not wanted to look
at this, but we must see this
if we're gonna save our ship of state.
There's the second thing we must see
and that is we must see the
heretical work of so-called
Christian nationalists
and white evangelicals.
You gotta see it.
Now, many of Donald Trump's critics
have raised concerns in recent weeks
about his alleged affair
with porn star Stormy Daniels
and if the revelations are true,
Trump's infidelity is a matter
between him, his god, and his spouse.
Quickly, but interestingly
so-called white evangelicals
rushed to defend the president,
urging the nation to forgive and move on,
all these things were years ago.
Jerry Falwell said Tony
Perkins told POLITICO,
he and others were willing
to give the president
a mulligan on issues of personal morality
because he trot champions
and evangelical agenda.
Now, it's easy to point
out the hypocrisy of men
who have cried so loudly about character
in public leadership only to defend a man
who spent his life flaunting
conventional morality,
but the truth is, can I drop
this little truth in here?
America has had to give
every president a mulligan
on some personal failing or another.
If Trump's pastoral advisors
want to forgive him,
that's their right
because infidelity normally
has its own consequences,
but the great moral issue here
and what is heretical
is that of this faith,
they're trying to push
in the public square
is when they use religion
to cover up his immoral
and pornographic policies.
Which are hurting vulnerable people
and undermining our democracy.
One of the great Jewish prophets
said in Ezekiel 22 said,
"Your politicians have become like wolves
"devouring the poor and
hurting the immigrants,
"but there is a worse sin
"the preachers are covering
up for the politician
"and claiming to say things
that God has not said,"
and so in the end matters
of public justice,
no one has a right to give
the president a mulligan,
you want to on personal thing, that's you,
but when it comes to public policy
especially in this nation,
for our nation's theological leaders
who should be the torchbearers
of public morality
not the enablers of ethical decay.
Unfortunately, what we are
seeing now is the revival
of a specific and subversive
strand of Christianity,
one with a historic legacy stretching
all the way back to
slavery which is heresy.
The infidelity, oh,
they shouldn't taught me
the bible at Duke Theological Seminary,
the infidelity that we
must concern ourselves with
is what the bible calls going
or whoring after other gods,
or whoring after other gods
is whenever a nation
chooses to hurt the poor
and oppress the stranger
and mistreat the weak
and keep the sick sick
and corrupt the courts,
the biblical prophets accused
the political leader of public infidelity.
Unlike in marriage such
adultery is not a private matter
and it must be challenged
in the public square.
The problem is too many preachers
are willing to overlook
the policy failings
in exchange for access to power
and they have said things
like Jesus teachings
are about private morality
and not public policy.
Jesus said love your neighbor as yourself,
but never told Caesar how to run Rome.
Well, that's just not true.
Jesus's first sermon said,
"I've come to preach
good news to the poor,"
and the Greek word for
poor there is ptochos
which means the poor
who have been made poor
by economic exploitation and imperialism.
That was his first sermon.
In his last sermon, Jesus
says that every nation
in the final analysis
and the final judgment,
every nation will be judged
and will have to give an account
for how they treated the vulnerable
among us in public policy
and Jesus;s good friend
that he often quoted from
Isaiah said that woe unto those
who legislate evil and robbed
the poor of their rights
and make women and children their prey.
It is hard to imagine
someone who proclaimed
the kingdom of God in the first century
not to have a clear vision
about transforming society.
It's hard to imagine that
unless your whole faith
has been built upon the
justification of systemic evil.
Now, this kind of reading of
the biblical text is not new
and we need to see it for what it is
because it's being used to confuse
the minds of so many people.
This brand was passed down by generations
of so-called Christians who
learned to read the Bible
in the 19th century as a
text that did not condemn,
but rather affirmed
race-based chattel slavery
and public policy that legalized it,
that's why Frederick Douglass once said
"Between the Christianity
of the slaveholder
"and the Christianity of Christ,
"I see the widest possible difference."
The widest possible difference.
Preston historian Kevin
Cruz has documented
how public religiosity that
wraps itself in the flag
while doing the bidding of big business
is a purchase product.
He said it was purchased
in his book of research
by the US Chamber of Commerce on Oil
beginning in the 1930s when
they funded organizations
like the spiritual mobilization group
that paid preachers to preach
a twisted form of Calvinism
to take on the social gospel of people
like Rauschenbusch and later Dr. King,
and this perverted form of
Calvinism went like this.
If you're good, you go to heaven.
If you're bad, you go to hell.
So, if you're a good
American, you won't be poor,
and if you're bad American, you're poor,
so therefore you don't
need Social Security,
you don't need living wages,
people just need to live
according to certain precepts
and it was purchased.
In fact by 1940, the leader of it
had bought 19,000 pulpits.
It was a 20th century
of slaveholder religion
that the plantation
owners had paid preachers
to defend slavery in the 19th century
and it's still with us today.
When Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham
who got $10 million from somewhere
to go all around the
country during the election
encouraging people to vote a certain way
and then had the nerve
to say that the election
of the current occupant of the
White House was God's will.
Robert Jeffress, Franklin
Graham, Jerry Falwell,
and all those who go in and
pray, P-R-A-Y, for a president
while that president and
the legislators are preying,
P-R-E-Y-I-N-G, on the least of these.
We cannot understand
some of what's going on
without understanding this heretical form
of Christian nationalism
that tries to limit
the moral discussion to
being against gay people
and against prayer in the school
and against abortion and for gun rights
and for tax welfare to the wealthy,
this is what now some are
calling Trump evangelicals
and they are not forsaken
their God to defend Trump,
they are showing us that their
God is cash and not Christ.
And for Trump's personal failings,
he needs personal professional counseling,
but for his mean and vulgar use of power
he and his allies, it's not
just him, he and his allies,
he can't write a law, he and
his allies in the Congress
need public critique and moral resistance.
No matter how high the
Dow Jones average is,
it can never be high enough
to be a sufficient payoff
for us to keep quiet
in the face of such moral inconsistency.
We must see this.
Now, if we're gonna
save our ship of state,
we must as I said see
this systemic racism.
We must see how this
heretical form of morality
is being used to confuse the public square
and then if we see that,
then we must see what kind
of politics and policies
you get when you mix this
kind of systemic racism
with classism and with
the distorted moral view.
What do you get?
You get us having fewer
voting rights today
than the people had 53
years ago on August 6, 1955
because issues are seen
as left versus right
not as right versus wrong.
What do you get?
You get 25 states that have passed laws
that preempts cities from passing
their own local minimum wage laws.
What do you get?
You get the criminalization of poverty
that has raised federal
spending on prisons
tenfold to $7.5 billion a year
and led to increased
policing to fill them.
Nearly five million people.
In 1968, wasn't but 180,000 in jail,
now nearly five million people.
We got two million more
people in prison than China
and China has a billion and
a half more people than us,
that's what happens
with racism and classism
and a false moral narrative
are woven together
and people use it from which
to shape public policy,
What do you get?
Federal spending on
immigration deportation
and the border has gone
from two billion in 1976
to 17 billion in 2015
with 10 times as many deportations.
333,000 in 2015 according to our report,
The Souls of Poor Folk,
an audit being done
by the Institute for Public Policy Studies
and the Urban Institute
that Dr. Tyson and Dr. Forbes
and others are working on.
What do you get?
As of 2016 there are 40 million people
living below the poverty line.
This is an income based measure
that is limited to $11,880,
$11,880 for a single person.
In other words, if you make $11,881,
you are not poor as a single person.
$24,300 for a family of four
which means if you make $24,301
according to the statistics,
you are not a poor person
and therefore for 40 million
people living below poverty,
this means there's been a 60% rise
in the number of poor people since 1968,
not because the programs
of the war on poverty fail,
but because the programs
of the war on poverty
were undermined.
There are 95 million people
who are either poor or low-income,
living under twice the
federal poverty line
and that number rises
to 140 million people.
43.5% of the population
when using the supplemental
poverty measures
and when you have this
mix of racism and classism
and a heretical morality,
you get people saying things like,
"Well, poor people are just on a vacation,
"on a glorified vacation."
16 million of the 40
million people are women,
13 million are children,
three-quarters of the people
living below the poverty line
are women and children.
The codewords of racism have called us
to racialized poverty,
but the reality is while
8.8% of white people are
poor, below the poverty line,
that's 17.3 million people
which is eight million more than black,
so that eight million
more poor white people
than there are black in raw numbers.
In raw numbers.
In raw numbers.
What kind of policies do you get?
You get that from 1968 to 2017,
the top 1% share of the
economy has doubled.
In 2017, three individuals had
a combined wealth of $248 billion,
the same amount of wealth
as the entire bottom 50% of US households
and Joseph Stiglitz when I talk with him,
the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said
we can't keep ignoring
the cost of inequality
because 250,000 people
according to the study
by the Mailman School of Public Health
die every year from low-income.
They don't die because
it's their time to die,
they don't die because the
divine has called them home,
they die because of low wealth.
We came to be the leader of the free world
and yet the US pays half of
its African American workers
and 60% of Latino workers
less than $15 an hour
while we give bailouts
to corporate crooks.
In the south where politicians
still pit white workers
against workers of color,
50% of all workers in the south
make less than $15 an hour.
There are 400 families
that make an average
of $97,000 an hour
and we lock people up who
simply marched for 15.
When it comes to healthcare,
even with the Affordable Care Act,
37 million people are still insured
and now with the rolling
back more uninsured,
more premiums are going up,
and you think about that
people will run for office
when you mix racism and classism
and a distorted moral narrative,
people will run for office,
look you in your face, and say,
"Elect me and I'll take your healthcare."
No, no, no, worse than that,
"Elect me, I'll let you pay
for my healthcare for free
"and take yours."
In other words, "Elect me
and I'll accept healthcare
"that I only get because I got elected,
"but I'll make sure that
you don't get what I get
"even though you elected me."
And people buy it
because they believe they're
talking about other folk
until the reality hits in
western North Carolina,
in West Virginia, and other areas.
When it comes to the health of the planet
between 1970 to 1979,
meteorologists recorded 600
disasters around the world,
but between 2000-2009, there were 3,322.
Climate scientists
testifying before Congress
have explained to the public
that two centuries of
fossil fuel extractions
have not only built a global economy
but have released enough
carbon in the atmosphere
that the planet to have a fever.
Today, the earth fever is raging
and the symptoms of rising
floods and waters and droughts
and poor people suffer the most
and get the sickest the
most from climate change.
In addition to climate change
when we talk about health,
poor people can buy unleaded gas,
but can't buy unleaded water.
Multinational corporations
are drilling for gas,
penetrating the aquifers
on the Apache lands.
I was recently out with the
Apache nation in Arizona.
Do you know to this day
that the First Nation people
can't even own their own
homes, own reservations, today.
I was there at the burial
and I went to the cliff
where 120 Apache warriors
rather than being captured
chose to jump off the cliff.
I was there in the
place and sang the songs
and cried with them, the songs of memory,
and you could feel the spirit of those
who were put in this valley
on this piece of land.
The Apaches were mountain people,
but they were forced into this valley
and then one night while
they were in the valley,
the troops opened up
the river to drown them
and now they're digging on
a place called Oak Flats.
They're drilling down in the earth,
so-called looking for copper
and only about two or 3% of
what they get is worth anything,
but the rest of it poisons the aquifers
and the people that started doing it,
they thought that if you drill
on the First Nation Apache land,
if you drilled, well, it's not the land,
it's the reservation, if you drill there,
then somehow the poison was
going to stay on their land,
only to find out that aquifers
mean water and water travels
and so now the white community
right down the street
is where it is now because
they're going to be poisoned
and many of them are upset
because they voted for the
people like John McCain
who approved a multinational
company to come in and do this.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
Pope Francis called it calls home,
our common home has been reduced
he said to a resource at best
and when I was at the Vatican
lecturing this past year
at the invitation of the
Pope about other leaders,
one of the things he said
to us in his letter was,
he said that when we refused to address
the issues of racism and poverty,
we abdicate our responsibility
to be the hands and the
feet of God in the earth.
Then the war economy and
how war is often perpetrated
toward black and brown
citizens of the world.
In Vietnam military
spending was 354 billion,
today, it's 635 billion,
53 cents out of every
discretionary dollar of our taxes
goes directly to military
and then we create these military weapons
and they end up getting
sold on our streets
and you can get an assault weapon
easier than you can get a fishing license
and our children end up dead
and we can't break some politicians
from their vampire-like bloodthirst,
end up with the NRA for money.
If you look at the money,
if you just took a portion of the money,
we can still blow the world up 50 times,
that's the sad thing about it.
It's not that somehow we
gonna have a weak military,
you can blow to earth up 10, 15 times,
that seems to be quite
a bit, quite enough.
If you just took a portion
of that military money,
the same money could provide healthcare
for 178 million low-income people.
It could create more than 11 million
green jobs and union jobs.
It could give seven
million poor kids Headstart
and 442 million household
solar electricity.
It's not the money that we don't have,
it's the moral will and the capacity
to do right with what we have.
And those who claim they
love the military so much,
now say they want to give poor people
their food stamp in boxes,
boxes of starches and canned food.
At least when Jesus gave people food,
he gave him fresh fish and bread,
he didn't put in the box,
they want to take us back
to the Ghost of Days Past,
back to Charles Dickens day,
back to the poor houses I guess,
but the problem with that is we give banks
that abuse the system bailouts of cash
and then wanna give
poor folk boxes of food,
it's just wrong,
but they claim they
care about the military.
Well, 23,000 active duty military troops
receive food stamps.
24% of children and schools
run by the Department
of Defense inside the US
qualify for free meals
and another 21% qualify
for reduced-price meals.
We have to see this.
When you deal with race and
class and I'm distorted morale,
what kind of policy does it create?
It creates a policy where
four million families
with children are being
exposed to high levels of lead.
It creates the kind of public policy
that the populations within three miles
of highly contaminated Superfund sites,
45% of them are non-white, 45%,
even though the majority
near these Superfund sites
are still white in raw numbers,
and so if we see this,
then that means we need
to understand why now,
we need to organize intentionally.
We gonna save our ship of
state, we gotta see right,
but then we've got to
organize intentionally.
Long before Dr. King,
a bullet took his life,
Dr. King, Rabbi Herschel, and others saw
their systemic policy violence
threatened the soul of this nation
through interlocking issues of injustice.
In 1967-68, he paired this diagnosis
and called it the Poor People's Campaign.
He said America's spiritual
sickness was terminal
and insisted that unless we experienced
a radical revolution of
values such a moral revival,
he knew could not simply
be spoken into existence,
it had to be lived into existence.
The poor people who were often blamed
and pitted against one another
would have to unite in a national
campaign of direct action
to save the souls of America
and others would have to
come alongside of them.
50 years later, Dr.
King's life and witness
can help us name America's
spiritual sickness
and see that the only hope
is a brand new time of fusion politics.
We face a national crisis
not unlike in some ways
to storm that rocked America in 68,
but too often attempts
to diagnose what ails us
cannot get beyond the tired debates
of left versus right and
Democrat versus Republican,
that is why we need a
Poor People's Campaign,
a national call to moral
revival more than ever
because there are five
interlocking injustices,
five bacteria if you will,
five diseases that threaten
democracy of the United
States simultaneously,
systemic racism, systemic poverty,
ecological devastation, the
war economy and militarism,
and the distorted moral view
of Christian nationalism.
As a preacher I would like the hope
that this crisis would
compel Americans to cry out
to whatever source of
divinity they know for help,
but far too much of our
religion in our public life
has contributed to the
moral crisis we now face.
We suffer from a civil religion
that has justified our social sin
and so America has a moral malady
and sometimes it tempts us to disband,
but it also then can bring
us in the darkest moments
to the reality that we
must have a moral movement,
that there's only one way out.
We've got to link up with others
who are directly impacted by
the interlocking injustices.
We cannot deal with these separately.
Black people can't get over
here and deal with racism,
white people over here with poverty
and environmentalist over here.
No, we have to find a
way to connect together
in a deeply moral way
with a deeply progressive
and prophetic agenda and
refuse to be divided by the few
who seem to benefit from a
system that hurts us all.
America I believe is right in the middle
and the possibility of
a third reconstruction
and at this moment, this
moment like this must remind us
of the one truth that is at the heart
of the tradition of resistance,
that goes all the way back
to the great psalmist.
Find it in Psalm 118.
The stones that the builders rejected
can become the chief cornerstone.
In other words, what we need now
is the work of the rejected
stones to lead a revival,
those who've been rejected through racism,
rejected through classism and
rejected through homophobia,
rejected because of poverty,
rejected because of militarism, rejected,
that fusion coalition must come together
and we must assert our moral
authority as children of God
believing that we can shift
the nation's narrative.
We must know this that when
a budget director goes on TV
and puts a ash cross on his
forehead on Ash Wednesday
and then proposes to cut Medicare
and cut seven million people
from heating assistance
and cut people's food stamps,
we don't have merely a
democrat or republican problem
we have a moral problem
and we need a Poor People's Campaign,
a national call for moral revival.
When leaders of both party
will celebrate a budget compromise
and one side will say we
did it for the military
and the other side says we
did it for the middle class
and nobody says what
was done for the poor,
the 140 something million people.
We need a moral revival and
a Poor People's Campaign.
When we are 53 years after the passage
of the Voting Rights Act
and we have the tax on voting rights
like we haven't seen since Jim Crow,
when people are more interested
in protecting the NRA
than funding our schools,
when we refuse to stop the
selling of assault rifles,
but we cut healthcare and
want to ban DACA students,
when we destroy the environment,
when we want to fund the war machine
and fund a racist border wall,
but we defend defunding poverty programs
and refuse to pay people a
living wage and protect unions,
when you have preachers
claiming to be representing God,
they're so loud when it comes
to being against gay people
and abortion and prayer for the schools
and loud on supporting
tax cuts for the wealthy
with tax cut welfare for
the rich and the greedy
at the tunes of trillions of dollars,
the amount of dollars we
haven't seen transferred
on the backs of poor people
since the time of slavery,
and when they claim
Trump is the will of God
and they say nothing
about racism and poverty
and stopping the sale of assault guns,
we must have a movement
that challenges this heresy
and names this hypocrisy
and refuses to stand down.
And this must be a
movement rooted in love.
It can't be just a movement about hate
and what we're against
or hating individual,
it must be a movement
rooted in love and truth.
It must be a movement
where we hate the policies,
but we almost have a deep
pity for the powerful
that will use their power to hurt people
because I tell you the
other day I was thinking
as I was reading through
some Howard Thurman,
something is wrong in the hearts of people
when they gain power
and then they use that
power to inflict pain
on the poor and the vulnerable.
How much do you have
to dehumanize yourself
in order to dehumanize other people?
That is the question before America.
Rabbi Herschel told America in 1960,
in fact, he said it to John Kennedy.
He said, "Mr. president, this
nation forfeits the right
"to even worship God when
you're on the wrong side
"of justice and racial equality."
Howard Thurman once said
that we rupture the unity
between us and God when
we are not concerned
about the dispossessed.
Just this week Marian Wright Edelman
who was a leader in the
Poor People's Campaign
wrote in an article, she said,
"When are we going to protect
"the children and not the guns?"
These are the kinds of moral question.
We need a Poor People's Campaign,
a national call for a moral revival
that will demand full restoration
of the Voting Rights Act
and will demand automatic
registration at 18.
If you can be registered
to go to war at 18,
you ought to be automatically registered,
that will demand an open democracy
that provides more than one day to vote
all across the country,
that demands a living wage,
that demands universal
healthcare for everybody
and we stop this ungodly
voting on children's healthcare
every five, 10 years.
It ought to be a divine
right in this democracy.
That demands guaranteed
income for the poor
and the weak among us,
that demands we not fund
and continue to fund war and militarism,
that demands that we take care
of our ecological systems,
that demands that we change,
that demands that we
thought we asked ourselves,
can America really be America?
Can we live up to the deep
religious values we claim?
Can we live up to the moral claims
saying that there is
no freedom worth having
unless that freedom engages in making sure
that we have the establishment of justice
and the providing of the common defense
and the promoting of the general welfare?
There's no freedom worth having
that does not have these things
and so we need people who will stand up
and join this movement whether
we believe in Christianity,
Islam, Judaism, all the
other great traditions,
or no religion at all,
we need to stand up.
We don't need another
tweet, another email,
we need some people who are
willing to stand with the poor
and not because this
is the 50th anniversary
of the death of Dr. King
because you don't
commemorate an assassination,
you don't celebrate an assassination,
the only way you can
pay homage to a prophet
or prophets that have been assassinated
is you have to reach down in
the blood where they fail,
pick up the baton and carry
out the next leg of the way.
50 years later, we must
deal with systemic racism,
systemic poverty, ecological devastation,
of war economy, militarism,
and this distorted national,
it requires a moral revival
and a moral revolution of values
and that's why as I close,
we are now organizing 1,000 people.
Dr. King called them emergency drivers.
Dr. KIng said that in the
normal course of time,
you have to stop at a
stop sign or a stoplight.
He said but when there's a crisis,
the ambulance can run the stoplight
because somebody's hurt, somebody's sick.
The nation's health is at risk,
we need ambulance drivers now
and we're organizing 1,000
of them in 32 states,
2000 in District of Columbia for 40 days
of direct action, civil disobedience,
voter mobilization, and power
building among the poor.
40 days starting on Mother's Day, birth,
ending on June 21st, the summer solstice,
the birthing light,
and on the 23rd, a massive
poverty march and a rally
not just to March, but
to give an action call
that we leave and we go back
and organize and build deeply
because change doesn't happen
from Washington DC down,
it happens from Montgomery,
Birmingham, Greensboro, and up.
And I tell you, we've been traveling
from Appalachia to Alabama,
from California to South Carolina,
from North Carolina to New Mexico,
and I've met some people.
I met a white girl over
in Seattle, Washington,
has the highest density
of poor white folk.
She was homeless and poor in
Seattle, Seattle, Washington.
She came to one of our mass meetings
and she stood up and testified.
She said, "I want America
to know that I am a redneck
"and I'm the white trash
that America threw out
"and forgot to burn
"and I'm joining the
Poor People's Campaign,
"a national call for moral revival,"
not only that we went down to Alabama
and there's a mother there
whose daughter died in her arms
because Alabama would not expand Medicaid
and she said the only way she can live
is to fight for other
daughters not to die.
She's in the Poor People's Campaign.
We're headed out to West Virginia
and Kentucky in the Appalachia
and their people are organizing all over.
We were in Compton and watch black people
and white people and Latinos
come together in Compton
to say we're organizing.
Over in central California, organizing,
Up in Wisconsin, we're organizing.
I was there in New Mexico.
One night we had a mass meeting
and a Pueblo spiritualist
and a Jewish rabbi
and a preacher and a Congregationalist
and somebody else got to
shouting onstage together,
all of 'em just like Pentecost,
like they were speaking
in tongues together
and signing up for the
Poor People's Campaign.
You can sign up tonight.
Just go to repairersofthebreach.org.
You can sign up tonight
and clergy are coming,
United Church of Christ,
Unitarian, Methodist,
Presbyterian, rabbis,
Muslims are coming together
not to do it for the poor
because that's paternalistic,
but with the poor,
but we're coming conspicuously
and we're talking about
being in 25 state capitals
all at the same time,
and in Ryan and McConnell's
office all at the same time,
and we're not going to the safe spots
where they tell us we can protest.
We're claiming back the people's houses
all over this nation and in Washington DC.
We're going to demand
an aspirational agenda.
We're going to demand the kind of goals
that can set America free,
demand it from the Democrats
and the Republicans.
We demanded that it's time
for all folk to step up
and if they arrest us, they're
gonna have to arrest us
linking arms with poor people
and they're gonna have to arrest us
in full ministerial attire,
but they're gonna have
to arrest us if they do
because we are going to arrest
the attention of this nation
and change the narrative.
We cannot have another
presidential election
or another midyear like
the one we had in 2016
where we had 26 presidential
debates in the primary
and in the general election
and not one hour on poverty,
not one hour on systemic racism,
not one hour or ecological devastation,
not one hour on the war economy
We talk more about tweets and innuendos
than we did the things
that are hurting people
and hurting real lives
and the political structure
can't change it alone,
there must be a moral revival
and a moral revolution of value.
We need a political Pentecost.
We need a political Pentecost
where black and white and brown
and Jew and Christian and Muslim
and gay and straight and young and old
learn how to speak with new tongues
and how to act with new power
and refuse to be denied,
and we go in and we
force CNN and and MSNBC
and the New York Times to change
whatever the tweeter
was trying to get them
to talk about that day
because we come together
and we call those 140 million people
who never hear their name poor called.
We call them and recognize
that that's a great army of hope.
It's a great army a possibility
when we all come together
and so I close tonight
not with my own words,
but with the words that come
from the great Jewish prophet Amos.
2600 years ago, he wrote this
and it sounds as contemporary
as it was probably when
it was first heard,
it actually gives us our order.
Some people say, "Well, are
you all getting your cues
"from the Poor People's Campaign?"
Yes, but we're also getting it
from the abolition movement.
We're also getting it from
the Reconstruction Movement.
There are a lot of streams,
the stream of resistance
is in no one place
or among no one people
and every age has always
had to be moral dissenters.
There's always had to be somebody
that will engage in moral analysis
and moral articulation and moral activism,
it's just our time.
Don't you let anybody tell you
this is the worst we've ever seen,
that's an insult to the slaves,
that's an insult to the
survivors of the Holocaust,
that's an insult to the women
who had to fight for women's suffrage,
that's an insult to those
that went through Jim Crow,
that's an insult to Cesar Chavez
and the early Mexican
people in their fight,
that's an insult to say this is the worst,
this is not the worst we've ever seen.
It's bad, but it ain't the worst.
I told somebody other
day if Harriet Tubman
could get 500 slaves out of slavery
and she didn't have she
didn't have Twitter,
she didn't have tweet, she
didn't have a cell phone,
she didn't have a computer,
all she had was moss on
the north side of the tree,
a made up mind, a 38 in her pocket
in case somebody wanted
to go back to slavery.
She would send them to heaven
and let them be free up there, but anyway,
this is not the worst we've seen,
but we've seen it and if we see it,
we have to organize in it and then lastly,
we gotta stand together
because it's our time
and so Amos said it like
this in the fifth chapter.
Listen to this and I'm
through Amos said, listen,
"People hate this kind of talk
"because raw truth is never popular,
"but here it is bluntly spoken,"
this is verse 12 and 13,
"because as a nation you
run roughshod over the poor
"and because you take bread
right out of their mouths,
"I want to tell you as a nation,
"you will never move into
"your luxurious homes that you've built
"and you're never going to drink in peace
"the wine at Mar Lago,"
I mean, the wine.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, the
wine, let me read the text
like it says,
"the wine from the expensive
vineyards you've planted.
"I know precisely the extent
of your violations as a nation.
"I know the enormity of your sins
"and it is appalling.
"You the leaders of that time,
"you bully right living people,
"you take bribes right and left
"and you kick the poor when they're down.
"Some people began to think
that justice is a lost cause
"and evil is epidemic
"and decent people are
throwing up their hands
"and some of them even said
that protest and rebuke
"are useless and a waste of breath,"
but verse 14, but I need somebody.
I need a group of people
that will see good and not evil and live.
I need a group of people
that will say to the nation,
you keep talking about God
bless you, God loves you,
well, act like it and the
way a nation acts like it
is verse 15, you hate
evil and you love good
and then you work it out in public policy
and then maybe God will notice you.
Verse 16, it says,
"Now, I need a remnant because this nation
"is not going to do right on
its own, so I need a remnant."
Maybe I need 1,000 people in 25 states
and 2,000 in Washington DC.
I need a remnant that will go out
and cry loudly and refuse to
shut up until change comes.
I need a remnant that
will fill up the malls
and the shops and warn the nation
that it can't be who she claims to be
until she does right by the poor.
I need a group of people
that will say not me, not us, not now.
I need a group of people
that were empty the offices,
empty the stores, this is in the bible,
empty the factories, empty the workplaces,
and enlist everybody in a general lament
until you make the nation hear
and God says I want to
hear you in the streets
crying so loud over what's so wrong
and if you do, then I will make my visit.
Could it be that God the divine spirit
is simply waiting on us to
get in the street and cry
and then if we do, that
divine spirit will help us
change the soul and save
the heart of this democracy.
I'm told enough now that I wanna try
and see what God will do.
It's time to save our ship of state.
We gotta see what's wrong.
We've gotta organize and
we must stand together
and launch this Poor People's Campaign,
a national call for moral revival
and dare to shift the narrative
and declare to history
that has yet been
and the future that is yet to come
in our time with the few
breaths of life that we had
and a few years in this earth,
we chose not to be silent,
we chose not to be content,
we chose to cry loud
and to change the heart of this nation.
God bless you.
(audience cheering)
- As a doctor, I know that
Reverend Barber has been,
his body has been through a lot lately
and I would like thank
him for all the energy
he shared with us
and give him formal
permission to take a rest.
And as a historian, I wanna thank him
for reminding us that our story
is part of a much bigger story.
He reminded us of the story of the 1890s,
of the fusionist movement
that seemed to bring
hope to bring poor whites
and blacks together,
how it collapsed in the 1890s,
climaxing with the Wilmington Race Riot,
but remember in Durham, part of our story
is that just two years after that,
a black physician, Dr. Aaron Moore
worked with a formerly
very poor white farmer,
Washington Duke, and
built Lincoln Hospital.
Out of the chaos of that
decay, there was hope.
He left.
Anyway, I wanted to
thank him for his words,
for sharing his historical perspective,
for sharing his faith,
and I would like to encourage all of you
to join in his future work.
Thank you so much, thank
you, Reverend Barber.
