- Good evening, everyone.
It's wonderful to see you here.
My name is Joy Connolly
and as provost and senior vice president,
I have the privilege of welcoming all of you
to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
and to tonight's event.
I'm especially pleased to welcome our alumni
and our friends and colleagues
who are part of today's conference,
events that preceded tonight,
and also those who are watching livestream.
The audience is even bigger
than the people you see around you.
Tonight, we are gathered here to discuss a topic
that has become increasingly relevant
and I would say, in fact, an urgent one
given our current political and social climate,
and we're also here to pay tribute
to a legendary member of our faculty, Frances Fox Piven.
(audience cheering)
I have a feeling that won't be the only time
we have a big round of applause.
Like Frances, many of you here this evening
have spent a long time on the front lines
in the fight for social justice
and others of you may be newcomers to advocacy
and you may well see yourself
as having joined a new resistance,
and certainly, many of our alumni
and especially those here with us tonight
trace their path to political activism to Professor Piven
who's been part of the Graduate Center for 35 years.
I imagine, too, that tonight's other distinguished panelists
have inspired many of you to work towards
changing the status quo,
but regardless of where the roots of your activism lie
or how deep they run,
we're delighted to have you with us and we welcome you here.
The fact that you find yourself here at the Graduate Center,
at the center of this conversation is no coincidence.
Our conference panels earlier today
used the themes that animate Fran's work
as the platform on which to hold intents
and lively conversations about our current political moment,
that's what we do here at the Graduate Center,
we bring together people from inside and outside academia,
it's really our habit, it's baked into our DNA,
and we're a place that values local and global impact.
I strong believe after spending
a little over a year here now having moved from another
unmentionable institution downtown,
that no other graduate school in the country
takes more seriously its public responsibilities
or its mission to advance knowledge for the public good.
As our name implies, the Graduate Center
is a national leader in graduate education,
at the master's level and especially the doctoral levels.
We're one of the largest PhD granting
institutions in the country
and we're especially proud to rank among
the country's top 10 institutions
in awarding doctorates to students
from underrepresented minority groups.
We're the home of pioneering research and creative work
of Nobel and Guggenheim and Pulitzer winners.
Every year,
I repeat this statistic everywhere I go,
it's one of my favorite numbers in the worlds,
our doctoral students teach more than 200,000 undergraduates
at the City University of New York,
that means that the very best of research and learning
from the seminar room here at the GC
goes into every borough and neighborhood.
Before we introduce this evening's panel,
I would like to take just a brief moment to recognize
those who helped make this event possible tonight,
the Graduate Center's Advanced Research Collaborative,
the Murphy Institute, New York State Senator Gustavo Rivera,
the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York office,
the JCF/Helenia Fund,
and former GC Foundation Board Chair Craig Kaplan,
I thank them all on your behalf, on our behalf
for their generous support
of tonight's and today's programming.
So, please join me now in welcoming
Professor Alyson Cole and Professor Lorraine Minnite.
Alyson is the executive officer of our doctoral program
in political science here at the Graduate Center
and she served as the co-organizer of today's conference
together with Lorraine.
Lorraine is a GC alumna in political science,
a former student of Frances,
and currently professor of political science at Rutgers.
I could say a lot more about their achievements,
but I know you're all eager
to get on with tonight's discussion,
so you're in for a thought-provoking night,
I wanna thank you again for coming,
so please do enjoy the evening, thank you.
(audience clapping)
- So, I'm Alyson Cole
and I have the honor of chairing
the political science department
here at the Graduate Center.
They call me an executive officer, but I'm just a chair
and this is a program that Frances Fox Piven
has played a crucial role in defining
for more than three decades.
Most of today, for those of you who were able to join us,
was spent reflecting on our current political moment
through the themes that have animated Piven's scholarship,
but before we continue that conversation,
Lori and I both wanted to take a moment
just to speak about Frances.
About 10 years ago, the pundit Glen Beck
singled out Frances Fox Piven
as one of the nine most dangerous people in the world.
(audience laughing and cheering)
Now, this is before the term alternative facts
had entered our lexicon,
back when Fox News claimed that their reporting
was fair and balanced
rather than their new more accurate
and far more disturbing slogan,
must watched and most trusted,
it was a gentler time
when the principles of Hollywood spectacle
rather than those of reality TV governed politics.
Despite Beck's vitriol,
there was a modicum of truth to his charge,
Frances Fox Piven is indeed a force to be reckoned with.
She has devoted her long and distinguished career
as a scholar, activist, teacher,
and mentor to righting wrongs.
Beyond an unwavering commitment
to enlarging economic and political rights,
this has also meant toppling the mistaken presumptions
undergirding orthodoxies in the academy
and ever shaping new fields of study
and spearing policy change.
In her scholarship, Piven not only identifies
how to analyze a problem rightly, but how to address it,
more specifically how to support the victims of injustice
to see that they possess the power to enact change,
that together they can by defying rules
and disrupting routines transform the institutions
that govern their lives
and that they can do so in Piven's words,
"aggressive, proudly, and even joyful,"
that is pretty dangerous stuff.
On social media many claim the title of public intellectual,
but Piven is an intellectual activist
which is a difference in kind not just degree.
She never tells us how she knew it all along,
though, often she did,
instead her work shows us how and where to look,
so that we can see for ourselves,
in the street, at a protest, in the classroom,
even at a department meeting,
to say nothing of her numerous books and articles,
her reasoning is always analytically precise
and her political convictions resolute.
She's been honored many times for her courageous activism
and groundbreaking scholarship,
but I think her interventions begin
with the performative power of her prose.
Her language is simple, bold, and piercingly sharp,
but equally striking is the frequent use
of the word we in her text.
Now, it's true many of her pivotal monographs
were co-authored with Richard Cloward,
but this plural pronoun exceeds their collaboration,
it's an expansive we,
a we that beckons readers to join in a collective endeavor,
in turn that plural pronoun incites readers
to connect with others
and to rally to defend those under attack.
It invites us all
and we're all students of Piven, one way or another,
to combine anger with hope and imagination
to turn quiescence into indignation
and apathy into conviction.
Now, Provost Connolly already thanked
our generous supporters,
but I also wanna thank the many students and staff
who helped pull together this event,
but most of all, I wanna thank Professor Lorraine Minnite,
a distinguished graduate of our doctoral program
and important scholar of electoral politics
and voting in her own right,
the success of this conference is due largely
to Lori's tireless and extraordinary work,
so please, let's give her a hand.
(audience clapping)
- Thank you so much
and thank you so much for being here
to share this evening with us.
I wanted to just say one word really
about the conference that we've had all day.
Frances retired recently after 35 years of teaching
here at the Graduate Center
and it's a great achievement and accomplishment
and it should be recognized,
but she did not want a kind of memorial.
She did not want people kinda standing up
and just praising her,
what she wanted, and this reflects who she is,
she wanted to talk about the world,
the way it is right now, about politics,
about what we can do to make the world better,
an analysis of how we can do it differently,
and really look to the future,
so I think that's what we try to achieve
today during the rest of the conference
by taking a look at and sort of being inspired by
some of her many works
and the many fields really that she has written about,
and in that spirit, I do not want to embarrass her
by telling her how much she means to me,
how much she means to so many of her students,
I simply wanna say that she is just a so cool,
fabulous, fantastic human being.
I am so fortunate that in my life,
my life has intertwined with hers for many years now
and this was the easiest conference I've ever organized.
I used to be on the Left Forum Board
and that was really crazy.
This was so easy because I had a happy champion
in the chair of the political science department.
I don't work here at the Graduate Center.
Alyson Cole worked as tirelessly as I did on this,
she deserves an enormous amount of credit.
Earl Fleary, I don't know if you've seen him or met him,
but he is just fabulous
and he's the administrative officer in the department.
And before I introduce Laura Flanders
who's gonna take over and get to the program,
I also wanna mention just one other supporter
I don't think was mentioned before, but the New Press,
Diane Wachtell and Ellen Adler from the New Press
have published a number of books that Frances has written,
but going way back, Frances association with that press
has been very, very important,
and they were a supporter also of the conference,
so thank all of our supporters,
we couldn't do it without you.
So, let me introduce Laura Flanders
who I know many of you know
and I was so happy that she was able to moderate.
I think she's gotta be one of the best journalists,
interviewers that I can think of.
Her work is showcased on her show, the Laura Flanders Show,
which is a weekly show that you can see
on the YouTube channel for the Laura Flanders Show
where they talk about politics
and she interviews forward-looking people
and people in the arts and people doing things
and her fairly recent work for Yes Magazine,
which I use actually in a course that I teach,
is really great
and so we're so happy to have her here,
and I'm gonna turn it over to her
and let her take over with the panel, thank you.
- Thank you both.
Laura's gonna take over, I love that.
This is the insurgency from
kind of the left hand side of the stage.
We have had a few insurgencies today already.
We've changed the format a little bit for this evening.
We're gonna do a conversation, but before we do it,
I do wanna spend a little moment
sort of embarrassing Frances, is that really off-limits?
I mean, for heaven's sake,
we're talking about the age of Trump.
I'd like to insurgent that very idea
because I feel like this is all one long age
that we have been in
since I first came to this country in the early 80s
and there's some similarity.
I feel as if I'm experiencing now and then,
then it felt like absolutely the worst of times,
Margaret Thatcher had just got elected,
Ronald Reagan had just got elected, nukes, you name it.
We were really in big trouble.
On the other hand, once I got here,
I saw a different model of women in leadership
and I saw women, Barbara as well, Barbara and Frances
both inspired me enormously,
that you could be radical and funny
and sexy and in leadership,
and really overturning applecart after applecart
in a way that I hope we can aspire to today.
Today feels a little bit like one of those moments,
yesterday I was on my way to a radio conference,
I pulled out of my pocket,
I hadn't worn my jacket for a while,
I pulled out of my pocket a flyer.
I was feeling pretty cheery, the sun was shining,
and I was on time for the train, always a plus,
there was this flyer, "Your community is under attack,"
and I was like, "Correct, I know, it is under attack."
There were more so-called candlelit vigils,
really triumphalist, racist,
supremacist, threatening marches
in Charlottesville this last week.
You've got the DACA young people in complete limbo.
You've got the Trump administration
packing the courts with people
who really just do not like women and LGBTQI people
and certainly anything having to do with love.
You have a climate catastrophe
that has reached the point of no return
and looks like there is no turning back.
You've got Amazon already responsible
for a quarter of all online sales in this country
wanna to now do a supersize purchase
of its video and television channel stable.
They're buying up television channels all across the country
to give them more ways to sell us things
as if supermarkets weren't enough
and you've got the Sinclair Broadcasting
takeover of the Tribune Company that will create
a right ideologically driven broadcasting behemoth
reaching 75% of US TV-viewing audiences.
Our communities are under attack.
At the same time, I think about what we put on our program
and I'm excited to say that the Laura Flanders Show
is back on CUNY TV, I think it started this week.
You can catch us every week
and we are soon to be a co-production of CUNY TV
of which I am immensely proud.
On that program, we say we like to interview,
it's the place where the people who say it can't be done
take a backseat to the people who are doing it
and we talk to people all across the country every week
who are doing something extraordinary.
Last week, it was people who are bringing aid
person to person from Detroit to Puerto Rico.
This week, it's people who are also in Detroit
connecting meshed internet servers
to create their own broadband providers
in a place where the big cable companies
just don't want to serve the majority people of that city.
We have the best and the worst of times
I think in these moments
and this panel I think will be the kinda panel
that unlike the flyer that says,
"Your community is under attack"
and you feel your breath getting a little shallower
and your heart racing a little faster
and you can't actually think,
I think this panel is people, women, notably, who pause,
summon us to consider deeply
where we come from, how we got here,
what is the essential makeup of the company we are in,
what mistakes have we made,
what great things have we learned.
This is an opportunity I think to talk about
how not only do we make an insurgency from below,
but from below, above, and from both sides of the stage.
So, I wanna introduce people who really need no introduction
starting at the far side.
Ai-jen Poo is the executive director
of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
A frequent guest on the Laura Flanders Show.
She's also the author of Age of Dignity:
Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America,
and I will just say there's a lot more in that book
than meets the eye.
Kim Crenshaw is a bi-tenured faculty member
at both UCLA and Columbia.
In Columbia, she is the director
of the Center for Intersectionality
and Social Policy Studies.
She's also the founder of the African-American Policy Forum
and its executive director.
Barbara Ehrenreich.
I don't know if you've ever heard of her.
She wrote a book in 2001, Nickel and Dimed:
On (Not) Getting By in America.
Her list of accomplishments is long.
She just wanted me to share with you
that she is the founder
of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
which if you're not aware of,
you really need to check out
and you can get more information about it
both at the Institute for Policy Studies
and we will make more information available to you
if you write to us.
And Frances is the terribly distinguished professor
and public intellectual activist who brings us all here.
With Richard Cloward, she's the co-author
of Regulating the Poor, Poor People's Movements,
and I believe the New Press is giving away
copies of Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven
which will tell you anything you need to know.
So, let's start.
Let's start with you Ai-jen.
I come to you for notes of optimism, but in this case,
I'm serious, when we talk about
how Frances Fox Piven's work has penetrated
the work that each of us do,
what's your story?
- Is this working, okay, great.
Well, first, I actually have a gift
from the members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance
to present to Frances for telling the story
of how everyday people have changed
the course of history in this country,
everyday people like domestic workers,
and so I just wanna present that first.
And I wanna share a story about Frances with you
because I think it actually really defines,
it gets me out of bed every day.
Back in 2011, not long after Occupy Wall Street,
I had the privilege of hearing Frances speak
to a small group of organizers
and she said, it was 2011, so it was after Occupy,
after the protests in Wisconsin, the DREAMers movement,
and she said that what she was seeing
was what she thought were early signals of the coming
of the next great social movement in this country
that would fundamentally update and transform our democracy
the way that the Civil Rights Movement had,
the way that the Labor Movement of the 1930s had,
the kind that only comes around once every few generations,
the kind where your kids and your grandkids ask you,
"Where were you, what were you doing at that time?"
And she also said that we would know when it had arrived,
when millions of everyday people
were in the street in motion,
and I was in Washington
for the Women's March on January 21st
and yes, I know a lot of you were there.
And I just kept thinking of what Frances said that day.
I looked around and all I could see were millions of people
in every single direction that you could see in the streets,
millions and millions,
over four million in the United States,
and I just thought this could be our moment.
This could be it.
And I do think that it's not inevitable,
but I also think that that is the potential of this moment
and much of it is up to us.
I do think there's a real hunger and a demand
for a whole new vision for our democracy
and people are in motion.
It didn't stop on January 21st as many of you know
and so that is the opportunity of this moment
and that frame, that story that I tell myself every day
I got from Frances.
- [Laura] Same question.
- Can you hear me?
- [Audience] Yes. - Okay.
I think Frances and I kinda got together
in a similar period that is the Reagan era.
I made a big mistake.
I put together a collection of essays
I had written in that time
and called it the Worst Years of Our Lives.
I mean, unless I can do a part two.
But anyway, it was very, very bad times.
I was like so many people totally intimidated by Frances
and amazed that she thought I was somebody could
be brought into the struggle
and not that I hadn't been an activist.
One of the big things we got into right,
well, she got me into,
was the struggle against welfare reform,
and what she said was,
"You have to start with the most oppressed,
"the most ground down
"and that would be welfare recipients."
Now, I've thought about that again and again.
Is that true?
Is that the best way to work?
It was very inspiring to me.
I'm an atheist not a Christian,
but my understanding of Christianity is
you start from the bottom.
Mostly, she's like a great friend.
- [Laura] Kim to you.
- Well, my story goes back
more decades than I actually want to acknowledge.
I went to law school in the early 80s
and during that period, we were in the midst of
perhaps the most significant retrenchment
since the first reconstruction
on questions of civil rights and race,
and when I went to law school,
there was the emergence of the Left
in critical legal studies
and at the same time, the,
I call them the liberal centrists on race
were basically in the position in law schools
to more or less dictate the terms of engagement around race
and as a young activist coming into this elite space,
I was basically torn between
these two political formations.
So, on the Left, there was conversation
around the critique of rights,
there was conversation around the idea that perhaps
a rights-based strategy wasn't the best strategy,
there were criticisms about the idea
that people from the bottom were demanding the wrong thing,
they were using rights discourse
in a way that was inevitably
going to undermine their interests in the end.
There were pieces of that that seemed to ring true,
but there still was something missing
it seemed to me in that analysis.
On the other side, there were liberal race centrists
who were completely engaged, committed,
they had consumed all the Kool-Aid
about the role of law in producing racial reform
that was sustaining and ongoing and transformative,
there seemed to be something kind of there,
but something not.
I was one of many young people of color
who were just trying to figure out
where's the space for the analysis that makes sense to us,
how do we talk about the transformative potential of law,
but also the legitimizing potential of law,
how do we talk about the fact that
rights allow people from the bottom
to actually have a language to affirm
their vision of how the world can be,
and at the same time talk about how quickly
those rights can deteriorate
once the insurgency of the moment
has basically been taken over by the idea
of we've given you what you need and now go away,
and so I was trying to write about this stuff,
trying to have debates about the critique of rights,
trying to write about what it means
to have been someone who was empowered by rights,
but at the same time realizing that there were limitations
and then I found Poor People's Movements.
I found the argument, it was all right there,
that poor people can challenge
the conditions of their lives from the bottom
and at the same time, elites at the end of the day
determine what poor people get in response to that,
so it was an answer to say,
"Look, it didn't matter what the language was gonna be
"that poor people, black people use,
"we were still gonna get rights
"whether we demanded land or something else,"
and it was also the case that
the work actually informed the title of my first article,
it's called Race Reform and Retrenchment:
Transformation and Legitimation in Anti-Discrimination Law,
that would never have been remotely
part of my understanding had it not been
for my engagement with Fran's work,
so in many ways I see her work as being
one of the unrecognized sources of critical race theory,
that work is one of the unrecognized sources
of intersectionality.
It's work that continues to bear fruit,
even in this period where the question is
who has the momentum when we're talking about
building from the bottom?
- [Laura] Frances.
- Laura.
How to say this nicely?
You're such a great moderator.
You're such a great steerer of the conversation,
can you please steer it away from me?
- [Laura] I'm going there.
(audience laughing)
Insurgencies, activism,
describe the landscape of insurgency as you see it now.
- Well, I think that the potential for insurgency
is always there
and the potential for effective insurgency is always there
because the complex institutions
of a complex modern society require intricate forms
of cooperation from lots of people.
If that cooperation ceases, if it stops,
things slow down and then they shut down
and that's what I call disruption,
that can happen,
and it often happens at a time
when observers are in a sense the least prepared for it.
This is really important
because so many of us are opinion-makers,
there are also enormous obstacles
to the activation of this insurgent power
that comes from disobeying, from rule-breaking,
and from all of the disorder,
the ungovernability that flows out of rule-breaking.
What do we mean by socialization?
We mean people as little infants,
little puddings that you can shape
are shaped into conforming animals, conforming creatures
because they want approval,
they want the support and affection
of those around them who are stronger and so forth,
and then there are of course the threats
and the incentives that come from conformity.
No matter how old you are,
you still want approval, you still want a raise,
you still want to get your pension.
There are a lot of ways in which this capacity
to be defiant, to break the rules,
and by breaking the rules,
to activate the elemental power that belongs
to all of the cooperating members of a complex society.
You have to break the rules to activate that power,
that's what the power is,
the power is in stopping things, that's what a strike is,
and we can strike in many different ways
in many different institutional contexts
and we mostly don't do it.
We don't do it, other people don't do it,
and we don't do it because the forces of conformity
are so large, so overpowering,
so comforting as well.
- [Laura] So, let me ask Ai-jen,
is it possible that the insurgency
that Fran was describing that you think about in this moment
is the insurgency of rule-breaking and disruption
and pudding-shaping from the Right?
- From the Right?
- [Laura] They claim that they are the great disruptors,
the Trump especially,
his supporters believe that he is the great disruptor,
literally those words you heard
at the Republican Convention last year.
- Yeah, I mean I think there's a way that that's true
and that there is a way that the core moral fabric
and the institutions of our democracy
are being threatened and disrupted
in pretty existential ways right now.
For sure.
And I think that I agree
we don't wield disruptive power enough
and I do think that that's something
we need to be wielding more.
I think that there's a lot of complex dynamics happening
and I think one of the things
that was so powerful about the movement for black lives
from Black Lives Matter was its incredible disruptive power
and is its incredibly disruptive power.
When Fran was saying that,
the first thing that came to mind
was a recent direct action
in LA County were they were gonna build new prisons,
some thousands of new prison beds
and the local Black Lives Matter chapter
actually organized a civil disobedience action
where they actually brought 2,000 beds
to block the statehouse
and actually chain themselves to the bed
and disrupted the business as usual in the statehouse
and I think that that kind of activity
is absolutely essential in this moment,
and I think it has to be combined
with wielding other forms of power like political power
and the power to un-elect people
and narrative power.
I mean, you're the pro at this in terms of how we actually
build the power to tell the story
of who we are as a country on our terms.
- [Barbara] If I may. - [Laura] Barbara.
- We don't have to just keep going in order
when you call on us. - [Laura] Not at all.
- Let's have our little insurgency.
- [Laura] Disruptive, disrupt.
- Because I think,
you know, Frances, people have a sense
that the rules are being broken all the time from above.
When you said the word pension for a moment I cringed,
what's that, maybe a little generation gap here, pension,
I mean, some of you may know about them, but not in my life,
but things are being destroyed so rapidly
from basic notions of courtesy and decorum
to any kind of social program that has ever helped people.
I don't have to describe what's going on.
There is an anger and there is a ripping part,
the energy of that kind of insurgency
against a technocratic government,
I'm not gonna analyze the term victory here,
but it was an attraction to what was seen as an insurgency,
an attraction that was,
I'm not also gonna analyze the social bases
of Trumpism and the votes for him,
but it was coming from a variety of people
including some very wealthy people,
but it also is true, I say with great personal shame,
comes in part from the white working class in this country
which is my class of origin.
My extended family, it's people who show up at Thanksgiving,
it's all the kinda thing.
It's large networks of people around the country.
Now, those that I am blood relatives,
none of them voted for Trump,
but there is something
that was attractive about him
to people who have every right to be insurgents
on our side or with us
because I think there could be
a few things to work out probably,
but Trump was a great middle finger
in the face of the kind of liberalism,
if you could call it that, represented by the Clooneys,
both of them.
- [Laura] Let me bring you into this.
- It had an insurgent quality.
- [Laura] Let me bring you into this, Kim,
because the first that many of us saw of that insurgency
was as soon as Barack Obama was elected,
as we saw the Tea Party Movement take to the streets,
how do you think of this language of insurgency
and activism in the Trump era?
- I clearly see that the insurgency was,
particularly as articulated by the Tea Party,
was an insurgency against the perception
of an illegitimate president,
a perception of having lost out,
a perception of diminished over-representation,
that's a phrase that my colleague Luke Harris
uses to talk about all of the backlash politics
against race and gender justice interventions,
namely these are battles over the diminishment
of the over-representation of white men,
cisgendered, straight people in power everywhere,
so you have these perceptions of loss
that create a counter response,
that to me is really not,
it's not the full part of the story
because we've had retrenchment moments in the past, too,
it's not just the impulse,
it's not just the backlash,
it's the softening of the resolve against the backlash,
it's the tying of the hands,
the inability to speak it, the inability to analyze it,
the inability to be insurgent against it,
so when the Tea Party came online,
when the disrespect of the president happened,
when Black Lives Matter came online,
the Center and I would also say some parts of the Left
were unable to respond to this
with the language that tied this
to historical moments of race retrenchment in the past.
- [Laura] Why? - It was like
people took seriously the idea that we were post-racial
which was a wink-wink,
we know we're not really post-racial, but it means that,
we can't talk about race,
we can't understand the structural/institutional dimensions
that have largely been continuous
over the last part of the 20th century into this moment,
and even our president when he says that
arresting Skip Gates in his own home was stupid
ends up being so completely silenced by that
that we don't see him again talking about race
'til the second part of his term
and even then when he talks about it,
he's talking about it pretty much
in the same way that Moynihan talked about it,
so the great transition and this idea that we've arrived
actually meant that we wound up back in 1965
in the way that race could legitimately be talked about.
So, I see our reaction as a condition of possibility,
the inability to actually talk about what has happened,
to talk about it in class and race terms
and not talk about it as there's a race conversation,
a gender conversation, a class conversation,
that is what I think has undermined our ability
to think about how to move in this particular moment.
- [Laura] I wanna bring Ai-jen back in on this,
but I want to tell or encourage the audience
to raise questions on cards.
We're gonna distribute index cards,
I think they're being distributed right now.
Now is your moment to scribble down in legible writing
your questions of this august group
and Barbara, did you wanna say something and then Ai-jen?
- Yes, I'll let somebody else talk, I will.
The trouble with having that kind of conversation,
they're so intertwined.
One of the great comforting things
about being a white person
in a professional managerial class
which most of us are or retired from,
but people who've been in desk jobs
who've been telling other people what to do,
what to read, what to et cetera,
the great privileges of being in that class
as a white person is you can project your own racism
and all racism onto the white working class
and that's what's been done.
There is great satisfaction in a contempt
people of the professional managerial class
feel toward the white working class
because it's proof of how un-racist they are.
Well, fine, but now we have to connect that gap
and I know you don't start those conversations of course
with a white working class person
by saying, "You're a racist,"
it doesn't go anywhere from there, lemme tell you.
We have to understand how tangled this has become
and part of that means confronting the prejudice
in people like ourselves and I speak here as people
who are educated professionals et cetera
and particularly those who are white.
- [Laura] Ai-jen, how do you do this work?
- I'll say two things.
One is that I've been really inspired
by a lot of white organizers
who are actually from rural and small-town America
who've been organizing in communities of color
and urban areas who after the elections
went back home to organize their people,
and it's actually a real thing.
It's a trend that started happening
and I think that that is a kind of organizing
that we really need to be supporting
and doing so in partnership
with organizing in communities of color,
and modeling a kind of multiracial democracy
that we want at the other end of this.
And the other thing I'll say is that
one of the most important things
about the Women's March to me was,
for those of you who were there in DC, you'll know this,
I mean, not even thinking about
what was happening on the stage,
it was happening on the street
was that every single person made their own sign
and it was about everything under the sun
and they were way smarter signs
and way more interesting than any activist's sign,
like any sign that somebody like me could've made,
but they were about every single issue under the sun.
It was everything from education
to reproductive rights and justice
to healthcare to immigration to transgender right
and there was room for all of it,
it actually didn't feel like you sometimes do feel
in progressive movements where there's a hierarchy
of issue or constituency.
It actually felt like there was room for all of it
and there was a vibrancy
and a way that that felt organic
that was incredibly powerful.
Now, what Kim and I did that night
was we actually did a town hall meeting
that was specifically targeted to people who were coming
and Ellen was there, too, Ellen Barbo,
who were coming to the march for the first time,
like really not having been active before,
as a way of connecting new marchers,
new people to the movement, newcomers to the movement
to women's organizations, women of color, working class,
women's organizations who are in motion
on winning on real issues
like paid sick days and paid family leave,
people who were working on immigration, all kinds of issues,
so that they could actually get connected
to what it means to organize, what it means to win,
what it means to be in motion together in a deeper way.
I guess I'm saying that the fact that
we have a movement moment in a context
where we can be in motion together
and we can actually choose to create contexts
where there's room for,
there isn't a hierarchy of issue or agenda,
and then in that context,
we can have deeper conversations about race and class
and all the things that we actually need to talk about,
that I think that that's kind of,
that's some of what needs to happen.
- So, it is also true that we went home,
that we didn't make demands.
As soon as the administration took office,
we were already home,
those hallways of power, corridors of power
were suddenly occupied only by lobbyists not ours,
so I guess my question is yes,
we need the movement internal work,
but we are in a crisis, we also need the external work,
the power creation and deployment,
who wants to address that?
How do we go that next step?
What are the pieces we need or the lessons we need to learn
to take that next step to power?
- This is the core of what I was gonna say tonight
if I was giving a speech
and I'll pick up on Ai-jen's optimistic note
about the number of new people
who have come into the resistance,
we can all name some in our own households,
but one of the things that worries me very much
is that there are some deep divisions
and I'm beginning to discover that they are class divisions.
Within the resistance for example,
there are white working class people,
more than you would probably think
if you just read the paper.
For example, it's seldom pointed out
that the women who was killed in Charlottesville
was a white working class woman.
- [Laura] Heather Heyer.
- Yeah, Heather Heyer, a paralegal
who did not even have a college education,
but learned to do the office stuff in a legal office
and also worked as a waitress.
Do you remember any mention of that?
Because the white working class
has been so demonized at this point,
then another thing that really became
very clear in Charlottesville is that there are groups,
blue collar groups like Redneck Revolt, you heard of it?
This is a rural, I imagine mostly white group
that goes to demonstrations,
goes to places like Charlottesville with guns.
They go ready to shoot if they have to defend their side.
- [Laura] I've heard a rumor that the slogan
is put the red back in redneck, is that--
- Yes, put the red back in redneck, I love that.
Then the other thing I wanna mention
and I know this is gonna be somewhat controversial
because there's a little controversy about it is antifa
or antifa depending on where you live in this country,
the anti-fascist who go masked into demonstrations.
Why are they masked?
They do not want to be identified.
They are really hard for journalists like me
to sit down with and talk to.
I began to get some inklings
of it being a more working class,
I mean, it's not Princeton graduates behind those kerchiefs
or undergrads or anything really.
There was a good article in Mother Jones in August
about solid blue collar basis of antifa.
Then I would just finish with this,
a personal thing that just happened to me a few days ago.
I was talking to a friend,
I said I had like this extended family
of friends who are working class
and I was telling him that I was just sorta mystified
by who the antifa people are.
Now, that's insurgent, that's very insurgent, these people,
and the person I was talking to,
a member of this extended family of mine
started to clear his throat a little bit
and he said, "I'm one of them."
I had no idea because they don't talk about it
and what that meant is that he is part of a phone tree.
They do not use the internet,
they do not use cell phones to communicate,
but you can get a phone call saying, "Come somewhere
"because a person of color is going to be harassed,"
or because there's somebody who needs defending
and through this kinda clandestine network,
they will come together--
- [Laura] Frances, do you wanna come in on this?
Did you wanna come in on this? - I did because I think
as soon as we start talking about
the current regime in a way that
refers back to the election, the November election,
we start searching for
singular answers,
and I think it's in fact a little complicated.
The first level on which it's complicated
is that A, Trump did not win the popular vote.
His technical victory was the result
of an anti-democratic provision in the US Constitution.
In a certain sense,
we're explaining something that didn't happen.
We're explaining a majority rejection
of the Obama administration.
However, I think there were good reasons
for white, middle, and working class people
to reject the democratic party and the Obama administration
which had not been speaking
to their basic concerns for some time,
at the very least since the emergence
of the Democratic Leadership Council,
but I think long before that,
so it's complicated in that sense.
It's also complicated in the sense that
Trump voters are not exactly who we're talking about,
we're talking about the white working class
and we talk about people who are experiencing
intensified hardship and the resentment that--
- [Laura] Well, let me bring the--
- Trump voters were not that part of the working class,
they were the better off among the working class.
- [Laura] Well, that's why I wanted to bring Kim back in
'cause it does seem like nobody has been served less well
by the democratic establishment than black women
and yet black women at the very bottom
of the class totem pole supported Hillary Clinton
in the largest demographic that she had.
- Yeah, thank you.
That's exactly what I wanted to being with.
I just wanna pause and note for a moment that
our very attempt right not to figure out
how to talk about race, class, and gender is difficult
because we've all sort of taken off
with a certain understanding
of what the initial conversation is about,
about how race played out,
so we've talked about recognizing
that the white working class was not
monolithically behind Trump which of course that's true,
nobody said that was the case.
It's also the case that race did have a lot to do,
it's not exclusive,
so we have to be able to be able to talk about race
without saying or inferring
that we're saying it's all about race
and we also have to be able to talk about hardship
without the assertion of hardship
being taken as an excuse or justification
for a racist, populist movement.
If hardship explained this vote,
African-American women would not have been voting
96% for the democratic party.
No one lost more economically over the last eight years
than African-American women.
African-American women have a median net wealth of $5.
African-American women are the group
that has shown the least amount
of being reintegrated into the economy.
I mean, we could go on and on and on,
so if it was just a matter of hardship being overlooked,
being forgotten, not being hailed, not being called out,
then it would've been African-American women,
the fact that it wasn't is telling us
that there is something both more that was going on
that generally this argument doesn't take up,
but what I'm mostly concerned about is what's happening now.
So, whatever we think happened,
one of the things that seems to be happening
in mainstream and progressive discourse
is we gotta figure out how to come up with a framework,
a way of mobilizing voters that we've lost
that doesn't involve using hot-button issues
or language that turns them off
and what that means is that our most loyal constituency,
our core, the people who are willing and able
to resist all the scapegoat politics,
they're basically being pushed out of the conversation,
so we gotta figure out how to have this conversation
without it prompting
or a sense of we are leaving people out.
We have to have a conversation that allows us to talk about
the race, class, and gender dimensions of all of this,
so number one, it has to be intersectional.
When we talk about class
and we're not talking about women of color,
then that's not talking about class
and we gotta figure out how to do that.
- So, Ai-jen, I'm gonna come to you
in just a second to talk about care,
how do we exercise care in our next steps,
but before we move off hardship,
I want to contribute another aspect, another lens,
and that's colonialism,
and I happen to have a call
come in this morning from a friend.
- [Rosa] Good evening, everybody.
This is Rosa Clemente reporting live
from San Juan, Puerto Rico.
First and foremost, I wanna send all my love
and thank to Frances Fox Piven
and everything she has done for people on the ground
and showing us how to do the work from the bottom up.
I just wanted to let people know
the dire situation in Puerto Rico.
I landed here Sunday with a intergenerational delegation
of all Latinx, Latina, Latino youth media-makers.
We've been here since Friday
and we'll be here 'til this coming Sunday,
whatever is being told by the mainstream press
and unfortunately, even of some of our friends
in the progressive or Left press,
is not telling the full magnitude
of what is happening in Puerto Rico.
Puerto Ricans do not need donations and supplies,
there are thousands of containers on the port
that have not been distributed to people.
There are people who unfortunately
are feeding their babies at this point
with mashed up bananas because there is no baby food.
FEMA has abandoned Puerto Rico,
the military has occupied our island once again.
Yesterday, we were able to go to Utuado,
one of the worst hit areas in Puerto Rico
and we did see military there and they were occupying a town
and we asked them, "Why are you not going
"to people on the mountain?"
And they said they didn't have the means to get there,
but we were able to get there in a Honda Access
four of us and get to the bottom of the mountain.
There are people who have not been there 21 days
without their diabetic medication, without water.
Puerto Rico is still 90% without electricity
and most if anything happening
is happening in the San Juan district.
Five mayors are being investigated as of today
including mayor of San Juan from what we are hearing
for withholding supplies to the people of Puerto Rico.
People are asking where is the insurgency
from Puerto Ricans.
The insurgency is Puerto Ricans helping themselves
because everyone, unfortunately,
including our friends all over the world,
our organizers and comrades have abandoned
the people of Puerto Rico.
People do not have water
and where we also see military the most
is guarding stores like Sam's Club and Walmart.
There are no points of distribution
in any of the 77 other municipalities in Puerto Rico.
People are bathing in river water that is toxic
and I can go on and on,
but the sounds of Puerto Rico are no longer the coqui,
the sounds of Puerto Rico are
sleeping at night to generators,
waking up to military helicopters.
We are on the ground and will continue to report.
We implore you if you can
to send any type of donation to us,
so that we could be reporting the truth.
When we went to the press convention.
- What she goes on to say is she goes to the press center
and she is at that moment
the only press from the United States there
and we'll put the rest of the audio on our website.
If you follow Rosa Clemente's Facebook page
or the Laura Flanders Show page,
we'll bring you her reporting.
Not to derail the conversation we've had so far,
but to simply add to it.
Ai-jen, I look to you, you and your colleagues
deal with people in life and death situations every day
at an intimate level.
You figure out as the domestic workers
how to deal with power across traditional power imbalances
of the client and the employee.
You deal with the state.
You're now very involved in the organizing
that has followed the Women's March on Washington.
Given everything that we've heard,
you deal with race, class, gender, all of it all the time,
what have you learned?
What is that we can learn from the domestic workers
and those you work with to apply in this moment,
so that our activism goes beyond activism to power?
In 30 seconds or, no, I'm just kidding
(audience laughing)
- I have to say I'm really just heartbroken
about the situation in Puerto Rico.
- I wanted to say one more thing
of this moment of silence I will say,
and that is to do with the urgency of this moment.
I hope the whole thing falls apart pretty soon,
the Trump thing, but what has been unleashed
is really fascist forces in this country.
I don't live in New York, in New York City,
I live in Virginia, not far from Charlottesville,
and then only a few blocks from where I live the Nazi
and that is a fair description,
what's his name, the white supremacist, Nazi guy,
yeah, he opened an office on the main street of our town.
There is a threat.
When people like Cornel West and real people deeply of peace
can go march in Charlottesville against racism
and be attacked by fascists, Nazis, that's scary,
that's why we have to take seriously
'cause it's not just any old moment.
This is what I hear from the young people
who are drawn to the resistance,
is they don't wanna hear all of our cogitations,
if they'll fight and they're ready to fight,
and that's like a whole political issue,
do you punch a Nazi?
I don't have an answer.
I wouldn't perhaps share it here.
I think there is a sense of something extreme
going on right now.
And what's thrown in our faces
every time we say, "We'll slow down.
"We have to pull this majority and everything,"
somebody will throw the line,
"We're a republic," in our faces.
- [Laura] Ai-jen?
- It's because you care.
Well, I think we have to build
the most powerful opposition movement
the world has ever seen
and I think that it has to be working
on multiple time horizons.
There is the immediate work of fighting
and fighting back and pushing back
and showing up for each other
and there is the work we have to do
to organize and build power.
We have to electoralize the anger and frustration
and fear that's out there into real electoral power,
and we have to build the capacity
of our organizations to represent
communities like women of color
who are the backbone of our democracy
and have never been supported to actually have
any real political infrastructure and capacity.
So, there's a lot of work that has to happen
on multiple time horizons
and more people have to be thinking about
what to do from a movement-wide level.
I mean, we're organized by issues and constituencies
and we each care about different things
and we focus on different things.
Well, this is a moment where we actually
have to really come together.
And the thing about this opposition movement
that we're building, it can't just be about opposition,
it also has to be about what we're proposing.
What is our vision for a multiracial democracy
in this country that actually supports
opportunity and dignity for every person in this country?
And we have to have real ideas
and I think one of the things we're trying to do
in the domestic workers movement
is propose a vision for care,
for childcare, eldercare, and paid family leave
that lifts up the predominantly
women of color and immigrant women
who've been doing this work forever
and resources families to be able to afford
the care they need to take care of their families both
and a vision for a way forward
that actually does make it real for people
why they should join our movement.
- I wanna ask a group conscious here,
we want to leave time for Frances to wrap up.
I have three questions.
I'm kinda inclined to let our panelists
share some closing thoughts
with those who posed these questions, forgive me.
One has to do with precarious workers right here at CUNY,
another one has to do with how do we do this at the bottom,
organizing to take power,
and a third one has to do
with transforming the democratic party.
If I could take your generosity to just throw it out there
and if people want to address those, that would be great,
but I really do want to hear from Kim and Barbara
and then we'll get a chance to hear from Frances
some closing thoughts here in a moment
where as Naomi Klein puts it
we could have shock doctrine one way
or we could have shock doctrine the other.
I try to focus on our program
on how into the vacuum of corporate and political fail
all across our country,
people who've been failed are moving
and they are moving with alternatives
that speak to their needs in whole different ways,
whether it's political or in the workplace
or in the home or at the level of their community.
I think there is possibility here
and I'll say it even around Puerto Rico,
we could either protect Walmart and the fossil fuel economy
or we can support a people's revitalized,
newly vital Puerto Rico
with more solar and wind power than you can imagine
and independence to make their own decisions.
I think we have opportunity.
Who wants to speak to it?
Barbara, do you wanna say a word, Kim?
- [Barbara] What?
- Do you want to give a final word, a final thought
before we turn it over to Frances?
- About Puerto Rico?
- [Laura] No, whatever you would like, on how we--
- But it just things flashing through my mind right now
was there are so many American workers of any color
who don't make enough money or don't have jobs,
could you imagine if the United States was able to pay them
to go and exercise their skills in Puerto Rico?
How that would change the whole picture on race
and white nationalism and all of this stuff
because we could take pride in that.
We could feel that sense of community,
but as a community doing things,
caring I will even use Ai-jen's lovely word.
We need vision,
but I do want some way of answering
people who say, "Don't you realize
"we don't have that much time in this country?
Or the world doesn't have that much time to dither
and I'm gonna just leave you with that.
I'm not gonna be leading the troops in the streets.
To me, it is the time we need Frances more than ever,
certainly these other women, even me,
you and I might be getting old.
- No.
- No?
- Nah.
- [Laura] Kim?
- I feel so many of these moments
are reminders of conversations
that we started to have, but didn't.
Kanye has done a lot of crazy things,
but the one thing that he said
that still rings in my head when I hear,
when he said after Hurricane Katrina, he told the truth,
George Bush doesn't care about black people
and now we're in this moment,
we cannot be shocked or surprised about what's happened
because it happened before.
Nothing really happened to change that.
We didn't have a society-wide accounting
of the fact that people were left to die in New Orleans
and now the same thing is happening in Katrina,
so there's at least something about this moment
that I want to think makes us grapple with the hard stuff
on our own team that we've not been able to deal with.
I want to think that.
I'm not sure that it's actually happening,
so when I'm listening what foundations are saying,
when I listen to what pseudo-progressives
like Mark Lilla are saying,
when I'm listening to people who are saying,
"The problem was we were too concerned about social justice,
"too concerned about anti-racism,
"too concerned about feminism,
"too concerned about queer people,
"that's why we got ourselves here,
"so we have to turn the corner and move away from that,"
and I don't hear millions of people saying,
"Hell no, that's what we need more of moving forward."
When I don't hear that, I start getting worried.
The piece of that does make me somewhat hopeful
and this builds off of Fran's work,
that the idea about insurgency from the bottom
means that people have to cast their gaze upward
in understanding where the conditions
that they're living in have come from.
What is not part of our conversation and just hasn't been
is the massive distribution of wealth upward,
so people are looking across
and down to stabilize themselves
and while that's happening,
they're not seeing the massive theft that's going on upward,
so I wanna take the idea of insurgency from the bottom
and attach to it the implicit part of it
which means you have to have a sense of where you are
and you have to have a sense of
who you are relative to those,
not just the 1% now, but the 1% of the 1%,
we've got to have that as part of our common conversation
if we're talking about building out this moment,
trying to institutionalize a different way
of thinking about politics,
that's got to happen now by shifting our gaze.
- And that's one way to bring in the white working class
that has been alienated.
- And I would simply add we have to have
a place to have that conversation
that is not owned and determined
by for-profit corporations like Amazon and Walmart
and people who are directly invested
in maintaining the status quo.
I'm just saying a public media infrastructure
might be a good idea.
Ai-jen, do you have a final comment
and then we'll come to Fran?
- Well, we could also take over
the City University of New York.
A gathering place, a forum,
a place of dialogue for the people of New York City
and in the process do something about
the persistence of contingent precarious work
at the City University of New York.
- I guess I'll just keep playing
my optimistic role here on this panel
and say that I do feel really inspired by the ways in which
people are activated.
I mean, it's really an organizer's dream right now
to see how much people wanna show up and organize
and especially women, women are on fire right now,
and I think that it didn't just stop on January 21st.
People have been organizing in communities
that have no progressive organizations for miles
and coming together and showing up,
and new organizations like Indivisible
showing up for immigrant rights and for racial justice
and there are ways that people are showing up in this moment
that actually are objectively quite hopeful.
- [Laura] And you didn't even say Harvey Weinstein?
Fran?
- [Frances] Are these my closing remarks, Laura?
- [Laura] You are issuing us out into the insurgency.
We're closing.
I don't like to think of you as closing.
- This is a very strange moment
in American politics and world politics.
It is in a way a bizarre moment.
- [Laura] You talk with your hands so let me make it easier.
- Oh, I do.
Well, I'm a New Yorker.
It would be a comedic moment, we would all be laughing
if it weren't all so horrible
and so filled with potential danger,
where the guy in charge is an imbecile
and deeply deranged
and he has opened the doors of the federal government,
thrown them wide open,
they've always been partly open
to the fossil fuel industry and to finance,
those are the two big economic interest groups
that are going to be running the country
unless we do our part.
Now, there's a problem in doing our part
and that is the really highfalutin intellectuals
who I love to read because they are so elegant,
so well-educated, and so forth,
are kind of in an end times mood or mode.
Wolfgang Streeck is brilliant.
Buying Time is a brilliant book.
The state of exception really does cast light
on our current situation.
However, I don't think it's end times,
I think it's gonna get hotter,
it's gonna get muddier,
the air is gonna stink,
but I think the human race has some time left
and the planet has some time left,
the question therefore emerges
about the possibility of restoring a measure of democracy,
of collective self-regulation,
especially ecological regulation, can we do that?
Can we restore a democratic society
or actually create a democratic society
because it wasn't so democratic in the first place?
What is our role in that?
And here I think it's very important
that we don't take advantage of our sophistication
to go around spouting gloom and doom.
Truth is we don't know, think of all we don't know,
think of our uncertainty.
Uncertainty doesn't prevent us from sort of
sliding back on the sofa and tearing our hair
and pontificating about how terribly everything is
and how it's all gonna get worse.
I think it's not gonna get worse
'cause we can make it better.
We really do have power.
We just don't use that power.
In order to use that power,
we have to shut our ears to the gloom and doomsters
because they don't know anything, they're just talking.
It's easy to talk gloom and doom
and to do it in very fancy ways.
So, we have to help people discover
their own sources of power
which stem from the roles that they play
in major institutions in the United States and in the world
and you know never have ordinary people
had more potential power
because never have the interconnections
which bind us together
and which make them dependent on us,
never have they been more far-reaching,
more intricate, more delicate, more fragile,
we can shut it down
and we outta experiment in shutting it down continually
and when we shut it down here,
it won't only shut down here,
it will shut down across the globe,
the tentacles of disruption will reach across the globe
and it will reach as Steve Lerner
was suggesting earlier today,
it will reach to the very top of our society as well.
We are the agents that can transform our society
and preserve it from the disasters that menace it,
so that's my closing message.
I wanna thank you all.
I'm so grateful for all of you who came.
I'm so grateful to my students, former students.
I'm so grateful to Alyson Cole
and my dear friend Lori Minnite
and the other people who,
Barbara who came from Washington,
even though it's hard for her to do that now.
For Ai-Jen and Kimberle, who is my next door neighbor
and were gonna hang out together more,
anyway thanks for coming
and go out there and be tough.
(audience clapping and cheering)
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