Holloway: Stay tuned next for the premiere episode of UNC-TV's new weekly series Black Issues Forum. I'm Jay Holloway. Join me as we talk about how North Carolina dreams in black and white.

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Jackson: John Kennedy picked up a black baby in his arms in Harlem and the press said, "well, of course, that's what liberal politicians from Boston who talk funny - that's what they do." Nothing. Bobby Kennedy picked up a white baby in his arms in West Virginia. When America saw that baby's belly bloated and that baby's nose running, the war on poverty came out of that white baby's belly not out of poverty in Harlem. When blacks are hurting in great numbers, it's called special interest. W hen whites are hurting, it's called national interest.

Now if we - let's think now. Let's think now. If you understand that black pain is something called special interest and white pain is something called national interest, how do you get the struggle off of poverty and wealth on the black and white by putting a black mask over a white face?

Holloway: Good evening, I'm Jay Holloway and this is Black Issues Forum. It's a new weekly series of a program that many of you may have followed over the past ten years. We'll be here every Friday night at 11:00 on UNC-TV. We'll provide analysis, ask questions, hard questions, take you to the most important events in our state, and give you statistics and suggestions on how to get more information and get involved in the topic. The program is designed for you to use all 13 episodes in a ser ies. We hope it will help you discuss serious issues with your family, in civic and community groups, and most importantly in the classroom.

The program is not only for blacks, but to encourage an increased understanding across racial lines. This fall expect us to cover topics relating to race and race relations and other issues such as the family, community, prevention, networking, education, technology, economics, business, and leadership. We will try to focus most of our attention on what we can and should do, not always what's wrong. And we'll attempt to give you more analysis and information along with one on one interviews with some o f the most interesting people of North Carolina. So we'd like to hear from you about your suggestions and comments on helping to make this program the best it can be. It's here for you.

So call us at 919-549-7167 or write to us at Black Issues Forum, P.O. 14900, Research Triangle Park, 27709 or send us e-mail address at biforum@unctv.org. In this evening's program, we begin with the touchy and often painful subject of race relations. If we can laugh at some of the absurdities of our traditional views of race relations, hopefully we can conquer the challenge, bridge the gaps, and move forward together.

Tonight you'll hear more from Jesse Jackson and noted writer, author, professor at UNC-Chapel Hill Michael Dyson. During the series you'll be hearing from someone who is no stranger to UNC-TV, researcher and writer Milton Jordan. Milton will be writing video essays for each program to help us analyze each topic. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to introduce him to you tonight on this first episode. Milton, why is the topic of race relations such a recurring issue in North Carolina and around the country?

Jordan: Well, Jay, I think it probably boils down to two rather interesting and somewhat humorous reasons. One is that you have a group of people in our nation who spend an incredible amount of time trying to prove that they are superior, which is absolutely absurd because if you are truly superior and really believe that you don't have to prove it. Superiority is a law unto itself. One example, we don't have laws governing the ant population of the planet. We're clearly superior to the ants , so they are at best pests.

Now the other reason is that we have another group of citizens who spend an incredible amount of time trying to do something that is impossible and that is to prove a negative, that I am not inferior. People are doing this in light of overwhelming evidence that this group of citizens are just as capable, just as apt, just as dedicated, just as committed, just as patriotic, just as American as anybody else, and yet that evidence doesn't seem to be enough. So we continue to get caught in this unending lo op of discussing race relations.

Holloway: Black Issues Forum attended the NAACP National Convention and we interviewed several people. What did you find that came out of that discussion of those that discussed race relations?

Jordan: I think that people still skirted the issue. I'll give you an example. We spoke with one gentleman, I think he was the membership chairman for the state of North Carolina and he said - the question to him was, Do we talk enough about this? And he said, "Well, no, there needs to be a real - more discussion, more talk." My question is if we do need to talk about it more why don't you engage that issue? Why are you waiting for someone else to begin the conversation? It really begins at a point where we seem to take an attitude - I'm waiting for somebody else to do something about it.

Holloway: So what we need to do and what Jesse was talking about in that opening piece is more engagement in moving towards public policy but it needs to start right at home with the person.

Jordan: Yeah. Basically we need to continually point out the absurdities because I think if we can get to the point in this country where we can actually laugh at this, where we can say, "Boy, we have been silly for a long time. Let's stop this silliness. Let's not take it into a new millennium."

Holloway: And it reminds me of something you had mentioned to me before about the whole self-identity. Can you share with our audience in terms of African Americans and identity and that kind of thing?

Jordan: Well, I think we have to come to realize as I've said it on times before, I was born in this country, a colored baby, grew up a Negro boy, became a black man, chose to be an African American, now I'm tired of living in the adjectives. I want to live in the now and human. That's what I am. I am a human being with all the prerogatives and responsibilities that go along with that.

Holloway: Now Jesse talked about public policy. One of the most recurring issues right now is affirmative action. Why is affirmative action such a hot topic and what have you found out in your research in North Carolina?

Jordan: Well, I think it's a hot topic largely because people try to make it mean something that it doesn't mean. Affirmative comes from the root word affirm, which means that I take this position, I believe this. And all we're asking is to say that your action should support your affirmation. Now the only reason that there is an affirmative action law are those kinds of strategies is because the evidence overwhelmingly shows that action does not match what people claim they affirm.

Holloway: So you affirm that there is a problem and you need to take action to -

Jordan: Solve the problem. As simple as that.

Holloway: Milton, thank you so much. We're going to be hearing from you throughout the series and we're looking forward to those video essays.

Jordan: Fantastic.

Holloway: All right. This summer Reverend Jesse Jackson was the keynote speaker at the NAACP National Convention in Charlotte. We were there and thought that it would be appropriate to bring you an excerpt of that speech that relates to our analysis and discussion of this topic. Listen now carefully as Jesse breaks down our racial dilemma and outlines why public policy is so important when discussing civil rights in race relations. Here's Jesse.

Jackson: Our mission is to change public policy. Now, repeat that. Say we live in our faith, we live under public policy. Say we live in our faith, we live under public policy. Now I got to make that distinction because our private faith must inspire us to change public policy. If our private faith leads us to adjust the public policy or becomes a substitute for it, then that is a form of drug.

In the compound of Georgia you've got some of the biggest churches, some of the most well-heeled blacks, blacks voted 7% in March and the right wing sheriff won by default. And they now have a ten-story jail out there on the highway that he's going to fill up with our children. And you've got these major churches and these well-heeled fraternities and sororities and social organizations and lawyers and doctors and nurses and judges and they're going to church and they are anointing, they are atoning, t hey are praising, they are full of joy, but there is no, no, no sense of public policy.

I say we live in our faith. We live under public policy. Let me put this another way. 1619 the date the slaves landed. A stone - pivotal for us - public policy, slaves. 1776 Declaration of Independence for whites from Britain not us from whites. There's something called the Constitution. Three-fifths human, public policy. A few years later the Bill of Rights but it didn't apply to those called three-fifths human - public policy. 1857 Dred Scott public policy. 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, pub lic policy. 1896 the apartheid laws, public policy. 1954 even playing field, public policy. 1990, 1964 public culminations bill, 1965, right to vote.

1990 the judges determined that they have found proof of race discrimination 25 years after Selma so white judges ordered the redrawing of these lines, not the NAA, not the Urban League, not NCLC. All white judges found proof of race discrimination so they ordered the lines to be redrawn 1990. Now here in 1996 there is an attempt to recycle 1896 and while we react to the white sheets it's the blue suits, the legislators, and the black robes that have the power to restrict even playing field.

I'll show you all something now. While 1896 the all white supreme court said separate but equal. When they upheld the apartheid laws in 1895 a mass black movement said it was all right. But Washington he had preachers and teachers and professionals who had just come out of Antioch and Harvard and black free schools for the first time they had some land, they had the right to vote, there were 22 blacks in Congress and they say rather than keep on fighting white people who are lynching us and burning ou r churches let's us just have our own. Our own church, our own school, our own pool hall, our own everything. After all we don't need to be with them, we got race pride. They wrapped up that reaction in pride.

But Washington did not come off as an Uncle Tom. He came off wrapped in pride. We are aware that we just like everybody else, so let us have our own side of town. Now we're going to drop our buckets and we dropped our buckets - ain't no oil in the hole now - didn't get around to that. Ain't no water in that hole, there ain't no fish where there ain't no water but at least we got our own. Our own dry hole.

You beware of vices, of black reactionary non-engaging conservatism wrapped up in Kente cloths made in Indonesia. Black conservatism is not just Clarence Thomas, there are far more less obvious forces. Withdrawal, non-engaging rhetoric, pride as a substitute for power. They laid the groundwork in 1896. There's a lot of focus on faith and pride, esteem, anointment, atonement, praise music, the bell is not mine, it's the Lord's. These are themes of reaction and non-engagement.

Holloway: Reverend Jesse Jackson at his best we would say there. That excerpt was taken from a keynote address at the NAACP National Convention this past summer in Charlotte and just for your note that was Merlie Evers the chairwoman of the NAACP on his left there. And here's something else that Reverend Jesse Jackson said about our next guest. "Michael Eric Dyson is emerging as a young and powerful black intellectual who is giving strong voice and clear perspective to the African experience in America. Such a flame can light the way for a new generation of resisters and freedom fighters." Reverend Jesse Jackson said that.

Now, let's move on to our discussion. An expert on the legacy of Malcolm X, Michael Eric Dyson is director of the Institute of African American Research and professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. An ordained Baptist minister, prolific author and cultural critic he is the author of three widely acclaimed books: Reflecting Black, African American Culture, Cultural Criticism: Making of Malcolm X, the most recently. The most recent book that is Between God and Gangster Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture. An the next book will be coming out this October and this book is really right on target with what we're talking about - Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line. Dr. Dyson has written for such publications as The New York Times, Vibe, and Rolling Stone. He has appeared on several national television shows such as the Oprah Winfrey show, MacNeill-Lehrer Report, Charlie Rose, on National Public Radio, the Today Show, Good Morning, American and currently has five other books in progress. Dr. Dyson, I'm extrem ely excited to have you on our premiere episode and we couldn't think of a better qualified, more profound guest to have.

Dyson: Thank you very kindly.

Holloway: Welcome. What lessons have we learned in this discussion or have we not learned in this whole discussion of race relations?

Dyson: Well, it's a very conflicted set of discussions we've been having. As Mr. Jordan has so eloquently articulated that we're living caught between, as he said, this endless loop of trying to assert on the one hand that we are capable of participating in the larger circle of American privileges, African Americans and other minority so-called groups excluded from that circle. And on the other hand people who are constantly asserting their given God-given right to own the entire pie. And par tly what we're discussing is not simply a matter of personal relationships.

One of the tragedies is we reduce race relations to what you and I as African American people think about or how we relate to other people of mainstream descendants and so on. And it's not simply about personal relations even though we want those to be improved. It's about issues of power. It's about issues of justice. It's about issues of equality. And as Reverend Jackson has said it's about public policy. So often we end up as Ernest T. Campbell said retreating into the womb of an historical piet y. We get all holy how we can reach out and help one another. Ralph Reed - thank God for the Christian Coalition's revelation that Jesus and God are not simply about skin color but about justice as well through this church burning situation. But the Christian right has really assembled its forces against the best political and social and one could indeed argue spiritual interest of African American communities.

And so what we're seeing in this discourse on the right, the assault of the new right upon African American people, the debates about affirmative action, which are very cluttered with amnesia, cluttered with ignorance, cluttered with a lot of misinformation. Debates about redistricting right here in North Carolina. I mean in 1901 when George Wright was driven out because of the ratification of am amendment to that really repealed the enfranchisement of African Americans not until Eva Clayton in 1993 an d Mel Watt took their seats was the 14th Amendment really lived out in concrete dimensions and North Carolina could make up for, could make restitution for its strategic denials of political liberties and civil rights to African American people.

Holloway: So this falls right in to what you're talking about in terms of power being one of the things - exclusion versus owning everything and I think even Eva Clayton and Mel Watt mentioned that, "Well, what do we want? We want power."

Dyson: Sure we want to participate equitability in American society. We want to be full-fledged citizens of American public democracy where people are able to engage in sending their kids to school, eating every day and so on. I mean the debates about welfare, debates about affirmative action. All of these are about power and they become racially coded. My great disappointment with President Clinton for signing that welfare bill, I think implicitly - there was not an explicit message sent, b ut the implicit message was that this is about black people's bodies.

As Jesse Jackson so eloquently talked about it's about black interest and when it's about black interest it's a special interest. When it's so-called about white interest, it's national interest. Whiteness has never needed to defend itself until quite recently because it was conceived to be universal. What was good for white folk was good for the nation, was good for black folk. Well we have to talk about, what's good for gays and lesbians, let's talk about it. What's good for Native Americans and L atinos and Hispanics, let's talk about it because those are chipping away at the profound consolidation and homogeneity of American democracy. Now that white men as one constituency among many in America society are feeling put upon. They feel the need now to defend their interests and to assert that any other interest outside the scope of their interest are special and depleting the great and grand drama of American democracy.

And what we have to say is that no, everybody has a piece of this pie. Everybody needs to participate equitably and we have to acknowledge the way in which people have been systematically excluded from participation in American democracy, not by appealing to the politics of victimization or crying or whining but about real politics. This is what Jesse Jackson meant, I believe, when he said we can't simply talk about religion which becomes a drug away from the central problems of American democracy. Wh at Marx meant when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses. That's a kind of Jesse Jackson in black face re-articulation of Marxist theories about religious persuasions that seduce us into non-activity.

What he called this non-engage in reactionary reality that many African Americans unfortunately have been seduced into. So what we have to do is to make sure that issues of power, of public policy, of understanding how we become fuller citizens of radical democracy in American have to be lived out.

Holloway: In the 90's now we've got this generation X. You're a Malcolm X scholar and we've got the youth here. And a lot of our problems - sometimes we carry over to our children and younger generation. What are you views on how the youth and the younger generation and how we need to deal with our kids on the issue of race?

Dyson: Well, it's a very difficult problem because on the one hand we find a generational divide, an abyss opening up, a chasm that is quite deep between older black people and younger black people. Not tremendously older black people. People like myself probably I'm older than you - I'm 37 years old and I have an 18-year-old son. And the thing is that between us and that generation even the so-called Generation X versus the 'tweeners, you know, those of us who are baby boomers but not quite into that - Bill Clinton baby boomers - so we're between generation X and the so-called baby boomers.

And I think that one of the divides that happens between black people is about how our particular pop culture expresses itself, so that young kids engaging in hip-hop culture and rap music. Biggie Smalls and Snoop Doggy Dogg and MC Lyte and the Fugees are not the kind of role models that many of us would choose for our children. And yet if we're broad enough we can see that there are political realities that are being contained in some of hip-hop culture that we need to appeal to while criticizing thei notions of misogyny, that is, the cruel hatred of women. Sexism, that is, sentiments expressed against the female species and against women, and also patriarchy, which is the rule and rein of men's perspectives over women's and other people's lives. So what we have to say is that let's be honest, on the one hand, we see this operating in our younger people's generations but it's operating in our generation as well. It was operating in the civil rights movement. It was operating in black national organ izations. These were movements to realize the masculine imperatives of our own racial communities.

What can we do? We can say to our kids first of all that everybody has a piece of this, whether you're gay or lesbian, whether you're a hip-hopper, whether you're a college student on a predominantly white campus, whether you go to a black institution. Race is a continuing matter of importance to African American people and we have to tell our young kids, you didn't get where you are just because you were so cute, just cause you were so fine, just cause you were so smart because you were so good. Many of our children - they also have as historians say we participate in the United States of Amnesia so they are cut off from their own roots as well.

Not simply white kids who have no understanding or interest in African American culture, but black kids who believe that because they were intelligent, grew up in the suburbs of California, and now go to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, University of Chicago, University of North Carolina, Duke, that they have gotten where they are because they were so smart and good. They may be smart and good, but is the blood shed by people who didn't know that a dangling participle wasn't a piece of lettuce, who didn't know gerunds, and didn't know verbs and noun agreement, but who understood the tremendous dedication necessary to make sure that all people could participate in American culture. And that's why we have to vote. That's why we have to become involved in the political process, and that's why we have to understand the need, the ongoing need for strategic intervention on behalf of a whole range of minorities and in this case especially black people.

Holloway: We really have just less than a minute here and I wanted to get in the whole bottom line of economics. If there's something you could give me on the bottom line of economics in less than 30 seconds?

Dyson: Yeah, if you ain't got no money, you're hurting in American brother. And if you don't have a way of having some kind of material security that is provided by both your education but also provided as a result of being a part of a majority in this culture, you're often left out. And I think that what we have to work towards is a society where the equitable distribution of wealth, the distribution of resources has to be redressed and we've got to find a way to - we've got to move beyond ra ce to talk about how issues of class, issues of poverty, issues of material suffering, have afflicted our communities, that is, black and white people and Latinos, Native Americans, and others.

Holloway: Dr. Dyson, thank you. The time has gone so quickly, but we're going to have you back on the next show and talk about the family and how that affects race relations in the whole African American culture. We'll have you back the next show.

Dyson: Thank you very kindly.

Holloway: A recent report reveals that African Americans have the resources to begin financing the frames in which strategy of engagement that Jesse Jackson talked about should develop into a new public policy agenda. This report shows that African Americans earned $324 billion dollars last year and, therefore, have the resources to launch a new day. A day in which we discover and explore the implications of the solutions as we heard from Dr. Michael Dyson right now and resist the continuous d iscussion of talking about the problem. Thanks for watching this episode, this premiere episode of Black Issues Forum. Join us next Friday evening at 11:00 when we'll discuss the African American family. I'm Jay Holloway. Have a blessed and peaceful evening.