1999 - 2000 Broadcast Season
Broadcast Program Transcripts
Episode #1516

Dr. Lenora Fulani
February 11, 2000

Holloway: Tonight, the first African American and woman to get on the ballot in all 50 states for the president here in the United States next, here on Black Issues Forum.

Voiceover: This program is made possible in part by contributions from UNC-TV viewers like you.

[THEME MUSIC]

Holloway: We thank you so much for being with us..

Fulani: Oh, it's great to be here.

Holloway: .For taking time out of your busy schedule to come to North Carolina. Dr. Fulani is a political leader, she is a developmental psychologist, she is a syndicated columnist, a TV talk show host in New York, and many of you probably know her most for two runs for the presidency of the United States, back in 1988 and in 1992, as the first woman and the first African American to be on the ballot in all 50 states. Now initially people know you that way, but tell us why Shirley Chisolm is not that person?

Fulani: I think Ms. Chisolm ran for the opportunity to be the democratic candidate.

Holloway: Primary.

Fulani: Yeah, in the primary, and the Democrats rejected her. Therefore she did not run in the general election.

Holloway: Is that right. And Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice President.

Fulani: Yes, absolutely.

Holloway: Well, you made such a significant impact. But you are, in North Carolina now you are also the leader of the Independent or Reform Party in New York, and you founded a similar organization, co-founded rather.

Fulani: Mmhmm, I am one of the founders of National Reform. In New York State it's called the Independence Party, we are an affiliate to National Reform, and I am in the state committee there. And the National Reform Party is the party that came into existence as a result of Ross Perot's second campaign for President, he ran in such a way as to create a new political party in the country, and many activists are in the process of creating the infrastructure of that party and making it into a party of real reform.

Holloway: Now let's jump right into this whole thing of party politics and Independence versus Republican and Democrat. Last year Jesse Ventura won Governor in the State of Minnesota. You've been there, and you have a very interesting viewpoint about party politics, particularly as it relates to African Americans. Tell us your view on that.

Fulani: I mean, we are basically, there are so many places to start. In addition to having been a long-time independent and activist, I have been at this for close to 20 years. One of the focuses of that work has been to create a political option in the United States, other than the Democrats and Republicans. We live in a country where we have more choices in selecting toothpaste than we do in selecting political parties, and my effort and those of us who are independent are obviously out to change that, and some changes have taken place. One of the other key aspects of my work has been to challenge the relationship between the Democratic Party and the black community. I think we have been obviously one of its most loyal supporters and we have nothing in terms of showing what we have gotten from that support, relative to political clout in our communities. And I think that part of what we need to do as African Americans is continue to play our role as, if you will, the conscience of this country and lead the way in creating new political options.

Holloway: Now you said, I'll just kind of categorize three areas that we, we don't have much options, blacks have been loyal, and what we need to do. Let's talk about the options. Basically it is a two-party system, but we see that there is an option. What does the Independent or Reform Party have to offer African Americans in particular?

Fulani: Well, one thing that it has to offer is a way out of the Democratic Party and its loyalty to it. And I say that not as a light thing. I think that the Democrats and Republicans have basically together served as a block to the expansion and growth of democracy in our country. That's very, very upsetting. I think that the relationship that the black community has to the Democratic Party has made it impossible for us to try on new things, particularly at times when it is an opportunity for growth and development, and that is changing. There was a Gallup poll that came out in 1997 that showed that 44% of blacks between the ages of 18 and 34 see themselves identified as Independents. And while that doesn't mean that they all rush to join the Reform Party or any party in particular, they also are not following, and this is especially the case for young blacks, into the parties of their parents. It is a new generation, and it's not just happening in the black community, it's happening across communities.

Holloway: So a "this is not your father's Oldsmobile" type thing.

Fulani: [LAUGHING] Yeah! Yeah, and it's a new phenomenon, because that has not been the case. The other important thing, and the other important aspect of the work that I'm involved in, which I want young people and black people to play a key role in, is that of political reform. Going back to Jesse Ventura's win for governor in the state of Minnesota, in addition to Jesse being Jesse, an entertainer, a wrestler, and having a location and being known, he also is from a state which has a very, very broad and democratic policy towards political reform. It's a state that has same-day voter registration, which means that you can go to the polls on election day without having been pre-registered and vote for the candidate of your choice. It's also the case that Jesse was involved and included in televised debates, and one of the exciting things is that if you were in Minnesota and you saw Jesse in a debate three days before the election and you wanted to go and vote for him, because of same-day voter registration you could go and do that. If in fact there were similar circumstances here in North Carolina but it had passed the deadline, you have to register as a voter 25 days before election day, if you saw a candidate within that period that you wanted to vote for then you couldn't.

Holloway: That's pretty significant.

Fulani: Oh, he got 15.8% of his votes from same-day voter registration.

Holloway: How many states in the country do that?

Fulani: I think there may be four or five. It's a very small number, and part of what I'm involved in is I'm involved in a national campaign to take and make the Minnesota model the model for the rest of the country.

Holloway: So suppose people in North Carolina want to help you or they want to help more of an alternative. What can they do for that?

Fulani: Well, one thing is to begin to look into what it would mean to implement same-day voter registration. Again, that makes a big, big difference for young people, because a lot of the young, like all of us, don't pay that much attention to politics, you know, it starts and it goes on and on and on, and maybe like two weeks or three weeks before the actual election day people start to listen in and they might pay a little bit more attention, and if you have a same-day voter registration opportunity in your state then you can do that and go to the polls and vote. The other thing is the ballot access in this state, trying to get on the ballot, that's another reform that North Carolina needs dramatically, and it's an important thing to look at. Put some pressure on the North Carolina state legislature, because the current requirements to get on the ballot for a candidate in this state stinks. And they share that unfortunately with a lot of others. What that means is that in order to run, if I wanted to run for statewide office as an independent in this state connected to a party, I have to get 51,324 some odd votes. If I was just an independent candidate and had no party affiliation, I need 90,00 signatures. I mean, not votes, signatures. Petitions. That's very expensive, it's very hard to get on the ballot. The requirements here are some of the worst in the country. And we need to do something about that.

Holloway: Now you said in some of your remarks earlier that here in North Carolina, and it may not be just about North Carolina but in general, in the regular two-party system, blacks have been loyal to the Democratic Party, but we haven't gotten the kinds of returns on that, other than a few positions in the leadership. Now are you making the distinction between the leadership and the large amounts of black populace?

Fulani: Oh, absolutely.

Holloway: Explain that for us.

Fulani: There is a major difference between leadership. Basically, obviously there are blacks who have jobs with the Democratic party, who are elected officials, who are spokespersons, a lot of our most outspoken nationalists in some ways are connected oftentimes to the Democratic Party. And for good reason: they want the party to flourish in our communities, meaning they want us to continue to vote for them. But when you look at so much of the day-to-day life of our community, the growing levels of poverty, the inability for education to flourish, for our young people to learn, I mean, there are a lot of reasons why we need to be concerned with what's going on in the country and in the black community. And I guess one of the things that people oftentimes, well, there is no opportunity for them to know about or talk about, is the relationship between the failure of the process of democracy in America. How the two parties work, the absence of being able to get to the polls and vote. Those kinds of things have a tremendous impact on participation. People are turned off, they respond to the negativity, they want to keep a distance, but that also means that the kinds of issues that we are concerned about never get addressed and are never able to be pushed forward. So it's not just the black community that is impacted upon by they failure of the Democrats or the failure of the two-party system. The country has been hurt by two-party politics, and that is one of the reasons why so many people are not participating, they don't want to have anything to do with it.

Holloway: Let's talk about the black leadership being so loyal and the black community in large droves supporting that black leadership. What is your viewpoint on that?

Fulani: Well, a lot of the black community, the black community that votes, supports that largely. There are a lot of black people, like there are a lot of white folks who say, "I don't want anything to do with any of them, I am not going to the polls, I'm not going to bother with this." I mean, the black community is mislead in ways that are, oh, God, tremendously harmful and hurtful to us, and a lot of that misleadership comes from the leadership body. One of the things that I have been speaking a lot about is the failure, for example, of the liberal coalition inside of the Democratic Party. It's a coalition that Gantt tried to put together, did put together, and was not able to make work in terms of his getting elected. It's a coalition that has fallen apart nationally. In New York State, for example, New York City, we have a mayor who is a reactionary Republican, Mayor Giuliani, in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one, but because many of the whites inside of the liberal coalition of the Democratic Party voted for Giuliani and abandoned the black community, it wasn't able to hold, and therefore we now are living with this particular mayor. So part of what the black leadership is saying to black folks is that we have to continue to believe in that coalition, that it's that liberal coalition that is going to rescue us, it's going to make a difference in our lives, it's going to take us somewhere. But it's gone. It's had its heyday and it's failed. And part of the appeal that I am making as an Independent, not just as a member of Reform but as part of a broader movement that I think has broken out in America, it is there, there is a lot of disgruntlement with two-party politics. Part of the appeal that I am making in the black community is that we have to form new coalitions. We have to work with people like the Perot voters, who we have been told for years in a variety of ways we have nothing in common with, and we have to come together with ordinary Americans and build a new political activity in this country.

Holloway: So in essence you are talking about a third party.

Fulani: I'm talking about a third party, but I'm also talking about changing the culture of what is politics. We are saying to people-it's hard. I mean, I was speaking to a former elected official who's considering the possibility of going independent, and he said to me, "You know, I have been a Democrat all my life, I can't even imagine going into the polls and pulling something else. My father did it before me." So we are really talking about reshaping how people relate to politics, what politics is, what that activity is. People's closeness to it. We are extremely alienated from Washington, from state houses, from what city councils do. We don't feel like they are there with us or for us. We don't know their names oftentimes, we don't know what they represent, and there is a reason for that alienation. It's because I think politics has a life of it's own. The two parties are into their own self-perpetuation, and people are tremendously responsive to that, negatively.

Holloway: You come at an interesting time, because the Republican Party is also actively recruiting African Americans too, and what they have to offer are that familiarity that you are talking about with the people and the politics.

Fulani: Well, part of my response to the Republicans, which I think is also a response from the masses of black people, is "been there, done that." Yeah, white folks are trying to get out of the Republican Party, why should we be going there? The whole issue, again we are talking about bipartisan control of the political apparatus of our country, which has harmed our democracy. So it's not like we can run to another party, to one of the other parties, one of the two parties, and do something that is more significant. We really have to break out of this bipartisan box. We have to challenge the notion that democracy is equal to two parties, because that is not the case, and we have to reform this process. We have to again make it possible for voting to be easier, for people to get on the ballot, for people to be involved in the debates. We have to support public financing of campaigns, we need to open up the process and make it more workable. One area that I think this is so critical in is relative to social policy making. Right now our capacity for producing social policy that is relevant and solid in our nation is stymied in my opinion by the two-party system. Because the dialogs around social policy are not open dialogs. They are extremely constrained and they are over-determined by partisanship. If you are a Democrat you say this. If you are a Republican you say this. It has nothing to do with what is good for the bulk of people. One of the areas that you see that is in the area of education. People agree, we have to do something about the educational process, it's not working. But you can't have an open dialog because if you are black and you utter the word 'vouchers,' which 80% of the black community has begun to do, in spite of our leadership, people go, "Oh, you can't say that, that's a Republican word, it's a conspiracy by white people, you know, reactionaries, to take over our educational system." If you say other things as a Republican, for example if you're, I don't know, it's just outrageous. It's so constrained, the dialog is so constrained, the environment is so constrained, so that you never really have a discussion about what the quality of education should be, what should education look like as we enter the 21^st century? What do we have to do to bring young people of color into the mix and make them competitive? What do we have to do to make the country competitive with other parts of the world? We don't have a discussion of that nature because everything is over-determined by the spin of the Democrats, the spin of the Republicans, and it hurts public policy. We have none!

Holloway: Is that why you are probably targeting, even in your speaking engagements now, youth, because you are frustrated not only with the status quo political process but those that have been there that don't want to change?

Fulani: Well, I am targeting youth because youth are on the move. I think right before the second time, the `96 Perot race, and Perot got a significant vote also nationally from young people, I think 70% of young people indicated that they would prefer, that they would like to vote for a third party candidate. Again, that poll where 44% of black people between the ages of 18 and 34 saying, "I see myself as an Independent," as opposed to 5% of blacks over 50. One of the things that you see is an interest on the part of young people in new political options. And you know, there are all these dialogs going on in the newspaper, in the black community, about how to bring young black people back to the polls, how do you get them to vote, you'll never do it, you never will be able to accomplish that by presenting them with the same old Democratic Party or even trying to seduce them to going into the Republican Party. These young people are not apathetic, they are looking for new ways to make a difference, and I am going with them. I love it, and I think that their activity is going to inspire people who are older, people who don't vote, some people who do vote who I think will feel freed up, if you will, by the activity of our youth to the degree that they take on these new movements and really help to build and to lead these new offices.

Holloway: Especially if they go to the polls in large numbers.

Fulani: Oh, absolutely, that's all they got to do!

Holloway: Right. Let me shift the discussion. Before I shift it, though, to the race initiative, because I know you have some views on President Clinton's race initiative, last year this program did a lot of things on that race initiative in terms of town hall meetings, but you mentioned Jesse Ventura. And you've done an article on this way for black empowerment, the three Jesse's. So when you say Jesse in the state of North Carolina, we think about Jesse Helms. Jesse Jackson went to A&T in this state, but Jesse Ventura is the other Jesse. He's not from this state, but tell us about those three Jesses as it shapes the political landscape.

Fulani: You know, well, one thing is that we live in a very interesting era. I often, some of us call it the post-modern era of politics. And in post-modern politics, one of the things that it appears is that the sort of defining of Jesses give us a sense of where we're at politically. And obviously, Senator Helms has been at the helm, at the forefront of anti-affirmative action, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, sort of anti-everything, every "liberal agenda." He's the person who has taken on the liberals and forced some changes, conservative changes in the country, sort of at the forefront. And then we have Reverend Jesse Jackson, who, you know, at one point, was the leader of millions of blacks and rainbow voters around issues having to do with challenging the status quo. But, I think, over the past, I don't know, ten years, Jesse has become a real part of the status quo and in spite of his statements every now and then about this thing or that thing that he doesn't like with the Democratic party, you can bet your bottom dollar that he will go with the Democrats in 2000. I mean, he's one of quote Clinton's advisers. At one point, Clinton and Gore and the Democratic Leadership Council, which is responsible for moving the Democratic party further away from the black agenda, was Jesse's nemesis. The point that I was making about Ventura is I think that he's on the cutting edge of politics in our country. I think his agenda, if you will, and what he represents, is the black agenda for the twenty first century. And, you know, he ran a very Populist, anti-status quo politics campaign, and he did something which is happening inside of the independent movement, which was basically to break away from ideological politics and build a coalition that's a left-center-right coalition. All kinds of people voted for Jesse. He brought together people who support gun rights and gay rights, a lot of Perot supporters, a lot of young people, disgruntled Democrats. Those new kinds of coalitions are critical. One thing is that we can't let the Democratic and Republican parties tell us, as Americans, who we can work with, who we can build with, who we can create with. Their politics is divisive, because they need us to be divided as a nation in order to carry on, I think, they're destruction, if you will, of our nation.

Holloway: Last few minutes. The Clinton race initiative and what's going on with race relations in America. What's your criticism of that race initiative and even the situation of race in America.

Fulani: Well, you know, I was thinking about Clinton when he, with the committee that he put together around race relations, pointing out to them that they needed to speed up this process and, you know, get some activity going. And the activity was to find out what's working, whatever that means, and put together a book. And, you know, it's one of these quick fixes. So what Clinton is like, you know, you take one of the most powerful issues in this country, completely controversial, hard to resolve, and he'll tell you in, you know, three sentences, how to put this hot recipe together. I don't think Clinton is going to resolve the race relationship issue in America. I think it's going to be resolved by Americans, black and white, and others, coming together and creating new kinds of institutions that are not black institutions or white institutions, that are basically institutions that come out of the, you know, sweat and blood and struggle of Americans learning how to work together. And, you know, I think that we need, we've done something, the civil rights movement took care of the structural inequities, for the most part, relative to race in this country. But there's a lot of healing to take place, and there's a lot of work to be done that we haven't gotten a lot of leadership on.

Holloway: Let me have you.We just have a minute left and I.We really could do a lot more time with this. Your primary training is as a developmental psychologist. You want to talk about the field psychology? Can you give us a minute over of your.

Fulani: Well, it stinks. I think we talked earlier about the failure of psychology and psychiatry because psychology and psychiatry, they're not sciences even though they've sort of fronted as sciences. I'm extremely.I think the diagnosing that goes on is problematic, and I worked for years, as I was sharing, with people, in this country but also internationally, who are interested in looking at different ways of dealing with human development. We've developed an approach to human growth that's based on development and not pathology, and I, you know, I could do a four year show on the failure of psychology and psychiatry. We obviously don't have four years, but I'll come back on and talk about that.

Holloway: Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming to North Carolina. Thank you for sharing your views on party politics, on the three Jesses, and on the race initiative. Thank you.

Fulani: Thank you, thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

Holloway: You're welcome. Well, I'm Jay Holloway, want to thank you so much for watching Black Issues Forum. Dr. Lenora Fulani, the first woman and African-American to be on the ballot in all fifty states for the U.S. presidency, and a proponent of the Reform party and the Independent party. You think about where you are with the three Jesses, and think about your future. I'm Jay Holloway, thank you so much for watching us. Contact us at the addresses and numbers on your screen. We'll talk to you again next Friday night, 11 o'clock, on Black Issues Forum. Have a blessed evening and a good night.