Here & Now

Welcome to Noon Wednesday, I'm Marisa Wojcik multimedia journalist with Here & Now on PBS Wisconsin. Two stories are being united in support connected by analogous histories and familiar fights for equity. Two years ago two UW-Milwaukee professors each brought what mattered to them to the TEDx stage. Dr. David Pate Professor and Chair of the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare at UWM talked about the phrase Black Lives Matter and what it means to him. Dr. Margaret Noodin, Professor of English and American Indian Studies and the director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian education, spoke about the importance of listening to the knowledge embedded in the words and places around us. So today, we are bringing both of these ideas together and both of these conversations together and they both join me now, thank you for being here. Dr. Pate, I wanna start with you, you've said these words from James Baldwin Stick With You, quote, "the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us are unconsciously controlled by it, history is literally present in all that we do." What do those words mean to you? You know, particularly now those words mean a lot but it means to me as a person who teaches social welfare policy is that based in a country's history is issues of superiority or supremacy and with that supremacy comes is ideal that one person or one group of people are better than others and that is the way we will run and construct the country that we live in. When I was doing the TED Talk it meant so much to me because I was trying myself as a black man to understand what the movement was telling me and what it basically told me with some of the things I've read in so many years from James Baldwin, is that based on well how decisions are made is generally based in the premise that I deserve this, you don't and that's the way we will operate in this country and as simple as that. Dr. Noodin, should we be teaching history differently? I would definitely say we could improve the way we teach history. I think that there are voices that are part of this nation's past that have not been included in the history books and I continually encountering students who feel as if they've been a little bit cheated of knowing the full complexity of the nation they are now really citizens and stewards of, it isn't to say that people haven't been making good attempts but it really is time to change, there's so much that has been left out. There have been so many ways that people have been allowed to learn only a little bit about a topic or an individual and really not know what the underlying issue or beliefs were that the issue or person might have represented. I think we see that in some of the changes in the ways, just in recent weeks people have talked about how we symbolize history and how powerful those symbols are in shutting down further conversations or truth about slavery and the history and segregation and the legacies that were in place. Absolutely, statues being brought down in La Crosse for example, there's a statue of an indigenous person and they're finally having a conversation about okay what if we took that down? Dr. Noodin you have been participating in jingle healing dances, what is the significance of this tradition to you and what are you hoping to heal right now? Well, I would begin my comments by saying that many different people will have a different origin story for jingle healing dances but we know that in our archeological past, we find evidence of what people sometimes refer to as tinkling cones, ways to make music while in motion and ways to attach to clothing representations that are either celebration or part of ceremony and those have been around for thousands and thousands of years. Right now the particular incarnation of the tinkling cones or little like items that make music while you're dancing on dresses, stretches back to about 100 years ago when people were living through a different pandemic and the tin cans often in the region I'm from they were snuff cans and you would save those up and you would turn those into cones and attach them to address so where I come from in Minnesota, there were people who were literally doing that during the influenza epidemic of the early 1900s and when I learned to do this in the 1980s it was following closely in that tradition, which essentially was that we would gather and dance and think of healing one another by being present in a space and caring for each other and it is a way of celebrating continuation and trying to really move from one generation to the next literally staying alive. So Kimberly Blazer and I had said this is something we'd like to join in doing at a time where we very sadly seem an echo of the same kind of history happening. Again, we we're not alone in doing this at all. Initially, when we were dancing, the weekend we started doing that in early March I knew people that were doing it in Ontario, in Manitoba, in Minnesota so it was a large diaspora that was united even though we were in separate locations. Dr. pate, you've been teaching a Black Lives Matter class at UWM and doing your own kind of forms of action, you've had your students produce and present art to the community around the words Black Lives Matter, saying they need to be an activist about what they're learning and how they're learning it, why did you decide to have them engage with these words in this way? Thank you for asking that question. The reason I purposely engaged in the development and the delivery of Black Live class on the term Black Lives Matter was one because I was ignorant as an adult, what did that really mean and how do I as an intellectual scholar embrace this idea and also understand it in a way that I'm giving the true due diligence in a way that I would purposely myself understand it. So I have to admit that class was a act of self care for me as an academic, as a person who was black in America but also was an opportunity for me to engage in conversation with white students which were primarily the students in my class and there were two black students but it gave me an opportunity to engage in what I would consider a difficult conversation. One because as Margaret was mentioning earlier, I wasn't taught black history in class, I wasn't taught, black history is American history let's be the start there and my American history lessons did not include much of anything on black people, except that they were slaves and I knew I had in my gut based in my adult education, I learned it was much more to be in black than we were slaves or enslaved people but I did it because I really thought it was important for me to be on this journey with my students because I really, really have a love of teaching and I believe that it was an opportunity to also engage students in a way to push the envelope for themselves to embrace the discomfort I feel every day as a black American in this country, to understand what it's like to have difficult conversations because that's the part of being a black American, you had those difficult conversations every single day and you had to figure out how to maneuver yourself and to strategize how you be in a safe space and I wanted students to understand what is it like to be black but also how is it to engage with your family members on a topic that you may not be comfortable with. What do you say when someone counters with the phrase all lives matter? It sounds like some of your classroom work encountered that quite a bit. It was fun for me to learn how to do that. I mean, I really thought it was an opportunity. I took it all this as an opportunity for me to be educated on how to address that question so luckily for me I had allies who are like Margaret and others I knew nationally, who had been very active in the Black Lives Matter movement directly but it came down to simply as we're not saying all lives don't matter but right now Black Lives are not seen as important or they don't matter and they never have mattered in the same way that people who were defined as white people in this country have mattered because our country, our government has set the standard as to who is important and who is not and as many examples that I raised in my class to codify that, to triangulate what I'm saying it's not the same because I'm some raging activists, even though I wouldn't mind being that many times but at the same time I was trying to say to them, they are real this historical first person narratives on Thomas Jefferson, on Andrew Jackson, on number of people who have done some horrible things in this country to people who are indigenous as well as black. Dr. Noodin you presented on the rich meanings of the Ojibwe language but the takeaway from your talk was to listen, what should we be listening to within the Black Lives Matter movement and how is it uniting others such as indigenous supporters? I think that's a really good reading of what I was trying to say there was that we do need to listen to other identities. So the way that I would hope we can start to look at our community is to really value every member differently so that I'm able to see in students, in colleagues, in my community black folks faces, black people that matter that are making policy that are holding power and that we're okay with them having power and having focus and being the center of attention and I think if we don't listen to what everyone in our community has to say, we don't understand enough to know when one part of our community really has a lot to contribute. So I think just the way David was saying there are times we are in the classroom as educators we have to address difficult topics and I think every student in the room has a moment when they think that their voice should matter in a conversation that what they have to say should be heard and I think many times that's what people forget needs to happen right now in our country. When we say Black Lives Matter, it's because we're trying to center that concern and have the black friends, family and fellow citizens that we all know centered and able to be heard and really matter in a different way than they have ever before in our history. When it comes to disparities and things like policing and access to good health care, do you see parallels with the indigenous community and the black community? I would say that that's definitely a starting point for both communities and perhaps it's a reason that our two communities are very closely aligned compared to many other communities that at any point in history may be able to say they were the minority in a setting or a city but when we look at the way the nation framed the relationship with indigenous people, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was originally in the War Department and the declaration of Indian, of independence states merciless Indian savages so it positions Indian people, indigenous people as enemies, as people to be controlled, as people to be at war with and I think that when a slave ship travels to another continent and captures people and takes them and separates them from their land, a very similar thing is happening. So both of us are dealing with legacies of separation and fairly violent. I mean, there's really no other way to say it pretty violent relationships with the nation and in many cases complete the ratio so people's individualized identity was not allowed to be expressed and so in that ways there are, you know, many people who make up the mosaic that is our nation who bring different opinions and languages to our country and they're all really important. I think in Wisconsin our immigrant history is a rich part of who we are now, definitely but I think that black and indigenous communities have connections in the ways that they have historically either been not part of the conversation or been in some cases erased from the conversation. Dr. Pate, what do you say to that question of how these two communities are coming in support of each other? You know and Margaret knows that when I teach my social welfare policy class, I lean on her expertise to bring in that knowledge about how those who two identify them by their tribal name or by themselves as Native Americans or American Indians. That's something I'm very cautious based on my conversations with her and others I've learned to come in contact or who ever come in contact over my lifetime as to how to identify and one of the big parts of my TED Talk was me identifying as a Black American, I don't use the term African American and not out of disrespect but black is a more political sighs word but also in Africa I was told to embrace my black history, to embrace the fact that I was socially constructed as a black person, a negro who built this country, who was very involved in building this country. So I'm very in the least my ancestors were I didn't build much of my ancestors did a lot and so I really, I think it's really important to acknowledge the issues that are confronting that people who are of native to this country haven't been affected by you know, even though we both can tell war stories on the amount of access to health care we don't have, the amount lack of access to housing we don't have, the lack of access to economic security we don't have, the number of non low wage jobs that we all that many of our people had, the amount of essential workers that both of us in the population that we are present have so there are definitely some similarities. But I tell my class yes, I wanna acknowledge as a black person that blacks are catching a lot of unfortunate challenges in this country but we never talked about what some of those who are indigenous to this country or native to this country are feeling as well because of our own ignorance around the whole idea that if they have a casino they must be okay and that's just not the reality and I know it's a running joke but it's not a laughing matter to be honest but it's something that I think it's important that we recognize that there are groups of people here who are just suffering but there's also a group of people who are doing very well. For example, a statistic that's out there as a pertains to blacks, I don't have it for though as it pertains to Native Americans is that a white person with less than a high school degree versus a black person with a college degree will still do better economically in their lifetime. There's no excuse for that, that we don't have the same access and opportunities based on our education when we're told that education is the route to our success, people that still is not and that's the reality and people don't keep that we really uphold meritocracy very highly, but there's many a person of color, and I don't use that term often but Latinx, Native American, black, monk who do extreme work really hard and are still not doing well economically. So that's a long winded way to say that we have a lot of the same challenges, they just present themselves in very different ways. Yeah, a big part of your work as you just said is to talk about policies and historical systemic racism and how it still presents itself today, Milwaukee often has the finger pointed at it for major racial disparities. Dr. Payne, you've said, this issue is all of our responsibility, do we need to still better understand these historical problems as a society before things change or are we ready to make tangible changes now? I think it can happen both at the same time. I think that what we're experiencing right now as seen is that I think the beginning of what may might be called a revolution or a challenge to decolonialism or deconstructing what has been the status quo for operating in our society. I think that we have a responsibility each and every one of us from the academic to the doctor, lawyer, school teacher, homemakers, whatever, we have to read and there's no excuse with Google or whatever ways that you can learn information to not know how this world exists. You may not wanna hear it, it's difficult to hear, it's hard to acknowledge that this is the reality of the world I live in because, for example, as a person who lives in Wisconsin but was born and raised in Philadelphia in a predominantly black neighborhood, I have to admit I've never been in a state that was so very white and that's the easiest way to put it as well, as people will say in my community and the privileges here are so very apparent for those who are white but for those who are black and brown it is just the total opposite and is seen as a behavioral issue when structurally people are purposefully keeping people in the place they are, you have to admit that. People have to admit that policies that are in place and practice that are in place are because you're trying to maintain your superiority or your supremacy around how you operate and how you do your day to day work, your day to day business and that's what I tell my students if I'm wrong I say come back and challenge me, find the information where I'm telling you not because I use first person narrative every time I talk and this is the reality of where we are. So, yes, there may be some poor behaviors but the structure that's in place only supports what we see day to day. Dr. Noodin what would you say to that question? I would agree with so much of what David just said, I think that we have to look at these systems and be honest about how we change them. I think, you know, these histories are so complicated, it takes a bit of listening and humility to take the time to understand them. So for instance, for indigenous people who might now be citizens of sovereign nations, the way those nations were constructed involves land tenure, so their ability to ever hold equity in property is limited. Their ability to have communal reason to own something together is incentivized but that's very different than the way the American system works. So when you have people who live in a society where everything, the water, sometimes the air you're breathing is commodified and you don't have the same access to possess or perhaps even the same desire to possess and own land or water in the same way, you just structurally never going to be equal. So that's what we have to look at, where are people who have been living in a system that has not given them? When we look at the Black Lives Matter movement in Milwaukee the places where I've been with people protesting are places that I know our high school students are not succeeding equally. I know we have black students who then attempt to come to our campus and we work very hard to help them feel they have equal access but they realize quickly that not all high school In Wisconsin are the same and they may have come from a high school that was funded differently and for many reasons well beyond their control, they may not have had as many AP classes, you know, those are pretty specific examples but I think that sometimes what we have to think about is where in our world does the inequality begin and how do we teach people to understand the various systems that are perpetuating it. You mentioned young people, are our young people driving this movement? I would say that young people are very engaged, very enlightened, very understanding because they can visually see through whatever medium they use black people being lynched in front of them. They can see that and students will come to me, I have a student right now who wants to talk to me every week because they're having what I would call PTSD from lack of being available, lack of resources to take care of themselves with their parents don't have a history of economic security and they're just out there by themselves and they can't survive but my voice and my leaning out, my reaching out to them is helping them get through the week. I think that young people I talk to are very angry, I unfortunately worry about my own nieces and nephews, I worry about my own kids of what they're witnessing that they see people who look like themselves who are being killed or lynched as I will say and there's no repercussions. Breonna Taylor, let's talk about her, I mean there's so many names I can say that I do believe the youth are very much behind it, very awoke and they're gonna the ones that make this happen and in some ways. However, with this recent protests we see across gender, we see across age, we see across race, we're seen something, we're seen internationally a response. So I think we're in a very different space but I definitely do see young people being very engaged and being very active around this movement. I would have to agree with that. I think that my initial sort of sense of exhaustion and fear about everything just repeating those of us that are old enough to have lived through the 60s and 70s this was just a reality of my youth and then we grew into a period where we all began to wonder, was all that effort worth it? We still weren't seeing the change we had wanted and we could continue in some ways but I think that many of us certainly at my age were saying this is just a repeat and where will we get and it's been really rewarding to see the youth pick up where we left off, they aren't starting over, they are starting in a different place. I genuinely believe that they are benefiting some of the people I see involved in Milwaukee are people that have had classes with David. Some of them are people who I think are asking questions differently than people ever asked before and that it doesn't solve it, it doesn't fix it for us but it does make me feel more hopeful that we will end up in a different place and at least we have a sort of a momentum that we did not have before. Fully, I totally agree with what Margaret just said, I think that, I mean I have one student I am thinking of who currently a police officer and he said that his way of policing is so different from taking my class. Now that's one student, you know, in the research world that the end of one so you can't really validate your class on that one student but it just, that what it takes one person each time you talk to one person, if one person can be changed in a different way that could be something, he could pass something to his children, to his family, to his nieces and nephews, you just don't know how far your influence can go and I think that's what we have to start thinking about how do I be become and who can I trust to engage in this conversation without feeling that we'll be harmed from having wanting to have this conversation? And I think that's possible. It's just that we have to be willing and not fearful of being challenged and being told, yes you have racist ideas but you know, as a possibility to save you let's keep it moving and see where we go from there. There's so much to read that will help you at this point, I highly recommend Kendi's book right now How to Be an Antiracist. It's helped me to think about racism in a different way and to really incorporate the term racist ideas because that's what the country is built on is racist ideas that we've all incorporated and buy into every day and racism can go across race. It doesn't have to be that because you're white doesn't mean you're racist, you could be you can be a black racist too for the first time. I'm now starting to challenge that whole idea, that ideology as it says in the book about if you evaluate your own group for whatever reasons you brought into because you live in racist environment, that's a reality that we have to start having those conversations about as well and I challenged myself every day like how do I think about people in terms of where they live and what they do and decisions they make as a researcher, as a husband, as a brother, as an uncle, as a cousin, how do I look at my own family and people I work with? So I definitely think it's the right time to have these conversations. Well, I think that's a great way to end this conversation. Dr. Pate, Dr. Noodin, I can't thank you enough for joining me today. Thank you for the invitation. Yes and thank you for having both of us, this was a great way to have a conversation across two different topics. Well, for more from Noon Wednesday and PBS Wisconsin you can visit pbswisconsin.org and thank you so much for joining us on Noon Wednesday.