Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  We may have the opportunity to see how racial caste systems can harm people of all colors, that truly few benefit from the imposition of these vast systems of control.

  Two progressive groups, the Economic Policy Institute and the Urban League, say that structural inequality cannot be confronted if we practice “identity politics.” And these progressive groups are asking for universalism. What does that mean to you?

  ALEXANDER: Well, universal policies are policies that apply to everyone. And obviously, health care and education are examples of the type of thing. Quality education, quality health care, the types of things we would want to be available to everyone. But not everyone is similarly situated. Which means that we need to take into account unique, lived experiences of particular communities and particular groups, which in our country are still often defined by race.

  All poor communities and all poor groups are not the same, right?

  ALEXANDER: That’s right. So having a blanket approach to all communities as though they were all similarly situated is doomed to failure. We have to take into account the unique experiences. We need to be race-conscious, conscious of the ways in which communities that are still segregated by race may experience educational inequity, may experience the underfunding of their schools in ways that are different from communities that are located in other areas. We have to take into account that difference in order to treat everyone fairly.

  But can you target racial differences, as Michelle just said, without a racist backlash?

  STEVENSON: I don’t think we can overcome our racist past without recognizing the consequences of decades of segregation, without recognizing the consequences of terrorizing a group of people based on their race. And I think we can actually find some reconciliation if we tell the truth about those histories and we deal with them in a structured, sensible way.

  I actually think we can undermine this tension, this tendency toward backlash, if we just deal with these things. For example, in my state, we still have segregated school systems. Even in integrated school systems, there’s a black homecoming queen and a white homecoming queen. Sometimes there’s a black prom and a white prom. Dealing with that, I think we can challenge some of the thinking behind that without backlash. It just means we have to kind of move forward.

  Some politicians, African American politicians, are urging that we give a pass to President Obama because, as the first African American president, he can’t really be expected to take on racially targeted issues. That is, he can’t appear to be president of black people. He has to be president of all people. Do you agree with that?

  ALEXANDER: What I think is important is for us to have a president who cares about all people. And what it means to care about someone who lives in a racially segregated ghetto is to be responsive to their unique concerns, their unique challenges. So if we’re going to care about all people and treat all people fairly, we’re going to have to extend certain types of help and support to some groups of people that may not be needed for others. So it’s not about having a black agenda and a white agenda, a brown agenda. It’s about having an agenda that genuinely extends care, compassion, and concern to all people.

  And jobs, right?

  ALEXANDER: Especially jobs today. Yes.

  STEVENSON: I think sometimes when we say “American agenda,” we don’t mean, we don’t include, people of color. We don’t include poor people. I expect every president to care about poverty in this country. If we have forty million people living in poverty, I think every president has to deal with that. And you don’t get a pass just because you’re African American or because of anything. We need for President Obama to have a real American agenda.

  If we have mass incarceration, that’s an American problem. Every president needs to be concerned about the fact that we incarcerate more people than any other country in the world. If we want to be the home of the brave and the land of the free, we’ve got to think about what that means and what that says. If we violate people’s rights because they’re poor, because they’re people of color, if we incarcerate them wrongly, if we condemn them unfairly, then that implicates who we are. And I don’t think that in any way is a black agenda issue or poor people agenda issue. It’s an American issue.

  ALEXANDER: It’s critically important for us to recognize that throughout our nation’s history, poor and working-class whites have been pitted against people of color, triggering the rise of successive new systems of control, even slavery. You know, many people don’t realize that before we had an all-black system of slavery, there was a system of bond labor that included both whites and blacks working right alongside each other on plantations. When blacks and whites joined together and challenged the plantation elite—and there were slave uprisings or bond laborer uprisings—the way in which plantation owners were able to split the workforce and gain control over their workers was by proposing an all-black system of slavery. Which led the white folks to believe that they had received some kind of benefit. And they no longer were willing to engage in struggles with fellow black laborers, with whom they had once joined in struggle. And so we had an all-black system of slavery in part because plantation owners wanted to prevent poor whites and blacks from joining together to seek economic justice.

  STEVENSON: There’s a tremendous effort right now to antagonize and polarize black and white poor communities and direct that anger toward new immigrants and people in this country who are undocumented. That has to be challenged and resisted.

  In poor communities, rural poor communities, the issues are different sometimes than in urban communities. We have huge problems with transportation. We will not solve the economic problem until we do something about the transportation problem. In my community, you know, people working minimum-wage jobs have to drive seventy miles to get to work. When the gas prices go up, it no longer becomes sensible for them to work. They have to quit their jobs, because it actually costs them more to get to work and work eight hours and get home than what they earn. We have to think about that. We have to think about urban communities, where there are these horrific housing conditions that feed violence and drugs and all of these other conditions, we’ve got to talk about it in that way. But the basic commitment is universal. That is, we’ve got to recognize that poor people in America have to be addressed. We can’t keep ignoring them. If we keep ignoring the poor, we not only undermine Dr. King’s vision, we corrupt our values. You judge the character of a society not by how you treat the rich and the privileged and the celebrated. You judge the character of a society by how you treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. And I think this is an American challenge that Dr. King understood. And that’s what’s universal for me.

  ALEXANDER: We need to go back and pick up where Martin Luther King left off, with the poor people’s movement, when he dreamed of joining poor and working-class whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans in a mass movement for human rights in the United States. King said it is high time we switch our focus from a civil rights movement and begin building a human rights movement. Shortly before he died, he said the gains of the past several years have been easy compared to the work that lies ahead.

  Gaining the right to vote, earning the right to sit at the same lunch counter—these cost people relatively little. But the changes that lie ahead, which require a restructuring of our nation’s economy and ensuring that every person has their basic human rights—the right to work, the right to education, the right to health care—honored, no matter what their race or ethnicity, these challenges require a movement even larger than the one that he inspired. So we need to go back to the movement-building work that Martin Luther King believed in so strongly at the time of his death.

  What would a commitment to economic justice, equality of opportunity for all, look like?

  STEVENSON: I think we can take the incarceration question and turn it on its head. In some states we’re spending $45,000 a year to keep a nineteen-year-old in prison for the next thir
ty years for drug possession—$45,000 a year. What could we do if we spent half that amount of money on that nineteen-year-old when he’s five or six or seven or eight?

  Economic justice would say, let’s not wait until we’ve arrested them at eighteen and nineteen and spend $45,000 a year on them. Let’s spend half of that a year, between five and eighteen, and see if we can avoid incarceration, see what kind of opportunities we can create. See what kind of society we can create if we invest in the lives of these children who are living in the margins. Let’s see what kind of America we can create if we invest in deconstructing the systems that have created poverty. Reinvesting in jobs. Reinvesting in the politics of hope. We talk about it, but we don’t make it real unless we deal with the most hopeless, marginalized, subordinated communities in our society.

  Does President Obama get it?

  STEVENSON: I think that elected politicians, at this point in our history, have a very difficult time confronting the politics of fear and anger, I really do. I think it’s very hard. President Clinton used crime to reinforce support among conservatives and moderates. He went back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector even though that man was braindamaged, and it was a horrible thing.

  Mr. Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. He used tough-on-crime rhetoric throughout that administration. That was certainly embraced by his successors. And we’re hearing some of that from this administration. We haven’t seen the kind of commitment to this issue that many of us had hoped for. So I think it’s very difficult for majoritarian politicians who have used the politics of fear and crime to create support to turn against that.

  Your book is the least sentimental of any I’ve read in a long time. You’re really tough on the new Jim Crow.

  ALEXANDER: Absolutely. The mass incarceration of people of color in the United States is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time. It is a tragedy of proportions as great as Jim Crow was in its time. And you’re right. I pull no punches in the book. But I do have great hope. And I devote the last chapter of the book to talking about why we must and we can build a new movement not just to end mass incarceration, but the history of racial caste in America.

  THOMAS CAHILL

  Thomas Cahill roams history looking for little-known individuals who, at pivotal moments in the rise of civilizations, changed the course of events. The iconic figures of the past rarely appear in his books. Cahill told me, “I’m not really interested in Alexander the Great or Napoleon. Every once in a while there’s a general or a politician in one of my books. But he doesn’t stay around very long.” Instead, you meet in the pages of his bestselling books people you may never have heard of—men and women who helped turn the hinges of history and then were largely swallowed up by the shadows of the past. Cahill discovered them among the monks of the Middle Ages (How the Irish Saved Civilization), in the synagogues of ancient Judaism (The Gift of the Jews), in the golden age of Greece (Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea), and in the rise of Christianity (Desire of the Everlasting Hills), as well as in his book Mysteries of the Middle Ages.

  At first, his most recent volume seems to be a puzzling detour from his excavations of the past and his curiosity about what makes a civilization. But only at first. In A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green, Cahill is taking the measure of civilization not as a pageant of events and personalities but through the story of one man’s life and death in a society riven by conflicted notions of justice.

  Dominique Green was eighteen years old in 1992 when he was convicted of a fatal shooting during a Houston convenience store robbery. He admitted taking part but insisted that he did not pull the trigger. The victim’s own wife believed Green did not deserve to die. “All of us have forgiven Dominique for what happened and want to give him another chance,” she wrote to Governor Mark Perry and the Board of Pardons and Paroles. They turned a deaf ear, hardly surprising in Texas. That state leads the way in executions, with four times more than any other state in America.

  While he was on death row, Green learned of Italy’s strong opposition to the death penalty (the Roman Colosseum lights up whenever a death sentence is commuted anywhere in the world). He wrote to an Italian newspaper asking for help, and his petition came to the attention of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic lay organization, whose members work globally against capital punishment. Their headquarters are in the same neighborhood along the Tiber River as the home where Thomas Cahill lives when he’s in Rome. Soon they joined forces on Green’s behalf, and Cahill arranged for his friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa to visit the Texas prison where the condemned young man was waiting to die. Tutu emerged from their two-hour meeting to plead for Green’s life, calling the death penalty “an absurdity that brutalizes society.”

  It was to no avail. Green, now thirty, was executed by lethal injection at 7:59 P.M. on October 26, 2004. Thomas Cahill was determined that the story would not end there.

  —Bill Moyers

  Talk about where Dominique Green came from and where he wound up.

  He came from an alcoholic, drug-using household. He was sexually abused several times. He was put in juvenile homes. Just about everything that could be done to him—that anyone could imagine being done to a child—was done to him. When it says in the Old Testament that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children into the third and fourth generation, I think that’s correct, that these terrible things that go on in families go from one generation to another to another. That’s how Dominique wound up on death row.

  What happened on the night of the killing that he was accused of committing?

  He and some other kids were robbing people in a number of different situations.

  And there are people who swear he pulled the trigger that killed the man whom he was then convicted of murdering.

  Right. But what actually happened was—and this is an example of how badly they do it in Texas—there were four kids. One of them was white. He was not charged with anything. Ever. And you cannot interview him to this day.

  Why?

  You can’t find him, but he exists. I know his name. And the other three were black. Dominique was the youngest. And it looks to me that two others turned against him to get lighter sentences. They decided that he would take the rap. He was certainly guilty of robbery. I don’t think he was guilty of murder. But even if he was, that’s not what I see in this. What I see in this is that we, as a country, are actually sacrificing children to an evil God, to the God of whatever this justice is that we trumpet. Instead of doing something for Dominique Green—a kid who grew up without the aid of civilization—we condemn him to death, and first to the torture of eleven years on death row.

  There was a trial. Dominique had very bad representation. The judge he came before was the same judge who in a slightly earlier appeal had been asked to reverse a decision because the defendant’s lawyer had slept throughout the trial. And the judge, in his decision, said, “The Constitution gives you the right to a lawyer. It doesn’t say whether he has to be awake or not.” Throughout the country, but especially in the state of Texas, there is a kind of collusion among lawyers—whether they’re prosecutors or defenders—and judges, and an awful lot of horrible things happen in order to get as many people executed as possible.

  Some people there see it as a matter of crime and punishment.

  There are no millionaires on death row, nor will there ever be. Almost everyone on death row is poor. And do you really think that no millionaire ever committed a capital crime? I’m saying that there are certain people in our society who we are willing to offer up, and not others. The ones we offer up have no power. We’re not killing Dominique Green because he committed murder. We’re killing Dominique Green because we want to kill somebody.

  People ask, “What would Tom Cahill write if someone in his family had been killed by a Dominique Green?”

  I understand very much the feeling of somebody who has lost a perso
n through murder. But however difficult it may be, the only way you are going to gain closure is to let go of your hatred. Holding on to it is never going to get you out of it. It’s never going to get you out of the bind, the knot that you’re in. The widow of Andrew Lastrapes, the man who was killed in the incident for which Dominique was executed, said to me, “Of course I forgive Dominique. And I forgive them all.” And I said, “How do you do that?” And she said, “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?” She’s an extremely bright but simple woman, and she had no doubts about where her values lay. That doesn’t mean that I would be able to say that, if such a thing had just happened to me. I understand very much the rage. I’m full of rages myself.

  Most democratic societies have given up capital punishment. There’s a new movement internationally to ban it.

  That’s true. When someone is executed in this country, you rarely see the name in The New York Times—maybe on a back page. But our executions are front-page news throughout Italy.

  Why is that?

  Because they consider it to be a terrible injustice that people are still being executed. A country can’t join the European Union if it executes people.

  Have you seen those photographs of the Iranians hoisting prisoners up on a crane while thousands of men and women shout, “God is great—God is great”?

  Yes, and it wasn’t all that long ago that we did things like that. Now we execute in private, out of the public square. But, it wasn’t all that long ago that we were executing publicly, and people would come. It was a big deal. They’d bring a picnic lunch and sit there with their children and watch some guy be strung up.