Racial Reconciliation is Solvable

It was five years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and it was the midst of the BP oil spill. In twenty sixteen, he was voted America's top turnaround mayor in a survey of mayors that was compiled by Politico, and Mitch gained national prominence for his powerful decision to

take down four Confederate monuments in New Orleans. Mitch has written about the entire process in his New York Times best selling book, It's called In the Shadow of Statues, A White Southerner Confronts History, and in it he recalled his personal journey confronting racism, and he also tackles the broader history of slavery, race relations and institutional inequalities that

still plague America today. You'll hear more in this conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, and you'll also hear how things are developing with his organization. It's called the e Pluribus Unum Fund, and he founded it to bring people together across the American South around the issues of race, equity, economic opportunity, and violence. And he does that by convening diverse community members to listen to and learn from one another. What

is it about this problem that attracted you? One of my thirty years of experience, sixteen years as a legislator, six as lieutenant government, eight as the mayor of the City of New Orleans. Being in a position of having to solve problems, it became fairly evident to me that it just got much much more difficult because people could be torn apart when they were hungry or cold or afraid by race, and it made it impossible for people

to work together. You see this actually permeating not just the United States of America now, but the rest of the world, and it's manifesting itself not only a long race but class ideology, nation of origin, sexual orientation, all

of those things, and I think that's exactly wrong. I think we ought to in the United States be purposeful like they were in Germany and in South Africa, to try to heal a lot of the divisions that continue today that slow us down and stop us from seeing finding common ground that matters and news as a very interesting and distinctive racial history different from other areas in

the American South. What was unique about New Orleans which was different from some of the other slaveholding areas, was that we were a port city through the Mississippi River. Right now in New Orleans south of our city, we have cumulatively one of the largest ports in the world. And as a consequence, many different kinds of peoples and goods came from all over the world. And if you're in a port city, it is by nature diverse, and

there were free people of color. Of course, the slave trade was as robust as it was anywhere else, and a lot of the economy, actually all of the economy pre Civil War, was as a result of the individuals being forced to work in the fields and to produce cotton and sugar cane and things of that nature, which formed the basis of the economy New Orleans back in

the day was one of the largest cities. As a matter of fact, in nineteen sixty if you jump forward many many years, New Orleans was bigger at that time than Atlanta and Houston. What I'm interested in, so you in kind of understanding the racial landscape of New Orleans when you take over His Mary in twenty ten, it is you've You've inherited it quite a It's a mess. Yeah. Were you aware of just how messy it was when

you took up? Oh yeah, yeah, no illusions. The reason why I went walked me through how one goes about repairing the kind of psyche of a city. We had lots going on at once. The city was on the verge of bankruptcy. When I ran for office, I ran honestly on asking people to make a sacrifice so they the people of New Orleans, we were hurting so badly that you know, we were kind of at the point where we would try anything. And I knew that in order to stabilize the city, I had to stabilize the finances.

So I mean I kind of went about, you know, finding a great team of people that were completely committed. And when I say completely, I mean twenty four seven, three sixty five, and what started to happen was New Orleans got themselves into it, just a giving spirit. You know, the whole world gasps, but the possibility that we would be lost, and that gave us a kind of a renewed sense of pride. And when I came in, my job was to try to corral all of that energy

and moving in a positive direction. And one of the ways you do that is that you touched skin in the skin every day with as many people as you can, so they can see you, touch you, feel you, hear you,

understand you, and then hopefully begin to trust you. So I started having a lot of community meetings, and a community meeting looked something like me walking into a room of a thousand people who are frustrated and angry in the neighborhoods that have hit the hardest, and making sure that me personally as well as my entire team was there and available to listen to the community here what it is they had to say, and then somehow try to form it into a coherent governing policy where we

started to put money where it needed to go. It wasn't all honky dowry. We had lots of starts and stops. The police department had a zero level of confidence in the African American community. But I invited the Justice Department to come in and to work with us. There was a sense of openness and a real sense of commitment that we were going to do what is necessary to change the city. And then people helped. I mean people,

everybody just kind of got their hands really dirty. We were in such a desperate situation that people actually stopped seeing the differences between us. We were in such bad shape that we all realized that we had to stop fighting and we had to choose common ground. The police aspect of this is an interesting one. So you have a you inherit a situation where you say, the level of trust between poorer communities and the copses as low as it can go. That is a profound problem in

a city where the police voices becomingly needed from the community. Well, I remember Katrina was August twenty nine, two thousand and five, and some police officers after Katrina left their post. Now, most most police officers, first responders were miraculous after Katrina. I need to be clear about that. It was an incredible thing to watch everybody lifting everybody up, but we

had some very dark moments. Historically, the police department in New Orleans from at least nineteen ninety six through until I took office, the police department had deteriorated in terms of its relationship with the community pre and post Katrina. So I knew that the only way that we could heal is by, as me the leader of the city, acknowledging that we had a problem, committing to change it, and then actually inviting the Justice Department to come in.

That was an acknowledgement that we were going to do everything we needed to do to reorganize the police department and to make it go in the right direction. Now, it was a rocky road with the Justice Department because they live in Washington, they don't live on the ground, and sometimes people that are not on the ground miss essential components. But it was the right thing to do. It sent the right message to the community, and then

we asked the community to actually help us. I created a community advisory board to actually help me hire my first police chief, and they made recommendations to me, and I actually took the recommendation. The first recommendation. So you do that, you build trust over time, you keep putting resources where you say they need to be, you keep

demanding some level of accountability. And then we were the first department in the country to put body cameras on police officers because I thought it was important for them to be real transparency. So now when there was an officer involved shooting, the community knew exactly what happened because we released those tapes within a reasonably short period of time, pending some kind of veto by the district attorney or the US attorney about whether it was going to compromise

the prosecution in a particular case. And those little things began to restore levels of credibility. But if you do that over and over and over again, and you began to walk the walk and not just talk to talk, the public starts to say we're good to go with what you're doing. And on top of that, we actually started to reduce the population in the prison and moving very far ahead a criminal justice reform, and we built a new use study center. So we were operating on

a bunch of different fronts. And I had a massive initiative to reduce murdered death on the streets of New Orleans, which I talked about every day. So the accumulation of all those things I think gave the entire community confidence that we were goodhearted and right minded about that approach, and it helped a lot. Wow, how long, but too the time you took office, how many years in did you feel like you had turned the corner with that? Well, you never feel like you're doing well enough. But I

think it took us about three, three or four years. Yeah, I mean it was a bit. It was a bit, and it was a long. It was a real deep dig. You were a two term there, I was to term. I serve for eight years. If you had been a one term mayor, would it have worked, That's a good question.

Probably probably not. You know. One of the actually challenges that we had was Mark Morio, who is known he's now the head of the National Urban League, was the mayor of the city back in the nineties, and he turned the police department around when he was there, and after he left it went back to where the lowest point. So when I took over, one of the things that was rolling around in my mind is that we had tried this before, but we hadn't never institutionalized and the

consent decree would be necessary to do that. The city actually is still under the supervision of a federal consent degree because the federal judges they won't let you out of it until they now see the institutional rules and regulations put in place, which we were very aggressive about. So I expected in a short time it'll be done and the institutional changes. But you have to be vigilant every day. Everything that we talked about, you've got to

repeat every day over and over again. Walked me through the whole issue of the statutes and what you learn from that, particularly what you learn from that for the book you're doing. Now. What I learned is that we're not as far long as i'd hope would be, and that saddens me as the mayor of the city. Remember, we're in the midst of the recovery. We're rebuilding the

whole city. The physical spaces of city inform how the city lives and breathes and works and interacts with each other every day, and it's really important, and many mayors in America spend a lot of time with this, and I was too. I had the benefit of a blank or landscape because of this terrible catastrophe and so I had a responsibility to make sure that it was built back that right way, and so public spaces were in my mind and big picture. Remember we were rebuilding hospital, schools,

We're building a brand new airport, rebuilding the riverfront. A lot of opportunity and hence a lot of responsibility. And so when I was doing that, I'd always had this fetish for circles. I loved circles. I loved the circles and washing you see. I loved them in Europe and New Orleans being such rich history and architecture, it always thought it was curious that we never had more circles. We only have one, and it's the most prominent spot in the city of New Orleans. It is the space

that all the autogra parades right on. It's on the main thoroughfare in the city, and there's a statue there of Roberty Lee, who is the general that led the Confederacy in an effort to destroy the United States of America. And so as we were building the city and I was thinking about how to keep the city still energized

to keep doing really big things. I wanted to use our three hundred anniversary as a framework for the city to finish its reconstruction projects and to leave a legacy, much like a city would leave a legacy after they built for the Olympics or built for the World Cup. So I had asked went mor Salis, who was a childhood friend of mine, who I considered to be besides being a great musician, I know that the horn and the music is just his meeting his messages democracy and

freedom in history. And I said, when I want you to help me curate the three hundred anniversary, which is in twenty eighteen. This conversation took place in twenty fourteen because we had a long window. And he said, I'll do that, but I want you to think about something. And I said what he goes, I would like you to think about taking down that Confederate monument. Well, it really never occurred to me that I would take that monument down. That statue really never played a prominent part

in my life. And I said to him, why would I do that? And he said, well, Louis Armstrong left here because of that monument, And he said, have you ever thought about it from my perspective? Well, when he said those two things to me, my brain really kind of exploded because when he said, Louis Armstrong left here for me, that was a really kind of a euphemism for the great my imgration after slavery, where four million

of our fellow Americans left, basically the silence. They took all the intellectual capital, of the music capital, everything that they had, and took it someplace else and let the rest of the world see it, know it, and understand it. And I had known that, but I'd really never processed it quite like that. And he just said it in a real small statement. Lewis Armstrong left, and sitting in front of me was Lewis Armstrong's progeny now the greatest

trumpet player in the road. So as soon as he said that to me, it occurred to me that that was really a symbol of oppression. He said, I want you to think about it from my perspective and what I think about when I have to look at that, and of course the immediate unfairness of it slaps you in the head and say, my goodness, I've been sending a message to went and Marcellus and every other African American that you're not worthy. And notwithstanding the fact that

the wall was lost you or not welcome here. And so I told went that I would look into it. I didn't know at the time, just because I hadn't thought about it. Who owned it. Turns out to the City of New Orleans owned it, and it turned out

that it was a mayor's responsibility. And so after good year and a half of a lot of legal research, because this was going to be a massive political fight, you know, I knew that I had to control over the property if I went through the right community process and got the city council to approve it that it was a city's responsibility taken down because in fact it had been put up by the Mayor of New Orleans in the eighteen nineties at the request of the Daughters

of the Confederacy and a group called the Cult of the Lost Cause, and that put the Confederate monuments up for the purposes of sending a message to African Americans that even though the war had been lost by the Confederacy, the cause was never lost, and then they would continue

to control the space. And the irony was which really took me off, is that Robberty League, of course, wasn't from New Orleans, had never been to New Orleans and New Orleans wasn't even a Confederate town, and so they've actually stole, they stole the most prominent space and told basically a historic apply and that if I was building the city for the future, building back the city not the way it was, but the way it was supposed to be, if we would have gotten it right, then

that was a clear aberration and that had to change. When you explain those facts to people who would otherwise have been hostile to take in a statue down, they changed their minds. Not initially I knew I had a pretty good feel for what the city wanted. In the city, of course, was at the time I was mayor, sixteen to sixty three percent African American. The majority of the

city supported what I did. I might have done it anyway if they hadn't supported it, because it was the right thing to do, had I been able to get the right authority to do it. But in fact they did. Now people who did not live in the city, and some white people that lived in the city, not all, were very hostile to the idea of taking it down.

And what had happened was that Donald Trump became President of the United States and the issue of race and the issue of white nationals and white supremacy really kind of got new flavor. And the taking out of the monuments. Actually they started happening at the same time, so the temperatures were really hot, and people from around the country came to New Orleans with the idea somehow that they had something to say about what the city of New

Orleans did with its own property. So essentially, and it's very simple form, this was just a property dispute. It was a city's property. They could do with it what they wanted. I could put an ice cream truck on it if I wanted it, and you couldn't stop me. But it was all caught up in the history and the ethos and people, and it was a very symbolic piece. But people were very against it. Now, not everybody, I have to say that was against taking them down was

against it for racial, aggressively racial reason. Some people all they remembered was that physical space where their daddy took them to enjoy a wad to grow up rade. So for them, their history was a short history that had nothing to do with anything other than what they did when they were kids. But it was such an overtly racial monument that I don't think that you can argue that it was put up for any other reason. And if it was historically wrong to put it up, then

it was my responsibility to correct that historical era. What did you put up in its place? Nothing? We took the monument off of it, and my dream was to take it down, to upend the entire circle, and then to put a really wonderful piece of public art that reflected our history, out riches in our culture. Because it took so long, and because it was so hard, and because it was such a security nightmare, and you can go back and look at the pictures it was, it

was really hard. We didn't have time on the money to do it, so we actually left it empty. So the pedestal is there and there's nothing on top of it, which ironically has turned out to be quite an interesting piece of art because people have gone have now driven by it, and now they're projecting what it is they would put on time. We took down three other monuments, by the way, but robberty Lee was the most famous

of them all. I think subsequent to taking them down, a lot of people who were against it came and their attitude was, well, I wasn't really for it, but I'm out as hostile against it. But I would say most of the people did not have not changed their mind. Most of the people that were against it initially still think that it was a mistake. I think they're wrong,

and I think history will prove prove us right. Let's talk about what it means to take the lessons from your time in New Orleans as mayor to the rest of the country. There are lots and lots and lots of other cities all over America that have profound divides between racially and economically. You're now going there and trying to help them. What are you telling them, Well, a couple of things. First of all, just in terms of the xs and oos of governing, government is an organism.

It's not a business, but it has to be run in a way that gains people's trust. It takes in money and it spends money, and it has to do it honestly. It has to do it openly, it has

to do it ethically. In my mind, it ought to do it as precisely as it can by using data, and so, without being a techno geek, there is a beauty to running an organization well to make sure it's delivers to people what it is, and putting aside anything that we've talked about relating to race or inequity, whatever, you have a much better chance of solving all of those other big problems if you're not constantly getting beat on for running a government that doesn't deliver good services

to the people where they are. Now, that's a mouthful, and that's a big thing. In other words, you've got to have the basics right before you ascend to talking about other things. You won't ever be able to get them done. If you can't manage a police department, you can't get the cars where they need to go, or respond to nine one one calls, they get the fire department to a fire, and then you've got no chance of doing anything because nobody's going to listen to you.

So you have to be a good manager, and you have to be fiscally prudent, and you have to be thoughtful about budgets. So that's first order a business. Secondly, I would say the thing that Trainer really taught me is that in our darkest hour, when things are really really bad, that human beings have a reservoir of goodwill

that I think we take for granted. And I think that when we get into our easy comfort zones, when we're not under tremendous stress from a catastrophic event, we tend to fall back into what I would call our more typical, selfish ways of thinking more of ourselves than of other people. I vividly remember, because I was in boats, rescuing people, no matter how much in despair we were, how I saw human beings who would not titled, are not entitled, would just run to each other and lift

each other up. And the walls of separation fell, The walls that we fight about every day, being black, being why, and being rich, being poor, being conservative, being liberal, all that stuff went away because we had a common enemy that was going to kill us all, and it brought us together. And I saw it happened, so I know it can happen. I can testify because I saw it. It's not just a theory in my life. And that same ethos allowed us to rebuild the entire city of

New Orleans in a very short period of time. So I actually rebuilt a government. So you ask yourself. One of the things I challenge other leaders about us. Why can't we keep doing that? Why do we have to have a catastrophe to take us to the point of sustained growth over periods of time? And the things that keep us away from that is fighting about money, fighting about race. And you got to try to organize your

life in a way so that your choices are good choices. Yeah, there has to be a vision, and the vision can be a collective vision that you get from talking to people. The interesting thing about my public meetings that I did was I did them all over the city. There were no few within five hundred people, and my community meetings and about a thousand, and I did a lot of them. After I did them all, it became abundantly clear that all of the people in the city one of the

exact same things. So when you do that and you're that connected and you're hearing, and then you try to deliver what it is that they say, and you're working hard to do that, they then begin to give more. You make sure that you give what it is that they ask for, and then it starts to create a virtuous cyclist success. The juxtaposition on the national level right now is and it's a strategy. If I divide, and I keep people separate, and I keep people angry at

each other. I win. That's the president's ethos right now. Not good for the country, but he succeeded at least for a four year period of time. I think the theory for the country now is well, now that you've seen what that looks like, and now that you've seen what that's gotten us, how is that working out for you? For some people, that's working out well. For most of us,

it's not working out well. And the country is going to have to make a decision to either be find a leader, and leaders that seek and find common ground are people that are happy with separating. It's because that's a strategy too, and I think there's a choice to be made about that, and I think the country is

going to have to make that choice. You had said it at the beginning that there were things that could be learned from the experience of Germany and South Africa in reconciliation and that could be brought to this country and we'd never gone through that kind of fomal process. What does that fomal process look like in the American sense. That's a really interesting question because I think it can take a lot of different forms. The first thing it

has to form. It has to take as a recognition by people that what happened was wrong, to formally say what happened was really really wrong. It did a lot of damage, and that damage lasts today. Whether that takes the form of a national declaration by Congress or mayors speaking individually, something structural that actually says to the world that this was really bad, and by the way, recognizing that things still exist institutional and they continue to exacerbate

what the original sin was. So that's institutional racism. That word gets used a lot, but if you mapped it out for people, what does it really look like, Whether it's how we divide congressional districts, or how we segregate school districts, or how we handle redlining, how we deal with the mortgage crisis, that tons of examples of it, and then to acknowledge it and to say we actually now want to fix it, and here's a pathway towards

fixing it. I'd like to build the National Institute for Racial Reconciliation that creates the space to have that kind of dialogue. It doesn't have to take place in that building. It can take place in communities across the country, but

we ought to be having in the New Orleans. We borrow something from the William went to Institute of Racial Reconciliation, the white governor from Mississippi, and they have something called the Welcome Table where they actually invite people twenty at a time, half white, half Blaque, or whatever the racial mix would be, to get to know each other and spend six seven eight months to learning from each other,

knowing each other, and befriending each other. Something as simple is that multiplied many, many, many times creates a relationship because it allows people to see each other, they know each other, and they have by put down any preconceptions they had and then work on projects together and build relationships. Something as simple and as loosely formal as that could be one of the pathways forward, as well as a whole bunch of other things that they used in both

of the other countries that were referenced before. Are there kind of takeaways for those listening to this things people individuals can do to kind on their own to further some of the things you've talked about. Well, honestly, it's not going to be done unless individuals do it. Whether the government can organize it. The government is not a person. Government's made up of individual people. And so yeah, you

can do everything. The most important thing is to begin to see other people as they are and who they are, as fellow human beings, and not see them racially, and not judge them according to race, creed, color, sexual orientation, a nation of origin. And to imbibe the notion that we all come to the table of democracy as equals, and we share opportunity and we share responsibility. That very simple way of living your life every day will changes

the world dramatically. It just will. Thank you very much, You're welcome, Thank you. As William Faulkner wrote, the past is never dead. It's not even past. Spooky but true. It's funny, isn't it not funny? Ha ha, but funny? Weird that when you hear people talk about the importance of a collective reckoning with America's legacy of systemic oppression of black and brown people, those people are more often than not black and brown themselves. But they're not the

ones doing the oppressing. They're not the ones responsible for this legacy or benefiting from it. Today. I'm grateful to them, of course, but white people need to take up this mantle if this country can hope to achieve the promise of equal opportunity for all. Like any other country, America needs to have a true understanding of her own history

and the legacy of that history today. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefeller Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Neia LaBelle, Research by Sheer, Vincent, engineering by Jason Gambrel and the Great Folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton,

Carly Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving Today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org, slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now goost solve it.