Dr. Menna Demessie (PhD '10) of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation speaks on how Black Lives Matter is changing the conversation on race.
Transcript:
This is Ford School Currents with Dr. Menna Demessie, who has a 2010
Ford School PhD. In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd,
we saw thousands of people in the streets supporting Black Lives Matter
and demanding racial justice. Have we capitalized on that moment? Yeah,
great question, and thank you for this conversation. I do believe we are
closer with every day, more attention, more protests, more people
not changing the channel when uncomfortable topics of race and racism come
to the fore is a sign of progress. This is definitely an opportunity
for elected officials to understand that what they are witnessing across
the country in regards to equity, criminal justice reform, and combating
police brutality is to change the conversation to action and to policy action
more specifically. Yes, so there are issues of healthcare,
criminal justice, education. They're all kind of tied together. How important
is BLM in moving these issues forward? Yeah, the Black Lives Matter movement
is really another opportunity to witness young people at work. For those
of us who do the work of analyzing the impact that social movements
have on policy, we understand that protest is not just protest per se,
but protest to open up avenues for more voices to be included in
our democracy. Unfortunately, young people are often stereotypically charged
as naive and inexperienced, but you can look at some of the great
actors in protest politics, these folks started at very young ages and were
able to change the political climate in ways that a lot of us
can recognize in the current Black Lives Matter movement. It's because you're
able to take a national moment, a national tragedy, like the murdering of
George Floyd on camera, by the way, by a 17 year old girl,
while we're talking about young people, who stood there with her camera
in a very scary situation and didn't put her camera down and didn't
run away, she captured that moment on film. Because of her,
this movement has also been able to take off, and so what we're
asking is to take that moment and localize it to what you're doing
in your community. For people like myself as a political scientist working
on Capitol Hill, the goal for me is that I'm working with my
like minded partners as well as others who may have a different perspective
but have power in this space, and we wanna be able to provide
policy recommendations of what Congress can do better to advance more diversity,
equity and inclusion, not just in the policies they forward, but also
making sure that their own office and their own staff
also reflects the diverse America that they will forward
in the policies they would advance. Menna Demessie, thank you very much.
Thank you so much.