Shaun King at Columbia: ‘Racism on campus is getting worse’
We met the activist after his speech in New York
Last night, Black Lives Matter activist and Senior Justice Writer for the New York Daily News, Shaun King, spoke at Columbia University.
Right after the show I got five minutes with Shaun to get his take on an array of different topics.
We had a lot to talk about – last week he picked up my story about getting into an argument about Black Lives Matter after GS student Vida Biggins emailed him screenshots of the original Facebook conversation.
What do you think about racism on college campuses? Is it getting worse?
I think they’re getting worse. A lot of people make the mistake and say, meaning well: “It’s not getting worse, social media is just making us more aware.” I know why they say that, because it is true: social media is just making us more aware. People say the same thing about police brutality: it’s not getting worse, we’re just learning more about it from social media. Again, it’s true: social media informs us more, but discrimination on campus, the number of racial incidents – just like police brutality – those statistics are going up. It is getting worse.
Particularly if you talk to students of color at predominantly white colleges, they’ll tell you that it feels worse. And I think we can’t invalidate their feelings. Statistics show it’s getting worse. There are more incidents. Hate groups are on the rise in our country. And it’s painful to accept that, it hurts. It sucks to accept that, that here on our watch, in our life, some things are getting worse. That is the case.
What can people do to help?
Any movement that we’ve ever had against grave injustice, be it slavery or Jim Crow, there was always deep interracial cooperation on some level or another. And fighting through racial violence and police brutality will require those same kind of partnerships. Now that won’t be for everybody, some Black folk will just work with Black folk, and that’s OK. But people who believe in racial co-operation will find ways to create and chart paths together. There are a lot of opportunities. First and foremost, and I say this everywhere I go, white folk need to understand that they have more influence with fellow white folk than the average Black woman or Black woman ever will. So they have to use it.
If you feel a certain kind of way, if police brutality bothers you, if racism bothers you, you are going to have way more influence, not just with your brothers and sisters and parents and cousins, but with your college classmates, with your co-workers, to help shape their minds way more than I could or someone else could, that are complete strangers to that circle. And so you have to change people’s hearts and mind, and it’s important for people in their own communities and networks for people to do that hard work.
What made you want to share my story about the cop who was fired?
Over 100 people a day email me with something terrible that they’ve seen, or that somebody’s posted online. I saw what you posted, and it bothered me. I took it personally, in part because I felt like it was dangerous, that for a police officer to be a bigot or a racist, it’s physically dangerous for people of color. This person has a badge, and a gun, and is empowered and licensed to use it. Not only that, they have arrest power. It’s very, very frightening for someone who is openly, publicly bigoted to have that power. They could take someone’s life and ruin it. Every time I see that, my first question is: “Is that real?” because a lot of people are posting fake stuff under false names. But once I saw that you were confident that it was real, I was like “Hey, I’m going to take a few seconds and share this.” I think I found the name of that police department and tagged it. I just want people to know: we see you. Racism and bigotry, when we allow them to be easy, get even more dangerous. People need to understand there are consequences to their bigotry. Someone asked me a question tonight: “Hey, but isn’t that free speech?” I said: “Yes, that is free speech. This police officer was not arrested. But free speech does not mean freedom from all consequences. He violated his oath of office: he could not serve people fairly and equitably. And so he lost his job, but he is not in prison for it. So any chance we can get to call out racism, we should, and I do my best every day to call it out. But I feel sometimes I’m barely scratching the surface with it.
(Note: It was previously reported that King responded to my post, however it was a post that Vida Biggins created and emailed to King that made him aware of the conversation. After the officer was terminated, he subsequently also shared the story I had written about the officer being fired.)\
You’ve said before: “We will win.” What does winning look like to you?
There are measurable ways – and it’s important for me to think of this in measurable, tangible ways. There are ways that we’re winning now. We’re building relationships. You and I now know each other, and can call each other “friend,” and that’s a win. There are beautiful things happening in culture, that’s a win. But with police brutality, for me, it’s about a visible, measurable reduction in the number of people who are killed every year by police. Last year was 1,207. We need to see that number go down. I think it may slightly go down this year. But we need to see it go down year, after year, after year to get it back down.
It will never be eliminated, because we’re the only country in the world, literally, that has more guns than people. The only country in the entire world. Because of the presence of so many guns, there will always be crime, and there will always be people killed by police. But no unarmed person should ever be killed by police. Nobody with a mental illness should ever be killed by police. Not once, it should never happen, ever. And there are tangible, practical, reasonable ways that we can reduce that.
And then secondly, soon before I was born in the 70s, there were only 200,000 people in prison in this country. Now there are 2.2 million. We’re talking about over a tenfold increase, even though crime has not gone up tenfold. We can go back at least to those numbers. We had 200,000 people in prison for almost 50 years in this country, and so we can go back again, to a drastic reduction in the number of people who are incarcerated. But the state, the government, local governments rely on that revenue in really ugly ways. We have to find ways to make that illegal – you can’t rely on the arrest and incarceration of people to meet your city budgets.
I think we’ll begin seeing some of these changes in our lifetime, but it took a long time to build these problems. It’ll take a long time to fix them.
In cover picture, left to right: Eugene Aiken, Shaun King, Vida Biggins. Vida shared screenshots of the original Facebook post with Shaun that brought attention to Officer David Hastings’ comments.