Is Justice for All a Reality?

Rashad Robinson joins the LEADing Justice podcast to discuss the groundbreaking work of Color of Change, a racial justice organization of over 7 million members, utilizing strategic action to address immediate issues and the structural problems of racism and economic inequality. We discuss his groundbreaking work and how to take active steps in making justice for all a reality. 

Dr. Janet Dewart Bell • Executive Producer / Host | Chris Neuner • Producer / Editor | Theme Music • First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn

Transcript

File Name: Is Justice For All a Reality?

File Length: 00:25:02

FULL TRANSCRIPT (with timecode)

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I am Janet Dewart Bell, the founder and president of LEAD Intergenerational Solutions, Lead Advances in Democracy and Social Justice by promoting democratic principles and leadership from an intergenerational lens lead builds on the wisdom, experience, energy and perspectives of diverse leaders and activists in the fight for America's Future. The Leading Justice podcast will tackle the most challenging issues of the day through provocative and informative discussions with singular guests who make a difference in the fight for freedom in America and the world. 

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Securing a just and equitable future requires courage, commitment, compassion, vision and hope. Those elements are the themes of the Leading Justice podcast. 

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Thank you for joining us today. Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change. 

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Thank you, my friend. It's always great to be with you. It is such an honor. And I it's also such an honor to be helping you kick off this This new project of yours is this podcast, this media project. And I am always so honored to be in space with you and working with you. 

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And so the first question I want to ask is what is color of change and what is it you purport to do? 

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Color of Change is a racial justice organization driven by over 7 million members, black folks and allies in every single race take action with us. And what we do is work to drive people to take strategic action on the things most impact. We were founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when black folks were on their roofs begging for the government to do something, and we're literally left to die. And the thing about Katrina and the thing about moments like that, which really animate our theory of change and how we do our work, is that in those crisis, they illustrate things that people already knew geographic segregation, generational poverty, the impacts of what we've done to our planet, and all the ways in which structural racism undergirds so many of the ways in which the systems failed and the systems manufactured more inequality. 

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But at the heart of those moments, no one was nervous about disappointing black people, government, corporations and media. And so at Color of Change, we work to build power, to change the rules. We work to make those in power nervous about disappointing us. And we work to run campaigns that create a more human and less hostile world for black people. And when black people, when the history of this country is, everyone wins. 

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Well, some would argue that the situation that the number of crises have really gotten worse even since Katrina. People may not be may not have been on the roofs recently, but they've been in the streets. They've been we've seen we've seen many instances and increase not only in, as you know, and in, I would say, police brutality and and even worse, the infiltration of what are supposed to be our legal and our 

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civic protection arms, the police and fire departments. We've seen the infiltration of right wing forces. And so what does that suggest to you that you can tell your you're 7 million people and also convince white people that the interests of color of change are also their interests? Or maybe that's not one of your objectives. 

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So, you know, what's clear to me is that building power is not easy. And as we build worse, as the forces on the other side are going to be building power, and as we make wins, the folks on the other side are going to be working to try to get wins, you know, on their side. I think about, you know, nine years ago, eight years ago, when to say black lives matter out in the world, people would say things like, oh, that's racist. And now you have it on streets. You have it raised up by sides. Right? It's become a kind of a 

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kind of a narrative issue that people will speak to, even if we have not yet built the power to hold folks fully accountable for actually making Black Lives matter. I think the progress that we are making is key. I think about that incident in the Starbucks in Philadelphia that we can sort of think about like, Oh, that was awful. But you know why that became visible to all of us? It was because white people with their cell phones who maybe a couple of years earlier would have seen that incident. But what are those guys doing? Probably would have given the police the benefit of the doubt, not only saw the incident, but then posted it on social media and other people shared it. 

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And in a city like Philadelphia, where the movement has elected a reform minded prosecutor, those men who were brought down were never booked and never charged because we have a district attorney that we hold accountable and we forced 

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a CEO to the table. And you have folks like Sherrilyn Ifill and Heather McGhee, they were able to engage and push them around a racial equity audit. And all of those things are things that would not have happened that way ten years ago. And that's a result of power and context and change. But movements have to constantly feed those things, constantly build on those things to make them real. So absolutely, I recognize all of the ways in which we are being challenged by so many of the forces. I also recognize that over the last several years we forced American Express, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal and Apple Pay to cut off over 100 white nationalist organizations from being able to process fees, accept money for donations, being able to sell paraphernalia and take credit card donations, and forcing these companies that wanted to stay on the sidelines to actually be nervous about disappointing us. 

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So we are working. You build power every day. And part of that means that we have more. We need more people engaged. And I think the fundamental belief that I say to black folks, white folks and anyone who cares about justice is that we will always lose in the back rooms if we do not have the people lined up at the front door. And that means we need more people invested and engaged and seeing themselves as part of the story of making this country all the things that it should be. 

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What do you say to someone who who who will listen to that and then does not necessarily see immediate immediate results than that? What would your answer be? I have an answer, but. 

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We are all recipients of work that did not provide immediate results. Our ability to use the technology that we use every single day is the result of effort and time and energy people put in generations ago to lay the framework of what things like the Internet would look like or what technology would look like. Our ability to express our will for a better future through the vote is as it was laid down by people whose names we know in bold print and whose names we may never know who did the work and the labor. 

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And so justice and progress and the freedoms that we all get to experience is the work of people who had the belief that that the that the energy and the effort that they put in were not always going to be immediate, but the fruits of their labor were just as worthy as, as as anything else. 

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I'm your child while I run this race

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Well, you've mentioned the Internet and social media. I'd like for you to say something about your announcement about Facebook. So what can we expect from that? What are your what do you think the results of this of your forcing Facebook to actually look at look internally at a certain kind of practices which perpetuate racism and cultural bias? 

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You know, we've been fighting Facebook for about seven years now. We we led the largest boycott actually in American history with the stop hate for profit campaign that forced billions of dollars of loss to Facebook, only to see a company like that be able to quickly recover because that's what monopolies can do. They have 75% of the messenger market. Facebook has nearly 3 billion users. That's more followers in Christianity. And they have a single sort of person in charge. 

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Mark Zuckerberg has 60% of the shares and is chairperson and CEO. And so I don't believe at this point that there's much we can do to get Facebook to change. I believe that that's why we need government in government role is to hold institutions like that accountable. The reason why our seatbelts are safe is not because of the benevolence of the auto industry. It's because there's accountability mechanisms and there's infrastructure in our government to hold the auto industry accountable and make sure their safety standards. The reason why we go into the supermarket and we can trust at a certain level the needs and the food that we're getting is because there's a whole infrastructure with the FDA. 

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It's not because big agriculture is somehow super benevolent about the food that they sell us. It's because it's all sorts of systems, and the technology that can so often bring us into the future is dragging us into the past because folks have been able to build things without having to be accountable to civil rights law, without having to be accountable to the ways in which their systems and tools are hurting folks. And what we've always tried to focus on, what are the smarter strategies to getting us to real change. And so a couple of years ago, it was having to deal with and face down Facebook, having to call for a civil rights audit, which the great Laura murphy, formerly of the ACLU National Office, sort of conducted and really engaged with. 

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They showed all of the challenges. We went back and forth with Facebook. The New York Times even revealed that Facebook, in the midst of that, while we were at the table trying to work with them on an audit, had hired a PR firm to lodge attacks against us. And I found out from The New York Times from a story that was printed only to get sort of a lukewarm apology from Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg for those actions that put us deeply in harm's way. I say all that to say that that's why elections matter. And we are working really hard with Congress and engaging with Congress, holding the White House accountable. 

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But we're not stopping there. I just finished co-chairing a commission with the Aspen Institute on Information Disorder, co-chairing that with Chris Krebs from the last administration and who left, you know, and was working on cyber security and journalist Katie Couric. And the three of us have been co-chairs of this commission, which have 15 commissioners, folks ranging from Safiya Noble, who just won the MacArthur Genius Award for her work around algorithms and their racial bias and gender bias, particularly against black women. To Prince Harry, who has his own sort of story of misinformation and disinformation in all the ways it impacted him as a young child with what happened to his mother to now and so many other sort of thought leaders across the political spectrum and sort of leaning in. 

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We have a report coming out very soon that will really illustrate a set of demands and really call on a new level of leadership that actually has to work to solve this problem. And so for us, we recognize the role that big tech has in our lives. We recognize that it's not enough for people just to turn off. Facebook could ubiquitous in our lives. And even if you turn it off, they still have your data. And because so many people are on this platform, we have to do the work to ensure that these tools are safe for all of us, that those in power are accountable. 

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And that is why government is so critically important. It's not enough to sort of it wasn't enough to express to hope for the benevolence of corporations to protect us in any other place. And we certainly can't express the corporate elite. We can't expect the corporate leaders in Silicon Valley to protect us either. 

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You talk about government's role. What about the Federal Communications Commission? Do you see any hope, any strengthening again from the FCC, the airwaves? People think people think I think popularly that that these big broadcast corporations on the airwaves, they do not people on the airwaves. You would never know that. But what is there anything that can be done to engage the FCC to do a better job than what they are doing? I know under the last administration that that the FCC was more. 

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Of a 

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not very effective commission, shall we say. 

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Yeah. I mean, FCC is tricky, right? It does have a lot of authority over the public airwaves. The cable airwaves and ISP providers that bring cable is a little different. And some of the authority is not the same as it relates to cable, where we're some of the worst actors lie. The FCC is clearly a place that we've engaged very closely. We have really strong relations at the FCC. Are our fight to win and secure Net neutrality happened at the FCC and we were able to frame that as a civil rights issue and get folks like John Lewis on the late Congressman John Lewis to really stand with us and talk about how he wished he had an open Internet when he was fighting and organizing 

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as part of SNICK. All of those things have been part of it. There's also the FCC for your listeners, and that's the Federal Trade Commission. And the Federal Trade Commission is another place that is an important focus because in many ways they get to evaluate a set of these products and tools that are coming online, and they also get to monitor, monitor for the rules around and around the consolidation, both of these media companies and the consolidation of these companies on the Internet. 

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Unfortunately, there there's been a lot there are a lot of the loopholes worked into the policy that have made it so tech platforms can pretend like on one hand, they're media companies when it's convenient for them in another and pretend like they're not media companies when it's inconvenient for them. And part of us as part of our work is getting them securely planted in a space with an accountability can happen because then what ends up happening is you have these companies where there's so much surveillance marketing on. And what that means is people are running ads like using all sorts of deep data on you mining your data because, right. 

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If Facebook is free to use and Twitter is free to use, nothing is free. So that's if it's free, then you're the product. And so you should like know that and know that you're being sold time and time again. But what ends up happening is we watched on Facebook where you could market jobs just to men, you could market housing just to white people or or any of those combination. Right. Those are things that were won and fought for and were supposed to be settled years ago. 

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But these platforms, because they looked at these loopholes in sort of how the the rules that were designed for them were created, they tried to argue in the courts that they are not actually under civil rights law, that they are not they don't have to adhere to civil rights law. And so even when there's been court cases and these platforms have tried to quickly settle those cases, rather than taking them to the court, because they want to continue to own this narrative that they can operate in this country but don't have to operate by its rules. 

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And that is something that's just simply not something we're going to adhere to. And part of electing a President Biden, part of electing a Congress that could not get there without black voters is to really be very clear, the last election clearly showed us what racial justice can do for an election. Those upticks in registration after the uprisings, what we saw in Atlanta, in Detroit, in Philadelphia, in Arizona, in so many places we know we know what racial justice can do for an election. 

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We need to see what an election can do for racial justice. And so our work is really about accountability on those in power to say we need new rules. We recognize that you may get a lot of donations from these folks in Silicon Valley, but you know, more than anything, you get votes from our community, and our community needs real protection against these information, disinformation and misinformation machines. 

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Rashad Robinson. You know that I am a big fan. I think you are a warrior for justice, and I have always appreciated your energy and your intellect and the fact that you are inspiring to people of all ages. I would like to ask you two questions. One is, what do you feel the biggest successes are of color of change, particular under your tenure now leadership? 

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There were a lot of campaigns that I think about when I think about our biggest sort of campaign success. One of the things I'm most proud of is building a 21st century racial justice organization that's unlike normal. And you know what it meant to get here ten years ago. And, you know, we reach out to corporations, they would ignore us. They you know, you reach out to government. You didn't always hear back. Our ability to force people to the table, to get real solutions, to actually be as. 

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As I talk about Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to be able to say on multiple occasions they've had to sit down and engage with our demands is is about what it means to be able to build power, to not just be loud, but to actually be able to force yourself in the room and to be able to do that while not taking corporate money. While not taking government money means that on a range of different campaigns, we start off in such a different place and we get to drive so many different places. You know, my dad is a contractor. 

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I grew up on eastern Long Island, and he worked to build homes and he still does. And and he's a contractor. And so I grew up with him and my mom as builders and seeing people that believed in building and built homes, built a life, built a context for me, my brother and I that I am so grateful for. And I, you know, every day I wake up and think about what does it mean to build something that exists beyond me, beyond my own engagement. And that's what I'm so proud of, where I grew up inside, of the legacy organizations that are so critically important and powerfully shaped my life and to be part of building the 21st century racial justice organization that can give everyday people the ability to take action. 

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And the thing that we do is we are online and offline, but because we live in a society where we are part of geographic communities and we are part of virtual communities, at the same time, I think we are helping everyday people take action in the ways that are most meaningful for them and do things that are actually able to connect with the time they have in the day. And I just find the opportunity to do that so rewarding. I find it to be a blessing and I find it to be a huge responsibility because when the biggest crisis hit, I find it to be our responsibility, not just to be outraged by it, but to say, okay, here's the thing that you have to do. 

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Here's the action that we can take. And it's not enough to say, tell Mitch McConnell to stand up for affirmative action or some other action that isn't strategic, that no matter how many people sign the petition, it doesn't matter. It's about how do we find the thing that's a force multiplier. So if we get people to take action, more and more possibilities are less. 

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And what what does justice look like? You said, until justice is real, your slogan. What is what does that look like for for most people? How do you how do you foresee that? 

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Well, I think justice is a couple of things. I think, first, justice is a more human and less hostile world for black people. I think justice is society that's on our side. I think justice is being able to get the same things at the same time in the same place and having opportunity. But more than justice is black joy and black joy is not the absence of pain, but is the presence of aspiration. It is not just what we are fighting against, but what we are fighting for. I want to do work that is not just about removing the pain, but unlocking the joy. 

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And for me, that's what justice looks like. It's not looking and living. It's not living inside of a world where we have less people hurting us and harming us. But living in a world where we have more people on our side fighting for us, building us up, making sure that there is opportunity and space for us. That is why power is so important. That is why we can never mistake our presence, invisibility, the awareness of our issues for power. Power is the ability to change the rules. And that's what we try to do every single day. Build power, unlock joy. 

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And I believe that is the role to make it so that we all have justice. And when we say until justice is we are, that is not just a tagline. It is a mantra that we do this work until justice is real. 

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I know you have deep meaning for that. So what gives you hope? 

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What gives me hope is how many people are willing to take action? How many people have opened their eyes to injustices? How many people? Want to be part of the story for fighting for change. You are wrestling with it, are concerned about and feel uncomfortable at times, but are dealing with it and engaging in it in new ways. That's what gives me hope every single day. And more and more people are engaging, willing to go deeper, wanting to stand up, wanting to fight for change. And and I think the other thing that I mean, the other thing that gives me hope is 

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the the new level of storytelling that I think we are seeing from black creatives, black women creatives in particular, and the new openings that we have to tell a new American story, a story that centers different voices and intergenerational voices, but storytellers that I think will help us be able to dream big, big dreams and fight bigger fights. 

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Thank you very much. Well, you Rashad Robinson and Color of Change. Give me hope. Always. 

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Thank you for joining us for the inaugural episode of Leading Justice. Please join us next week for a conversation with Gloria Steinem, one of the great leaders of our time. Writer, lecturer, political activist and feminist, Mrs. Steinem continues to have extraordinary impact on America and the world for which she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom next week. 

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Gloria Steinem, the Leading Justice Podcast. 

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guide my feet while I run this race