Social Justice - A Conversation

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Wesley Knight 0:06
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Charles Stanton 0:18
Good evening. This is Professor Charles Stanton. I'm a professor of Boyd School of Law,

Blanca Pena 0:23
and my name is Blanca Pena. I am a third year law student at the Boyd School of

Charles Stanton 0:26
Law, and this is social justice, a conversation,

Blanca Pena 0:29
a conversation.

Charles Stanton 0:33
Well, good evening, everybody, and welcome back, Professor Stanton, here with my partner, Blanca Pena, want to welcome you back to the show. We have so many things to discuss in a relatively short time, but we will do our best to try to be as informative as we can as as as of now, of course, we know that there has been a shutdown of the government, and we're going to talk a little bit about the ramifications of that shutdown, which I believe sincerely was in the making for a long time. I think that the shutdown of the government, which was essentially because the Democratic Party and the Republican Party could not agree. Was precipitated by the fact of the desire from the Republican Party to basically make massive cuts in the health care plan, massive cuts in Obamacare, massive cuts in Medicaid, etc, etc. But what I think has happened throughout the shutdown is that there's something much bigger going on here than even those cuts. I believe that the Office of Management and Budget has taken the opportunity now that the government shut down to see how many other agencies and how many other departments can be eliminated under the excuse of that there's no money. The funding is gone. What have you, etc, etc. I also think, I also think that there is an element in all of this that has to do with attacking the minority community. WIC, which is one of the major programs for Feeding Infants and feeding newborn children, which has a large, large presence in Minority Health, is one of the targets of what they want to do. I think the man who is in charge of it, Vought, has been working on this for years, and I think what they want to do is to as much as they can impair the minority community. But also, ironically enough, through the through the Medicaid and through these other cuts, they're also impairing their own people as well. So the misery is being spread out across the table. And I was reading an article recently about Colorado, how enormously impactful these cuts are going to be. You have a large portion of the state that lives in poverty, and they're basically not going to be able to get any kind of medical care, doctor's visits or anything like that.

Blanca Pena 3:40
Yeah, the implications of that shutdown is we're going to feel it for a long time. I mean, we're already feeling the effects of this administration now, and we're going to continue to feel it, I think, even if this wasn't planned for a while, even if this wasn't planned previously, and you know, it just happened, I think they're doing a really great job of taking advantage of the opportunity to further divide the country. I mean, that's the first thing I saw, like, if you're on the right, they're saying it's the left, and if you're looking at the left, they're saying it's the right. And what makes these claims so powerful is people not doing their own research and figuring out why things are actually happening. And, I mean, I'm always going to bring up the immigration stuff because, I mean, now more than ever, it's just it keeps going and going. But to see these politicians just actively lie, deliberately lied to their constituents and say the reason why the shutdown happened is because Democrats want to give billions to undocumented immigrants. I can't help but laugh sometimes, because it's. Yes, first of all, and I said this in the last episode, it's like undocumented people can't even get federal funding, you know, like it just goes down to what? Where is the common sense? Where is the knowledge? Why can't people just do their own research? And why are they so easily manipulated into just thinking whatever somebody else thinks? And, you know, I can't really speak to the loss in Medicare and Medic and Medicaid stuff, because as an immigrant, as I said, I don't use these things. I don't use the federal stuff. But, I mean, I can only imagine how awful it is. People are already living paycheck to paycheck. Kids are not going to schools with high quality. They're not even safe in their schools. There's fear all over the country. There's anxiety all over the country, and now the government is shut down because Congress can't pass a budget. Is there anyone that has our back?

Charles Stanton 5:56
Well, I think, I think a lot of it has to do with the way they look at the immigrant community, the minority community, that community, in their eyes, is devalued, so that a lot of the things that they're Doing vis a vis arresting people, breaking into people's homes, you know, mass arresting people just because of their, of their how they look, etc, etc. They will rationalize that, yeah, they will tell you that, well, we're trying to, we're trying to prevent an invasion, or whatever it would be. But the real, true reason is what is, what we know is to be the truth. I think also though that there are other disturbing things that happened last week that really got my attention. One of those things, of course, was the summoning of the generals and all the military people for a conference or a speech by the President and by the man who was the Secretary of Defense. And I think that was a very jarring incident that, as far as I know, has never occurred in our history. All these people were brought together, and basically they were they were talked to in a very insulting way, particularly particularly regarding women in the military and how headset the Secretary of Defense basically minimalized all the contributions that the women have made in the military. Basically it was, it was, it was very like misplaced. It was a misplaced address because these people who were there, both men and women, but in the case of what he was saying, the women who had achieved all these things throughout the years in the service were basically devalued. And it came to me, it came to me then, that this was part of the plan, also, because, as we remember, Trump went out of his way, basically, to get rid of as many hierarchical, hierarchical female officers, and pretty much all the all the different forms of our defense. And I'm listening to the I'm listening to this, and then I was also listening to what the President said, and he said that we need to, we need to put you people in the cities. We got to protect cities from the enemy within. So my question is, who is the enemy within? Is it? Is it the mothers who can't feed their children because there's no funds in these different programs? Is it the people who are working in Walmart and they're working in, you know, Home Depot, trying to subsist on menial wages, are the enemies within the people in the in the educational community who are trying to tell people or educate people as to what's going in, to what's going on. And I was just, I was it was just an amazing event, because you see all these people sitting there who basically have devoted their lives to the protection of our country from every from every race and from every creed and from every ethnicity, and they're just sitting there like and I was talking with to one guy on Thursday night, and he was he was saying to me, because he's. Involved in the military, and he was saying to me that his son spoke to him, I guess this was a few hours before I spoke to this man, and his son was in the Special Ops, and the son is leaving the military. Wow, he says, I don't want to be part of this, because I think, I think a lot of these people know where this is headed. Yeah, it's scary, and it is and it is scary. It is scary. What is what is even scarier though, to me is that I'm sitting here with you in this studio, yeah, and it should be super scary to pretty much everybody who lives in this country as to what's going to happen. And, you know, you talk to people, I talk to people all the time. You talk to people all the time, and you you mention these things to them, and, oh, no, it's all gonna, everything's gonna be all right. It's all gonna, it's all gonna be good, you know, they're just, they're just trying to, you know, bring order to the country. And I said, but there's no disorder in the country.

Blanca Pena 11:10
Denial is the first day to grief, right, right?

Charles Stanton 11:13
And I'm saying, yeah. I said, But, you know? Oh, he says, Well, you know, there's a lot of people who are, who are trying to bring us down. And I says, Well, okay, who would those people be? Well, you know, they're out there,

Blanca Pena 11:27
like a huh? Keep going.

Charles Stanton 11:30
It's just though, it, will you say denialism? It, yeah, it is for some Yes, for some years, it's denialism. It's ignorance, but it's also, it's also this twisted attempt to rationalize what clearly, what clearly is not any kind of a normal way to conduct a government. No, I agree. I mean, there are things that are going on here that clearly, I mean that have never happened before. Yeah, I

Blanca Pena 12:07
don't know if you saw the news about the Super Bowl halftime announcement, and they selected bad bunny to do the halftime in February. And everyone's up in arms about that. And mind you, right, he's Puerto Rican. Puerto Rico is a US territory. Bad bunny is a US citizen. But they are villainizing him for his heritage, for his ethnicity. People are saying he does not belong there. I saw a few tweets from Congress members saying that if you support bad bunny, you're not a real American. And sometimes I sit back and think a little bit and are, are we just not allowed to like artists who are not American? Like so I can't like Shakira, I can't like Adele, like they're, you know, like artists exist all over the world. Why are we now at a point where racism is so accepted and normalized to where one can't even be happy that an artist got chosen. Like, it would be a different conversation if people were like, Oh man, like, I really wanted you know this other artist to play, because I really like them, right? But no, the conversation is no, this particular person should not be at the Super Bowl, because he is of this kind. And it, again, kind of like the enemy within conversations. It's a very over generalized label, but it's very narrow, and it's very directed, and it's very purposeful. It's very, you know, it's very strategic, the way that that they set that up, yeah, and it's ridiculous. And I think it really just comes down to what the government looks like right now, what they have allowed, who our president is. I mean, he's the one that called immigrants animals. And, you know, it's just, yeah, it's insane. Just how much chaos now is in the country. We cannot agree on one thing, and this is, mind you, right? Like No one's forcing anyone to watch the Super Bowl halftime either. Like, if you don't like the artist, you could simply just go get a snack while you're waiting for the game to come back on, you know, like no one's forcing you to like it either, you know, it's just a 15 minute show, but because he happens to be not white American, there's a big issue and this obsession with, you know, this cookie cutter American, This white family who is Christian and who believes in the traditional values, like all of a sudden, that's what people want from this country, but that's not what this country ever was. There was that idea.

Charles Stanton 14:51
But, well, you know what's also interesting about what you're saying is, and there's no. There's also the presumption, though, that people who are not white can't be part of our heritage, right, and can't have the same values that that other people have, can't raise their families in the right way and all those things. Yeah, you know, it was so interesting because last week we had done the the In the Heat of the Night Movie. And every time I watched that movie, and I've seen it many times, and I and I had met him a few times, and I had talked to him, who had Sidney Poitier, of course. And I'm watching that movie, and I see the man, and the man's, you know, he visited his mom, he's going to go back to Philadelphia. He's sitting, he's sitting waiting for the train to come. And it has to be him that committed the murder. It has to be. There's nobody else in that town that it could have been, except this man, except this man. And there's that, there's that feeling that attributes to people who don't look like the people you were just referring to, that these people, they're, they're prone to doing things that are criminal, basically, yeah, and, and, I mean, that was, that was basically, that was basically, that was basically the trial movie. There's and these are movies going way back. There's a trial movie. There's a movie called Intruder in the Dust, where juano Hernandez, one of the great, all time, great Hispanic actors who was in the trial movie, he was an intruder in the dust. And it's about like this mob mentality, basically, where something happened and Well, this has got to be the person who did it. Why does it have to be that person?

Blanca Pena 17:03
Yeah, you see? No, I am with you. I was watching this video the other day, actually. It was about biology and the human makeup, right? And it was saying how people who are racist are scientifically illiterate, because the entire human race, we all share about 99.9% of our genetic makeup, right? That point 1% is our skin color, our eye color, but everything else is the same. We are made up of the exact same thing, almost down to the T Yeah, right. Yet, there are people who actually think like the people that you're mentioning. You mentioned movies. This happens in real life every day. You know, there are people who actually think that if you're a specific color or shade or whatever, that you're more prone to commit crimes, to hurt people, to do this, that and the third, and it's just that is just not the case, and it just goes to show how the human brain has been manipulated throughout so many years. And I mean, we no one's perfect. We all happen to grow up, and we get those racial biases, we get those like we we all have it, right? But what's important is you recognize it and you rectify it. You don't just become a horrible person. It. That's just not what you need to be doing. But it, I mean, it happens every day, and it happens all the time, and who knows when it's gonna stop? I mean, people were really trying to tell us that racism ended when Obama was elected. Wrong, wrong. He wore a tan suit, and it was the end of the world. But Donald Trump does a million things and, oh, it's like your friend, the one that said we were gonna be fine,

Charles Stanton 18:55
yeah? No. It's, you know, it's, it's interesting, because, you know, I was thinking of, I was thinking of the In the Heat of the Night Movie, when they had, they had the incident. Thank God it wasn't the incident that it could have been where the guy who was the boxing champion went back to Omaha and they had a parade in his honor. His last name is Crawford. He's one of the first fighters, I guess, in a long time, to be the world champion in three different weight classes. Yeah. And so they had to prayed for him, and then, I guess, they went, he went driving with his friends, and they were stopped by the police. And but for the grace of God, it could have taken a very bad turn. It was like one of the movies that I that I showed the Honors College, the hate you give movie. And it would have been that, except that this man was a prominent man, and he wasn't a teenager. He. As an older gentleman, but there's, I don't know how to put this, but people are always talking about religion, and, you know, we need religion, and we need all things, and I don't disagree with that. I believe, I believe in God. I I try to be a good person as best as I can be, even though I'm a flawed creature like everybody else, but I, but I do try. But what gets me is, you know, people always talk about, you know, God created the world. God did all these things. Okay, that being true, then God created people who don't look like you. So if that's the case, then if God's plan was to create all these people and He created the world, then these are your brothers and sisters. Yeah, what is, what is so hard, though, what is so hard for people to to accept that and look and look not at people in a stereotype, but look at people as people who are human beings, who, despite maybe the differences they have, are just like you are. Yeah, totally agree, and also hopefully that they look at you in the same way. Yeah, you see, that's the thing. That's the thing,

Blanca Pena 21:20
yeah, unfortunately, now we are in a time where religion is weaponized and it's used to further agendas and it's disgusting. I mean, I, I'm not particularly religious, but I respect religion, and I like, you know, it's not something that I grew up with, it. It's not something I like, hate or anything. But i i I can recognize, I can see when it's being used for the wrong things. And just the other day, Trump and Netanyahu had this press. It's holding some it was somewhere. Forgot where it was, but Netanyahu started quoting the Bible, and I use quoting very, very lightly here, please do your research. He, he said something along the lines of in the Bible, if you bless Israel, you will be blessed, and if you curse Israel, you will be cursed, right? He completely took some you know, verse in the Bible and completely turned it into, like, basically, what God is telling all of us is that you have to support the State of Israel or else he won't love you, or you will go to hell. And that's horrible. First of all, he doesn't say that, right? The Bible does not say that. But second of all, to have Trump, who claims to be, you know, who claims to run the Christian party, right, the Christian political party, and to stand by such blasphemous language is so insane to me, and that's coming from someone who doesn't, who isn't all that religious, and it offends me because it's so well horrible.

Charles Stanton 23:05
It's to me, coming from mixed parentage. The way I look at it is this, you can go to services, if you desire, you can go to Mass. You can go to the temple. Okay, I think, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think it's a good thing. Yeah, I when I get up in the morning, I say my prayers. When I go to bed at night, I say my prayers, yeah, I ask God for help. But beyond that, the most important thing is help other people. Of course, do good. I always say in the class, and I sincerely believe this, these are your brothers and sisters. They may look different than you, they may come from a different place, but these are your brothers and sisters, and we have an obligation as human beings and as people who want to do good, to treat them that way, and to take the opportunity when we have the chance to Do things that are positive, to try to, not merely, not merely do things in a sense, like, you know, obviously, if somebody was hungry, you'd give them something to eat. But encourage people. Encourage people try to try to open up a dialog with people. Try to give them, you know, enthusiastic energy. I call it, try to be able to do that. I mean, in the community I live in, it's a very interesting community, because we have, we have people who are Muslim, we have people who are Jewish, we have people who are Christian, we have people who are whatever they are. I. But it is about, it is about looking at looking at other people as we would want to be, looked at ourselves and wanting and wanting. Because I really believe all of us we want to be loved. I mean, I think that's what we all want, and as we would want to be loved, then we have been given the gift of loving other people. We have an inexhaustible supply in our being of love. But the question is, are we willing to open up the vault and use that love or just or just not use it and say, well, a whole group of people are, are not worthy of my love. They're not worthy of my attention. They're not worthy of my caring. But that's really not for you to decide that's that's you are put on the earth to try to do something positive, and however you look at God or look at the almighty being, all of that is I have an opportunity to help now and now in our country, right now, we're in a very difficult situation. But I think what we need to do, one of the things we need to do as best as we can is try to have dialogs with people who don't agree with us. Now, a lot of times that's extremely frustrating, but we have to try to present ourselves as people who care about other people that may not truly care about us. That's the hard thing to do, because human nature is, well, if a person doesn't like me, you know, they don't like me, I'm just going to move on. But, but really, the ultimate thing is to try to reach out to people and try to and try to find some common ground between them and ourselves. And of course, you know, when I've been doing this, I've been doing this, this show, for four years, and the longer I do the show, the more I realize that we are the solution. We are the solution, but it's us, you know, taking that, taking those steps to engage people who many times are many times willfully unengageable, but that we, we try, we try to make change. And then, you know, a lot of the time we get frustrated by it. We're, I can imagine if I'm frustrated by what's going on now, the amazing amount of frustration that people are going through. I mean, I mean, just Friday, they had the Supreme Court decision where, literally, close to half a million Venezuelans are going to be returned to Venezuela and their protections here are removed. But we must, I think the main thing is we must never lose faith. Though we must never lose faith, not just in government or any of those things. We must not lose faith in ourselves, that despite all the things that happen, we can change make, we can make a change. That's what sustains us and to the people who are listening out there, you know, to our program. This is your program. It's not my program. It's not blanca's program, it's your program, because only by all of us working together can we solve these problems.

Blanca Pena 28:37
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think also, just to add on to your list, we should stay principled. We should stick by our principles, and we should, most of all, just have each other's back. I think I said this a few episodes ago, but just spreading love, showing love to each other, being patient, that's that's really all we can do, right? If we can't create, or if we can't have worldwide impact, then let's have the kind of impact that that suits us in our lives. And if we can even change one person's mind or love one person, then that's that's that goes a long way, because we can, we can go really far if we all just tried and did that one thing. Thank you all so much for listening to us tonight. We had a great time chatting. We'll see you guys next week. Good night.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai