If in this moment of crisis, in this moment of conflict and controversy, in this moment where democracy is being threatened, we remain silent.

I don't think it's just apathetic.

I don't think it's just cowardly.

I think it's dishonorable.

And So if we are Americans committed to a future, if we are Americans who believe in freedom, of quality and justice, we have to now speak out.

We have to do things, and we have to be prepared.

That may mean things get uncomfortable, but we have behind us generations who did those uncomfortable things to make this nation the nation that it is in hopes that we would continue that struggle.

And so that's what I'm embracing in this moment.

Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Curic, and this is next question.

I've probably interviewed thousands of people over the years, but whenever anyone asked me who my favorite is, I don't even have to think about it.

It's Brian Stephen.

He has an extraordinary presence in a way of taking the most painful and confounding issues we face as a country and helping us see them with clarity, perspective, and even a sense of hope.

Brian is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, where he has spent decades taking on some of the hardest work imaginable, challenging racial injustice, mass incarceration, and the death penalty.

His work has given voice and dignity to people who are too often forgotten.

It also inspired the creation of the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, which forced us to confront our history honestly while pointing us toward healing and hope.

And of course, his best selling memoir Jess Mercy, has become a touchstone for so many people around the world.

We really covered a lot of ground in this conversation.

We talked about the troubling things we're seen in this country right now, the progress that's been made or being reversed, the regressions that are just as real, and where we go from here.

I hope you enjoy our time together as much as I did.

Brian Stevenson.

I am so thrilled to have you here.

Thank you so much for coming by.

It's good to be with you.

And there's so many things I want to talk to you about, because I can't tell you how many times I've thought about you and how you might be reacting to a whole host of things that are happening in this country under the Trump administration.

I also think back on when I really got to know you and what the environment was in this country, and that was around twenty eighteen, I think, and there was a sense then that this country might be finally coming to terms with its past and confronting racial injustice head on.

And now, just what seven years later, we're seeing a retreat and even a reversal, not only from policy issues like DEI and police reform, but from even acknowledging our country's history of systemic racism.

I have one question for you, Brian, what the hell is going on?

And I really have been looking forward to talking to you and almost having a therapy session with you, if you will well, I.

Think your question frames the moment we're in really perfectly.

Throughout most of American history, we have been silent about the harms of our history, about all of the damage that was done, about the false narratives that we embraced to justify the displacement of millions of Native people when Europeans arrived.

You know, there were millions of indigenous peoples here before Europeans arrived, we wanted their land, We wanted this and so even though we created a constitution that talked about equality and liberty and justice for all, we didn't apply those concepts to Native people.

We instead created this narrative of racial difference.

And I think that was like an infection that took root in America and behind that kind of misguided narrative where we said that Native people are savages.

Indigenous peoples are not like the rest of us, so we don't have to extend to them a quality liberty and justice, and we can force them off their land, and we can reduce their population, we can do all of these terrible things.

That same narrative was used to justify two hundred and forty six years of slavery.

And I continue to believe that the great evil of slavery wasn't the forced labor, the bondage, the violence, the cruelty that was horrific.

I think the greatest evil of slavery was the narrative that was created to justify enslavement.

Because people who enslaved other people didn't want to think of themselves as immoral or indecent or unchristian.

And how do you think of yourself as a decent person when you see mothers being pulled away from their screaming children, knowing those mothers will never see those children again because you chose to sell them.

How do you think of yourself as decent when you see the cruelty and the violence.

Well, you need a narrative, and we created a false narrative that black people aren't as good as white people, that black people are less capable, less worthy, less human, less evolved, and that narrative of racial difference was the great evil of slavery in America, and it outlasted the Civil War.

The North wan the Civil War, but the South wan the narrative war.

Because after the Civil War, even our commitment to use law to protect formally enslaved people failed.

The Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection to formally enslaved people, the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote, were quickly abandoned by our US Supreme Court and other court legal institutions who sided with states' rights over the US Constitution.

And that's what led to that century of violence and lynching.

It's what led to Jim Crow, It's what led to racial segregation.

It led to the silence about this history and our textbooks and schools.

It led to bias against other immigrant groups when they came to this country.

Asian people, even ethnic minorities like the Irish and the Italians were initially targeted until they adopted whiteness or adopted an identity that wasn't other, wasn't racially different.

And that was our history and continued to be our history.

And I think the consequences of that are really painful.

We did horrific things to black and brown people.

Millions of black people had to flee their homes in the first half of the twentieth century because of terror of violence that raged uncontrolled throughout the American South.

They went to Chicago and Cleveland and Detroit and Los Angeles and Oakland, not as immigrants looking for new economic opportunities, but as refugees and exiles from terror of violence in the American South.

And they weren't entirely welcome in those places, and they were put in what you could call the equivalent of a refugee camp.

And we see the footprints of those camps in South Side of Chicago and East Saint Louis and poor neighborhoods across the urban north and West.

They abandoned lands that they owned, and therefore were denied the opportunity to create wealth for their children and their grandchildren.

And we have a wealth gap in America today that is rooted in the displacement of millions of black families who could have used their land to create wealth, but were denied that because we didn't commit to their constitutional rights.

In the fifties and sixties, you began to see some organizing to push back against that, and the heroic Civil rights movement tore down the legal architecture of racial segregation, of that narrative of racial difference, but the idea was still with us, the practice was still with us.

The cultural conditioning.

The cultural conditioning.

That's exactly right, and so for the last sixty and seventy years we've been continuing to experience those harms.

And when women and people of color got into the workforce, got into places they had historically been excluded, and they outperform their white male counterparts, they should have been promoted, they should have been celebrated.

But because of these narratives, we didn't trust women and people of color to have the leadership positions they deserve because they were more skilled, and we denied them those opportunities, and so then we began to realize that that wasn't right, that wasn't fair, and that was the genesis behind DEI.

That's when we started to say, oh, you know what wrong to not put the most skilled person in the position of leadership just because she's a woman, or because this person is black or brown.

And that was an effort to begin repairing the harm that is connected to this narrative of racial difference.

But I think Brian, a lot of people thought, well, don't put the less skilled person just because they are a minority in that position.

I think that's how so many people interpreted that's right.

DEI efforts, that's right, And I think we have to fault the corporate bodies and the institutions that started implementing these policies because what they should have said is we have done wrong.

We've had lots of women in our workforce, We've had lots of people of color in our workforce who were more skilled, and yet they were passed over for promotion.

They weren't given leadership opportunities because of their race, because of their gender.

We made that mistake, we did something wrong, and now to repair that by committing to correcting that cultural conditioning.

But they didn't want to admit that they had done things in a bad way.

They didn't want to say we backed it poorly.

I got on a plane recently and I was sitting next to someone and the pilot came on.

The pilot was a woman, the co pilot was a black man.

And the person sitting next to me turned to me and said, oh, my god, did you see who the pilot and co pilot is?

And I said I did.

He said, Wow, this is going to be a really scary flight.

You know, they're not skilled and qualified to fly this plane.

Come on, someone said that to you.

Yeah, yes, that's exactly right.

What And I said to him, I said, oh, sir, when I saw that woman and I saw that pilot, I actually relaxed because I knew that they were likely more skilled than most other pilots, because for an airline to give them this opportunity, they had to outperform their counterpoints.

That's been my experience is that you actually have to do a little bit better when you're a person of color, when you're a woman, and so I actually feel more comfortable than I would ordinarily feel.

And what did he say?

He just looked at me.

He said, well, I never thought about it like that.

But that is the consequence of corporate institutions not saying we failed, we did something wrong, we did discriminate, we did not give the most skilled person the job because of their gender and their race, and now we're going to commit to doing that.

And so instead of it being presented as a gimme to unqualified, less skilled people because of their race and gender, it was actually a remedy for harm that was done to people because of their race and gender.

And we don't like owning up to the mistakes we made.

And that's the same thinking that was shaping other cultural institutions, educational bodies.

Textbook writers should have said, we failed, we did something wrong by not talking honestly the history of America, and now we're going to try to correct that by having more comprehensive, more inclusive language and text and our books.

We've disfavored people because of their race and gender.

We skipped that part and we embraced this moment of response without acknowledging the harm.

Twenty twenty was a very powerful example of that.

You saw police violence manifesting in ways it made it undeniable that there's a problem.

When ab at Arbury was shot while jogging, when Breonna Taylor was killed, when George Floyd was killed, people were saying, we've got to do something about this.

And I wanted police departments to say, you're right, We've got a lot of officers that presume people are dangerous and guilty because of their race, because of their color.

You're right, we need to fix a problem we have presuming dangerous and gilt based on race.

But instead we just talked about, you know, we're going to do this, We're going to do that.

And then as the cultural environment shifted, there was this big push against it, and people thought people who didn't deserve things were getting things that they don't deserve, when in fact we were addressing long standing problems that have long existed.

I went to Harvard Law School.

I've got a lot of degrees and awards.

I've won cases at the US Supreme Court, and I've been in courtrooms representing clients, getting there early, sitting at defend's council's table where the judge will walk in and immediately get mad at me.

The judge will look at me and say, hey, hey, you get back out there in the hallway.

I don't want any defendant sitting in my courtroom without their lawyer, and I have to stand up and say, well, I'm sorry, your honor, I am the lawyer.

I didn't introduce myself.

My name is Brian Stevenson.

I have to try to de escalate this situation, and I was doing that recently.

I was in a courtroom in the Midwest and the judge started laughing, but it wasn't an apologetic laugh and it kind of angered me.

And the prosecutor started laughing.

They thought it was so funny, and I was sitting They're getting angry, and then I thought, oh no, Brian, you can't get angry.

You need to smile.

You may need to laugh.

And I felt that way because my client was not going to be able to leave that county.

I was able to leave that county and never come back based on the way I was treated if I chose to do that, but my client was going to have to stay there.

So when they were laughing, I smiled and then I eventually chuckled.

Client came in.

We did the hearing, but I remember sitting in my car after that hearing, thinking, Wow, here I am this middle aged black man.

I'm in my best suit actually argue the case of the Supreme Court that we were trying to implement.

I got all of these degrees and awards, and I'm still required to laugh at my own humiliation to do justice for my client.

That's not right.

That's not fair.

And I'm getting old enough to know that.

When you have to constantly navigate presumptions of dangerousness and guilt because of your color, when you have to tell your children how to survive or police encounter, what to do and what not to do, how they can't do the things that their white friends can do because they're going to be burdened with this presumption.

When you have to constantly navigate this world, it's exhausting.

And I want something better.

I want something better for everybody.

And that's why the commitment to truth telling, the commitment to building institutions that help us understand the harms of history, is such a priority.

It's why we were making necessary progress in twenty eighteen, and I think some people again misinterpreted it.

You know, we opened our sites and I talk a lot about this, and I think sometimes when people hear me talking about slavery and lynching and segregation, they think I want to punish America for this history.

Have no interest in punishment.

My interest is liberation.

My interest is getting us to get to the point where we are unburdened by this history.

I want the children of my grandchildren and their children to be born into ay where they or not presumed dangerous or guilty because of their race.

I want us to get to the point where we're not breathing in the pollution created by this long history of racial injustice that we just haven't addressed and so it's still with us.

I want us to get past that fear that is everywhere because we have these unaddressed problems created by our history.

Hi.

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Addressing these problems, though, Brian, for some Americans, I think sent them into this shame spiral and a feeling that, hey, this was a long time ago and this has nothing to do with me.

So I think there was a shame element that people felt was imposed on them, that they rejected, and then I think that morphed into demonizing these efforts, this acknowledgment and a deeper understanding about our past with the word woke, and that has become obviously not even a talk whistle, but a loud signal that the pendulum had simply swung too far.

And I'm curious to get your thoughts on that the rejection or discomfort people felt, and if there were instances where this evolution and this deeper understanding could have been less jarring or offensive for people.

I know that's a strange question because it was neither jarring nor offensive for me, and I am grateful for everything that I've learned and experienced, But I'm just thinking about what I've heard people say yeah.

I think what was jarring for people is that throughout most of our history people have never really had to encounter this.

But it's also not unprecedented.

In the nineteenth century, when abolitionists began saying slavery is moral, it is unacceptable, it has to end.

In the regions of this country where the whole economic infrastructure was built on enslavement and the forced labor of people who had been abducted and kidnapped, that was a moment of crisis, and so they started banning books on abolition.

They made it illegal for enslaved people to be in possession of literature about abolition.

Even white people in the South could be arrested and prosecuted if they were in possession of these materials.

They just could not accept a world where the basic economic infrastructure would be attacked, and then with that led to war.

When we got on the other side of that, people in Congress passed all of these laws, civil rights laws.

There was a Ku Klux Klan Act that was passed to protect formerly enslaved people from mob violence and lynching violence.

But it was again a narrative.

People were rejecting and instead of saying we reject all of the bigoted thinking that supported enslavement.

People tried to hold on to it, and they were rewarded by retreating from those laws, and so a new narrative emerged that you know, nothing that bad was done by the Confederacy who rebelled against this country.

The insurrectionists who led that weren't bad people.

It wasn't treason, it was something else.

And that loss caused narrative, and those people were empowered, and then we created this codified racial hierarchy.

That same resistance that we're seeing was also on display in the nineteen fifties and sixties when black people in Montgomery said it's not right that we have to give up our seats on buses to white people because we're black, And they said it's not right that we don't get to vote in this country when we are citizens and have had that right for one hundred years, and they started marching and engaging in non violent protests.

There was a sense that, oh, this is a crisis.

We've got to do everything we can to stop this, and ultimately those voices of change, the abolitionists during the time of slavery, those who fought against lynching, those who fought against racial segregation in Jim Crow prevailed, and I want to say right here we will prevail again in this moment of resistance.

But right now we're in the heat of the battle.

Those same voices that are saying, oh, you can't talk about slavery, you can't talk about lynching, you can't talk about segregation, are, in my judgment, replicating the behaviors of people in power that go all the way back to the time of enslaving.

It's no different than those who enslaved other people saying no, we can't have abolitionism, we can't have an end to slavery.

It's no different than those who did nothing.

When white mobs formed outside of churches and schools, in jails and pulled people out and tortured them on the courthouse lawn.

That was lawlessness.

It was the opposite of public safety.

It was terrorism that we tolerated for decades.

When people said we're not going to ride these buses, We're going to boycott the buses.

They were saying, no, you can't do that, and they use threats and violence.

They arrested people.

Doctor King was arrested for driving thirty miles an hour in a twenty five mile an hour zone.

This is nineteen fifty six.

He's a young twenty some year old, twenty six year old preacher.

Then they started arresting people because they were saying this is wrong.

Those civil rights protesters like John Lewis were getting arrested and beaten.

That was a violent response to trying to get us where we're trying to go.

So I think we have to understand that history as we understand what's been happening over the last decade.

So finally, in twenty fifteen, for the first time, we create a museum in the Smithsonian Complex that's about the history of African Americans.

And it can't be an honest museum if it doesn't talk about that period of enslavement, if it doesn't talk about terror, violence, if it doesn't talk about pggregation, if it doesn't talk about those hardships.

And then we started seeing other cultural institutions, and then people started talking about how do we recover, how do we repair?

And I don't think that is inherently jarring, it's not inherently problematic, But when you've been silent forever, when you've never had to do it, it can feel that way, and so I don't think it was a mistake.

I don't think there were errors made.

I think we just didn't help people understand the things that they need to understand, and we're still in the early stages of that.

I mean, for me, I think about this from a faith perspective, and I think faith communities have a larger role to play in this moment than they have embraced.

But in my faith tradition, as a Christian, you can't come to my church and say I want heaven and redemption and salvation, but I'm not going to admit to ever doing anything wrong.

I'm not going to acknowledge any sin.

The clergy in my church will lovingly tell you that it doesn't work like that, that you can't actually experience redemption.

You can't experience all of the beautiful things if you're unwilling to repent, to confess, and you shouldn't feel bad about confession.

You shouldn't feel bad about repentance because that's what opens up.

Your heart and that should feel cleansed.

You should feel clean.

That's how you get to experience grace and mercy.

It's the beautiful transition that allows you to walk out anew different changed and we haven't done that.

We've denied people in this country that moment of transformation, and individuals have had it, communities have had it, a lot of people have had it, and they feel energized by it.

I look at Germany.

I just got back from Berlin two weeks ago.

It's a nation that ultimately, not immediately, but ultimately said we have to repent, we have to confess, we have to acknowledge that we were the villain of the twentieth century and we did something horrific.

And when you go to Berlin, you can't go to two hundred meters without seeing markers and stones and monuments dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.

I know they are everywhere.

Everywhere.

They have memorials for Jewish victims, for gay victims, for the Roma, and for the Centi.

And there's this reckoning with that past.

In Germany, every student is required to study the Holocaust.

You can't graduate.

And I think it's even in elementary school, and.

Even in elementary school.

When I was at the Holocaust, when I saw elementary students coming to that space, and there are no Adolf Hitler monuments in Berlin.

There are no statutes honoring the Nazis.

They're not naming military bases after the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

There's a reckoning and because of that, we see Germany as an ally.

I encourage people to go or Brilliant, it's a beautiful city.

We see them as someone we can work with, even though not that long ago they were gripped in this politics of fear and anger, this narrative of hatred and violence.

But there's been redemption.

And I live in a region and you know, this region where our landscape is still littered with iconography celebrating the perpetrators of that narrative of racial difference, of that ideology of white supremacy, of that hate and violence.

Montgomery, Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama.

And I think because we haven't reckoned, we're still held back.

And so what I think we have to help people understand is that you don't have to fear truth telling.

And it's interesting because in most areas of our life, we know that truth is important in relationships, personal relationships.

You know, in a marital relationship, if you make a mistake, if you say something you shouldn't say, you hurt your partner in any kind of way.

The only way you get past that is by talking about it.

You have to say I'm sorry, I didn't realize I made a mistake, and you have to get to the point where there's forgiveness.

If you show me to people in a loving relationship for fifty years, I'll show you two people who have learned how to apologize to one another to get past the inevitable mistakes and hardships.

It's how you build something stronger.

And I do believe that the truth sets you free, allows you to get to a place.

And I am persuaded, and I think what I and others are trying to do.

I am persuaded there's something better waiting for us in America.

I don't think our best days are behind us.

I think there's something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, more like healthy living, more like a healthy community, And it's waiting for us.

But we won't get there if we're still burdened and bound by the history of harm, that we won't let go, that we won't acknowledge.

Why is it so hard?

You know?

I agree with your assessment of Berlin.

You look at places like Rwanda.

Why is it so difficult for Americans to acknowledge these painful chapters?

And then there's the other side of the coin of people who say, Okay, we get it, we get it, let's move on, which is something that I hear from people.

And how do you balance those two things, Brian?

The need to understand, value, appreciate, accept and learn from your past mistakes, but also taking that and moving forward and not focusing on it so much that the moving forward part is difficult to do.

Yeah, well, I do think it's important to understand the differences between America and most of the places that we now acknowledge as having gone through transitional justice.

In South Africa, a black majority took over.

It was no longer a country ruled by a white minority, and so you had a truth and reconciliation process because that black majority realized it was important to create space for the victims of apartheid to give voice to their harm.

In Rwanda, there was a military intervention and so the victims of that genocide became empowered, and so that powerful genocide museum was something that a new order was able to facilitate.

The Nazis lost the war and because the Nazis lost the war and the Allies insisted on some confrontation of that history.

Eventually, not immediately because there was resistance to truth telling in Germany in the nineteen sixties and seventies, but eventually things changed.

But there was a shift in power, and the wrongdoers, as it were, the people who were directly responsible for that injury and harm, lost power, and a new regime came in and it became easier for them to facilitate it because they disassociated themselves from that prior regime.

That hasn't happened in America.

It could have happened after the Civil War had we made reconstruction work.

But because we retreated from reconstruction and our courts gave in to states' rights, the very same architects that had tried to preserve slavery that evolved enslavement, evolved into this world order that looked very much like slavery.

We created constitutions that literally said they were about white supremacy.

We created and mandated racial hierarchy.

And then even after the Civil Rights movement, when we had a moment in the nineteen sixties to finally transition ourselves, there was no real denunciation of segregationists.

There was no repudiation of Jim Crow and white supremacy.

We didn't distance ourselves from this that We just tried to accommodate those who had been resistant.

We tried to kind of make them feel okay, and that was the priority.

What do you mean accommodate those who had been resistant?

Well, I think you know.

Every Southern legislator in Congress voted against the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, most every Southern voted against the Voting Rights Act.

And we didn't say, how can you represent this country if you're going to deny the right to vote to US citizens.

We had the Justice Department become the institution in power to enforce these things, and they were constantly saying, you can't do that, you can't do that in the seventies and the eighties and the nineties.

But we never made it so that people felt like it was wrong to resist implementation of the Voting Rights Act or Civil Rights Act.

My school didn't integrate until a decade after Brown Versus Board of Education.

Schools and Bama didn't integrate until the nineteen seventies, and rather than embrace integration, As you know, most white parents pulled their kids out of those schools and put them in all white private academies with the hope that they could shield them from integration that goes on today.

The schools in Montgomery, Alabama are as racially segregated today as they were seventy years ago.

There was that resistance even then, And sometimes I joke because if we really wanted that moment to turn into something like what we've seen in other countries, we would have thought about it differently.

I think it would have been appropriate.

Fred Gray, an amazing lawyer, my friend and mentor, still actively practicing law in his nineties, and who was of course one of the critical lawyers around Browner versus Gaale, the case that involved in Montgomery bus boycott, all of those litigations.

I keep saying to mister gres and mister Gray, we need to get back to nineteen sixty five.

We need to get in a time machine, and we have to make some different arguments, because I think what we should have demanded of the states that had violated the rights of African Americans for so long is something remedial like I don't think it would have been wrong to say in nineteen sixty five, then all of these states that had disenfranchised almost all of the black population.

You have to automatically register black people when they become eighteen years of age.

You have to do something that acknowledges the harm of a century of violence and disenfranchisement, not just for them, but for you, so that you're not confused about the fact that what happened over the last century was wrong, was unconstitutional, was un American.

And now to get to something better, we need to do something remedial.

If I make a mistake and bump into somebody on the street and they fall and injure themselves, I can't just keep walking and feel good about myself.

I first have to say I'm so sorry.

Please know I did not intend to run into you.

If I hear that they're really injured, I want to keep up with them, and I'm doing that for them, but I'm also doing it for me.

And we never created that opportunity in the nineteen sixties for all of these effects.

They didn't want it, so we were going to have to push them.

But because we didn't do that, we didn't just continue.

And then not that much later, they were trying to say, oh, we don't need that Voting Rights Act anymore.

Shelby County is a twenty thirteen case that went to the US Supreme Court where they were arguing, oh, we don't need that.

It's been oppressive, it's unfair to us.

That just says we're still rooted in that idea.

So in that regard, we have not done what these other countries have done because we have not been required to do it.

And too many people have tried to embrace that history as if something there was nothing wrong with it, which is why I do react in a negative way when I hear someone say make America great again.

It's that last word that gives me problems.

Make America great, I'm all for it again is what confuses me, because what is the era of greatness that we're somehow trying to get back to.

Hopefully not the pre civil rights era when black people were humiliated on a daily basis.

Hopefully not the first half of the twentieth century when millions of black people were fleeing their homes and lands because of mob violence and racial terror violence.

Hopefully not the nineteenth century when four million black people were enslaved living in horrific conditions being brutalized and violated.

I need to understand what that again is referring to.

But because we're romanticizing our past and we're glorifying our past, we're not disconnecting from that harm of history.

But I also feel like in many ways we're erasing our past.

If you look at what the administration is doing, whether it's in national parks, military installations, libraries, museums, schools.

The recent discussion about removing that photo, that very very famous photo of the slave with welts all over his back that I think is currently at a civil rights monument or a civil rights location in Georgia.

What is going on?

Yeah, what is going on?

Did you predict this?

You're such a student of history.

Did you say it's coming?

I sort of did.

I mean, you know the reason, you know, I spent my career as a lawyer.

As I mentioned, I'm a product of brown versus board of education.

I grew up in a community where black children couldn't go to the public schools.

I was in a community where very few of the adults had high school degrees, not because they weren't smart or hard working, but there were literally no high schools were black people in our county when my dad and his generation were coming up, and it took lawyers coming into our community to open up the public schools.

If you took a vote in the mid sixties when I was a little boy about whether kids like Brian could go to the public schools because the county was a eighty percent white and twenty percent black, we would have lost the vote.

People weren't going to vote to integrate the schools.

It took the rule of law.

It took lawyers enforcing the Supreme Court's decision, and without Brown versuspot of education, without those rulings from the court, we would not have had that civil rights revolution.

And so I became a lawyer because I wanted to use that saying power to help other disfavored people, marginalize people who we still have in this country.

And I spent the first part of my career representing people on death row, children prosecuted as adult, people who had been wrongly convicted and unfairly sentenced, because I knew that the law would protect them in ways that the legislature might not, that politics might not because of the way politics plays out.

And we've had a lot of success.

But about twelve thirteen years ago, I remember distinctly waking up one day we had lost a case that I thought we could have won five years earlier, a decade earlier.

I could sense that many courts were getting tired of trying to insist on full compliance with the law, full compliance with the Constitution, full compliance with equal protection.

And I remember waking up thinking, you know what, I'm worried that we might not be able to win Brown versus Board of Education today.

I'm not sure today our court would do something that disruptive on behalf of a disfavored, politically marginalized, politically disempowered group of people.

And that made me worry.

And what that made me recognize is that we were going to have to get outside the courts and begin doing what I call narrative work to help us understand why it's important that we believe in equality, why it's important that we believe in fairness, Why it's important that we reject racial bigotry, that we reject violence, that we reject hatred.

The war by part, I'd assumed, and it was becoming clear that even in our legal system, people were retreating from that, and that was the genesis of the narrative work.

That was why we started issuing those reports.

It's why we built a National Memorial to Peace and Justice.

It's why we built a legacy museum, It's why we built Freedom Monument, Sculpture Park.

It's why right now I'm really focused on creating an infrastructure and cultural institutions that tell the truth because I think we are in a narrative struggle in America, and we are either going to embrace the politics of fear and anger that have led to so much division and I think inequality and injustice over our history, or we're going to have to embrace something more hopeful, something that we haven't quite seen yet, but we can imagine that gets us to a healthier place.

And the book banning that you're talking about, in the erasing that you're taught, it's just a classic strategy.

It's what people with pass have always done when they're threatened by ideas that I don't think they can actually compete with.

It's going to be hard to persuade me that people actually believe that inequality is better than equality, that freedom is better than isolation and bondage, that treating people fairly is better than only treating some people fairly.

And that's the ideology behind equality, racial justice, treating people as human beings.

You know, you don't have to be you know, LGBTQ.

Nobody's going to force you to adopt an identity that you don't want.

But it doesn't mean that people who have that identity should be mistreated, should be the objects of hatred and scorn, and should be threatened and menaced.

I don't think that's consistent with an ideology that most people want.

But if we can turn it into something else, banning and erasure, is it a classic strategy.

It was what again and slavers did in the nineteenth century when confronted with the threat of abolition.

It's what the Lost Cause narrative was all about.

Was about erasing any idea that the Civil War was about slavery or about racial hierarchy.

It's what the Civil rights movement, you know, the White Citizens Council that formed all over the country.

They persuaded themselves that this wasn't because a racial bigotry.

It's because this is our right, this is our states rights.

It's because of the god you know, sanctioned order between the races and they some of them wanted to believe that that's what black people wanted, and it's that kind of false narrative.

So censure, censoring, and erasure a book banning.

It's just a classic strategy.

And I think what's scary to me, that's what the Nazis did in the nineteen thirties.

When you're unhappy and don't want transparency, you try to ban people from seeing what you do, which is why journalists have been such a critical part of the struggle for justice in so many parts of the world.

And the journalists are being threatened, they are and they're being silenced, or they're being plowed and they're being canceled.

Yeah, how concerned are you, just as someone who deeply understands and appreciates the Constitution these threats to free speech and what many of view as corporate corruption that we're witnessing now in America.

Yeah, Well, it's absolutely disheartening to see so many companies that were so proudly proclaiming their commitment to DEI so quickly eradicate any of that.

To see so many academic institutions retreat from the kind of commitment to diversity within the classroom as if somehow diversity is a bad thing, And you know, I think anybody who experienced that realizes that, you know, it's not that that person got a seat that belonged to somebody else.

Is that you will learn things you cannot learn.

If everybody in your classroom is just like you, You're not going to learn really important things about the human experience.

If everybody is the same race, and the same gender, and the same idea and the same faith, you're going to miss out on a lot of the understanding that you need to function in a world that is very, very diverse.

What about this whole notion, Brian, that universities have turned into what is the word that they always use in doctrination camps that I heard David Brooks say in an interview that eighty two percent of college students and I'd like to find out where you got this statistic feel they have to kind of not lie but not speak honestly about their political beliefs for fear of being canceled or mocked or thought of less than I'm curious how you would look at that situation.

I don't think there's any question that not just on colleges and campuses.

We have made honest discourse harder in America.

I think that actually relates more to social media and the way in which we've created a new hierarchy of who succeeds, who becomes the most influential.

We've created this currency where the more you shun, the more you cancel, the more you disparage, the more you ridicule and critique those with whom you disagree, the more power you get.

And do you think that's on both sides?

Oh?

I do, absolutely, I absolutely do, And I mean I don't think a decade ago I would have predicted that the Republican Party would become so singular in its perspective on a range of complex issues.

But you have to kind of point out that that is largely what has happened.

And I don't believe that many of those folks who make the votes they make believe that that's the right thing to do.

But because of the threat, the menace, the culture we have created around only one perspective, they give into that.

I think the same thing can happen in a classroom and did happen in classrooms.

But I don't think that's the problem.

I think that's the symptom of the larger problem that we haven't been curious about the truth, the complete truth.

And I think on the whole, academic institutions have been moving toward more complex, more nuanced presentations of history and understanding and art and literature and all these sorts of things, and some people experience that as canceling because they can't just walk in and say, well, i'm the son of so and so and so I get to lead this.

People are like, well, yeah, we don't care who you're the son of.

We need to know what you can do.

And that's a more complicated world than the world that some people might have experienced before.

But I don't think that's dishonest.

I don't think that's unhealthy.

I actually think that is how you make progress.

Have there been excesses, of course, of course.

I remember in twenty twenty people were saying all kinds of things that were not rooted in what I believe is a genuine understanding.

I mean, people were saying, well, we're not going to be non violent anymore, We're going to embrace violence.

You know.

I think a lot of that happened, But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be engaged in that truth telling, and so for me, the retreat of these institutions.

And so to get to the first part of your question, you know, how do we respond in this?

And I think this is true for journalists, it's true for corporate leadership, it's true for academics.

I think we have to stick to our truth.

I don't think we can let threat and menace and intimidation silence us.

I don't.

But that's not happening.

Well, it's not happening a lot of places, but there are some places that are doing it.

Not every law firm gave in to the mandate that they abandon any pro bono work on behalf of immigrant communities or migrant communities or people.

A lot of law firms said, no, we're not with that.

Perkins, Cooey and Seattle said we're going to resist, and a lot of law firms join them in that resistance.

A lot didn't, but a lot said no.

Harvard eventually said no, we're not going to sign your agreement.

A lot did, but some didn't.

I can speak for our cultural institution, the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, we are not going to retreat one inch in the full and honest telling of American history.

We're going to actually do more to help people understand the harms of slavery, the harms of lynching, the harms of segregation, the harms of racial injustice and racial inequality.

And I think journalists can't give in to that censorship.

It'll be uncomfortable, it will get really challenging, But that's the way justice has always prevailed.

It's not really the journalists, it's their corporate overlords.

Understood, understood, And that may mean we have to find other vehicles for journalism.

We have to find other platforms for truth telling.

We may not be able to remain under a tent that is so corrupted by threat and menace and intimidation that it's a greed and greed that it's no longer a place where you can be an honest journalist.

I felt that way about a lot of the institutions that I encountered along the way.

But that doesn't mean we can't be truth tellers.

And I think this is an when truth tellers have to step forward.

That's what the fifty thousand people who decided not to ride the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, were.

They said, we have a truth, and the truth is that it's wrong for you to exclude us and to humiliate us because of our color.

And we don't have money, we don't have power, we don't have corporate backing, we don't have a government that will intervene on us.

But we have our bodies and we're going to use these bodies and stay off of your buses.

And they did it for over a year, walking three miles a day in the morning, working ten hours, walking three miles at night, and that resolution ultimately prevailed.

The civil rights movement the nineteen fifties and sixties didn't have corporate sponsors.

Everybody talks like they were on the side of doctor King, but nobody was on the side of doctor King or very few people in power.

They didn't have corporate backers, and the church, the White Church, was largely against them.

There were people who were high profile supporters.

They use what they had and they didn't have very much.

And I just feel like I stand on the shoulders of people who did so much more with so much less.

They had to face such a greater threat.

They would go places and they'd be on their knees praying for the right to vote, and they'd get beaten and battered and bloodied, and they'd go home, wipe the blood all, change their clothes, and go back and do it again.

And if they could do that, I don't get to say I can't do what I have to do in this moment.

Do you think the civil rights movement could happen today?

It seems like there are very few people with that level of courage and commitment to fight for something that important.

There seems to be a lot of apathy.

Yeah, I think it'll be a different movement today.

But yes, I absolutely do think it can happen.

You know, in twenty twenty when people took to the streets, wasn't just black people.

I think a lot of older white American and young They were just appalled that we're still seeing this kind of abuse of people and they wanted it to end.

And I don't think you absolutely have to manifest your concerns in that way, but you do have to manifest them.

I mean, we have come apathetic.

You're absolutely right.

I mean it was interesting to me in the last two elections talking to people who so it doesn't matter I don't like this person and I don't like that person.

I'm disgusted with this and that it's just interesting.

I come from a political tradition because you know, my great grandparents were enslaved, couldn't have the chance to vote.

My grandparents had to deal with terror of violence.

My parents lived through Jim Crow and segregation.

I just grew up so excited about the opportunity to finally have the right to vote.

I would never dream of not voting.

And even if I have to choose between bad and worse, I'm going to go vote for bad because that's better than worse.

My opportunity to get to someplace better will be increased with this outcome rather than that outcome.

I've never been so privileged to expect, so entitled to think that I'm going to have just the perfect person.

And until I have that perfect person, I'm not going to exercise my right to vote.

I've never been so privileged to think that I get to have only vote for the people who have everything aligned with my values.

I've never been that privileged.

It's always been a struggle, and justice is a constant struggle.

So we have to get past that apathy, and we are going to have to find our courage.

I think a lot of people felt that it wasn't going to be a problem for them, whoever won the election.

And what's interesting to me is seeing all of these communities of people who thought they were insulated from the consequences of some of these narratives.

The federal workforce, hundreds of thousands of whom have now lost their jobs, cultural leaders, people engage in aspects of American society and the health construct and the sciences, some of those academic institutions.

No one thought that farmers, exactly, people who do business on an international scale now contending.

And so it was apathy that made you think that it wasn't going to be consequential.

Now, when you're experiencing these things, the question is are you still apathetic or are you now motivated to do something, to say something, to contribute to something that is more consistent with these values.

And on the cusp of our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I think people didn't realize how fragile democracies are.

It is absolutely right.

I mean, I think this is a very critical moment in American history, and for two reasons I'm not sure are well understood.

One.

Throughout my lifetime, we always had a court that was going to always put the rule of law in the constitution over ideology, and I think a lot of people are now questioning whether that's still true.

And are you questioning, Oh, I absolutely am?

I absolutely am.

I mean, for a court that has talked so much about wanting to get to a colorblind society, something I think that is kind of misguided.

But I get it to just two weeks ago, and upholding the administration's immigration raids to legitimate the use of race, national origin language as a basis for stopping someone to commit these raids is pretty devastating because it is completely inconsistent with that idea that the Constitution does not tolerate bias based on race.

I think what the Court did two weeks ago is an echo of what the Court did in the nineteen forties in a case called Kamatso when the government said we're going to round up every person of Japanese ancestry and we're going to put them in concentration camps.

We're going to put them in these camps.

And it was wrong, it was bigoted, it was unjust, and the Supreme Court gave in to it because the prevailing political ideology was all about retribution against the Japanese for their attack on Pearl Harbor.

They gave in.

And what's fascinating is forty years later, fifty years later, the court was prepared to say, oh, you know what, that was wrong.

We made a mistake.

We should not have done that.

And now I think just two weeks ago, by saying it is appropriate for these agents to consider race, identity language as a basis for detaining someone, stopping someone as part of this immigration rate, we have legitimated that kind of racial bias.

We've given the government the opportunity to consider race in detention, arrest, suspension and all of these things.

And Justice Soto Mayor wrote a powerful discent.

So the first thing that troubles me is that without a court to constrain and hold on to the parameters of democracy, we become much much more vulnerable than we would otherwise, Which means that the other way which we hold on to our democracy has to be expressed through our vote, through our willingness to get out and make our perspective clearly known.

And even there you're seeing all kinds of manipulation.

I mean, this whole thing we're seeing where states are being asked to manipulate their congressional districts in such a way to guarantee that one party wins and the other party loses.

I mean, that's no different than the poll tests and the literacy tests that were used by states for decades in the first half of the twentieth century.

If you were against that and against the racial bigotry behind that, you have to be against this.

It's no different than what happened after Reconstruction when we disenfranchised black people through threat and violence, intimidation, and so yes, this is going to be a gut check for our democracy.

I think we have to be hopeful that we will prevail.

And I am hopeful, and I think my hope rests not in what I see in front of me, but it rests in what I feel pushing behind me.

I've been talking about this.

I was just at Harvard.

It was very honored.

They gave me a ward, and I told them that when I went to Harvard Law School.

On the first day, they put us in groups to try to make us comfortable, and the student group leader was supposed to just orient you, and my group leader took twelve us out and she asked the students, why are you in law school?

And all of my classmates started talking about why they were in law school, and each one of them started talking about how they were the son or the daughter, or the grandson or the granddaughter, or the nephew or the niece of a lawyer.

And I started squirming because I knew I wasn't related to any lawyers.

And after the six or seventh student in both these family connections, I really started to panic.

And then I realized something I hadn't even realized until that moment.

What I realized was that not only was I not related to a lawyer, I realized I'd never even met a lawyer.

And by the time they got to me, I felt so diminished.

I didn't answer the question.

I told a joke.

I just tried to get out of there.

And afterward I called my mom.

I said, Mom, I don't belong in this law school.

And my mother, of course, one of these beautiful mothers, she said, what are you talking about.

You belong wherever you go.

You're the smartest person in the world.

You could do anything you want to do.

Now you go back there and you tell them why you're really in law school, and I felt better after I talked to my mom, but I knew I couldn't organize another meeting with these law students, and so I just went on about my business.

But two weeks later, I still felt the weight of the dishonesty I had engaged on my first day.

So I found some of the students in the group.

I said, hey, can we have a little meeting.

I just want to tell you something about the person.

It was so awkward, it was so challenging, but they were kind and they allowed me to have this meeting.

And what I told them I said on the first day of law school, I wasn't fully honest.

I didn't tell you why I'm in law school.

And I said, I'm not related to a lawyer.

I've never even met a lawyer.

But my great grandfather was enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia.

And even though my great grandfather was enslaved, he had this hope of freedom, and it was so powerful.

It weighed on him so much he risked his life to learn to read.

It was against the law.

It was illegal for enslaved people to learn to read or write.

You could be sold, you could be killed if you were discovered trying to learn to read and write.

And my great grandfather had a hope of freedom so powerful he learned to read in the eighteen fifties.

He didn't know civil war was coming in a decade, but he learned to read and write.

And after emancipation, my grandmother told me that once a week my great grandfather would allow people from the community who didn't know how to read to come over to their house and he would stand on the porch and he would read the newspaper to them.

And she said she'd love the fact that her father knew how to read, and people would be so grateful and so happy.

They would bring food and bring gifts just because he was helping them to know what was going on.

And my grandmother said, as a little girl, she wanted to learn to read, and so whenever he would start reading, she would push her siblings aside.

She would sit next to him, and she said she would wrap her arms around his leg and put her head next to her leg, because she thought you learned to read by touching somebody while they read.

And he figured out what she would say.

He said, no, Victoria, that's not how you learned to read.

I'll teach you how to read, and he taught my grandmother to be a reader.

My grandmother worked as a domestic her whole life.

She'd cleaned other people's houses and did domestic work, but she was a reader.

She had ten children.

She demanded that all of her children be readers.

When I would go visit my grandmother, sometimes she would come out on the porch with a stack of books and she would make you read something before she let you in the house.

She was very tactical.

She said, Ryan, what do you want me to make you for dessert?

And I'd come up with something it didn't even make sense.

She said, okay.

She'd go in the kitchen.

It would smell so good.

She said, okay, Brian, come on, it's ready, And there she'd be with those stack of books, and I'd have to read something to get that good smell in dessert in the kitchen.

As I said, I grew up in a really poor, racially segregated community.

You did not see a lot of hope outside the door.

Most of the adults worked in the poultry plants.

People had out houses, didn't have running water.

It just wasn't a hopeful.

You didn't see a lot of that, But my mom went into debt when we were like small kids, eight nine, ten years old.

She went into debt.

I'm not sure she ever was able to pay for these things.

My mom went into debt and bought us the World Book Encyclopedia, and we had those books in our house.

And I told my classmates, I said, I never met a lawyer, never kind of related to a lawyer, but I read all about the lawyers in the World Book Encyclopedia.

And you know, I can't lie.

As a ten year old, I didn't always understand because you know, Christmas comes along, you go outside and your They're like, well, I got a bicycle, I got a basketball, I got a baseball.

I'd have to say, well, I got Volume G of the World Book Encyclopedia.

But I told them, I'm in law school because I read about the lawyers and the World Book Encyclopedia, and I read that they could help people who are experiencing harm, they could open doors for people who are being excluded, they could do something about bigotry and discrimination.

And because I've seen that, that's why I'm in law school.

And in many ways, I feel the hope of the enslaved behind me.

When I talk about slavery in our cultural institutions, I think, actually it's wrong.

I think memory and truth telling is what we owe the ten million black people who were enslaved for two hundred and forty six years in this country, the ten million black people who endured the immense suffering and constant sorrow of slavery, we owe them the truth of their story.

And when we try to diminish it, when we try to center it, when we say stop talking about it, not only is what we're doing dishonest, I think it's unjust, and if I care about justice, I have to lift that up.

And I feel them behind me, those people we're trying to bring attention to, who are the victims of terror, of isolence and lynching, those people who fled there.

I feel them behind me.

The people I grew up with, who had to endure the humiliation and degradation of segregation.

I feel them behind me.

And so when I have to speak and people say be quiet, when I have to stand up and people say sit down, I've gotten to a point in my life when I don't ever feel like I'm standing alone.

I don't.

I don't even think i'm speaking just for myself, and I think we all have to tap into it.

You don't have to be African American, no matter what your background are.

Most of us are where we are because generations of people family non family, have lifted us up, have put us in positions where we could do things to make the world better, to do things better, to create something healthier.

And I think we dishonor them if in this moment of crisis, in this moment of conflict and controversy, in this moment where democracy is being threatened, we remain silent.

I don't think it's just apathetic.

I don't think it's just cowardly.

I think it's dishonorable.

And so if we are Americans committed to a future, if we are Americans who believe in freedom, of quality and justice, we have to now speak out.

We have to do things, and we have to be prepared.

That may mean things get uncomfortable, but we have behind us generations who did those uncomfortable things to make this nation the nation that it is in hopes that we would continue that struggle.

And so that's what I'm embracing in this moment, That's what I'm holding on to in this moment.

That's so moving, and I so appreciate you saying that, because so many people say to me, what can I do?

What can I do?

And they really feel powerless and they feel at a loss, and they know what they're witnessing is wrong and scary and bad for this country, but they don't know how or where to channel it.

The one thing I like to tell people, too, is that learning is an action item.

When you educate yourself, you're actually doing something.

And there's so much we need to know about what democracy requires, about what history can help us with that I think will be important as we prepare to meet this moment.

And no one can actually prevent you from learning.

At EJI my organization, we have something called a History of Racial Injustice.

It's a calendar and every day we put out something that just documents parts of our history where we fail, where we didn't do what we should have done.

And I think we need to learn that history.

We need to know that language.

It facilitates conversation that we won't otherwise be capable of having.

It allows us to rebut some of the bigotry and some of the misrepresentations of who we are, and it's a very small thing, but I think at a minimum, we should commit to learning our past and understanding our history so we are better prepared for the moment we're in and better prepared to create a healthier future.

And perhaps inspired by absolutely who came before us.

Hi everyone, it's me Katie Couric.

You know, if you've been following me on social media, you know I love to cook, or at least try, especially alongside some of my favorite chefs and foodies like Benny Blanco, Jake Cohen, Lighty Hoyk, Alison Roman and Ininagarten.

So I started a free newsletter called good Taste to share recipes, tips and kitchen mustaves.

Just sign up at Katiecuric dot com slash good Taste.

That's k A t I E c o U r I c dot com slash good Taste.

I promise your taste buds will be happy you did.

I want to ask you about a couple of other issues that of course, when I read or think about these things, I'm always like ww bs s, what would Brian Stephenson say?

And one is this cultural whiplash that we've seen when it comes to mass incarceration and crime in general, and I've seen this shift all the work that you've done with mass incarceration and minimum mandatory sentencing, and I see the country moving in this direction of we're not being tough enough on criminals, prisons are revolving door, We're seeing people who should be in prison committing crimes, who have been in and out and in and out.

And I'm curious how you see that arc of history unfolding, Brian, because I saw Ben Shapiro on Bill Maher the other night and I was like, I wish Brian was here to debate him.

But he said, you know, people say we can't incarcerate ourselves out of this problem, but we can, he said, And I'd love you to share with us how you see this kind of about face and this focus on crime.

And for example, the situation in Charlotte that got a lot of attention, the twenty three year old Ukrainian immigrant who was fatally stabbed on a light rail train by a man with the significant history of arrests who struggled with mental illness, and a lot of people are seizing on that case as evidence that criminal justice reform has gone too far.

So tell us what you're thinking about this.

I mean I think unfortunately, over the last seventy years, one thing that's become really clear is that bad crimes have resulted in bad policy.

So if you focus on one crime and that's going to be your justification for a whole new set of policies, those policies are going to be flawed because you need a bigger picture.

Okay, what do you mean by that.

Well, throughout most of the twentieth century, we had fewer than three hundred thousand people in our jails and prisons.

We did not incarcerate a ton of people.

We reserved incarceration for people who were a threat to public safety.

That changed in the nineteen seventies when politicians from both political parties began arguing that people who are drug addicted and drug dependent are criminals who should be punished, and we started filling up the prisons with hundreds of thousands of people dealing with addiction and dependency.

Now, we could have said that people suffering from addiction and dependency have a health problem and we need a health care intervention, but we said they're criminals, let's use punishment.

There are countries around the world that said addiction and dependency is a health problem, and they've had phenomenal success at reducing the number of families that are impacted by opiod addiction.

They've had phenomenal success at improving public safety because they dealt with a health problem as a health problem rather than that's exactly right.

And then we expanded that in the seventies and we started wanting to punish people who have other kinds of issues, children dealing with trauma, and our prison population went from three hundred thousand in the seventies to over two million by the end of the twentieth century, and we did not become safer.

If anything, we became less safe.

So we did not incarcerate ourselves out of that problem.

Can you tell me how we became less safe as those numbers rose.

Yeah, because we were essentially creating situations where we were putting people who didn't need to be in prison in prison where they would be threatened and abused and traumatized.

And become criminals.

And when they came out of prison, they were more likely to offend than they would have ever been if we'd never sent them.

To prison, if we'd gotten them different kind of help.

That's exactly right, Or even if we had said, you know what, we're not even going to punish you.

We would have made them less likely to commit an offense than when you put somebody in an environment where they're constantly being threatened, when they're being minutes, where sexual violence is a way of life, where they're being dehumanized and abused and traumatized.

You know, trauma is the source of so much of the criminal behavior that people want to get rid of, and we don't appreciate that.

There is a strategy for helping someone with a trauma disorder, but it is not threatening them.

You know, our combat veterans when they come back, those who come back with post traumatic stress disorder, they have that disorder because they were in a situation where they were constantly being threatened and menace.

Their brain starts producing cortisol and adrenaline to help them cope with those threats.

And then when they're removed from that situation, their brains are still in that hyperactive space where they're being flooded with cortisol and adrenaline.

And so when somebody does something just a little bit wrong, they overreact, they maybe even become violent.

But that's a health condition that requires a health response and the way you help somebody but trauma is to not threaten them more so in that regard, we created a world where I would go into communities where my thirteen and fourteen year olds that I would meet would say, we know we're going to be in jailer prison by the time we're twenty or twenty one, because that's what we see happening to all the people in our community.

So we're going to go out here and get ours while we can.

They were actually being made so hopeless about the future that embracing these pathologies of crime and boce became more rational than resisting them.

And you see that in so many of the institutions.

And only in the last ten or fifteen years did we begin to recognize how building more prisons, spending more money, taking money from health care, money from human services, money from schools was not helping us.

And then we began doing things and guess what, the crime rate began to drop.

We actually saw improvements in public safety, which is why it's so ironic, you know, talking about hormonicent troops into bon Bonember is actually seeing the lowest levels of violent crime in many categories in its scene in decades.

These reforms have actually made us safer in a lot of ways, certainly healthier, because we're now spending money on things that can actually help people.

Does that mean that people won't commit horrific crimes like the crime in Charlotte apps No, We're going to continue to see those crimes.

We have a long way to go.

How we respond to those things is going to be the metric future.

But I also take great exception to taking one crime and saying, well, this is the thing we need to focus on.

You know, even in this moment of horrific violence.

I mean, it's actually a bit provocative to talk about one crime here and to ignore all of these other crimes.

You know.

In twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen, a young white man walked into Emmanuel Amy Church in Charleston, South Carolina and slaughtered nine black people while they were praying.

Dylan Ruth, Dylan Ruth.

A few years later, a young man walked into a supermarket in Buffalo and killed ten black people while they were shopping.

A young white guy goes to a black college campus in Florida, ends up killing three people, not on campus.

Nobody ever says, what are we going to do about the racial bigotry that is shaping the mindset of these young people and killing so many innocent people.

We didn't have that moment, even when we were talking last and white men walked onto the University of Virginia holding torches chanting anti Semitic and racist things.

Rather than see that as a threat that our nation needs to reckon with, we tried to minimize it.

And so I just think it is dishonest to create policies based on this one thing.

And what I meant by bad crimes.

We've got crimes named after people who were victims of horrible things.

Usually they're victims of privilege.

They're victims who people can identify with, and they turn into bad policies, and so I think we have to resist that in this moment.

I think if we're going to get to a healthier place around crime and public safety, we're going to have to stop talking about crime as if we can put crimes in prison.

That's what happened in the eighties and nineties.

Legislators started talking as if they could put crimes in prison.

Oh, I hate that crime, child pornography, I hate that one hundred years this kind of assault I hate that fifty years life without parole, the death penalty.

The truth is we don't have the ability to put crimes in prison, none of us.

You cannot put a crime in prison.

You can only put a person in prison.

And people are not crimes.

People can commit crimes.

We can want to hold them accountable for the crimes they've committed, but there's a gap.

There's a distance between what someone does and who someone is, and that's where policies become bad.

When a woman who's been abused for twenty years wakes up one day, goes into the room and shoots and kills her abuser, she may not be threatened in that moment, and what she does is a crime, and you can say that is murder, but we have to think differently about how we're going to hold her accountable than we would hold someone else accountable.

When a child that's been abused and traumatized, when somebody is suffering from mental illness and dealing with psychosis does something horrific like stabs someone to death in public transportation, we can't ignore that psychosis, that mental health history in thinking about what's appropriate.

And so that's where we've been trying to help policy makers.

And guess what places across the world that understand this have succeeded in lowering the rates of incarceration and improving public safety.

It's fun.

You go to northern Europe, it's rare.

They don't have people being shot and killed every day.

They don't have the kind of sexual violence we have in this country.

You even compare Vancouver with an American city across the border, the homicide rates are radically different.

And that's where I think we just have to become sober.

When people start talking about really committing to gun control, gun safety, limiting access to guns, that's when I'll know we're getting serious about public safety in this country, because that's the recipe for how we make our community safer, and nobody seems to want to talk about that.

Let me ask you about two other events in the news, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the reaction to that horrific event, which I see is two different situations and two different points of discussion.

He has been lionized, even canonized, I think by many people on the right, primarily, but I think others as well.

And then he's been demonized by people on the left.

And probably others because of some of the views he espoused.

Where do you how do you make sense of all of this?

Brian?

I think first of all, we should all be outraged and heartbroken that we had witnessed the murder of someone who was in a public space on a college campus.

Those kids will be traumatized for life.

We ought to be thinking about how we eliminate that from the American experience entirely.

And it doesn't matter who he is and what his views are and what he said.

That's a tragedy that we all need to condemn and to acknowledge, and truthfully, it transcends politics, as we saw a Minnesota politician murdered in her home behind that kind of idea that you can just kill the people you disagree.

With, and her husband and dog as Ahortman.

It's all horrific.

So I think all have to be pretty clear in our condemnation of that kind of violence and attacking people in that violent way.

But when you politicize these things in ways that are just not accurate, when you say, oh, this is because of left wing media or etce, when we don't say the same thing when a Democrat or somebody progressive is murdered or killed.

What you do is you feed this kind of ideological warfare, and I think that's really unhealthy.

I think that is also inconsistent with a thriving, healthy democracy.

And then people start reacting to that, and that's what we've seen happen over the last few days, people reacting to what they believe to be a distortion of what's really happening here.

I don't think you have to legitimate, accept or even be silent about the views, the objectionable views, the bigoted views, are the really painful and harmful views of someone like Charlie Kirk.

To mourn his death, to grieve his loss, to condemn the act of violence that took his life.

I do think we have an obligation to call out bigotry, to speak to speech that threatens and menaces and fuels the kind of hatred that I see growing around our country.

And that doesn't end even though someone dies tragically.

So I don't think there's a real tension in that.

I think what's now a bigger problem, to be honest, is whether the people who have power are going to use that power to silence and to intimidate anyone who says something that they don't agree with.

I think that, to me is for democracy in America is an existential threat.

If no one is allowed to say I disagree with these views over here, if they're silenced, if they're kicked off the air, if they're a journalist or on TV, if they're menaced and threatened with violence, then we will not become a healthy society.

We will deteriorate in ways that I think are really really.

Tragic, which of course brings me to my final area of discussion, which is Jimmy Kimmel.

And this is something also we were talking about about institutions capitulating and not fighting back.

Jimmy Kimmel, who knows what will happen.

He's been suspended.

You heard the comments he made.

He was making I thought an observation of how the Charlie Kirk tragedy was being used and exploited by some of Donald Trump's followers, and basically he got pulled off the air.

And of course, if you know the backstory about Nextstar, which owns a lot of ABC affiliates, wanting to buy Tegna, which also would have exceeded their amount of coverage over the country, that local news stations are allowed to have.

There seems to be a direct correlation, kind of a quid pro quo to the FCC in terms of Jimmy Kimmel's suspension.

And we saw this earlier with George Stephanopolis, we saw this with CBS and sixty Minutes comcasts fired somebody Matthew Dowd, who I interviewed yesterday.

I mean, this is all very scary and very chilling.

Can you put in perspective, historically or otherwise, Brian, why this is so threatening to the United States as a democracy.

I really was horrified by the Chimel firing.

In particular, when I heard about it, I thought, oh my god, what did he say?

And then when I read it, I did interpret it as him actually trying to protect those who were legitimately grieving the loss of this person and their family, and condemning those who are trying to exploit it for these political purposes.

I was actually quite shocked that corporation would then react in that way.

I think it's unjustifiable, and I do think it reinforces this movement that we should all be quite concerned about.

In the nineteen fifties, when McCarthy was using the power of that Senate committee to silence, intimidate, to coerce companies in California to fire people based on suspicions and things like that.

Too many people in corporate America gave.

They basically capitulated, and it did irreparable harm to the lives of so many creative people in this country.

It did incredible harm to free speech in this country.

Very few people now align themselves with McCarthy.

Everybody likes to think, oh, I would have been against McCarthy.

You know, they see good night, good luck of I'm with Edward Marrow.

You know I want to be on that team.

And you don't get to make that choice if you engage in behaviors that replicate the same power dynamics.

I think, you know, what happened to law firms, what happened to academic institutions, is now going to happen to big media conglomerates.

We've already seen what happened to public media, and these institutions are going to have to genuinely understand what's at state, because when you give away your integrity, when you give away your commitment to honest journalism.

Or when you sell it.

When you sell it, that's right, when you sell it or you get it, you don't get that back easily.

You do not get that back easily.

Even if this moment passes, which many people think it will, even when we get to another place, you don't get to just step back up and say, okay, never mind, let's go back and Jimmy come on back, and people come on back.

You don't get to do that.

And so the decisions that you make will have consequences long beyond this moment.

And I just think this is a time for people to think more deeply about the way in which they respond to threat and intimidation and to the use of power.

Just because your corporation had just because you have money, doesn't mean that you are not supposed to be held accountable.

That doesn't mean that you're not responsible.

You know, I was saying this to some young lawyers.

We got people wearing masks sweeping all across the country, just abducting people, pulling people, and they think they have legal justification to do what they're doing.

And I've been saying, but there may come a day when that's going to be questioned, and someone's going to say you really did not have legal justification for that, and you're going to be held accountable for what you do.

And I just think we all need to go through that process right now.

I often say, you know, everybody today says, if they were alive in eighteen fifty, they'd be an abolitionist.

Most people say, oh, I'd be against slavery if I was in eighteen fifty.

They were alive in nineteen twenty, most people say, oh, I'd be against my violence and lynching.

Everybody today says, no, I'd be marching with doctor King across the edmun Petits Bridge in nineteen sixty five.

Well, you don't get to claim that status if you give into greed, if you give in to threat, if you give into intimidation, and you do things that you know are not consistent with your creed of honest journalism, with your creed of being for the good of the community, for the good of society.

And I just think we have to push people to understand the moral complexity of this.

That is, it's not just what's good for A lot of the firms say, oh, we had to do it's for our businesses, But there are things that are I think ultimately more important than money, than profit.

And I know that a lot of people in the business world.

I'm not in the corporate world, are you know, kind of twitch when you say something like that.

But I just believe that you have to be willing to do what's right, even sometimes when you're going to lose more than you gain.

That's the way you build.

I think an honest company, a company that endorres, an institution, a brand that has integrity.

I just think that that has to be more central in the discourse that we're having right now.

And I think the rest of us have to try to hold people accountable when they fail, when they retreat, when they don't do the things that they're supposed to do.

We cannot forget.

You know, I'm still talking about things that happened a year ago, but I think they're still important.

I was just talking about this recently, you know, when the candidate Donald Trump talked about Haitians in Ohio eating cats and dogs, knowing that it was false, knowing that that was just creating bigotry toward that community.

To me, that was really hard how people would just kind of walk past that because it had an echo of so many of the things I grew up with about the black people in my part of town and what they were doing over there, and the false narratives that kept us from having We have to hold people accountable for these things.

We can't just look past that.

And I just think there are so many examples now that are going to be tempting to forget, but we're going to have to hold on to them.

And I hope corporate America does not fail this test the way many people in corporate America failed in the nineteen fifties when McCarthy was making threats, the way many people failed at the turn of the century.

Many jailers and law enforcement failed when all to pulling black people out of jails in prisons to lyne them, the way that many companies failed in the eighteen fifties when they put the profit of exporting cotton over the immorality of enslaving human beings.

This is a test, and I do think we have to pay attention to who passes and who fails.

Brian Stevenson.

Always great to see you.

I hope it's not as long as it has been the next time I get to sit down and talk to you.

Thank you so much.

Always love these conversations.

I've learned so much from you and I've grown so much from you, and I'm grateful.

Well, thank you, Katie.

Always great to be with you too.

Thanks for listening.

Everyone.

If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out send me a DM on Instagram.

I would love to hear from you.

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