It's really good to be able to sit down and talk with you again.
Always a pleasure.
So let's talk a little bit about, we know that Nehemiah has its arms and all kinds of
different things.
Let's talk a little bit about just about anger.
Alright, let's go.
How did it start?
I was minding my own business, driving to a prayer gathering right in this space, pulled
up right outside the front doors, and two police cars pulled me over.
Said that they were looking for a red car, mine's black, and they were looking for a car that
was going the wrong way down Fisher Street.
I grew up on Fisher Street, and I just left a visit in my mom that said, Fisher Street
is a two-way street.
What do you mean, the wrong way, and my car is obviously not red?
That experience, and let me just add, my associate pastor who's white was in the parking lot
when I pulled up.
I hired him, I signed his payroll check.
He got out of his car to come and make sure that nothing weird was going on.
Not once did they say, get back in the car, who are you, show me ID?
But they asked him to corroborate my story because they wanted to know what I was doing
here.
And I'm the longest serving pastor in this community.
So you were profiled, basically?
I was profiled in my own church parking lot.
Well, and if they wanted to know what I was doing here, why didn't they want to know what
my white associate pastor was doing?
He was sitting in the parking lot first.
It was an evening, it was dark.
He was the first car.
I pulled up with the second car, and then two police cars pulled up behind me.
And even when he got out of his car, he never said, so who are you?
What are you doing here?
Show us ID?
I looked at my rear view mirror and saw him standing back here talking to the police
officers while they asked him to corroborate my story as he who he said he is.
I had to drop the name of three police officers who were part of this congregation at the
time.
I had the name drop to have them let me go.
Between that and the event at Rotary, where I talked about the bleak realities of mass
incarceration, a woman thanked me for not being an angry black man, I said, well,
why would you think I'm not angry, man?
I'm very angry.
Oh, I know.
But you're not angry like some effing and she named another black influencer, you know,
hitting us against each other.
I said, I'm angry just like him.
After that, I found one of my friends, Phil Haslinger, who used to write for Cap Times
and he was a pastor.
I said, I need to tell my story.
This crap goes on all the time and people wouldn't believe it because I didn't believe
until it happened to me.
So I pinned my response, you know, and Cap Times published it and it went viral.
I wrote it, I think it published December 18th and by the 31st, it was the 11th most
rare story of the year.
So let's talk about the Cap Times essay that you put together.
The headline was, Alex G. says Madison is failing in an African-American community.
You feel that was an accurate way to describe it?
It's always extremely accurate.
I knew that my response would ruffle feathers because who wants to listen to a middle-class
blackmail with an advanced degree living in Fitchburg talking about racial disparities?
And I knew that.
So I sat on some of these truths for a long time, but after being pulled over by the police
the second time, after being profiled the second time and pulled over and that comment
at Rotary, I said, I remember at the end of New Jack City when Wesley Snipes said, you
know, if I need a brow set, if I go down, everybody's going down, I just said, if I
go down, everybody, I'm going to tell it, I'm going to tell it, and I just started talking
about the experiences.
And the accuracy really comes in the fact that we have been voicing these issues for
a long time.
We've been talking about the two-tier system, the parallel realities and people like, no,
no, Oprah, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, you don't see color, Alex, this is Madison,
oh, no, come on, just calm down, you're high strong.
And I just said, no, I'm going to talk about these experiences.
And when we bring them up, if action does take place, it's someone typically white going
into space, some spaces and creating solutions, and then asking us to river stamp it.
Said in order to really address these issues, we have to address them, we have to tell the
stories, and we have to invite others when we're ready to be a part of that solution,
but we need to design them ourselves.
And I wanted the letter to kick off the reality that is not only are we experiencing the disparities,
we are invited to the tables very late to address them, and we needed to change that.
So that's really what I meant when I said that Madison was not treating its black residents
well.
It's because our experiences weren't being respected.
And correct me if I'm wrong, the name justified anger, that was something that you did not
come up with.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
No, no, cap times came up with that.
Now I like it.
I think it's catchy, but no, no, I didn't make that up.
And so when they came out to shoot the photo for the story and say, well, why don't you
can you hold your hands like this?
So I mean, I wasn't thinking about it was cold outside, so I got to pull up my arms.
When the article came out, a lot of our black friends said, ooh, Alex, you're going to get
it.
They made you look angry.
They made you look defiant.
You're going to get it.
They're going to peg you as an angry black man.
I said, well, I am angry, but that doesn't mean that I'm destructive.
And the only thing that I'm dangerous to is the status quo.
And so I'm not going to hurt anybody, but I'm going to spill the beans and I'm going
to challenge the status quo.
When you say when we say justified anger, what does that mean to you?
It means that even though anger is often a feared emotion, the justification of it
makes sense because if I'm experiencing these issues with what I've done in the community
and who I am, perhaps other people have been telling the truth also.
And if this indeed does happen because of race, then you have every right to be angry.
That anger is called for.
And it gave me space to own that.
Now I would have to tell you, I sat down with a lot of white influencers after that
took place and they said, Alex, can't we call it justified something else?
Can't we call it justified attitude or justified action?
It's just that anger just sounds so threatening.
It is a threat.
I've threatened every day my existence and the existence of those who look like me
threatened every day.
Let's call it what it is.
When I refuse, I absolutely refuse to change it even if they insinuated that my funding
would be jeopardized.
I wasn't to be bought and our pain wasn't to be bought.
And so here it is 10, 11 years later, and we're still known for that.
Yeah.
And you talked about some of the funders wanting you to change the language on that.
Is it something you considered ever and do you ever worry about coming up signing to
angry?
I am angry.
Do you ever worry about signing to angry?
No.
No.
In fact, what I told one of the funders is when white men start becoming more angry,
perhaps then I can become less angry.
So help me carry this anger.
But you're not going to challenge me and my anger and you're not going to look at your
own lack of courageousness.
There's a poem that I quoted in the anniversary article of Just About Anger from Augustine
of Hippo, fourth century theologian and philosopher, and he said, hope has two beautiful daughters.
One is anger and one is courage.
Anger at the way things are encouraged for the way things can be.
And so anger is a part of hope.
You can't get to hope without anger because anger is a catalytic emotion that can cause
you to start doing something.
My anger caused me to organize people, train non-black allies, train black emerging leaders,
making my mind advocating for my community.
Anger prompted those issues.
And so people can try to get upset at the vernacular of the word, but take a look at
the body of work.
Does it justify fear?
Does it justify worrying about what my intentions are and have I not contributed more to the
community as an angry black person than some of the colleagues who are white and calm and
very placid in terms of how things were, how was that working for them?
And so I never ever worry about sounding too angry.
Let's talk about the coursework, justified anger coursework.
How does the program work?
My undergraduate work was in Afro-American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
So I've always thought if people understood how we got to where we are in terms of race
relations, they understood the history of systemic racism.
Let's just take the name of it out.
Let's just talk about the way the country was built.
Let's look at our history at a non-political academic perspective.
I felt that people, non-black people would say, wow, I didn't know that, really.
I understand things a lot differently now.
Now I know how strategic we must be in dismantling this if people were very strategic in manteling
this.
And we thought we'd get maybe 100 people, the first class of who got 150, with a waiting
list.
And then the next time I think we did 250 with 100 people waiting list, so eventually
we took up to 300 people and then during the pandemic when we put the course online, that
first cohort was 1,700 people.
We've taken nearly 5,000 people through this nine week, two hours a week course that teaches
history from Western African civilization pre-transatlantic slave trade through the
1950s and 1960s.
And it's just packed out and it's been a very, very powerful tool for helping people to understand
how we arrived at this place of a racialized America.
Do you feel like, you mentioned the 5,000 number, which is what you've seen in the 10 years
now.
Do you feel like that number is higher or lower than what you would have, oh, it's much,
much, much higher.
Because even though I wrote Justified Anger in 2013, I don't think we launched the class
until maybe 2017.
And so it took us a couple of years to design it, to work with faculty on campus, but it's
much higher.
First of all, I didn't know that we'd be doing it every year.
Just thought, let's just try this because hundreds of people were emailing me after I
wrote the article asking, what can I do?
So I thought, let's create a bar.
And if people adhere to this bar, if they come through this nine week course, then I
can have a crew of people, a core of people that I could at least say, all right, let's
take the next steps in addressing this issue.
But I couldn't just tell the hundreds of people who have said, tell me what to do.
It's just too much to manage.
But if people went through the course, they show that they're really interested in educating
themselves about the issue, it's easier to move those people along because they've
dedicated some commitment.
So I didn't know that we're going to do it again and again and again and again and again
now because it's going online, people have taken it from coast to coast.
People stop me in restaurants and say, you don't know me, but I've taken your course.
This is what's going on.
People have completed the course.
The judge, Justice Joe Koroski, has opened doors so that we've created opportunities
for fellow judges to take a portion of the class.
We've offered it to corporations, whether it's Summit Credit Union or American Family
Insurance or other major corporations, University of Wisconsin has actually sent faculty elected
officials to have taken it CEOs of nonprofits.
I don't think that I imagined how eclectic the group would be, that it would continue
for so long that we would actually talk about 5,000 graduates with about 84% completion
rate.
So the numbers of people who started is actually higher than 5,000, but the 5,000 is the number
of those who completed it.
What's the demographic of the person who goes, like what's their race, gender and what kind
of work are they involved?
It was designed for white allies, for people who want to be white allies primarily.
We saw other groups coming as well, but it was really designed for the larger population,
for the dominant population here in Madison.
When you say ally, what do you mean by a lot?
Well, actually referred to folks who are interested in helping as would be allies.
Because we found that the term ally was thrown around too easily because anyone who felt
sympathetic about these issues called themselves an ally, but it didn't convict them enough
to vote in a way that would help the issues, donate in a way that would help the issues,
show up and affiliate themselves with these organizations, but we needed more than just
sympathy.
We needed people to really align.
Allies put themselves in harm's way, they say they don't wait for me to address an issue
or they're black friends, let's say, excuse me, that's offensive and what you just said
or in their own places and spheres of work, I thought we said we're going to wait for
a diverse pool.
I thought there were, why is this committee so monolithic?
They would ask their own questions and so that's what allies do and so we created this
training for people who wanted to become allies.
We didn't just assume people were allies because they felt sorry about the issues.
The demographic early on, it's probably white Madisonians who were in their 60s or close
to retirement age, many of them had an advanced degree and so they were really considered
to be educated people who knew nothing to very little of real U.S. history.
Never heard of the Harlem Renaissance, did not know about Reconstruction, they did not
understand a lot of these things that were just everyday knowledge, you know, in certain
groups of people and so it caused them to question who messed with my educational process,
that I can have an advanced degree, an intelligent individual and there's a whole segment of
American history, not black history, of American history that we never heard about.
I use a quote by James Baldwin that he wrote for The New Yorker in 1964 I think and I'll
paraphrase it, and he said to the extent that white America doesn't understand the history
of black people in America, they do not understand themselves and I found that to play out incredibly
true.
Many people signed up for the class thinking we want to learn what happened to our black
brothers and sisters.
In the third or fourth session they said, wait, wait, because they could go home and
Google and say, this is real, this really did happen.
The Harlem Renaissance is really a thing.
How could I have not been told anything about it?
So then it caused them to question their own educational experience and processes.
When that happened, gloves off, they were ready to say, okay, we're going to dive in
because we understand that you weren't told about your history, but we didn't know that
we weren't told about ours, and why was that, and how did that make us party to the
systemic racism that would happen in this country?
It's a very powerful moment when that takes place, that takes place for every cohort around
the fourth lecture.
I remember reading that you put this together to better race relations here in Madison.
Why not put something together to better race relations throughout the entire state of
Wisconsin?
I know you have to understand your market and your reach, and sometimes I think we've
missed the opportunity to do good by trying to do too much.
I have credibility here, I've invested here, I've been raised here, and I knew that I could
pull off things and I could gather people, and I had a reputation here, but I also felt
that if this became established enough, we could then spread it throughout the state,
but I've learned to really start locally and begin to move out.
So I just wanted to be cautious and to think this through.
I love now that it's statewide and that people are taking it all over the country, but the
idea was let's just make sure that we take care of the would-be allies in Madison who
need some type of threshold to cross to say, now I want to be taken seriously.
I want to be invested in because I want to be part of the change, and we could do that
locally.
I couldn't do that statewide at that time.
And I understand also a big part of the effort in Justified Anchor is not just to educate
about black history, it's also about letting white residents learn about themselves.
Oh, definitely.
Because learning about black history won't change anything.
Learning about themselves will change everything.
What do they learn?
They learn was really meant by the term white privilege, that that's not just a moniker,
that's not just throwing off on people.
They learn that they're not really white, they're German, they're Italian, they're British,
they're French, they're Scandinavian, and then they have to ask, well, why do we celebrate
that?
And we tell them your grandmother's did, your great grandfather's celebrated it.
If you tell me the ethnic background, I can almost tell you how they may have celebrated.
Tell me what they ate, and I can tell you how they celebrated it.
So then they have to ask themselves, well, then why did we stop being German?
Why did we stop being Irish?
Because you were given the option to not only to be white, which was to be American, but
to not be black, so that no matter what they, the country put on you as a white person,
you could always say, at least I'm not black.
You can vote, you can go into theaters, you can marry at all these rights that black people
didn't.
All you had to do was to wear the team jersey of whiteness and kind of throw away your own
little separate cultural identities that might separate us.
Meanwhile, black people were holding on to their blackness.
You remember the scene in Roots where they were trying to tell Kunta Kinte that his name
was Toby, and he wouldn't say it because all he had was his name, his blackness, his
culture, his family, his God, and he kept saying, what's your name?
And he could not get him to say Toby.
We were holding to our heritage, and white America was selling theirs for the American
dream for American capitalism to be accepted, and so then that completely polarized the
country between black and white or white and other.
And when people learned that, they realized that once you dichotomized people that way,
once you polarized them that way, you can put them at odds around anything, separate
them and how they live, and then they never come together so that we never work together.
We don't create solutions together.
Without even realizing it, we've been made to be the enemies of each other and fearful
of each other.
And when they realized that that was strategically designed, they were pissed.
Our participants were pissed because they just didn't know.
They had been thinking, why can't you just be it?
Why can't you just be American?
Why can't you just be American?
We've been trying to be American for 500 years.
But we couldn't, and it wasn't because we didn't work as hard as you all, or think
as hard as you all, or run as fast as you all, there were other reasons that kept us
from being American.
And I think by now, we know what those reasons were, and that reality causes those who are
watching closely to think, if I don't do something, I'm part of the problem.
And that's what the course taught.
Either you become a part of the solution, or you are the problem.
And remember, if I may say this, something that this is very important, we presented
to the Wisconsin Partnership Program, the idea, we gave their data back to them.
And departments of public health have found that racism has become a social determinant
of health.
And if people of color, not speak specifically about my background, as a black person, who's
working predominantly in white spaces, dealing with microaggressions from, can I touch your
hair, to only talk to me about black news and not regular news, to, why do you increase
your genes?
So whatever the case may be, not all of these are mean and nasty things, but they're things
that keep reminding me, I'm not seeing this just an employer partner.
I'm seeing this black first.
We have found that illnesses develop in us more quickly because of the stress of those
microaggressions.
We find that we are more prone to diabetes, hypertension, even dementia, et cetera.
We wrote a proposal to the Wisconsin Partnership Program saying that we can reduce those microaggressions.
If we are allowed to train white people in understanding the roots of these microaggressions
so that they create a different environment at their doctor's offices, their law offices,
their classrooms, wherever they are, if they create better space for people of color, they
will reduce the stress that shortens their lives.
Conversely, I said we need to bring emerging black leaders to the table.
So we need to take black employees who are nominated by their employers to invest them
in the seven-month process, where we have black speakers and presenters, and we talk
about what does it mean to bring all of you to the table, giving them black space to process
what it means to still be the first and the only.
You and I know about that well, I mean, the first and the only, at this point, in 2024,
we bring Dr. Kristin Carpoujaro to talk to them a little bit about black history and
understanding themselves and the resilience of our communities.
So between investing in black leadership and training would be white allies, we could
reduce the microaggressions that black people were experiencing and help black people and
white people and everyone else to work together on solutions by having a better understanding
of the way things work, that by doing that, we could reduce the health risk of black
people in our community, we received a million-dollar grant to do that work.
And so I just want to make sure that I put that on it as well, that it's not just,
well, let's just talk about history and have a kumbaya moment.
Now, there's a lot of strategy.
We captured data on this in order to prove that if we're going to create space for black
wellness, it begins with non-black allies understanding how we got here and it's training
black emerging leaders and understanding how they run with the ball from here.
And that by doing both of those together, we begin to create the capacity to change the
environment in Madison that will make it perhaps more attractive to other black people
because this environment will no longer be detrimental to our health.
What's corporate America's role in all this?
As we move ahead, you know, I'm working on the Center for Black Excellence in Culture,
a place where black people can come and celebrate our resistance, our stories and tell our stories
and have this fine art space, this cultural space, the corporate community has responded
tremendously because they realize and I've asked them, what do you do with an employee
who's been hired and she happens to be black and she's the candidate, head and shoulders
above the rest and at the end of the interview, she says, I want this job, but can someone
drive me around your city and just show me a few examples of black innovation?
Where would you take her?
And this is on Zoom to the Chamber of Commerce Board.
No one said anything, not a single response.
I've asked that with other CEOs and what they've said to me later was, Alex, if you
asked me that question, bottle of Tina woman, Latinx woman, I would know, if you asked
me that about an Asian man, I would know a white woman, I would know, I don't know what
I would say.
I've never thought about that.
And then I said, your competition is not epic, ex-an, exact sign.
Your competition is not epic, exact science at SSM, UW, the bank down the street.
That's not your competition.
The competition is civic life in Madison for black people at five o'clock when they
go home for work.
And they want to be around other black people like they were in D.C., Atlanta, Raleigh,
Dallas, Chicago, Milwaukee.
We don't have that here.
We're having health implications, one of the reasons why we're not keeping people here,
because they've come from places where that was just a given.
You can't ask black people to be the first and the only in their jobs that have no place
to go to be reinforced by people who share their culture.
And the business community got it.
And that's why we've been so successful in our fundraising campaign, because people
understand that's a piece of the puzzle that we've never considered.
So we know people of color move here, sometimes have a tough time adjusting.
We know that people grow up here and they have a tough time adjusting.
And I read that you prefer to see black people stay here in Madison, I should do.
Why is that?
I want to see black people stay here because Madison has promising opportunities.
And I want our people, I want black people to take advantage of that.
It's a beautiful community.
It's a world-class university, so many things to do, but it's not catering to us culturally,
so it never feels like home.
The example I use is, if I went to my grandmother's house with all of my cousins and everyone
else's picture was up on her fireplace, her mantle, but mine, everyone else's homework
and drawings, but mine, at some point I would say, grandma, is there something you want to
tell me?
Or mom and dad, is there something you all aren't telling me?
Madison feels like that, that a lot of people see their artwork, they see themselves, they
see their pictures and their faces, but the black community, we really don't.
And when we are talked about, it's the bucks, it's the packers, or it's the prisons, or
it's reports, but it's not the black, resilient brilliance, it's not a historical perspective,
it's always pejorative.
And that's not who we are, and we've done more for this state than just that.
And so I want, not only do I want that narrative changed, I want us to be the one to change
it.
And I want space where that's changed.
I have space where we tell our stories and space where we train our leaders.
I want to make this place attractive to black people from all over, because it's actually
a place where we can sigh and have a reprieve from being the first and the only, because
it's okay to be the first and the only.
But historically, when you were the first and the only, you still went back to a community,
you still went back to a center, you still went back to a church, you still went back
someplace where you could say, my people, I'm not crazy, I can be reinforced, I can go
out and do it another day, but you don't have that, your days are limited.
Are you ever worried about your safety with the work that you do?
It's not my first reaction, but people, people often close friends will pull me to the side
and they'll just say, you know, you just need to be a little bit more cautious.
Not in what I say, but just whether or not I travel alone, posting, if I'm out of town
or not, making sure my house has a good security system, people have brought up things
to me in the line of my work saying I just need to be aware that it could be, that what
I'm doing could feel threatening to some, but it's not my first thought.
So it's been 10 years since you wrote that first essay and the cap times came back and
wanted you to write, I'm not going to just do that recently here, I did.
And I saw that it started off with you saying, yes, I am still angry and yes, it is still
justified.
Yes.
What are we saying then?
Well, because I know people are wondering, have things gotten better, you know, are you
still angry, you know, has your work made you less angry?
Has your work fixed things so that you have less to be angry about?
So I just started out by answering the question that I knew people had, yes, I'm still angry
and it's still justified, but let's talk about what I've been up to.
But there's so much work and so much that still needs to be done that I can't afford
to let up off the anger gas, because it still motivates me to make things better.
Part of that essay you said that you just want to thrive in your hometown, you look
at all the great work you're doing, all the different arms that your organization is
involved with, do you not feel like you're thriving?
You know, it's impossible to really thrive alone.
If you think about community as an ecosystem, you can't just have a good flower, but the
soil is crappy and it's dry and there's no irrigation and there's no weeding and no
fertilizing and no sun.
By definition, if I'm doing well, but my people aren't, it's not thriving.
I'm just, I'm finding ways to succeed in spite of it all.
Everything has to do with the infrastructure, it has to do with the ecosystem.
I want to create something so that thriving is normalized and it's not just an occasional
person or two doing well.
So no, I'm doing well, but I'm not thriving because I need more people to be thriving
and to see this as a wonderful, as a great destination.
We're moving to that place, but without space to tell our stories and be ourselves and be
reinforced and create a new narrative and hold others accountable without thriving yet.
But we are getting awfully close to thriving here.
Yeah.
It's going to happen.
And you also said that 10 years is not enough time to fix all of our problems in the Black
community, but it's enough time to move the needle.
How much has the needle moved since you began this effort?
I mean, I see instances of growth, but again, using the ecosystem analogy, you can plant
a garden, but you can't make the sun come out.
You can't make it, you can water, but you can't make it rain.
The issue with the Black community is not the Black community.
The issue with the Black community is systemic racism.
It's the structures that are in place and people that are leading them and benefiting
from them.
That's got to be changed.
That's got to be acknowledged.
That's got to be held accountable for going to really see true thriving.
So when people ask me, aren't things better, I want to ask them, well, how have you changed?
How have your friendships changed?
How has your office changed?
Your board changed?
Your leaders changed.
That's the true indication of this.
I'm not fixing Black people so that White people can feel more comfortable by addressing
the issues of Black people.
I'm helping this community to become really what it can be, who it really can be in the
place where everyone can thrive.
So the White community doesn't need to be watching me work and trying to decide if
I'm fixing it or watching the Black community to see if things are better.
The Black community has not created these systems, these systems that hinder Black
thriving.
We need something to happen in the broader system in order to stop impeding Black success
and Black thriving.
And so whenever that happens, whenever people get that memo, whenever people get that inclination,
that function to do something different, that will then exacerbate the outcomes, that will
then exponentiate those outcomes.
But that's something that we can't do.
But until then, our train would be White allies to understand the benefit of work that they
do in their communities to help them dismantle these impediments to Black wellness and Black
health.
When that begins to happen on a large scale, we will see huge change.
So the White community is not waiting for us.
We're waiting for the White community.
And what's your call to action for this community, for Blacks and Whites?
And is it the same call to action as everyone?
It's a different call.
I think to the White community, the call is educate, donate, affiliate.
Understand the issues, support the issues and affiliate with people and organizations that
are different than you become connected.
Don't just say, oh, yeah, I give to, but you don't know anyone that that enriches lives
and experiences to the Black community.
I would say we've got to prepare ourselves.
We've got to build this space.
We've got to train our own and quit our own and develop our own and celebrate our own.
Those are things that we've got to do.
So we each of those groups and all groups have work and for our allies who are non-Black
and are not White, we need their partnership as well.
In fact, in our history class, when we break up into small groups to discuss the lectures,
we help to group people based on those ethnic identities also because we want them to know
that we need all hands on deck.
And so I would say to the Black community, let's build, let's develop, let's grow because
we are creating opportunity and we want to be ready as those doors open.
And also in your second essay, you said White influencers must own injustices facing Black
Madison.
Who is that demand aimed toward?
White influencers.
That's fine.
I know you're looking at me saying, I just asked you that question.
It's interesting.
When White influencers say Black leaders, they have five to six people come to mind.
When I say White influencers to White influencers, they say, we don't know who that is.
Yeah, you do.
You just don't call them White influencers.
The chancellor, the mayor, the governor, the county executive, they have exact sciences,
the head of Epic, the head of SSM, you all know what they are, they're just not called
White influencers, they're just called leaders, influencers, they give us names so they can
pick who the four or five are.
So they know who they are.
The people who will the authority, who run organizations, who pick political leaders who
support them.
They know who they are.
We need them to use that power and influence to help their peers practice fairness in every
sphere of business, education and civic life in this, in this community.
Whatever attributes they offer to Black people, whatever those indicators are to make them
think of that Black person is a Black leader, they need to just attribute those same things
to themselves and figure out who their leaders are and they need to motivate those people
to do better.
What's your gauge on whether or not you're moving the needle, who building the center
for Black excellence in the culture and breaking ground in summer of 2024, that's one of them.
I think the 5,000 graduates, the people who finished our course, that gives me hope.
You know, Mr. Seymour, we, some of our alumni, they create their own action plans.
Because that's not my work.
I can't tell why people what to do to be effective.
They're smart enough to do that.
But we have a group that have created a program called Court Observers.
They sit in on court cases just to monitor our people, a challenge.
They sit in on court cases just to monitor our people are treated.
They have documentation from 11,000 court case observations.
This is not paperwork they read.
These are notes they've taken.
They have sat in on 11,000 court cases.
Half of which are Black people.
We have that data.
They took this upon themselves.
That gives me hope that just by sitting in the courtroom, providing a level of accountability,
it doesn't change everything that moves the needle.
Because then that helps us to think, well, what if we sit in on expulsion hearings and
foster care hearings and Medicare hearings?
These are not Black people.
These are White people using just their time and energy to observe.
What they're noting, what they're capturing, is blowing them away because they're thinking,
I never would have believed that these differences were happening.
I would not have believed it had I not documented it myself.
They sit in on the course and watch a DA ask for one thing for Black defendant.
And then in the same day before, the same judge recommend a whole different outcome from
someone of another ethnic group.
To the point that the judge had to say, wait, you just recommended for the same crime this
for the Black defendant, but this for the White defendant.
And our court observers captured that.
That gives me hope.
They're going to report out on that information.
They're going to talk about it.
But people educating themselves, donating, and then affiliating themselves to organizations
and causes that bring about change, that's how we move the needle.
It's not a huge needle, but that's moving in the right direction.
11,000 cases, 5,000 people, 80 participants in our emerging Black leadership program.
That helps you to move the needle.
Now, it'll be a few years until we see the impact from that.
But those steps, that action gives me a lot of hope.
No, I know you're a man of words or an educator, but I noticed that your first essay ends with
the word forward.
And then your second essay ends with the words, I remain committed and angry and courageous.
That has to be some symbolism to.
Oh, that's a good observation.
With the first essay, I ended with the word forward because that's our state model.
So I wanted to underscore the fact I'm a Wisconsin to my core.
Let's live into this model because we're walking backwards when it comes to race relations.
So that was a subtle jab to my fellow Wisconsin Knights.
Let's live into our state's identity.
With the second, I wanted to sound a little bit more seasoned because even though I want
to continue to push the systems to continually change, I've raised $25 million in this community
in 24 months in order to create space to help black people feel more at home and to help
the non black community to come into state of the art space that will talk about our
contributions to the state of Wisconsin.
So really, I couldn't just say nothing's changed, nothing's changed, but I couldn't
say everything's changed because the community is helping me to build this space.
I want to find a middle ground.
So I wanted to let people know that even with building this space, I'm angry because that's
an outward expression of pain and fear that I still, I still, those things are still very
real.
You know, I drove home from the cross recently.
It's a very cautious when I'm in rural areas between major cities.
And so that brings a sense of anger.
But referring back to Augustine's quote, I've got to be able to hold anger and courage
in an appropriate tension if I'm going to arrive at hope.
And so by saying I remain courageous and angry, it's saying that I'm still focusing
on hope, but just arriving and having one major success doesn't mean that we've all
arrived until we all arrive.
I've got to be angry for the brothers and sisters who have not arrived at the table.
I've got to be otherwise, I'll forget about them.
So there was some symbolism to what I said in the second because I wanted them to know
that you're not going to get me to stop being angry anytime soon, but you're not going
to stop me from being courageous either because I will have hope because I have nothing else
to offer the community if I don't have that.
Dr. G, thank you for your time, sir.
Mrs. Seymour, it's good to talk with you again.
Thank you.
Thank you.