Podcast: America After George Floyd with Deval Patrick

TRANSCRIPT: America After George Floyd with Deval Patrick

Deval Patrick:

Racism is not my problem. It's white people's problem. The impact is on me, but the work to overcome it, that belongs to others.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. Here you'll find extended versions of the interviews from my show on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today is all about race, inequality and why it feels like so little has been done to solve America's deepest social problem. I'll dig into it with the former governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Let's begin.

Announcer:

This GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by Walmart. Around the world, Walmart aspires to use its strengths to transform the systems on which we all rely, setting ambitious sustainability goals, supporting the communities we serve, and creating development and advancement opportunities for our 2.2 million associates. Learn more at corporate.walmart.com/globalresponsibility.

Ian Bremmer:

Former governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate, Deval Patrick, great to be with you.

Deval Patrick:

Good to be with you, Ian. Thank you for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

So much to talk about. We're at a very remarkable moment of American history, protests blanketing the country in the midst of a global pandemic. Certainly not where any of us thought we were going to be at the beginning of the year. I have to start this off by asking you what you think these protestors and the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement should be demanding at this moment.

Deval Patrick:

Well, first of all, I want us all to share in the gratitude that I have to them because I think in addition to calling attention to police excesses, so many more of which occur without being videotaped than the horrific ones we have seen. They're also calling attention to what the lasting and pernicious issue that underlies so much of police culture and so much frankly, of our criminal justice system, of our healthcare system, our housing, our education systems.

Deval Patrick:

And that is the ways in which we have gotten accustomed to the devaluing of Black life. And the outpouring of personal testimonials that you and I and everyone is reading today and listening from people in the business world, people who are pro-athletes, from students, folks from all corners of the country. They aren't as devastating as that awful videotape of George Floyd being killed by a police officer. But they are in their own way, connected to this idea that Black people are presumed dangerous, presumed guilty, presumed less competent, presumed less reliable, and on down the list. And we've got to get at that, I think, in order to make America true to what we say we are.

Ian Bremmer:

It's one of those rare bipartisan issues in Washington, the criminal justice reform. So when you look at what's happening right now across this country, I mean this isn't one or two cities, not one or two states, do you have any optimism that things can quickly get better and where would you point to likely progress if we were to get the agenda right?

Deval Patrick:

So Ian, I am cautiously optimistic. I am, by nature, optimistic, but I do think that the protests have brought a certain urgency to these issues that we don't always see. I think the bipartisan support has mainly been around sentencing reform, which is critically important. The warehousing of people and the failure to prepare the 95+ percent of folks who are in to be out again one day and back into productive and mainstream life is enormously important. And we have been walking away from that for 30 or 40 years. And there does seem to be bipartisan understanding, I think coming to it to the same place from different reasons, but bipartisan understanding that, that needs to be fixed.

Deval Patrick:

Policing is a sub part of that. We have not had bipartisan support for that, at least in a very public way until now. In fact, I remember, I think I'm right that at the end of the Obama administration following the shooting and the unrest in Ferguson, the president convened a commission on 21st century policing and they came up with a list of really terrific and quite detailed recommendations. And when the Trump administration came in, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions was very public about withdrawing those recommendations and shelving the report. So I'm not sure there is yet bipartisan support on reforming policing.

Deval Patrick:

Now, as I said, because the protestors seem so much to be getting at the underlying issue of what it means to be truly equal and what true equity means in policing and beyond. And because that support seems to be coming, again, judging by the photographs I see from all sorts of people in all corners of the country, if we can do what we don't normally do in America, which is actually sustain our attention for a period of time, we might actually be able to see some real good come out of this soon.

Ian Bremmer:

We are seeing people of all stripes showing up at these demonstrations and protests. At the same time there is a pandemic on. So last week, week and a half we've seen very little of Dr. Fauci, of Dr. Burkes. How do you deliver a message like that without undermining both the pain and the progress that is at stake here?

Deval Patrick:

Very, very gingerly. My wife is a cancer survivor, she's recovering not quite even two years now. I have felt like I wanted to be present and witnessing protests personally. And she's basically said, "Not if you want to come back home afterwards because-"

Ian Bremmer:

For a couple weeks, exactly.

Deval Patrick:

Exactly. Because we all have to care about her health. And I think people are making those kinds of judgements all over the country. They're also at the same time, I think just on the human level, if I may say, Ian, we're hungry for the company of other people. We're hungry for connection and community under any circumstances, but especially after a couple months of being self-isolated in this way. And to come together around something as meaningful as the current issues, I think is enormously important. Trying to be socially distant under those circumstances, it's gratifying to see so many of the protestors wearing masks, but not all do. And it is tough when you're being herded behind police riot gear to stay six feet apart. So it's deeply concerning.

Ian Bremmer:

So we see one of the biggest expressions visible from space in Washington DC, a massive mural on the street saying Black Lives Matter put out there by the DC Mayor. And then the next day after that says, "Defund the police." And we see in Minneapolis as well, city council coming out with agreement, defund the police. Well, everyone talking about this. Obviously a lot more controversial than Black Lives Matter. What do you think about that message as a rallying cry for many that are out there on the streets and are leading this movement right now?

Deval Patrick:

I get it, Ian. I'm not there yet personally. I have a little bit, to be honest, the reaction I did to the calls to abolish ICE. Someone has to do that job. And to me, more to the point is how do we get policing right? I understand the slogan, I understand what it points to, but what I want is to be able to count on the police to build real relationships with community, to be a source of safety and order and not just a source of control and in many cases, violence.

Deval Patrick:

There are lots of really great rank and file police officers and I think it is meaningful that so much of law enforcement leadership has spoken up in support of the protestors and in support of the points that they're making. I thought that the image of the chief, I think it was in Denver, joining arms with the leaders of the march there in the early days and walking with them or the scenes we've seen of officers kneeling in solidarity, even if they don't agree with all of it as a demonstration of how you deescalate, it's enormously powerful and important.

Deval Patrick:

So I want us to be able to rely on responsible and modern policing that emphasizes restorative justice and deescalation and community building. But I take the point that there are reasons behind the desperation people feel in lots of American communities. For a long time in Black and brown communities, increasingly in white communities too. The economic unease, the social isolation, the way opioids have come in to fill that void, the way those issues become issues at election time and then disappear in between elections.

Deval Patrick:

Those are experiences, as I say, Black communities have had and felt for generations, but now many, many more communities are feeling that. And until we get at that and invest in the kinds of responses that alleviate and ultimately eliminate those kinds of anxieties and stresses and trauma, then it will not be enough simply to train police officers how better to deescalate. I think that may be how I sense what the slogan, defund the police, is getting at.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, there are a lot of people that are debating today the issue of structural racism. A lot of white people coming out and saying, "Yeah, there's racism in the United States. There are a lot of individuals that act in a racist way and we need to do something about that." And very few people trying in any way to justify what was behind that video that we all saw in Minneapolis. And then in the Black community, you have a lot of people saying, "No, you don't get it. This is actually about a system that is institutionally racist against people of color." Deval, how do you talk to people to try to bring them together when the divisions about the nature of the problem are that fundamental?

Deval Patrick:

Well, we've never been able to have this conversation very well, I think, in America. Sometimes it feels like we divide between those who say, "We've made profound change. Look at all that happened in the sixties and we're done." And those who say, "We are in the same place we were at the end of slavery." I've heard some rhetoric that we are the same as we were in slavery. In fact, both are true in the sense that we have made extraordinary progress, much of it in my lifetime by the way, in the access, the freedoms, the equality and opportunity of Black and Brown Americans.

Deval Patrick:

But we have a lot to do. And it isn't always manifest in the violence visited upon George Floyd and incidents like that, although it is. And anxiety about that is something that every parent of a Black child thinks about and talks about with their kids. But there is a lot more to this, Ian, that gets at what my wife sometimes describes as the indignity de jour, the notion that you expect, especially if you're driving a nice car in a so-called white neighborhood, that you're going to be pulled over. The numbers of times you're called the N word or something else sometimes by people who think they're joking.

Deval Patrick:

I have given up going to baseball games and football games because I just don't want to have to listen to some drunk fan calling the players the N word or ape or something like that. I just don't want to hear it. You think about Amy Cooper. Remember the videotape of the woman in Central Park? I think what that demonstrated is that she understood that by pretending to be threatened by a Black man, she could reign holy hell down on that man. And when you think about the fact that she, and I don't mean to pick on her, but what happens when she's looking at resumes in that firm she used to work for and what does it mean when she says, "You know what, I just have a feeling this one, there's no fit here for this one. This one's not really qualified."

Deval Patrick:

That there's been this whole outpouring of personal testimonials from Black business leaders and Black pro athletes and Black students and others. I remember being stopped by a state trooper while sitting in the passenger seat of a black SUV with a Black driver when I was governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Now, the driver happened to be a plain closed state policeman. I was governor, it was a rookie state trooper as far as I could tell. But he still, when he stopped us and asked, he couldn't quite process what this scene he was seeing.

Deval Patrick:

In my own life, I have known deep, intimate, loving relationships across differences. So that it's not that I see evil everywhere. I think the curse of being Black, if you will, is that we're constantly asking ourselves whether the things that went wrong in our lives or went sideways, were on account of race. And the sad fact is that statistically and based on incidents, it is often true. And so, we've got to get at that and we've got to enable others. We have to enable our white brothers and sisters to have those kinds of conversations and endure them and get comfortable with them and ultimately overcome them.

Ian Bremmer:

I'm sure a lot of our viewers right now are looking at this and saying they can't even compute it. How is it possible that someone of your status, your success, would feel that way? And I think that's what we're trying to get through. And I'm just wondering, how much of that is front of mind for you just every day?

Deval Patrick:

I had forgotten that story until the white staffer who remained close to me reminded me that he was sitting in the backseat when that happened. And I think in some ways there's a device, there's a tool you develop where you just learn to put it down and keep moving, not everybody. But to put it down and keep moving. Racism is not my problem. It's white people's problem. The impact is on me but the work to overcome it, the work to see that it is more than being called an offensive word that cuts, that belongs to others.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you were governor of Massachusetts, the state I grew up in, Chelsea, Mass. I understand just how divided Boston has been from a racial perspective. And I wonder what were the challenges that you, looking back on what we're seeing right now. You know what the police department was like in Massachusetts when you were governor. What more should you have done with the lessons that you've now learned with the militarization of the police, the low bar for the use of deadly force and all of the problems that we're seeing emerge now?

Deval Patrick:

So again, I grew up in Chicago on the south side, but I've lived in Massachusetts off and on for the last 40, 45 years. And Massachusetts has grown just as I have grown. One of the reasons and the reason most often cited for why I was a long shot candidate for governor, my very first race for anything was that I had no name recognition. But there're an awful lot of people who just said out loud, "Massachusetts not going to elect a Black governor. Certainly not with a Black population at hovering around 5% of the total population."

Deval Patrick:

But I learned to engage. I learned to push past the first impressions that people had, the suppositions that people had. I'm a pretty good listener, and as I said earlier, I'm curious about people. And that has served me, not just politically, but in the rest of my life and career as well. I think that the question of criminal justice reform was remarkably difficult, even for our democratic dominated legislature who were, at that time, still seized with the fear of being called soft on crime rather than smart on crime.

Deval Patrick:

We had a plan going in to add resources to local police departments in order to enable community policing, which is a strategy that works. And 15 minutes after I was elected, the bottom fell out of the global economy, and so resources were constrained. We didn't do anywhere near as much as we might have in that respect. On the other hand, I think about the aftermath of the marathon bombing and how much we had to ask of local law enforcement in Boston and elsewhere. How much we had to ask them to set an example that we were, all of us, challenged to turn to rather than on each other, which could easily happen and often happens in moments of shock and fear of that kind.

Ian Bremmer:

And huge rally around the police force from the community after that bombing.

Deval Patrick:

People stepped up. They stepped up and people stepped up. So there was a kind of gratitude publicly expressed, not just by me, but by everybody, by regular citizens for that kind of professionalism. And think about this, the day that the surviving suspect was apprehended, that Friday, we had a couple hundred highly agitated law enforcement officers from multiple jurisdictions all across the state, federal, armed to the gills. Any one of which under that kind of emotional circumstance would gladly have taken out that remaining suspect.

Deval Patrick:

But when he finally was extracted from the boat and put on a gurney and wheeled past all of these law enforcement officers, one of the troopers in my protective unit was out there with his long gun. He said there wasn't a crass word, nobody showed any disrespect. They were solemn and serious and understood what had been asked of them and expected of them by all of us. So I know our officers have it in them. But there is a culture of excess, of militarism, as you said, that we have to break in order to enable the best of what they have. And then we have to call out the ones who just can't be taught.

Ian Bremmer:

I haven't brought up the president's name once so far in this interview, but I have to. So we've now seen President Trump's response to these protests across the country. Obviously, incredibly divided times in the US. Have you been surprised by anything that's come out of the White House at this point? Anything? So let me let you react to it.

Deval Patrick:

Ian, I'm old fashioned, I guess, I would say in the sense that I don't actually want the American president to fail. He wasn't my pick. He's not my party, but he is our president. And I wanted to be surprised, but I wasn't. We are cursed with the worst possible leader for the circumstances we are in. And I would've said that about COVID-19 and still do. This is the time when we need, as I said, to turn to, not on each other when we need empathy, when we need understanding. Those things can live alongside being firm. And when we need a willingness to think about others and not just yourself.

Deval Patrick:

And this president has shown time and time again, he is incapable of thinking beyond himself at any given time. So I wish I'd been surprised, but I haven't been. And the notion that a repeatedly lawless, and chaotic president would call for law and order and described himself as your "law and order president" was just almost laughable.

Ian Bremmer:

You've said that all racists voted for Trump, but not all Trump voters are racist. There are a lot of white Americans too, as you've suggested, that have felt on the wrong side of inequality and increasingly so, oppose immigration, oppose free trade and oppose all of this talk of Black Lives Matter when you're not taking care of me. And that grew under eight years of President Obama. What do you think, leaving aside Trump as president for now, what do you think can be done to reach out to those people at this time?

Deval Patrick:

I do think that the one truth that candidate Trump spoke was when he talked about how current politics in the economy aren't working well enough for most people. And by the way, it's the same thing that candidate Obama spoke about and that President Obama spoke about as he was leaving office. It's true. I'm a loyal Democrat. I don't think you have to hate Republicans to be a good Democrat, but I do think that we have yielded a lot of ground to the hard right over a long period of time, not just in the last three years, that has led to where we are today, the economic uncertainty and inequality. The retreat from public education, the over-emphasis on policing and the disparities in sentencing around the kinds of crimes that Black people have been responsible for versus others.

Deval Patrick:

You see these disparities in our healthcare system. It still blows my mind that you listen to Republicans talk about supporting, at some level, every feature of Obamacare until you get to the Obama part. And then there's like, "We have to destroy this and upend people's lives because we can't permit the other side to have this political win." And so, I feel like in many ways the experience of white Americans in cities, in rural communities, in so-called red states, I hate that term, and in blue states, is becoming more and more like what Black Americans have experienced for generations.

Ian Bremmer:

You didn't seem to have as much of a problem when you said blue states though, just want to let you know.

Deval Patrick:

Well, no, in blue states, I just hate that nomenclature.

Ian Bremmer:

Yea.

Deval Patrick:

That's what I'm saying.

Ian Bremmer:

That's fine.

Deval Patrick:

And so to me that feels like a tremendous opportunity. It feels like an opportunity for real unity, not by just sharing common grievances, but that the solutions that we need, in so many ways, are to enable the American dream for everybody everywhere.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, after you pulled out of your presidential bid, you launched a pack to support Joe Biden, 77-years-old, white guy, supported the 90s Crime Bill and has made a lot of missteps, gaffs when it comes to talking about race. I'm sure you've got your talking points down, but just give me a little bit informal bit about why you think he's the right guy.

Deval Patrick:

No, no, it's a fair point. First of all, just to be clear, Together Fund is not just about the Biden campaign. In fact, it's not even just about this election cycle. It's about encouraging and elevating the values of generational responsibility, of servant leadership, of community building as frames for how we make policy and supporting candidates for the Senate and the House as well as the President who are willing, frankly, to lose in service of those values.

Deval Patrick:

And look, I know I've known Joe Biden for, God, a long time. He was chair of the Jjudiciary committee when I was nominated by President Clinton to head the civil rights division. And I first met him then, and we've interacted a lot since then. We worked closely on the Stimulus Bill and the stimulus expenditures when I was in office. And I know him to be a deeply empathetic person. I agree, he can be, you mentioned the gaffs, he can be clumsy in his public speaking and so forth. I see that, everybody sees that, so can I. And so are other regular people.

Deval Patrick:

And I think he's always been growing. He's always been evolving. I love community policing as a strategy. Might be the one great thing to come from the crime bill in 1994. But there's a lot about that crime bill that may have seemed politically smart then, but that has been responsible for an awful lot of damage, direct or indirect by setting a model that a lot of states followed around minimum mandatory sentencing. And I think he himself has said publicly, I know he has personally that it's time to fix that. Now, having said that, I think it's incumbent on all of us to push him and to push our party to be bold, because that's what the moment demands.

Deval Patrick:

It's one thing to campaign, Ian, with your supporters and for their support and so on. But once you get the job, you have to govern for everybody. The people who voted for you, the folks who didn't, the folks who just stayed home, sadly. And we haven't seen that in the last little while, but it is what we need going forward. And I think we have to demand that we break this old pattern of expecting the worst from Republicans and the minimum from Democrats. But asking for a bold, unifying agenda that is enabling of people, again, in ways that this last little while hasn't been.

Ian Bremmer:

Deval Patrick, thank you so much. It was great being with you.

Deval Patrick:

Good to be with you, Ian. Thank you. That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? I hope so. Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

Announcer:

This GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by Walmart. Around the world, Walmart aspires to use its strengths to transform the systems on which we all rely. Setting ambitious sustainability goals, supporting the communities we serve, and creating development and advancement opportunities for our 2.2 million associates. Learn more at corporate.walmart.com/globalresponsibility.