Leith Mullings - New Social Movements In The African Diaspora and The Role of Black Women (2014)

Speaker 1: It's my great pleasure to introduce you to Professor Leith Mullins, actually another distinguished professor. You guys have had several distinguished professors up here. This time, a distinguished professor in cultural anthropology. She has a variety of areas of interest that include globalization, urbanism, medical anthropology, health, feminism, critical race theory, gender.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 1: social movements. She got her PhD at the University of Chicago. She's just finished— is it a 3-year stint?— as president of the American Anthropological Association. She's gotten awards from the Society for the Anthropology of North America, the Distinguished Author Award. She's gotten grants from the NSF, National Science Foundation, and from the Center for She's written several books. I put here the first one and I think the last one. Oh, gosh, this is terrible. I can't read my own handwriting. 1984, Identity and Change in Urban Ghana. That's not the right name. And then in 2009, New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenges Oh, this is really embarrassing. Gosh. In the global age?

Speaker 3: No.

Speaker 1: I know, but yeah, well, age, you can't read your own handwriting or remember anything. So, and also she wrote a book co-authored with Manning, Maribel Freedom: The Photographic History. At least I got that one right. So it's my pleasure. I know you're looking forward, as I am, to hearing Dr. Mullins, we're at the point where we've moved from looking at civil rights particularly just for blacks. We've moved into looking at women's rights, gay rights. She's gonna kinda pull it all together for us with a focus on women and black women. And so I'm gonna hand it over to her before I mess it up any further. So let's put our hands together for Dr. Mullins.

Leith Mullings: Thank you. Thank you very much, and thank you all for having me. How is everybody this evening?

Speaker 1: Good.

Leith Mullings: Excellent. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I will first discuss new ways of thinking about race and gender in the post-civil rights era. Then I'm going to talk about the role of the Black feminist movement. Then I'm going to talk about new social movements in the African and diaspora and the role of women. And then to wake you up, I'll just show you a couple pictures. They're in color.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Leith Mullings: So I'm going to ask you a question first. What is race? Yes. Okay. Skin color.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Leith Mullings: We have ethnicity. We have skin color. Nationality. What else? Okay. Okay. She says a population of people that are grouped together.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Leith Mullings: Ethnicity.

Speaker 3: It could be people that share a cultural background.

Leith Mullings: People that share a cultural background. Anybody else?

Speaker 3: Ethnic. Ethnic.

Leith Mullings: Ethnic group.

Speaker 1: Uh-huh.

Leith Mullings: OK. Yes?

Speaker 5: Just a group of people who identify with each other.

Leith Mullings: OK. A social contract—

Speaker 6: construct.

Leith Mullings: OK. OK. You got the prize.

Speaker 1: All right.

Leith Mullings: Okay, so, but all of you have actually mentioned definitions that have been used over the time about what race is, and people still consider all of those definitions what race is. But what I'm going to argue this evening is that race is a social construct, a social construction, And that race is a relationship, and it is a relationship of inequality between groups of people. So when I get to the end, you know, then we can discuss what you think about that, because this is not something people hear very often. Okay, I'm going to ask you the same thing about gender. What is gender?

Speaker 3: You can be a female but feel like a male, so you— Oh, sorry. Uh, you could be a female, but if you feel like a male, it's what you feel you are, you are. So your gender would be, um, male or female according to what you feel on the inside. That, to me at least.

Leith Mullings: Okay. Male or female. Okay.

Speaker 5: The difference of the sexes.

Leith Mullings: Okay. And what is the difference of the sexes?

Speaker 5: Male and female. The difference between male and female.

Leith Mullings: Okay. And what are the differences between male and female? Genitalia. What else?

Speaker 2: I believe it's also another social construct of identification amongst humanity for the sake of like belonging to a certain— I don't— it's not necessarily a sex because you don't have to be anatomically structured. So it's more like a group of masculinity or femininity.

Leith Mullings: OK. You got the prize.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Leith Mullings: Another relationship. So, I'm not going to talk about that as much in terms of defining gender, but you'll be able to see the relationship between the way I'm going to define race and the way I define gender, that it is a set of categories that we place on people, and we place them on people in particular historical circumstances and for particular reasons. But then there are consequences of putting those categories on people. Okay, so currently then, at least in anthropology, if not in the general public, we really think about race and gender in very different ways than we thought about it, say, 3 or 4 decades ago. So initially, race was understood to be a biological fact. Race was something you had, and it was biological. And it was understood that we could see different races. Sometimes people said there were 5 races. Sometimes people said there were 3 races. They would call them sometimes Caucasian, Oriental, and Negroid. You know, there are all kinds of—

Speaker 6: Negro.

Leith Mullings: Terms, but that there were these groups and these groups was something that biologically existed. And not only that, and of course the important point about making these categories is that these categories were seen to exist in a hierarchical relationship. In other words, some races were smarter than others, some races were more More civilized than others, and you can imagine how the categories went, usually with European-type people at the top. This was called scientific— so-called scientific racism. And the reason we called it so-called scientific racism was because it was actually developed in schools of anthropology, unfortunately. That's kind of how physical anthropology got its start.

Speaker 5: Right.

Leith Mullings: Physical anthropology is not my favorite branch of anthropology. There's several branches. But physical anthropology actually got its start in a way by studying and nurturing the concept of race, that there are these differences among people and that they can be grouped into 3 to 5 groups, that they can be put on a scale of civilization hierarchically, and that what race a person fell into determined all kinds of things. Now, after World War II, people began to rethink the whole concept of race. What do you think it might have been about World War II and the aftermath that made people really start to think about race? Yes, somebody back there has their hand up. African Americans serving in the military? Well, that's part of it, yeah. African Americans served in the military, and the military was segregated. So people were going over to fight for democracy to Europe, but they were in segregated units. So I remember my uncle was being shipped out from the South, and he was— it was his last night in the United States, but because there was segregation and white people were not allowed to eat— and black people were not allowed to eat in the same places as white people, his unit couldn't get anything to eat. So, his captain had to go out and buy food for the whole unit and bring it back to their barracks so that they could have dinner before they went to Europe to die for democracy. So, needless to say, you know, people started thinking about that, okay? Now, and remember, the armed forces were not desegregated until Truman, okay? What else happened with World War II? The GI Bill.

Speaker 5: Yes. The Holocaust and the actions of the National Socialist Party?

Leith Mullings: That's right. Okay, Germany, the Nazis, the National Socialist Party they were called, or they called themselves, took over Germany, took over much of Europe, and there were many genocides. The largest was among the— what's called the Holocaust, the killing of the The Jews. There were genocides among the— what's now known as the Roma. They were gypsies. Socialists were killed. Communists were killed. People of African descent were killed. And all of it done in the name of race. The Germans thought they were a superior race and that they should just wipe out all the other races because they were the superior race.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Leith Mullings: If you're unfamiliar with World War II, I don't blame you, but I would urge you to look it up. My daughter, who is now a sociologist and teaches at Guttman Community College— she's been waiting for your John Jay building, but I understand you're going to keep it— but she went to public school in New York, and she went to one of these magnet schools, which was a kind of progressive school. Oh, yeah. So I remember she studied the Maya about 4 or 5 times, but when she was in high school, she hadn't heard of the Second World War. So the education was a little skewed. So if you haven't— if you don't know a lot about it, it's okay, but you should go and read about it. But this is a time at which, you know, there were just genocides carried out by the Nazis in the name of race. Race. So people began to really think about how useful or how not useful is this concept of race. At the same time, you have a long Black freedom struggle going on that is always attacking the concept of race that has been developed by the ruling group to actually rationalize segregation, slavery, to be anti-abolition, to rationalize discrimination. You have the liberation struggles around the world. So all of the areas of the world that are colonized by the European powers in Africa, in Asia, etc., they begin to fight liberation struggles and they develop intellectuals. And these intellectuals really begin to think about what is this construct called race. So in this context, you have social scientists, but in the context of a struggle that's going on all over, and the civil rights struggle in the U.S., really thinking about, well, what is it that we mean by race? So you have the Black Freedom Movement, you have the civil rights movement of the '60s and the '70s.

Speaker 5: And—

Leith Mullings: And you have the second-wave feminism and the Black feminist movement. And these movements then tried to bring about structural changes, such as against segregation. And one of the institutions that was affected was the university. Now, after World War II, is the first time that you get large numbers of white working-class men being able to go to the university. Prior to that, mostly only the elite could go to universities. Now, what is it why after World War II you begin to get white working-class men going to universities? The GI Bill? Right. Okay, GI Bill is really important. And the GI Bill pays their way through college. But now, all kinds of people were GIs. Why is it only white working-class men? Did the GI Bill apply to everybody? Okay, well, the GI Bill actually technically applied to all GIs. The GI Bill was fantastic. You could get your way paid through college, and you could also get a mortgage to buy a house. But the only people who could get into colleges were white men, and the only people who could get mortgages were white, to a great extent. There are, of course, exceptions. But because there was so much segregation in the states, white working-class men were able to take advantage of the GI Bill and get into colleges, and white families were able to purchase homes.

Speaker 5: Right.

Leith Mullings: And homes are really the major form of wealth for most Americans. And black GIs were not able to do this, one, because they were not allowed to get into most colleges, and two, because of all the redlining and all the stuff you know about with segregation, they were not able to buy homes. So there's a very good book, a couple very good books, but one is by a political scientist named Ira Katzner.

Speaker 1: Katzner.

Leith Mullings: Nelson, and it's called When Affirmative Action Was White, and that's about how the GI Bill produced— helped to produce a white middle class. And there's another book by an anthropologist by the name of Karen Brodkin, which is entitled How the Jews Became White, and that's a story of how racial transformation took place. The Jews were originally not considered white, Neither were the Irish, but in the context of these kinds of changes, people become white. All right, so now we're coming then to the point of what is race and why do we say race is a social construction. As people began to understand this, they began to rethink race. So when you think about human beings, human beings are different in all kinds of ways.

Speaker 2: Right.

Leith Mullings: Just look around at all of you, right? People have different kind of hair. People have different eye color. They have different kinds of noses. They have different skin color. They have thumbs that may be flat. They have earwax that may be waxy or may be dry. They have different blood types. They have many, many differences. And what we The way we consider race in this country is that out of all the differences that human beings have, although they are much more the same than different, as we know now from DNA, out of all the differences that human beings have, we picked one. What did we pick? Skin color. And we said skin color is going to be the one difference that we pick out of all the differences by which we are going to categorize people and determine their life chances. Now, think about it. Let's think, for example, suppose we decided to categorize people by blood type. Suppose people wore their blood types on their forehead. Now, that makes a lot more sense, because blood types are important. O, for example, is the universal giver. So, if you're blood type O, like I am, you can give blood to If you're blood type B, you can receive blood from anybody. There are about 5 major blood types. So if people wore their blood types on their forehead and we divided up people by blood type, which is one human difference, now just think about what your difference is, who you might be associated with, how you might look at people differently. So the question is, why did we pick skin color? So what we find as we go back and think about it historically is that over time, it didn't always exist, but at a certain point, particularly with transatlantic slavery and the enslavement of Africans, skin color became a way in which to distinguish people because you could use that to enslave them. And it wasn't always the case, even in the US, in all places. And so there are many studies now by historians which are whiteness studies where they study how did white come to exist. What is whiteness anyway? Is anybody actually white? What does whiteness mean? Okay, so what they would say is that whiteness is a form of privilege. And what's so interesting about these new ways of looking at race is that you can actually look back in history and you can see when in certain places race began to emerge and whiteness began to emerge. So there was something called the Bacon's Rebellion. So they had, you know, at the beginnings of the U.S., they had all kinds of unfree labor. They had enslaved labor from Africa. They had people They had free Africans, they had indentured servants, they had all kinds of people. And so some people got together in Virginia and decided, well, they were going to kind of rise up against the elites because they were being oppressed. And so interestingly enough, you begin to see the way in which the elite classes begin to create racial categories by giving some people privileges So some of the people who were of European descent got certain privileges, like you can vote, whereas people who were not of European descent could not vote. So you begin to get the divisions of people. And a good book on this is by an anthropologist by the name of Pam Buck, B-U-C-K, and the book is called Work to the Bone. And it's really very interesting to read. It's a certain area in Kansas, I believe, and she just shows how whiteness gets created, how people become white. They don't start out as white. They become white. They're created as white. So this is why we say race is a social construction. Now, at this point, you might want to ask me something or a lot of things. What would you like to ask me?

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 3: I don't know if it's relevant to this, but, you know, when When we read the Bible, the Bible goes back— it was written by people that, you know, would call human as a whole race, like the race of humans.

Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3: So, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that they would take the word race, that would put everybody under it, and it would just break it down to Or the race of the Asians or the Europeans.

Leith Mullings: Yeah, no, that came much later. So the human race, people have, you know, generally, you're right, talked about the human race. In the Old Testament, there are different tribes. And so the Old Testament is about the tribe of the Jews, right? And, you know, then you can begin to read about the other people and whatnot. But in the Old Testament, people are described sometimes by phenotype or by all kinds of differences, like the Song of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And the Queen of Sheba is from Africa. And it says something like, you are black but comely. So you find really very different notions of difference, that people describe difference. But what they're not doing is they're putting— is not putting people into these categories. Categories and saying these are categories of race, and based on these categories of race, this is what you're able to do and this is what you're not able to do. So actually, the Bible is quite interesting in that way. So now, isn't anybody going to say to me, well, you can say that all you want, but I can look around and I can tell you who's white and who's black? Okay, who's thinking that? Okay, the guy in the Yankee cap wants to say something.

Speaker 2: I was just like, Agreeing with you via body language. But I think that that's a major part of New York's culture, especially since I have the Yankee hat on. But I find that in New York specifically, again, as we deal with the legacy of Brown v. Board of Ed, is the fact that these lines and the very constructs that we speak of Can be reconstructed, yet they're so much harder and present as— and, you know, they're so much more solid, while the rest of the world and life and humanity in itself is more tenuous, that that becomes almost a microcosm of our being.

Leith Mullings: Right. Okay. So the important point there is that we are saying race is not real. Race is not a biological fact. Race is a social construction. However, racism is real, okay? And that's really important to keep in mind. So, okay, so to continue. So, after the '60s and the '70s and post-Brown versus the Board of Education, you begin to get many more people of color coming into the university. And as people of color come into the university, Yes. They challenge the general curriculum and the production of knowledge. They challenge what is knowledge, what is it that we are saying is true and not true, and how do we know what is true and not true, and to what extent is knowledge created in a particular social context by elites who have certain interest in creating certain forms of knowledge. And so that's the critique that race becomes subjected to. And so what happens is that we begin to understand that, as I said, race as a notion is created in certain contexts, and we can understand, we can go back and look at history and understand the context in which Populations are racialized. So, as I said, humans are characterized by many small differences, and why do we pick one difference and categorize people, and that difference then goes on to affect their life chances? Because racism is real. So, what we do now in social science is we ask, What are the conditions under which populations are racialized? How do states and nations make race? In other words, race now becomes not a noun, not a thing, not a biological fact, but race is a verb. Populations are raced under certain circumstances. So most recently, I think we see the racialization of Middle Eastern populations. They're created as a race and they are discriminated against. So as history changes and different circumstances pertain, different populations are raced or unraised. So the Jews used to be considered a race. They're now considered white. The Irish used to be considered a race. And if you go back and you look at that history, they were talking about Irish the way they were talking about Black people. But how did they stop becoming— when did they become white? A book by David Roediger, a historian, talks about— oh, and no, well, Ignatieff actually wrote the book called How the Irish Became White, although Roediger also talks about it. And it has to do with the Democratic Party and the Irish voting for the Democratic Party. And so the Irish become white. So at the turn of the century, when you have immigrants from Eastern Europe, from Southern Europe, they're all racialized, but they become white under given circumstances. Okay? So we talk then about race as a verb, not as a thing.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Leith Mullings: And that becomes particularly important When we then ask, okay, how does whiteness develop? How and why does whiteness develop? How did whiteness develop and begin to separate working black people from working white people? So white people then think that they have different interests. How does it separate people, and what does this mean for the society? So these are now the kinds of questions we ask.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Leith Mullings: About race. And then when genetics comes into it, what we find is that what we think of as racial groups, there is more homogeneity between what— among what we think of as racial groups than within them. Okay? And 99% of humans are— humans are 99% the same genetically.

Speaker 5: Okay.

Leith Mullings: So the genetics, you know, that doesn't work anymore. So the question is, how do we get these categories? Okay, so one of the most important social movements was black feminism. And so in the '70s, and I think you heard about it last time, you got second-wave feminism. And second-wave feminism made similar critiques about the ideas about gender that pertained and the limitations of women. The Black feminist movement developed soon after that, and I think you had a reading by Angela Davis. And the Black feminist movement tried to deal with the structural inequalities that racialized women— and you notice I say racialized women, women who have been raced—

Speaker 2: Right.

Leith Mullings: Faced in employment, health, and housing, but they also had to confront 2 other issues. One was the notion of an essential category of womanness, that there was such a thing as womanness. And what they found and what they put forward— and they found this both through their struggle and through the kind of work people did in history and in the universities— that the experiences of working-class women and the experiences of women of color differed significantly from that of middle-class women. So the second-wave feminist movement, for the most part, was talking about middle-class white women. And there was just an article today in The Times, which I didn't get to read, but it was talking about Gloria Steinem being the face of feminism, which she was at the time. But these are middle-class white women. And what became clear to black feminists is that their experiences were very different because their experiences had— also had to do with being racialized and being working class. So there's no blackboard in here, but I want you to imagine this. Think of 3 circles that are overlapping, okay?

Speaker 1: Okay.

Leith Mullings: And so one circle, say, is African American. One circle is working class. One circle is— race, class—

Speaker 2: women.

Leith Mullings: Okay. One circle is gender. One circle is women. See, I really need that blackboard. But anyway, so what women of color were saying is that they find themselves in the middle. So they are affected not only by issues that middle-stratum white women— we're about having to do with women, but they're also affected by issues that had to do with being working class and issues that had to do with being Black. And so indeed, this was true all over the world. So many women all over the world were ambivalent about American second-wave feminism because— there's no way I'm going to be able to No, I was going to say I could put this up. Okay, okay, but thank you. Because in fact, they're also dealing with the issue of race and racism. They're also dealing with issues of nationality so that, for example, if you compare the experiences of, say, Black women and middle-stratum white women, one of the things second-wave feminism was about was that women were not in the workforce, that women had been relegated to the suburbs. Now, as we did research and we thought about it, black women have always worked. Black women were never relegated to the home. The vast majority of black women worked because, as a result of discrimination, you always needed 2 salaries to make it. Now, that has become true of everybody.

Speaker 2: Right.

Leith Mullings: In the last couple decades, but throughout history, for African Americans, you generally needed 2 salaries to make it. So they were not— so they, you know, so their issues around feminism were not issues of, you know, I've been relegated to the home in the suburbs. The issues were, you know, I have— I'm working at home, I'm working outside the home, and I'm doing community work.

Speaker 5: Right.

Leith Mullings: I have a triple day. So what black feminism did was to really bring in issues of race and class to talk about the ways in which women had different experiences. This was also true for women around the world. Women around the world who felt, for example, that they were oppressed by colonial— that their countries were oppressed by colonial European powers Said, you know, yeah, there may be issues of gender, but then there are also issues of nationality, the issues that my whole nationality is being oppressed through colonialism. So this is what we call intersectionality, when people begin to think of the relationship of these different forms of oppression and what is the meaning of these different forms of oppression, and so therefore What you then go and do about it. So then, where we come to is then we need to look at these interlocking variables of race, class, and gender, and how do they affect somebody's life? How do they affect somebody's ability to purchase a car, to purchase a home, health, and employment? Does anybody know about any of the studies about purchasing a car or purchasing— or getting a mortgage by sociologists? Okay, so sociologists have done these studies where they send out pairs of people, and I don't know how they ever got it past an institutional review board. You can never get that past an institutional review board, but they have nonetheless done it. But so what they do, for example, is they will take a car dealer, they'll send out a white man, a black man, a white woman, and a black woman. And they will have exactly the same information, credit information, credit status, etc. And what they found was that there were significant differences in how much each category was forced to pay for the same car. So the white man paid the least, the white woman paid the next to the least, the black man paid—

Speaker 1: The most.

Leith Mullings: The next to the most, and the black woman paid the most. They did the same thing with housing and getting mortgage, sending out pairs of people with exactly the same setup. So the issue was to understand how these variables of discrimination actually work and affect people's lives. So we say then that race is a social construction, but racism is real, And racism has real biological consequences. So, race is not biological, but racism has biological consequences. So, one of the things that I study is health, and what we find is that class and race will affect somebody's health. And just recently, Last week, I read a study by Harold Freeman on black women and cancer. And it used to be white women get cancer at greater rates than black women for some reason. However, black women die from cancer at greater rates. And so he put together a whole study in Harlem about why this was so, and at first they thought And it was at first the case that because they didn't have access to medical care, so he set up an experiment where black women got access to medical care, access to early screening, et cetera, but they were still dying at greater rates. And so what he found doing a study was that the reason this was the case was that the doctors Were not giving them the same options that they were giving to the white patients. And they say it's not that the doctors are racist, and the doctors are not consciously racist, but the doctors have in their minds that these women who are black will not be able to understand complicated medical directions and various things to do. And so what they have demonstrated, and they have demonstrated this across across the board with many diseases now is that doctors unconsciously treat people who look different in different ways. And of course, this applies to gender as well, in interesting ways. And that this can explain some of the health disparities that we see among different people. So, again, race is not biological, but racism has biological consequences. So these are the new ways that we're thinking about it. Now, before I go on, are there any questions? Because I'm going to go on to a different, slightly different subject.

Speaker 1: Really, no questions?

Leith Mullings: Now, you know you don't believe everything I said, so ask a question.

Speaker 1: Or have you ever heard of that before? You must want to follow up.

Speaker 6: Well, actually, it's not a question. For the most part, I actually agree, and you're very informative, therefore.

Speaker 3: We—

Speaker 6: I, personally, don't want to interrupt. I want you to continue. But in that sense, that most of us come to clinics, and I don't know if it's, like you said, consciously or unconsciously, they are less informative, based on either appearance, color, race, however they want to categorize you. And, you know, you have experiences where doctors feel like you're asking too much, because they don't expect you to ask. And, you know, I think that goes on, and we accept it as a community, as member of communities. And, you know, it's very informative and educational that you come over here and talk about how we accept it, and somebody points it out. It's even, you know, good, and at the same time bringing awareness.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Good.

Leith Mullings: Glad to hear. Anybody else want to comment at this point?

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Leith Mullings: Before we continue. Okay, so we have these— all these social movements that you've been hearing about going on. And I think we have to say that there were some tremendous victories that came out of these social movements. And it's important to say that and to recognize that because lots of people died for civil rights, in the antiwar movements, And the fact that they're turning back the Voting Rights Act now, to me, is incredibly painful because so many people died, you know, fighting for these kinds of rights, fighting to be able to vote. But we do have changes. So there are no longer white-only signs, right? You don't see them. You used to see them all over the South. In the North, you didn't see them so much, but you couldn't get into places. You no longer have those signs so prominently out there. But what you now have are new forms of racism along with some of the old forms of racism. I think Obama's presidency, for example, has brought out some of the kind of old-style crude racism. But for the most part, In many areas, you have really new forms of racism. And one of them is something that we call colorblindness, or so-called post-racialism. And this is the assumption that the civil rights movement did away with all forms of racism, so that today we live in a colorblind society. And you'll hear this from Ron Paul, for example. Therefore, if anybody doesn't do well, it's not about racism, it's not about class inequality, it's about something being wrong with them. The worst part of it is that people like this incorporate the language that was used to struggle against racism in order to who continue to struggle against racism. So, for example, the phrase from Martin Luther King's speech, which was not my favorite speech, but it's one that's always quoted, that people should be treated on the basis of their character as opposed to the color of their skin. So the assumption for many people now is that is that we've done away with racism, and so if you are— if there are obstacles to your progress, those obstacles have to do with you or your culture. They do not have to do with the structural inequalities of society. But as we study society, we find that those structural inequalities continue and in some ways are worse. But the difference is that they are not open. They are not, you know, no colored allowed signs. They are things such as the prison industrial complex. So you can talk about the prison industrial complex and you never have to mention race. There is incredible inequality In sentencing, in policing, in treatment, in jail, in all kinds of things, so that you have a new— what we call a new site of racialization. And I was just speaking to a young lady before I started speaking who was telling me about schools. So if you look at our high schools, our high schools, many of them are like prisons. You have to go through— A security check. You know, all kinds of gates, and people are treated as though they're prisoners, but the race is not mentioned here. What's mentioned here is crime, but then when you look at it, it's a racialized group. It's a creation. It's the recreation of race in a particular site. I think another thing that you might want to look at is something like the stand-your-ground laws. Now, that is Really an incredible example of this whole notion of we don't have racism anymore. So that if you followed the Trayvon Martin case, the jury supposedly was not told anything about race, right? The jury didn't think it had anything to do with race or racism. Nonetheless, a young man is shot and murdered who's on his way home by a white man, and the white man gets off free.

Speaker 1: Right.

Leith Mullings: So this is now a new form of racism that is racism without mentioning the term race, and in fact denying that race has anything to do with it. But I understand about 29 teenagers of color, the vast majority of them teenagers of color, have been murdered with these stand-your-ground laws, okay, or if you play your music too loud or whatever.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Okay.

Leith Mullings: So these are the new forms of racism. They don't mention race. Okay, so let me get to the good news before I end. The good news is that there are really now many new international collective movements against racism. And we have what we call globalization, which is people and capital and ideas and everything just moving all around the globe at a tremendous speed. And that has brought about problems for a lot of people. It has dispossessed people. But on the other hand, it has also brought people together. And people communicate with each other. And people have learned to understand each other's problems and have begun to see that people have similar issues in different places around the world. So there are new international collective movements against racism in which black women are playing leading roles. So these new social movements are actually successors to international projects such as Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s, which had millions of people at its height and existed all over the world. Or W.E.B. Du Bois' Pan-African Congresses from 1919 to 1945. There were all these international movements where people in different countries were working for the same thing. Some Latin American countries, for example, have had a long history of resistance by people of African descent and indigenous people. However, generally in Latin America and the Caribbean, you have very different frameworks of race than you have in the United States. In very few countries in Latin America and the Caribbean did you have the kind of one-drop rule that you had in the States, right? So that if you had a drop of black blood, you were black. Now, in Latin America and the Caribbean, There's usually a spectrum of people of all different colors, right? And in fact, Brazil used to refer to itself as a racial democracy because people were not segregated either legally or in the same way they are— they were in the United States. However, if you look at the statistics, what you do in fact find is that people of African descent are disproportionately much poorer and people of European descent are disproportionately richer. And with the countries that have indigenous people, similarly with the indigenous people. So people began to start thinking about race in a different way. So one of the good things about the racial categories that you have in the United States States is that you're locked into that racial category. But that racial category had— became in the United States a space for resistance. So it became a space in which people resisted the way in which they were racialized. So that's why you have such a long history of a freedom struggle among Black people in the United States. In many Latin American countries, it did not develop in that way, possibly because there was in fact so much more flexibility with respect to color and the way in which people were categorized. Many people in the same family, you know, some were white, there were many different colors, et cetera, but it was still the case that the hierarchy existed Such that whiteness was considered to be best and indigenousness was considered to be at the lowest end and African descent also. Now, in 2010, the UN held a conference and it was the UN Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Other Forms of Discrimination. And this was a huge conference. And people came from all over the world to Durban, South Africa to this conference. And it was fantastic. I was there. And so there were African-descended people from all over Latin America, from North America, from Canada. The Roma, from— who are otherwise known as the gypsies, came from Europe. The Dalits, who are otherwise known as the untouchables, came from India.

Speaker 1: Right.

Leith Mullings: And they developed this concept of global apartheid, which doesn't have to do with phenotype, but has to do with north-south, global north-south discrimination, discrimination based on how you are racialized or where you are in a given place. And they developed relationships among each other to fight fight this kind of discrimination and to request reparations from the European nations that had colonized all of these areas of the world. And the reparations struggle was actually really going and, you know, becoming a big thing. Now, unfortunately, what happened is that 9/11 took place, and I remember getting home from the conference just 3 days before 9/11. And then once 9/11 happened, you know, everything just kind of dissipated because everything was about security and it became impossible to maintain these movements. Nonetheless, in many areas of Latin America, they maintained these movements and these movements grew. Many of them are led by women. They have net— they have— Women. They have networks that are regional, they have networks that are national, and that they have cross-national networks. And Creola, for example, in Brazil is a group of African-descended women that do all kinds of things. And so in a way, what you see now is you see a sort of inversion In the way in which race is being thought about in Latin America as compared to North America. So in Latin America, people are actually beginning to talk about race and beginning to admit the fact that there is racism. Now, this was not admitted before. And Brazil was considered a racial democracy. And it was— what was his name? It was the one before Lula da Silva. Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Who said Brazil is actually a racist country. When Lula da Silva came in, he actually created various kinds of mechanisms to deal with race and racism. Women in Colombia, in many of the countries in Central America, and in Brazil, black women of African descent began to run for office and began to make all kinds of changes. And so in Latin America, people are talking about race and racism overtly, and Lula da Silva in fact put into effect affirmative action, and this was, you know, really fought by a number of the people, but a very effective affirmative action to get people of African descent and indigenous people into universities by quotas. And in the U.S., on the other hand, we are now denying that racism exists. And we are taking apart affirmative action. So even though my Spanish is terrible, I love to spend time in Latin America. It, you know, just reminds me of the kind of struggle that was going on with the social movements in the '60s and the '70s, et cetera. So what you now have then is an inversion. However, currently many of the populations, the indigenous populations in Latin America and the African-descended populations have really been very successful in some of their struggles. They have gained constitutional recognitions. So in many Latin American countries, the constitution has been written— rewritten to recognize people of African descent and indigenous people And their rights to land, and they are fighting to stay on their land. Now, it is a major struggle often because there are many international and national forces trying to push them off their land. So in Colombia, for example, the richest land is on the Pacific coast, and that is where people of African descent have traditionally lived. But that is also the area of the country where there are the most minerals, where the Where there's the most biodiversity, and there's also where rivers come inland and a lot of drug dealing, trafficking can be done. So there's a real effort to push people off the land, and there are a lot of wars going on. In Guatemala, the mining industries are attempting to get rid of the indigenous people who live on the land. Guatemala has a history of warfare.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Leith Mullings: But the mining industries are really engaging in genocidal practices, as has been the case for quite a while. So there are many struggles going on around the questions of ethnicity and race. And in some areas, African-descended people and indigenous people are working together. In other areas, there are tensions among them. So women then who have— so now if you look at some of the kind of parallels with the U.S., what you find is increased dispossession with globalization. So it can be— in the U.S., it's dispossession of neighborhoods. So Harlem, Central Harlem is now less than 50% Black, okay? Central Harlem is a traditional Black community, is now less than 50% Black as a result of gentrification.

Speaker 5: Right.

Leith Mullings: Similarly, in Latin America, African-descended and indigenous people are being pushed off their land. In these areas, women have been especially active in organizing, and particularly because women are the ones who have caretaking responsibilities. And because they have caretaking responsibilities, they have been very active In community work, in trying to keep their land, trying to keep their shelter, et cetera. As women of color migrate in search of work and come to the U.S. to support their families, they are also involved in organizing. For example, many women from the Philippines, from Asia, from Latin America, from the Caribbean, from Central America, come to the U.S. and work as domestic workers. And working as a domestic worker is probably one of the hardest jobs there is and one of the most difficult jobs there is. However, in New York State, they have now formed an organization called the Domestic Workers Union. Now, this is a major, major thing because domestic workers, as you know, are scattered. They're not all on a shop floor in a factory or something.

Speaker 5: Right.

Leith Mullings: They're all over the place. And they have been able to overcome the obstacles of isolation to form a domestic workers union, and they had a domestic workers bill of rights pushed through the New York State Senate a couple of years ago. Now remember that historically domestic workers have been black women. Domestic workers now are women of color, but often immigrant They were left out of all of the legislation that you got with the New Deal. There was a deal made with the South, and so domestic workers were not included in workers' rights, as neither were the black farmers, right? And this was the way they got things like Social Security passed, that it didn't have to apply to these groups. So now they have a union, and they are organizing nationally. So that's a very good thing. Finally, I'd say that black women have been tremendously active in contesting the international— and it is international— prison industrial complex. All over the world, there has been a tremendous and precipitous rise in incarceration of people of color. And there is a book by a sociologist by the name of Julia Sudberry It's called International Lockdown or something like that, and she points out that as conditions get worse all over the world, you have people increasingly incarcerated for crimes of survival, and that in fact U.S. prisons, U.S. private prisons are moving all over the world to help set up prisons in different countries. What has happened now in the U.S., of course, is that people have realized that it is way too expensive to maintain the level of incarceration at the level that they have been maintaining it, and so you begin to have now openings. The Rockefeller drug laws, people have worked against that for a long time, critical resistance. That is hopefully on its way out, but in the meantime, people have been unjustly incarcerated for many years. And as they come out, the question is going to be how we deal with their rights, because in New York State, for example, there's a long list of jobs that people who are formerly incarcerated cannot hold, including being a barber, for example.

Speaker 2: Right.

Leith Mullings: Housing is almost impossible to get. So these are the issues that we face, and these are the issues that people are involved with. But I have to say that we're now having some successes, and so we should be cheered by this. And I think with our new mayor, for example, you'll see some changes, I hope. I don't know about the police commissioner, but we hope we'll see some changes. And I think we're seeing changes with respect to the whole issue of this incarceration that could not be maintained. The U.S. incarcerated more people than any other country in the world. So let me show you some cheerful pictures so that you can see what some of these people look like that I'm talking about. Okay, so, yeah, I'll slide change. Okay, so this is a project that I'm working with now. Hemispheric comparative anti-racism project. So these are people from 5 different countries. And what happened is that, if you think about it, you know, Obama was elected president. Evo Morales, who is indigenous, was elected as the first indigenous president ever in Latin America in Bolivia. But at the same time that Obama's elected president, And Evo Morales is elected president, you really have a precipitous rise in racist incidents and violence. And so the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, says that it has risen to an incredible level. In Bolivia, you had this incident called the Sucre Incident, where indigenous people were kind of Who had come to see their president, Evo Morales, speak were beaten and incarcerated because— and made to kneel down and apologize for the fact that Evo Morales was president. So as a result of this, we formed these anti-racist networks in 5 different countries. And so these are some of the people that— who are in this network, and you see that they are both—

Speaker 5: Black.

Leith Mullings: of indigenous descent, they're white, they're of African descent. And what we hope to do is to really do some studies of comparative racism and the strategies used against racism and see what works cross-hemispherically. And this is— we were at a meeting in Rio, Brazil, and this is some of the Some of the material that comes out of Brazil where they are in fact again, you know, fighting for African-descended people and integration. I love this graffiti. This was also in Rio. And so you see that it's a graffiti of Martin Luther King and it's really a symbol of the unity of struggles Cross-hemispheric. And this is Derce, who is an indigenous woman from Guatemala who was present at our conference, and her father had been a community organizer in Guatemala trying to keep the indigenous people on their lands against the mining companies who were trying to dispossess them from their land. And her father was assassinated, and so she was at this conference. And you see what a beautiful woman she is, telling us about her culture and her community and how they were trying to fight. And so finally, this is Crioula, which is a Brazilian black women's organization, and they are attending a conference at the same time we were having our conference. In fact, they hosted our conference. So I guess all this is to say that there's a lot of work to do, but there are a lot of people that are very active in doing it. So I'm actually feeling that this is a positive time in history when we can— when we're able to cross national boundaries and cross ethnic boundaries to actually create the kind of world that we want to see. Thank you.

Speaker 3: You just touched on something that I was thinking about when you were saying, like, you know, the United States is doing all this. And when I grew up in Brazil, I never thought— I never thought of my skin color. Never, you know, never. You know, sometimes I think about some comments and I go back and I go, oh, maybe, you know.

Leith Mullings: Yeah.

Speaker 3: But the thing is, when you point it out, and of course I hear things also over the years that, you know, you come to realize at an older age, this is what it was. But you were saying about the inversion, you're so absolutely right, because over there, you know, it was not something on your face.

Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3: It was always like, you're getting older, your skin is getting darker. But, you know, these things, like, they don't really affect you if there's not anybody else to come and push them into your mind. But later on you realize, you know, these are little things that go unnoticed. And now the soap operas, from maybe a decade ago to now, they were showing— I saw in my mother's home because she has the satellite— that they were talking about racism. And the women were like, I'm a—

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: A Black woman— they say it differently, but they say, I'm a Black woman in this soap opera. And the mother and the daughter in a dialogue, talking about it, you know, which before you would not see that on TV. And as well as about 2 or 3 days ago, my sister called me today, and she was telling me that some woman— she went into a nail salon, and the Black woman started staring at her. I think she was doing her nails. I'm not sure.

Speaker 2: I see.

Speaker 3: I have to read that. And she looked at the woman and she said, what are you looking at me for, you negra? And then this whole thing escalated to the point— there was no physical contact, but they were so astonished by the woman, what she was saying to this other woman that was black, that they called the police. And the woman now is responding in court for her actions, which before I don't think it would have happened. Have gone unnoticed and not talked about. So yes, when you were saying that, I was like, wow, you know, it is so true, I guess. You know, not I guess, for sure.

Leith Mullings: Yeah, no, that's— yeah, a lot of people talk about that. And there's also a lot of resistance to it. There's still many Brazilian social scientists who accuse Americans, Black Americans, of being imperialistic in bringing American racial categories to Brazil. Now, it is absolutely the case that Brazilian racial categories and the race situation is very different. It is not the same as in the United States. But there is racism in Brazil. And yeah, and African Americans tend to be quite sensitive to racism. So they have generally been able to point it out. Yeah.

Speaker 5: I just wanted to make a comment about You were talking about the colorblind mentality and how people try to basically place, you know, any oppression that you feel on yourself. And, um, it's funny because I have that issue with like some of my friends, some of my family members. And, um, even when you hear Bill Cosby speak out against Black people, you know, it's always like we have to pull ourselves up and stop acting a certain way as if racism doesn't exist, you know, and different. You know, institutions, different parts of society, you know, and it's funny that they basically want you to forget what happened, and basically, you know, like, this is a new time, this is a new era, and I personally don't believe that.

Leith Mullings: No, you're absolutely right. And particularly if you're a young man of color, I mean, you're often in very dangerous situations, and to ignore that is really at your peril. You're absolutely right. Just another little version of this.

Speaker 2: When I went to Mexico back in the 1960s, I was informed that mestizo women differ in hairy legs, and this was a way of saying, I'm American, I'm not Indian. And that was what I was told down in Mexico.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Leith Mullings: And so, as the indigenous people are really organizing, and I think 2 decades ago or so was the decade of the indigenous people, and they organized across the world, really, in the U.S., in Latin America, in Canada, to really demand indigenous rights in conjunction with the United Nations. And so they have been able to, based on U.N. law— the U.S. doesn't pay much attention to say the Declaration of Human Rights and all of the declarations that come out of the UN. But many other countries, people in many other countries are able to organize around these things and make claims based on some of the declarations of the UN.

Speaker 1: We have time for one last question.

Leith Mullings: Okay. I'm wondering, you made a statement to the effect that 9/11 kind of set back progress in toward making, you know, toward eliminating racism. I'm wondering what your comments would be with regard to the election of President Obama, because I felt that after his election so many people said, oh, racism is over, you know, and I believe we lost ground on that basis. Yeah, yeah, that's a very complicated and interesting question. And people certainly do say, well, you've elected a black president, how can there be any racism? And by any measure, many indices of racism have really risen. And those Southern Poverty Law studies are really interesting to look at. The racist websites, the racist incidents, the racist violence, you know, it has just gone like that. And I think that's a very important point. And if you look at the way in which Obama is treated, right? I mean, now, if you thought there was no racism before, I mean, just look at that. Don't look at anything else. With respect to losing ground, you know, some people suggest that because the president is black, Movements have not developed that need to develop to confront the powers that be. I actually put that not so much on the president, but on us, really. You know, we voted for him, and then we went home.

Speaker 2: There you go.

Speaker 1: Right?

Leith Mullings: And that's always a mistake. There's nothing anybody in any office like that can do without a tremendous amount of pressure from the people.