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>>ELLEN FUTTER: Good evening. And thank you for saying that, that doesn’t always happen.
[laughter]
I’m Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History and it is my great
pleasure to welcome all of you to the Museum this evening for this very important evening,
which we are pleased to present with the New York University Institute on the Arts and
Civic Dialogue.
This Museum, as I’ve hope you’ve noticed, strives to be a forum for discussion of the
big issues of our time, those that have a basis in science,
and especially when they sit at the intersection of science and society.
So often people think of science as being for scientists only.
As too hard. Or to the side of everyday life.
We see things differently here at the Museum because we know that science underpins many
of the most important issues of our times and of our everyday lives.
Tonight’s distinguished panel will elucidate this as they reveal how are social environments—
the urban settings, racial conflict, educational and economic inequality, incarceration rates
and poverty—
influence and harm our children on a biological level.
And, equally, how science can offer solutions to these seemingly intractable social problems.
And who better to lead us through a discussion on these issues than Anna Deavere Smith?
Anna is…please.
[applause]
I should have said, “The one and only Anna Deavere Smith.”
Anna is a multiple award-winning writer and playwright, a MacArthur Fellow, an esteemed
stage, television and film actor.
Here at the Museum, we are deeply honored to count her as well as a member of our Board
of Trustees.
Anna is perhaps best known for her powerful and revolutionary documentary style theater
productions
that tackle fearlessly and with deeply, deeply-felt humanity the most complex political and social
issues in America.
From Brooklyn’s Crown Heights’ riots to Hurricane Katrina to the healthcare system
itself, among many others.
Through exhaustive research, sensitive interviewing and brilliant performing,
she gives voice to those on the front lines of these issues and, in the process,
she has transformed the art of theatrical monologue into a dynamic force for civic engagement
and a catalyst for change.
And, tonight, you are participating in all of that.
Her latest work, which she performed this past weekend in her native Baltimore, is titled
“Notes from the Field: Doing Time in School.”
It examines what she calls the schools-to-prison pipeline for disadvantaged youth throughout
our country.
Tonight, she and the panel will discuss that topic and how we can help change the future
for at-risk youth.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great, great pleasure to introduce Anna Deavere Smith.
[applause]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, I’ve taken a habit since, I think really within the last
10 years, I think that when I met Ellen Futter, of after being introduced, to say something
I heard her say when she was introduced, which is quoting Golda Meir and that is:
Don’t be humble, you’re not that great.
So, as Ellen said, I’m currently working on a new play about what is called the school-to-prison
pipeline.
And the Justice Department revealed numbers a few years ago that showed us that it is
a fact that
young African-American, Latino and Native American, for the most part, poor kids are
disciplined more harshly for things that can even be considered mischief in other environments.
And that that discipline and a certain number of suspensions and expulsions at a certain
period in their life
has a direct correlation to the likelihood that they will end up in the criminal justice
system.
And so that’s what I’m working on and in the course—
I’ve done about 150 interviews in northern California, Baltimore, Philadelphia, we’ll
be going to South Carolina—
And you could think it was pretty depressing.
Although in the course of this time I’ve spoken to judges, I’ve spoken to kids in
schools, in facilities, on the streets.
I’ve talked to teachers, I’ve talked to parents, I’ve talked to scientists, politicians,
all kinds of people.
And so it’s really been intellectually invigorating.
And when my friend here at the Museum, Ruth Cohen, asked me to do something about the
pipeline, I said,
“Well, you know, what I really think we should have somewhere is a kind of a think
tank of all these brilliant people
from different professions and walks of life who are really trying to do something about
it.”
And that’s what we have put together for you tonight. So, let me introduce this wonderful
panel to you.
First of all, we have Ana Bermudez, who is the Commissioner of New York City—
she’s the New York City Department of Probations first Latina commissioner and second woman
to be appointed in the role.
A graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School, Commissioner Bermudez began her professional
career representing children in Family Court cases at the Legal Aid Society.
For over 20 years, she has been a tireless advocate for children and teenagers
involved in the justice system through the development and implementation of strengths-based
interventions,
the application of restorative and youth development practices,
and the design of programs that ensure successful re-integration for adjudicated juveniles.
During her tenure as DOP’s deputy commissioner of juvenile operations from 2010 to 2014,
she successfully led city-wide initiatives that focused on improving outcomes for court-involved
youth through interdisciplinary collaborations.
With her appointment to commissioner in March 2014,
she continues to lead the department in its mission to enhance public safety through appropriate
and individualized intervention in the lives of DOP clients
to enable them to permanently exit the justice system.
She played volleyball at Brown. She is the mother of two teenagers. Would you please
welcome Ana Bermudez.
[applause]
Bruce McEwen is the Alfred E. Mirsky professor at Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory
of Neuroendocrinology at the Rockefeller University.
He studies how stress and sex hormones act on the brain, taking an interdisciplinary
approach that
combines behavioral analysis and measurements of hormone levels with neurochemical, morphological,
neuropharmacological, cellular—
they’re going to define all these things, I asked them to—
and molecular methodologies, as well as collaborative translational studies.
McEwen’s laboratory has helped create a new understanding of how the brain changes
in adult life and
in development with implications for understanding the impact of stress on the brain
and sex differences in human brain function, abnormalities, Alzheimer’s disease, depression,
post-traumatic stress disorder, and aging.
He served on the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health,
is a member of the National Council on the Developing Child, and is the co-author of
the titles,
“The End of Stress As We Know It” (sounds like a good book) and “The Hostage Brain.”
He published his first paper as an undergraduate and it was published in the very prestigious
Science Magazine in 1958.
Would you please welcome Dr. Bruce McEwen.
[applause]
Dorothy Roberts is the George—is it? I don’t remember when I first went to college that
the names of university professors were so long.
I think it has to do with money—but I’m not sure.
Professor Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology
and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the
University of Pennsylvania Law School.
She is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and law.
Her path-breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health,
social justice, and bioethics,
especially as they impact the lives of women, children, and African-Americans.
Her major books include: “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics & Big Business Recreate
Race in the 21st Century,”
“Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” and
“Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.”
She is the author of more than 80 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor
of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women in the law.
She’s currently working on a project to document interracial marriage in Chicago in
the 1960s,
using 25 boxes of files that she received from her father who interviewed hundreds of
interracial couples in Chicago from 1937 to 1960.
At age 5, she wanted to be an anthropologist. Please welcome Professor Roberts.
[applause]
Professor Frances Champagne is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University.
She’s involved in several Columbia Population Research Center initiatives focused on the
understanding of gene-environment interactions.
Professor Champagne’s research explores the implications of the interplay between
genes
and the environment in shaping development and the role of epigenetic mechanisms in linking
experiences with developmental outcomes.
Her research uses rodent models to study epigenetics, neurobiology, and behavior,
and also collaborates with clinical researchers who would like to apply the study of epigenetics
to better understand origins of variation in human behavior.
In addition to investigating the modulating effects of mother-infant interactions,
Professor Champagne is currently exploring a broad array of social influences and environmental
exposures.
There is a neuro tree—I didn’t know about this till just now—
there’s a neuro tree that shows the neuroscience academic family tree and Dr. McEwen is her
grandfather on that tree.
Would you please welcome Dr. Frances Champagne.
[applause]
Now, I first heard of Fagan Harris when I was at a dinner at President Hennessy’s
house at Stanford University
and he went on and on about how I had to meet Fagan Harris and I tried in May when I was
in Baltimore
and I’m so glad that the name of the American Museum of Natural History has made this possible.
From Baltimore, Maryland, Mr. Harris is the co-founder and CEO of Baltimore Corps,
an organization dedicated to building a stronger Baltimore by mobilizing a new generation of
leaders,
focused on urban renewal, and is proud to work every day strengthening one of America’s
greatest cities—and, as you know, now trouble.
Previously, Mr. Harris worked at College Track, a national after-school program dedicated
to creating college-going cultures
in historically underserved communities.
He’s a fellow at the Emerson Collective. He staffed the White House Council for Community
Solutions where he supported efforts to harness the talents of opportunity youth.
As a passionate service advocate, Mr. Harris has worked to ask and empower Millennials
to pursue careers of social impact at Stanford University,
where he was student body vice president, and later at the Franklin Project, a national
cross-sector effort dedicated to revitalizing citizenship through service.
Mr. Harris studied international human rights in Ireland as a Senator George J. Mitchell
Scholar,
and holds a masters of philosophy in comparative social policy from the University of Oxford,
where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
He still holds three track and cross-country records at Glen Burnie Senior High School.
Will you please welcome Mr. Fagan Harris?
[applause]
Each of our panelists will make a brief presentation, then we’ll talk together for a bit, and
then we are going to have—
we’re going to open for your questions rather early in our time, then we’ll come back
and talk and we’ll open for your questions again.
And that’s because as I work on this particular matter of the youth who are disappearing from
our culture,
I feel it’s really important to call on the public to have as much to say as the experts.
Would you like to begin?
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: Sure. Thank you for being here tonight.
The first thing you need to know about my work is that we’re not parole.
Probation is for—it’s a sentence that people get in Family Court, if you’re a
juvenile delinquent,
if you’re adjudicated that, or in an adult court, in criminal court. And that means that
you avoid going to prison.
So that makes the New York City Department of Probation one of the biggest alternatives
to incarceration in the country,
as we are one of the biggest community corrections entities in the country.
So, we provide services to over 55,000 people annually, whether young people in the Family
Court system or adults.
And we have about 900 employees providing these core services.
And what they are is that we make the decision for our youngest clients, who can start at
age 7 in New York State. Okay? You can get arrested at the age of 7.
So, from 7 to 15 years old, they come through Family Court.
And our officers process those cases and make the initial determination, with the consent
of the victim in the alleged crime—
because at that time, it hasn’t gone through court—whether the case proceeds to prosecution
or there’s an alternative to court process that can take place to take care of the matter.
Then, after that, the young people, if the case goes to prosecution, then they can be
sentenced to probation.
In the adult system—and here’s another tidbit, adults in New York State start at
16.
One of the last two states in the United States that does this; North Carolina being the other
one.
So, for those cases, we also—and in both courts we provide investigation reports to
the court
to help the judge make the final determination on sentencing.
So we’ve run the gamut of influence in these court systems.
So as I said before, we serve people from 7 to 99, basically. And at various locations
in the city.
And we have concentrations of people in certain areas of New York City that, as you can imagine,
also overlap with high poverty and other challenges that they face.
So our clients are overwhelmingly young men of color, with an increasing group of young
women of color.
So we have an African-American and Latino system, all right?
They come from some of the poorest neighborhoods of New York City,
where 18 to 42 percent of the families are food insecure and housing insecure sometimes.
And they’re most stressed by chronic poverty—limited access to healthcare, low educational attainment,
high unemployment.
And high rates of crime, as you can imagine.
So, in many of our clients’ neighborhoods the heads of households cannot make ends meet.
And, in the South Bronx, for example, where we have a fairly high concentration of clients,
76 percent of heads of households cannot make ends meet.
Our teenage clients are also very challenged.
In New York City, you need 44 high school credits to graduate with a high school diploma.
At last count earlier this year we had over 500 children on probation, aged 15 to 17,
that had fewer than 10 credits, okay?
Five hundred and counting.
And a substantial number of those children have been identified as eligible for special
education services.
So you may wonder, what do their futures look like?
Chronic stress, toxic stress all over the place.
So that’s why we’re here tonight, because the science we’re about to hear about offers
hope
and demands that we think and do things differently.
It increases the probability that, for our children, of brighter and thriving futures,
because the young peoples’ brains develop well into their young adulthood.
And it’s a call to arms to do better for them and do better by them.
It will help us—it’s a new tool to counteract some of these negative effects of poverty.
I might not be able to solve the poverty problem, but I can do a lot not to make it worse. And
this science will help us.
And it demands that we refer to them as “at-promise,” not “at-risk.”
I’m going to leave it at that and then come back to that later.
[applause]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Bruce?
Me?
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: I think.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Yeah.
[talkover]
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: I think it should be, yeah—she has to introduce…
>>FRANCES CHAMPAGNE: So, my research has really focused on development and the interplay between
genes and the environment in the developmental process.
Now, in traditional views of development—and this is summarized in the slide above, traditional
views really espouse a very
a strong biological determinism.
And what I mean by that is we see development as a process that is directed by the genome.
We have genes. They direct what goes on at a cellular, at an organism level.
And the environment’s really just a passive context for the organism that is being shaped
by these factors.
So this view is very deterministic. It is very one-direction in terms of the flow of
the information.
And, encompassed within this view is the idea that the transmission of whatever trait you’re
looking at,
whether it’s behavior, whether it’s growth, is mediated by genes alone.
However, as we’ll see in the next slide, there’s a change in how development is being
viewed and this is something that my work is hoping to contribute.
And this is the idea that a very simple change to this developmental trajectory,
where though genes can influence your biology, certainly, they are a part of your biology,
there’s interplay between the environment.
And, in fact, the environment can act at the level of the organism, at the level of the
cell,
and actually activate or inactivate genes within your genome to determine how your biology
lays out.
Now, long ago, in the 60s, a developmental biologist named Conrad Waddington coined the
term “epigenetic.”
Now, at the time there was a strong genetic determinism within the field of developmental
science,
where genes were dictators of our biology.
And as a developmental biologist, Conrad Waddington was really reacting to that view and saying,
no.
In fact, development is a dynamic process, where we have interplay between genes and
environment.
There is bidirectional influence.
And we can have more than one character emerge from the same genotype or same DNA.
And so multiple different traits can come.
Now, he coined the term “epigenetic” to describe this dynamic process of how our biology
is being laid out
and that’s really been adopted by modern developmental science to describe this dynamic
process that is not deterministic,
though there are influences of the environment on our genome, this is flexible throughout
the lifespan, so it’s not set in stone.
And, moreover, this expands the view of inheritance to culture, to social transmission
and to various molecular changes that can occur around the DNA.
So it’s really broadening the view of development to be more inclusive and dynamic than it was
historically.
Now, if we go to the next slide, we can see what modern day thinking about epigenetics
really encompasses
and this is really getting down to the molecular biology of how it is the environment—
and the environment being anything from the experiences of the individual at the level
of stress,
but also think of broader social context that the individual finds themselves or broader
ecological events that are occurring within the society.
These funnel down within our biology, can alter what’s going on around the genome.
So we have our DNA.
But beyond the DNA sequence within our genome, we have lots of molecular events going on
that can determine whether genes are expressed or not.
That description really embodies what people think of when they talk about epigenetics.
It’s this idea that there are plastic and changeable events going on around the genome
that allow for dynamic changes within your biology.
Now, our expanded view of development and our increasing knowledge of the molecular
biology of epigenetics
is helping us to understand how exactly how it is you go from an environmental experience
to a change in the brain and behavior.
And so you can have many different life events occurring early in development,
or even occurring later on in development in the form of stress, social interactions,
exposure to different nutritional environments, exposure to different toxins.
These can alter the epigenetic states of genes within your whole body, but certainly within
your brain
and effect behavioral outcomes.
Now, these can also lead to the transmission of traits and in some cases that may lead
to the transmission of stress-related phenotypes across generations,
so where you have parental stress leading to stress in children and leading to stress
in grandchildren.
But, again, this is a very dynamic biological change and so we can intervene and change
the epigenetic status of genes and change the inheritance pattern that we see as a function
of life experience.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Okay.
[laughter]
Fagan Harris.
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Good evening, everyone.
[applause]
Good evening. At Baltimore Corps, we believe that Baltimore is uniquely positioned to tackle
some of the most pressing and urgent challenges of our time.
We’re a city that’s home to dynamic and visionary cause leaders and social entrepreneurs
and leading change makers that are really taking the best of science and pioneering
some of the best models of social change,
and scaling that through policy and really effective entrepreneurship.
The challenge that we face is, while that’s all true, if you go to the next slide, too
often people see…
back a slide … too often people see one image of Baltimore.
The events of April are now seared in the public consciousness. I mean, we did nearly
a billion dollars of negative advertising for the city of Baltimore last April.
And so rather than viewing Baltimore as it is, which is really the frontline and the
frontier of social change,
where some of the best work is happening in social change, because we’ve lived with
these problems for so long that we’ve actually begun to view them as
opportunities to really turn the corner and change the trajectory of the lives of children
and families, we’re combatting this narrative and this image.
And this is problematic on two levels. One, it implies that somehow the challenges in
Baltimore are unique to Baltimore.
Well, that’s just not true. From St. Louis to this great city of New York, to Birmingham,
to Detroit, all over this country,
the issues that plague our city plague those cities, as well.
And the second thing that’s often missed is that Baltimore is actually quite unique
in how to respond—in so many ways, it’s on the cutting edge.
We really punch above our weight in terms of the efficacy of our entrepreneurs and cause
leaders.
People like Dr. Leana Wen, who’s the health commissioner in Baltimore City,
or Dr. Sarah Hemminger, who runs a fantastic organization called Thread—
they are really pioneering this notion of a trauma-informed city that really understands
and bakes those concepts into everything that we do
and in all our practice, on the ground level all the way up to policy.
And so, if you go to the next slide, we’re really a fantastic tapestry of so much great
and positive work and that was the story that was missed last April.
And, as we come to this one-year anniversary,
I think the country has a second chance to re-engage with Baltimore and to appreciate
its unique place in the American conversation today
about how do we deal with some of this really hard stuff?
And it begins by really recognizing that so much of the fabulous science and insights
discussed on this panel tonight,
folks in Baltimore are already taking those lessons and scaling their impact and scaling
their import.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Thank you so much.
[applause]
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: So, you’ve heard from Frances that biology is not destiny.
I began my career and my scientific training at Rockefeller University in a laboratory
that in many ways was way ahead of its time
because it understood that there was this thing we now call epigenetics, that genes
are regulated by the environment.
And that is what I chose to do in my career, studying the effects of hormones, stress hormones
in particular, on the brain.
And so as Frances’ scientific grandfather, I want to take off from what she told you
and talk about how toxic environments produce toxic stress and how that influences how the
brain develops and functions.
So, if we could have the video, please. This is a video from the National Scientific Council
on the Developing Child.
>>video plays
Learning to deal with stress is an important part of healthy development.
When experiencing stress, the stress response system is activated. The body and brain go
on alert.
There’s an adrenaline rush, increased heart rate and an increase in stress hormone levels.
When the stress is relieved after a short time or a young child receives support from
caring adults, the stress response winds down and the body quickly returns to normal.
In severe situations, such as ongoing abuse and neglect, where there is no caring adult
to act as a buffer against the stress, the stress response stays activated.
Even when there is no apparent physical harm, the extended absence of response from adults
can activate the stress response system.
Constant activation of the stress response overloads developing systems with serious,
lifelong consequences for the child.
This is known as “toxic stress.”
Over time, this results in a stress response system set permanently on high alert.
In the areas of the brain dedicated to learning and reasoning, the neural connections
that comprise brain architecture are weaker and fewer in number.
Science shows that the prolonged activation of stress hormones in early childhood can
actually reduce neural connections in these important areas of the brain
at just the time when they should be growing new ones.
Toxic stress can be avoided if we ensure that the environments in which children grow and
develop are nurturing, stable and engaging.
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: So I wanted to highlight a number of things, the consequences of toxic
stress,
starting of course with what happens to the development of the brain and, in particular,
the development of the prefrontal cortex which,
as Ana Bermudez said, develops after birth and as young people grow up, affecting and
toxic stress impairs what we call self-regulation of mood and impulses.
It impairs decision-making, leads to antisocial behavior, depression, drug abuse and other
problems.
But, because the brain interacts with, through the neuroendocrine and autonomic nervous system
with the rest of the body,
early life adversity also exacerbates problems such as obesity and diabetes.
And these in turn affect the brain and impair the ability of the brain, the ability of the
individual to learn.
So, diabetes, Type II diabetes, which is very prevalent and more prevalent among people
of lower SES, having adverse experiences and living in toxic environments,
have increased levels of diabetes and obesity.
Which of course is linked to increased risk for cardiovascular disease, early mortality,
later Alzheimer’s disease if people live that long.
And as I said, also affects learning ability.
But also because a lot of these toxic environments involve exposure to traumatic events, violence
and chaos,
it also leads to PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder-like symptoms, and chronic fear and
anxiety.
And so very much in trying to develop educational systems that work, they have to provide feelings
of safety,
which enable the children, to say nothing of perhaps help with nutrition and other things,
that help children actually be able to learn.
The Codman Academy in Dorchester, Boston, is an example of a place that is trying to
do this
and this is a model of perhaps how some education in these toxic environments should go ahead.
So, that’s just a little sample. But if we have the next slide,
I just wanted to highlight, these are some of the areas of the brain. I mentioned the
prefrontal cortex.
There’s a brain region called the hippocampus which is important in spatial memory and learning.
It’s also a target of PTSD and it’s a target of diabetes.
And then there’s the amygdala, which is the area of the brain that produces anxiety
and fear and
is overactive in these disorders and is overactive in post-traumatic stress disorder.
The prefrontal cortex becomes less able to control the amygdala and less able to interact
with the hippocampus
and so people who have toxic stress develop less ability to regulate their behavior,
their memory may be impaired and they show levels of chronic anxiety and, if worse, post-traumatic
stress disorder.
And if we have the next slide, there is some hope, because we recognize that the brain,
throughout adult life,
is still quite plastic and that experiences, positive experiences, can actually change
brain architecture.
And so the hope is to develop interventions such as providing a safe environment, as I
mentioned, that help then the brain, the individual’s brain move in the right direction.
So there’s hope that perhaps even after a lot of this terrible events that it’s
still possible to direct the brain and body to develop a healthier life.
Thank you.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Thank you.
[applause]
Dorothy?
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Well, I am a sociologist and a legal scholar and so I don’t study
these mechanisms in the body.
I study the way in which social mechanisms privilege certain groups in our society and
disadvantage other groups.
And I’m particularly interested in why it is that people of color and, as relevant to
this panel, children of color,
are disadvantaged by just about every institution in our society—
the educational system, the criminal justice system, the foster care system, the healthcare
system—I could go on and on.
And so my question is, what is it that puts these children at risk of this disadvantage
by institutions?
What is it that we can do to make them less discriminated against by institutions?
And so, for example, I look at the work of social scientists in the field that Anna Deavere
Smith talked about, the school-to-prison pipeline.
And what social scientists have found is that children of color are disadvantaged in schools.
They are targets of higher disciplinary action for the exact same offenses as white children
and more likely, then, to be suspended, expelled, put in juvenile detention
not because of anything different about their brains, but because of racial discrimination
against them.
If we could have the other slide.
Clinical or social psychologists have also examined the way in which racist stereotypes
about children affect the response of institutions to them.
And so they have discovered that even implicit racial biases that portray children of color,
especially black children, as less intelligent,
as more prone to bad behavior, as less innocent, affect the way in which institutions treat
these children.
And so, when I think about the potential or the pitfalls of this new science that is trying
to understand the relationship between biology and society,
I ask whether or not this science is going to focus more on this type of institutionalized
racism
and the ways in which racism is embodied, the biological impact, so that we are even
more concerned about social change,
or will it divert attention away from institutions and focus more on biology?
I also ask what will the relationship be between the science and these racist stereotypes about
children of color?
Will it reinforce the view that there’s something innately wrong about children of
color and that’s why they end up disadvantaged?
Or will it refute that view and explain the way in which institutionalized racism harms
these children?
And then, finally, with the solutions,
will the new bioscience focus solutions on fixing children or will it focus solutions
on fixing the institutions that harm these children?
And that’s what I’d like to discuss tonight.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, I think that’s a great way for us to begin.
[applause]
We went in alphabetical order, but I’m glad we ended with you, Dorothy Roberts.
So, Bruce and Frances, what do you think about Dorothy’s question?
>>FRANCES CHAMPAGNE: I think it’s a good one. I mean, from my perspective, the science
is a science
and we do with it what we will and that’s driven by sociopolitical beliefs at the time.
So, whether we decide that something is deterministic or not is really about whether as a society
we actually want to intervene.
So we’ll say, something’s genetic, I can’t do anything about it, when we don’t want
to.
Or we decide something’s plastic, changeable, due to the environment, when there’s public
will to actually induce a change.
So, I think, you know, I think we have to pursue these scientific questions, but not
be blind to the fact that
what happens with the science, how it’s used and how it directs intervention is going
to be driven by what the public will is.
And we have to be part of driving that will towards using this information.
I always think of this question of in terms of institution versus individual.
And I see a lot, certainly, because of my affiliation with the medical sciences, where
it’s really about intervening at the level of the individual.
I’m going to give you a drug to cure your problem, but I’m not going to deal with
whatever the causal pathways were that led to your disease state.
And the problem with that is, well and good, you could give someone something, some treatment
that might impact in perhaps the short term.
But if you don’t remove these institutional and structural changes, your change will be
short-lived and won’t persist over generations.
And certainly in the research that we’ve been doing on multigenerational effects,
you can, let’s say, do a parenting intervention, let’s say, in a family to help provide nurturing
care.
But if you’re not changing the stressors and the context in which that parenting is
happening,
you may unintentionally have a negative impact on the way in which that family interacts
with its social niche,
but also you’re unlikely to have an impact that lasts beyond one generation.
So, I would advocate for a multiple strategy.
This certainly works with individuals, because I think—I always worry that if we don’t
try at least to focus on individuals,
people won’t try anything, because society’s too big a problem to deal with.
But, again, I would agree that I would not want people distracted from the greater goal
of engaging in a societal shift.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Would you like to add anything?
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: Well, I was thinking of the basic question of, are people of color inferior?
Well, the Harlem Children’s Zone, the mainlining of kids shows that this is simply not true,
they do as well as anybody.
And, under the right circumstances, with an enriched environment from early in life, they
do very, very well.
But the reality is that the Harlem Children’s Zone can take a tiny fraction of the kids
who really need it and I—many—
Paul Tuft’s subsequent book called “Children Succeed” is more of an example of what it
takes to really be successful in these.
So, anyway, that…but I think the problem is we have to—we can do things that will
help children develop in an optimal way.
But at the same time, we have to change the system, the social environment.
So, I spent 10 years on the MacArthur Network on socioeconomic status and health, where
this—
the systemic problems in society that lead to inequality, that lead to all these problems,
health problems and so on, we have to change these in some way.
But that doesn’t mean at the same time we can’t work as best we can at the individual
level to help kids move ahead, no matter what environment they’re in.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I want to also take one of the words that I hear used an awful
lot as I do this work—implicit bias. Implicit racial bias.
And I was wondering, Fagan or Ana, how do you .., how do you … in the work that you
do, you know,
with people who are on that edge and in relationship to judges and teachers and doctors and psychologists—
how do we … can you really do anything about implicit bias?
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Well, you name it. You can’t get rid of it because everyone’s got it.
But if you name it, you give permission to police it and manage it and to call it out.
And so, to the question of how we take up science to make a big difference, I think
as a matter of practice
you also have to have a conversation about racism, structural racism and implicit bias.
And when those things start creeping in, oh, well, you know…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, what is structural racism? I mean, one of my friends, Pedro Noguero
says it takes so long to describe what it is,
we can’t get to the conversation.
I’m not sure the whole audience knows what … knows any more about structural racism
than epigenetics. What is it?
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Structural racism is the series of decisions that we make at an institutional
level that leads to a disparate impact on people of color.
And whether that’s decisions about policy or education or criminal justice, it’s…
it’s the, frankly, racist decision-making that really ends up holding and oppressing
communities.
And so I think it’s a trigger for a lot of folks because I think on a one-to-one level,
people feel more tolerant and they perceive society to be more tolerant and so, when they
hear “structural racism,”
they get defensive and they say, “Well, that doesn’t comport with my experiences.”
Like, things are so much more tolerant on a one-to-one level.
And while that may indeed be true, the fact is institutions become path dependent
and a lot of them have legacies that stretch back decades, if not centuries. And so there’s
a lot of…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So would you say that, at Princeton, they should take the name “Woodrow
Wilson” off a building?
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Mmmm…
It’s a good question.
I think intent matters and so I think in that case Princeton wanted to honor Woodrow Wilson.
And I think as society becomes more conscious about his legacy and we start to have more
dimension on what his contributions were,
and we don’t parse it as just, “oh, my god, he did all these great things for Princeton
or…
you know, he created the progressive income tax and that was the biggest redistribution
of wealth in modern American history.
We also know that he was a racist and obliterated a ton of black wealth through a lot of his
policies as President of the United States.
And so I think we need to be open to having the conversation about how we evolve and how
we take stock of these individuals.
And, as we become a better, more informed, more tolerant, empathetic and inclusive society,
when those behaviors don’t comport with our values, yeah, I think we need to make
changes.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Ana, what about implicit—do you see implicit bias in your… and how do
you get at that?
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: I mean, I completely agree with Fagan that it’s there no matter what,
right?
We all have it. And you never know where it’s going to surface, right?
And so, naming it, talking about it, asking the question: where did this action on our
part as a government entity come from?
And so we just have to be very conscious about it and making sure that we don’t make things
worse and exacerbate the problem.
So we have, the majority of our staff is also African-American, Latino, right?
And so does that mean that we don’t have bias, institutional bias as a government
because our staff is very similarly, from a racial and somewhat gender background, as
well?
No, not really. We still have to ask the question. We still have to look at our statistics and
see, are we doing things that…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, tell me how you would know that a staff member had implicit
bias.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: I don’t know that I would know it automatically or that there’s a
particular behavior,
but let’s say that we look at what we do in Family Court, that we have the authority
to decide whether a case continues to prosecution
or goes to an alternative to court process.
And the idea is there that—you know, we have the whole risk instrument and all that
and that the low-risk young people with a low-level offense should not go through the
court system.
We should try to find alternatives ways to dealing with that.
And when we look at our statistics and we look at the young people who come in, we have
to look at black males, Latino males, for example.
And we have a category of non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic whites.
When you break that down category, do those numbers look different?
Do they look different for the black youth and the Latino youth sometimes? And even then
the few white youth that we see, as well?
We’re in the process of looking at that, because we really don’t know if we have
that bias.
When we make the—we do our case reviews, we ask these questions about where is this
behavior coming from?
So that we don’t make assumptions and that it’s informed by science.
The science has been great for us, because we can really look at the behavior of our
young people and
then assess whether it’s really coming from an intentional or not intentional in the sense
of the environment that is creating it.
So it’s very complicated. I think it’s there and I think there’s some exercises
you can do,
there’s some very good things coming out of psychology that can help us…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Do you think people react well to those?
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: …determine, well…
To what? The…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Those exercises.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: I actually think so. People get surprised. If you create a community of
learning, actually,
so you also have, as an institution wherever you work, whether a non-profit, whether government,
a safe environment also for people to be able to look at themselves.
Because it’s very hard to accept: I’m a Latina, you know, I don’t have implicit
bias. Yes, I do.
And you have internalized stuff, too. You know, you have ways in which that you project
certain things.
I don’t know if I would call it an internal bias, but if I was raised a certain way and
I have a young person in front of me in a criminal case
and their parents are not acting right I don’t think and I make certain decisions because
of that and I was raised differently and—is that implicit bias?
I don’t know, but it could be, right? It’s a different kind, but it’s a cultural implicit
bias, perhaps.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Now, how would you feel, Dorothy, if you knew that research on toxic
stress was being done
both on poor black males and Latino males and Native American males, and girls—by
the way, girls are really kind of left out of this conversation…
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: They shouldn’t be.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: …an awful lot. We will get to that I’m sure in the course
of…
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: I’m sure.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: …one of you wants to say, Well, what about the girls?
So, how would you feel if there was an experiment done equally about toxic stress and its effect
on the brains of police officers?
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Well, one of the issues I have with the research is that it selects
who’s going to be experimented on,
who’s going to be studied based on certain assumptions about who is at risk for certain
behavior.
So I agree that part of the issue is how will the science be received.
But there’s also assumptions embedded in this research, like who is the at-risk population?
So, at-risk we often think of as children of color, but what about the police officers
who we know have biases and racism against these children
and, you know, we’ve all seen the videos, the way in which police officers have brutalized
children of color for the same offenses
that they treat white children differently.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So you feel that even if the circumstances of how they work and
have worked over time or if their fathers were cops or
but that even if these circumstances did create their environment of violence in policing,
created toxic stress in their brain,
you would still hold that we still would have to find out how they treat white kids, basically,
right?
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: What, what I’m saying is that when we look at the studies of toxic
stress and its effect on the brain,
we have to think about all of the people who are involved in perpetuating institutions
that disadvantage children of color.
And who we’re going to study is an important question.
The assumption about what kind of behavior is at-risk behavior or antisocial behavior.
Very often in these studies, there’s a desire to understand the antisocial behavior of children
of color.
What about understanding the antisocial behavior of police officers?
That question doesn’t come up as much.
[applause]
And so that’s what I’m saying, the very assumptions about what is antisocial behavior?
What does it mean to be at risk?
Who will be in these studies?
I was recently in a conversation with neuroscientists about studies they were conducting on African-American
children
and one of the scientists said, unfortunately, only African-American children’s parents
enrolled their children in the study,
so we don’t have a comparison of conduct disorder in white children.
Who are the subjects?
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I want to ask one last question of Fagan and then I would love if
we could hear from you.
So, Fagan, when I was in Baltimore in May, right after the unrest or the riot or the
revolution, whatever you would like to say about it—
or the events in Baltimore is probably the safest thing to say,
You know, I met a reverend you probably know, Dr. Hubert Brown, and I wanted to, when I
spoke with him, I could tell—well, I really want to hear you preach.
And, given what my schedule was and when I was leaving, the only time I was going to
be able to hear him preach was at a funeral.
And as this funeral was … it seemed to be almost like a ritual, I have to say, or that
it should be a cathartic experience,
with mothers crying and preaching about also how we have to stop this murdering of our
black males murdering each other as teenagers.
And, when I came out of that funeral, which I had to leave because it was going on quite
a very long time, I had to go do another interview,
there was another funeral coming up the street.
And I said to a woman on the street, I said, Well, whose funeral is that?
And she said, Oh, that’s the child that got, a 7-year-old that got shot.
What about…how do you think about that? How do you talk…I’m specifically thinking
about Baltimore in this moment in history, our town…
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Right.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: How do you think about that in all that we’re talking about here,
even what Professor Roberts has just proposed?
Do we warrant a look specifically at that kind of … is that … where does that violence
come from?
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Well, there’s a lot there to unpack.
You know, this has been one of the deadliest years in the city’s history.
And that’s deeply troubling and we think about that a lot.
And I think there’s two ways that we’ve got to think about and approach it.
On the one hand, we got to think about what set of conditions preceded this violence so
that this is normal.
What kind of isolated, intergenerational poverty, chronic lack of opportunity has given way
to a billion dollar drug economy,
that the only way to compete in that market is through violence and retribution.
Where certain norms have now become an independent causal force in and of themselves around this
violence.
What do we need to do to change those conditions, the fundamentals of how the city’s set up,
so that people have far less incentive to participate and engage in that?
And then we know that there is evidence-based interventions, like Cure Violence, like Safe
Streets,
that uses a lot of the best research about trauma-informed care and trauma-informed interventions,
that interrupts and disrupts that violence.
Two of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Baltimore historically, Cherry Hill and Park
Heights, have not seen an increase in violence this year.
And so we should also ask the question: Well, why is that?
Well, it’s because we’re bringing to bear the best of science and we’re activating
our community leaders—honestly, a lot of them are the formerly incarcerated—
as assets, as foot soldiers in the hard work of peace-building and justice-building in
our communities.
And we need to be moving mountains and doing that across the city.
And we got to take a hard look at ourselves and why we stigmatize the very people who
are the essential allies in that fight.
And so we got to change the way that we mobilize and engage and activate our communities, because
there are things that we could do to address the symptoms—
this horrific, tragic violence, where so many young people are just being taken from us.
And then the fundamental conditions that have given way to that and that’s an intergenerational,
political question
that we have to attack head on with a lot of courage and candor.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Let’s go down the line…
[applause]
Let’s go down the line—no longer than a Twitter sentence, because epigenetic, implicit
racial bias—
I’m not going to just assume that the whole audience knows what—thinks about trauma
the same way you all do, or that you think about it the same way.
No longer than a Twitter feed or—what do we call it? A Twitter sentence…
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: A tweet.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: What?
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: The tweet.
[TALKOVER]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: A Twitter sentence. Don’t tell anybody—that’s just between
you and me that I said that.
[laughter]
Okay, so what is trauma?
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: It’s a series of experiences that puts you on high alert all the time.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Bruce, what’s trauma?
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: I would agree with her. That’s …
[laughter]
I mean, I was thinking of counteracting trauma, creating communities, environments of safety,
but also experiments with things like mindfulness and so on among kids which seem to have effects
of reducing aggressive interactions.
Irrespective of what racial or ethnic background.
I think it’s something that is important throughout all of our society, all of our
kids.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Trauma.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: I would say it’s the emotional, psychological, biological, social
consequences of experiencing social injustice.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Trauma.
>>FRANCES CHAMPAGNE: I’d say a series of events that are beyond your capacity to cope
with.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Trauma.
>>FAGAN HARRIS: It’s the legacy of physical and emotional distress that impacts people’s
fundamental wellbeing and sense of self and identity.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Okay. Let’s open up and see what you would like to ask this fabulous
panel.
Can we bring the lights up and I think there’s mikes in the hall. Down at the front of the
Slowly the lights come up. Slowly.
[laughter]
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: While they’re coming up, I was just thinking—
there are studies of the children of Holocaust survivors who still show evidence of PTSD-like
features.
So these things may be epigenetic in the sense that Frances told us about.
And something that is universal to the human…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Human spirit.
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: …spirit.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Yeah.
Yes. Can we get a little bit more light just so we can see the faces of the folks who come
up?
Would you say your name, ma’am, please?
>>QUESTION: Check, check. Good evening, I’m Dr. Curagant. I’m an ethnomusicologist and
an anthropologist
and I study the unintended consequences of marginalized youth and digital media.
And so I would love to hear—and I’m also part of a conference that’s coming up dedicated
to African-American girls at Columbia in April,
April 7th through the 9th, called The Black Girl Movement.
And we’re dealing with the very issues you’re talking about: The school push-out, issues
of obesity.
I’m wondering especially epigenetically, what can you say about how the attention economy
of social media,
or constantly being on our phones, how are you seeing that impact probation?
How are you seeing that impact families?
And then what does it say about epigenetics or how is…what are we passing down environmentally
from the way that we use social media today?
Not the positive stuff, but the addictive stuff.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Addictive tweeting. Let’s get like three questions in a suite
and then I’ll open it up for you all. Yes?
>>QUESTION: Can you hear me okay?
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Yeah.
>>QUESTION: Name is Howard ***, I’m a retired professor of educational psychology
and I do kind of therapeutic work sometimes with kids.
Here’s my question and my fear.
I was on the subway many years ago and this man’s name…Doctor…what’s his name?
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: McEwen.
>>QUESTION: Dr. McEwen, your statement reminded me of a thing I saw on the subway.
Impressions in wet cement last a lifetime.
And I was more disturbed by seeing the visuals of the physiological effects of trauma in
early youth.
And, of course, I’m trying to be hopeful.
I want to hope that the plasticity of the brain is such that, even for a 40-year-old
who is terrified at 3,
I can overcome that fear and have that person feel safe again the world.
It seems like lifting a ton of bricks up a mountain when the older a person is.
So, when you say the word “plasticity,” it’s a good metaphor for optimism.
But can you talk about, let’s say, let’s take one trauma—fear in early childhood.
Can we really fix that by the time the person is 40?
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: One more.
>>QUESTION: My name is Gary Gerstein, I’m a retired physician.
I’d like to make one comment and ask one question.
While the panelists were speaking, I was thinking about that horrific event in South Carolina,
where the young African-American girl was ripped out of her seat for the onerous problem
of not giving her cellphone back.
But talking about institutionally, I mean, that would almost be an easy thing to fix.
The school that this occurred obviously did not have a plan what to do in situations like
that.
I’ve talked to educators and no educator would have handled that situation the way
it was handled in that school.
So it wasn’t just the police officer at fault. It really was the institution itself.
Secondly, today the Supreme Court is opening up the can of worms again of affirmative action.
And it doesn’t appear to be going well. And most likely it’s going to be ripped
apart.
I’d like to ask the panel what they think affirmative action can and cannot do with
all you’ve been talking about.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Thank you. So we have social media, we have affirmative action and
your question was almost specifically to Dr. McEwen?
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Plasticity.
>>QUESTION: Can we … is there enough plasticity…?
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Is there enough plasticity by the time you’re 40 to really make any
changes?
So, I’m going to open it up. Anybody wants to say anything about any of these good questions.
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: Do you want me to try to respond to that one?
I mean, I think it’s harder, but effort—for example, there’s a study that shows people
with a chronic anxiety disorder doing a mindfulness-based stress reduction.
Which doesn’t work in everybody. But in those people it worked, it actually made this
area of the brain, the amygdala, smaller and less active.
So it’s a demonstration of the fact that it does—you are able to change the brain.
One of the most general activities that is beneficial for mood disorders is regular physical
activity. And that changes the brain.
So there are a lot of examples, but we have a long way to go to try to figure out more
targeted interventions that will help.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: You told me reducing caloric intake every other day helped.
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: Yep, that does. It’s actually…caloric restriction is another way, along with physical
activity, mindfulness…this is growing.
I mean, we don’t have to rely on drugs for this. Drugs may be helpful in opening up what
we say,
a window of plasticity, but then you have to do something, it takes hard work.
So it’s not that it’s going to happen automatically, but yes, it is possible, to
answer your question.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Ana, I know you wanted to say something.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: Yeah, I wanted to address the social media thing, because it is a big
issue, I think, in our society,
and I’ll probably sound like an old-fashioned—like a fuddy-duddy person.
But social media, it’s good and all that stuff. It allows people to stay connected,
but in a disengaged way, right?
In the sense that it doesn’t build relationships.
And it’s very easy, because you’re not facing the person to disrespect them in a
way that triggers the issues of disrespect
that our young people have, which are normal developmental markers, but in this day and
age,
because there’s so many guns available and so many other things, that’s at the root
of a lot of the catalyst to violence.
“Someone dissed me on Facebook who then said we were going to meet, etc., etc.”
And we have a lot of information that it starts there.
That’s the importance for us, at least, at Probation and other—and, frankly, in
schools and there’s, thankfully, a movement in this direction in schools
to use restorative practices, to be able to build those…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Say what that is.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: …and let me tell you what that is.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: That’s not our vocabulary.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: That’s—so, restorative justice is a theory of community-building
and dealing with behavior that engages everybody who’s been affected by it.
And it requires the person who’s responsible for the initial behavior to take ownership
in front of others
and have the community basically figure out how to deal with that.
And people who posture or posture it around, like what happened and this and that, when
they come together in a group, you become human.
You treat the person with humanity.
And you try to figure out what happened. The person who was harmed most directly starts
understanding and taking on the role of mentor and protector, ultimately
(if it’s done correctly).
The person who did the harm takes ownership and starts building relationships with others.
The people who were affected also, who watched, who experienced it, etc.
In the case of the girl, for example, in that school, if a restorative process was used,
everybody who experienced this,
because all the other students who observed this were traumatized as well, right?
And often in our resolution of the problem, those young people were not involved, are
not involved.
So this is a community-building and relationship-developing process that also addresses harm.
And that is critical for us to use because social media allows people not to relate that
well and not deal with each other’s humanity.
[applause]
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: Two things about social media.
One thing that’s fairly obvious for the kids who, particularly, are people who do
this day and night,
is that they end up with sleep deprivation and are not able to concentrate on perhaps
the things that they really should be doing.
The other part is this rumination about who said what and so on.
The essence of mindfulness—it’s not that difficult to understand—
it’s stop ruminating about things you can’t control and bring your mind into the present,
put those thoughts aside.
When you do that, your physiologic systems that are normally activated by these stressors
calm down.
And the body and the brain are benefited.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Anything from this end? Yeah.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Yes, I just want to emphasize how important that concept of plasticity is
to this whole discussion,
because if policy makers, the public hear epigenetics or the effect of poverty on the
brain as meaning children are damaged from childhood and there’s no hope for them,
it becomes a type of biological determinism.
And then we know from the past that that generates policies that say, why spend any money on
them?
Why devote resources to them? They’re damaged from the time they’re toddlers.
And so it’s really important to understand that these processes can be changed by intervention.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I have to say that most of the ways in which I have heard it—
I’m thinking about Nadine Burke Harris who has a clinic in Bayview Hunters Point in San
Francisco—
I hear so many people actually talking about it as a call to provide, for example, this
word we’re hearing about—good relationships, right?
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: That’s so key.
But let me link it, then, to a couple of the other comments and questions about affirmative
action, for example.
Why is it that a majority of Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court think affirmative action
is reverse racism or unnecessary?
Because they don’t understand that we still live in a society that is marked by institutionalized
racism that disadvantages people of color
and privileges white people in America.
They refuse to accept that.
So there are people. All we have to do is listen to the Republican debates, the … you
know, what’s going on.
We know that there are many people in this country who think there is no racism in America
and they’re looking for…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: How could they still think that within this last year.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: But they do. But they—how could they? I don’t know, but they do.
They’re invested in thinking that way and so they are not going to want to hear that
this is a call for action.
They are going to want to hear this means that we shouldn’t be devoting any attention
to changing society.
They’re anxious for biological explanations for why some children do poorly and other
children do better.
I think we have to be realistic that it’s not going to be for all people a call for
action to change society.
It will be for some people a reason not to change.
And that’s important to acknowledge, I think.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I want to talk about change.
We’re going to, could we, I’m going to come back, we’re going to have another round
here and then I’ll come back to the audience before we’re done.
So, when I look particularly at your, what your bio and what you do
and also some of the work that you’ve been doing with parents and thinking about parenting
and how …
You know, one of the things I’ve noticed, I wonder is, have children changed, right?
Like, folks say with teenagers, right, different things are happening to their brain, they
don’t have an adult brain yet. They’re not little people.
Or, just the ideas of how what is parenting now is very different.
A friend of mine was talking about those whippings that he got as a kid.
So, have children changed?
And so I just want to read something to you to see if you think very much has changed.
It was written in the 1950s. Some of you will recognize this as a popular song called “Officer
Krupke.”
Dear … Written, brilliantly written by Stephen Sondheim.
>>Recites full lyrics of “Gee, Officer Krupke”
[laughter and applause]
Have we learned anything since “West Side Story”?
>>FRANCES CHAMPAGNE: I think we’re pretty much at the same page as described here.
I mean, it’s really interesting thinking about parenting and early life events.
And, certainly my work is focusing on this intimate relationship that’s occurring early
in development
and how the causal pathways between parenting behavior and offspring outcomes.
And I think we always have to be cautious that we’re espousing this blame,
blame the mother, primarily, but blame the parent more generally idea.
And I think that because, if you look beyond that relationship between parent and child,
you see what is driving the parenting behavior.
And that’s why, if we intervene at the level of this dynamic social interaction,
sure, we can have some benefits for the child, but we’re not going to have lasting change,
right?
And so usually in cases where, for example, one of the groups that we work are depressed
moms.
Depressed moms cannot engage as much with their children and the depression is being
driven by stress and adversity in the mother’s own environment
or by her own experience of child-rearing.
So, when we’re thinking of why am I like I am?
It’s easy to say, well, I am like I am because of the parenting that I had.
But then you have to ask, well, why did I have that parenting?
And in addition to these influences of the early social environment that’s mediated
by parents,
we do have to think about this interplay between the actual characteristics of the child.
So there is this dynamic relationship going on where sometimes it’s all about the match
of the characteristics of the child
and how they react to the low or neglectful parenting.
And in cases where you see resilience, often it’s the case that there’s this ability
to adapt to the
early experiences that they’re having in terms of child care.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: What about…
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: Oh, god, I have so much to say.
[laughter]
Because the first part of all that, of Officer Krupke? On point. Right?
Of all the factors that come into play.
The problem we get into is—and that whole thing gets into—is that then we blame.
Then we accuse.
Then… But then also we excuse whatever behavior, I’m doing these bad things …
And then all of a sudden we feel compelled to decide that you’re doing them because
you’re a bad person. Whether you’re a bad person or not, whether you had a bad parent
or not.
These are all labels of judgment.
As opposed to “This is the context.”
Are there things we can do to still build resiliency to overcome some of this and move
in a different direction?
Are we able to do things to build rather than take down and go in that direction?
So, the biggest issue there is the blaming and the stigmatizing of “you’re crazy”
and then it’s pathological.
And we do this all the time here, in our systems.
We pathologize behavior that, one, is often normal.
Two, can be with this science, the exciting part is what you were mentioning before, Dorothy,
that we have to focus on the plasticity piece, of the ability to undo things that have happened,
that this is not deterministic.
And that we have a responsibility, in my case, from government, schools, police, probation,
anybody—children’s services—
of not blaming and understanding that you can build and not just give up.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, say a little bit about your idea about the difference between
accountability and punishment.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: So, a lot of people think that you have—people say you have to hold
youth, in this case, accountable for their actions, right?
And if we asked 15 of you, we might get 15 different, you know, explanations for that
or definitions for that.
But most people think punishment. That that’s accountability.
And if you look at the word, at the actual definition, it’s to be answerable to someone.
And so when you ask the question, the questions, back to the restorative ideas of, okay, so
let’s look at what happened.
Who’s affected by what happened and what are you going to make sure this doesn’t
happen again?
It’s a different conversation, right? And it builds accountability in the sense that
I have to try and understand what happened
and what I was thinking, and what connections to people that I have that are harmed by what
I did.
And then let’s try to fix it.
And it’s fixable, right?
And sort of that idea that it’s all a learning process. It’s huge to build that sense of
self-efficacy, resiliency and all those things.
It’s not, it’s not punishment.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Where is this going to be taught?
Or, I’m thinking about the way, again, the call for good relationships—where are they
going to come from?
Fagan, do you have any ideas about that? I mean, where is it all going to be taught?
Where are the relationships going to come from?
Who’s going to teach the people who manifest the relationships?
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Yeah. You know, one of my favorite social entrepreneurs is a woman named
Sarah Hemminger and she’s in Baltimore City
and she runs a program called Thread.
And Thread takes young people who are in the bottom 5% in Baltimore City schools.
And their most recent cohort of students, the average GPA was point-04. Not Point 4.
Point 04.
And they make a 10-year commitment to these young people and they build a social fabric
around them by mobilizing mentors
from the school, from the community, from the families.
Diverse cadre of caring adults who get involved in these young people’s lives.
Now, the results are amazing. Hundred percent, 12 years later, graduated from high school,
90-odd percent going to college, 82% have a college degree.
Again, this is point-oh-four-percent when they come into the program. Decade later,
results are staggering.
The really brilliant part about Thread, beyond just the academic achievement of these young
people,
is the results you see in the volunteers and their understanding of relationships. And
their understanding of what it means to be part of a city and a place.
And I think that’s part of the work that we’ve got to do.
We can’t have a passive relationship to citizenship and residency.
In other words, we all have a responsibility to not just teach, but to learn how to build
these relationships.
Too often the young people that we talk about in forums like this, we don’t have enough
meaningful and personal relations with these people. They’re an abstraction.
And so programs and platforms like Thread that force us to get out of our comfort zone—
Yes, the kids do better and their outcomes are through the roof.
But we get better. And we learn.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, in terms of the young people you come into contact with, you
know, I’m thinking that, college students, African-American students who are making lists
of demands across the country…
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Right.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: …right now in universities, they look at the paper, they know how they’re
being talked about.
Do the young people that you interact with, are they as aware, in a very ironic way, as
Action and Jet and these characters in “West Side Story”
of how they’re talked about?
>>FAGAN HARRIS: That’s a great question. We run a summer jobs program at Baltimore
Corps
and we work with a lot of teenagers from around the city and we help place them into work
and
we support them and connect them to mentorship, about 75 of these young folks.
And we were doing some programming at our headquarters and one of our mentors slipped
up and said
“Well, you all are opportunity youth” and he was just going on and talking about
that.
And one of our young guys said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m sorry, can you go
back? Like, who are the opportunity youth you were talking about?”
He’s like, “Oh, that’s like a term, you guys are opportunity youth”
and he was like, “What opportunity? Like, what are you talking about? [unintelligible]
no opportunity youth.”
And I thought that was so funny. I mean, there’s a larger point there, but it makes you chuckle,
because I don’t think they realize that there is almost a vernacular that surrounds
their lives and their experiences.
And in some ways I think reduces or kind of strips them of their agency because it’s
language that puts distance between the experience that they’re living
and should own and should be a part of the discourse …
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: They should be—that’s it. Is how do we bring them into the discourse?
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Right. And I think you … we underestimate them.
They’re living this and we don’t need to sugarcoat what they’re going through,
they’re perfectly aware of it,
so we can talk to them in adult terms about a lot of what’s happening.
Because they’re talking about it in those terms to one another, I can guarantee that.
And, if we do that, we create space and invite them to be a part of these conversations
and we need far more youth-led, youth-driven policy making and decision-making.
That’s also part of this formula, in terms of changing how we live and work and be together.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, I’m going to ask you guys to help me with something and
then open up again for a quick round of questions and that is:
You know, I was invited, really, to start looking at this, quote/unquote “school-to-prison
pipeline” and started my interviews in 2013.
And the more I, deeper I look, the more I feel it’s absolutely irresponsible—
talk about words and labels—to call this a “school-to-prison pipeline,”
because we’re blaming teachers and schools for something that appears to be much, much
bigger.
So, somebody actually, at the time acting dean of Stanford School of Education, calls
it a “womb-to-prison” pipeline.
How do you feel about that?
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: Oh, no. I’m sorry.
[laughter and talkover]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Say more. Oh, no.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: We’re blaming again. The womb is only the mothers.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Right, yes. Yeah, right.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: Come on. Like, what are we talking about?
I don’t know what the good…whether there would be even a good term to use here.
And a pipeline is this, whatever.
[laughter]
It’s also this image that deprives everybody of agency, it’s almost like a given.
And I understand why it started.
And a lot of expressions start for a good reason. You gotta drive the message home.
Like, this is the problem.
And then over time, then you start, when you start engaging the people most affected by
it, then you discover this is not a good idea.
But womb-to-prison …
[laughter]
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Yeah, I absolutely agree that…
[Talkover and laughter]
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: That’s so—again, a big risk of this focus on the impact of the
social on the biological
as an explanation for bad outcomes for these children is that it focuses on mothers.
And how mothers raise their children.
Or how the environment on the pregnant woman then causes these epigenetic changes that
produce these bad outcomes.
And mothers have always, in fact, in the song from “West Side Story,” the mother was
the focus initially of the problems that the children had.
So I think that, to me, one of the benefits of school-to-prison pipeline is at least it
focuses on the …
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: …Institution.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: …institution, as opposed to on the bodies of the …
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: But there are people in those institutions, teachers working very,
very hard.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But I think the teachers that are working
very hard also want change in the institutions.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Yeah.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: To me, recognizing
[applause]
that there are embedded injustices in institutions isn’t necessarily a way of blaming anybody.
It’s a call to change those institutions.
If we don’t recognize the injustices are there, we’re not going to work to change
them.
And maybe we need … we need something prior to school, but it shouldn’t be wombs, that’s
for sure.
[laughter]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: But, but, come on now. But, Frances, you’re very interested in
the womb. And what happens there.
[laughter]
>>FRANCES CHAMPAGNE: Absolutely. So, I think the problem is, if you’re studying the pathways,
right, you’re trying to figure out what leads to what leads to what.
And that’s what we do in the lab.
And that’s great. But the issue of blame is something almost completely different.
Obviously, when we describe these pathways, when I say, yes, if you’re stressed during
your pregnancy, this will lead to—
this is associated with certain outcomes in your child, I’m being absolutely truthful
and the science supports that.
But then if we take that and then say, well, then we can blame the moms for these outcomes,
that’s the problem.
And I think what we need to think is how do we divorce this issue of trying to understand
pathway, causal pathways
from putting blame on any individual or even an institution.
And rather to refocus people on thinking, what can I do to help in these causal pathways?
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Very, very important. Bruce and then Fagan.
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: What about talking about toxic environments and toxic stress?
That doesn’t put the blame on any one thing, it talks about a whole system of problems
from the social environment policies
down to individual families and so on.
That’s really what we’re talking about. If we can come up with better wording than
that, maybe that’s…
Because it puts the emphasis on the causal factors that we have to try to undo, at multiple
levels.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: But what causes the stress? That’s the question.
Where do you go back to? When you’re going to the pathway, I think very often the solution
depends on where people think the root of this is.
>>FAGAN HARRIS: Right.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: And if they think, stop at the pregnant woman and say, That’s the
root,
then you’re going to get solutions that are focused on fixing what she’s doing.
As opposed to if you go back to the root is the injustices in which she’s living that
caused the stress.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Although, what if—you got to stop, you got to intervene somewhere.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: You do, you do. Absolutely.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So, if the mother is in a certain condition…
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Yes.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: …at least if you, if there’s a positive intervention there,
even if it’s to give her support, right?
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: I agree. I’m not opposing positive interventions.
I’m just thinking about how do we …
In what context, in what framework do we place the science?
And I think that’s really important to how these interventions are going to play out.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Fagan, one last remark from you and then we’ll take one last, burning
question.
If you have the burning question, you’ll just have to shove everyone out of the way
to get to the mic.
[laughter]
>>FAGAN HARRIS: I think we’ve got to be careful not to go too far down this road,
because there is racism and institutional racism
that is to bear on a lot of these systems and institutions and people.
And we’ve got to name that and talk about that because
there is a tendency sometimes for folks to focus on how we could do more good instead
of doing less bad.
And at an institutional level, we are doing a lot of bad to a lot of people.
And that sets up families and women and men and children to not do well.
[applause]
And by order of magnitude, we invest far more in a punitive, retributive criminal justice
system than we do in Head Start.
By an order of magnitude.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Yeah.
>>FAGAN HARRIS: We just do. We need to do less of that.
And, yes, we need to intervene more with mothers and children and do the right thing by them
and to honor them.
But to limit the conversation to that lets us off the hook.
And we have to own the fact that we have stakeholdership in these problems, right? All of us.
Because we’re all citizens and we’ve all got our implicit bias and we all vote or don’t
vote, which leads to a certain set of results.
But if we don’t get to that institutional level and if we don’t name some of the deep
and troubling sins that we’ve wrestled with in this country
from the very beginning, I think we’re taking the easy way out and that’s a mistake.
[applause]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Burning question.
>>QUESTION: Good afternoon, well, good evening, everyone. I’m Charles Nunez.
I was given like 5 minutes to share my story and my work…
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Go right ahead, I’m sorry, I should have called on you a long
time ago and I’m glad you walked right to the front, Charles.
>>QUESTION: Perfect, thank you.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: He was invited to ask a question.
>>QUESTION: Well, first off, thank you all, thank the panelists for the great information
and informative discussion we just had and…
[Applause]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Charles, let me just say a couple of words in introduction, because
you really are…
So, Charles is a community advocate at Youth Represent. At 17 years old he was charged
with a violent felony and spent 5 months in Rikers Island.
The case was eventually sealed, but not without Charles and his family enduring horrific collateral
damages stemming from his criminal charge.
Fortunately, with the aid of various community-based organizations, he was able to overcome these
problems that were impeding his entry.
He has graduated from City College of New York, with a bachelor’s degree in political
science, recipient of the Skadden, Arps Honors Program fellowship, and I believe you are
planning to go to law school.
>>QUESTION: Correct.
[applause]
>>QUESTION: All right, so first of all, I’d like to start off that, one, I’ve never
heard the word, the term “epigenetic” prior to this event,”
but what I can say is that I knew about just from watching my neighborhood before then,
just knowing that kids are raised one way, they have these sort of intuitous things,
like how they act,
…but then our environment changed that.
And I’d like to get into that, like in regards to my story in general.
So, one, in regards to our panelists, you guys just discussed and gave vital information
on how
scientific research can aid our juvenile justice system and how different science education
initiatives can address poverty
a primary factor that causes our children to go into the criminal justice system.
Growing in an impoverished neighborhood in New York City and going through the criminal
justice system at 17 years old,
and now working with at-risk youth—and let’s start calling them at-promise youth…
I can tell you that the way that our current criminal justice system is treating our youth
is detrimental to all parties involved: the youth, their families and our communities.
When I was 17 years old, I spent about six months in Rikers Island. And what I experienced
there no other youth should have to go through.
In retrospect, crossing the bumpy, cracked and rigid bridge that connects Queens to Rikers
Island, on that New York City Corrections bus—
I’m sure you’ve all seen it before, it’s blue and white, you can’t miss it once you
see it—
But if feels like it has no suspensions when you’re on it.
And one thing that I got to notice is that it symbolizes the experience of every person
that is held in Rikers.
It’s a tough, long, rough, bumpy road, with no support.
And I’ll get into that, just on my experience alone.
When I was in Rikers Island, I spent about six months there and, throughout that six
months, I had a three-week period in which I fought every single day.
And these are fights that started off avoiding to get extorted, fights that started over
phone usage,
and then other things that we take for granted as just wanting to sleep without being bothered.
And the troubling part about this is that correctional officers were watching and actually
overseeing these fights, like,
directly in every single fight that I was having from that three week span.
They were right there and in one instance, the correctional officer actually jumped in
and slapped me and was part of the fight.
So these are violence—these situations that happen, these are traumatic issues that happen—not
just to me, I’m not the only Charles.
Everyone that goes through our adult criminal system has witnessed this.
And we all need to keep in mind that these environments hinder our children’s development.
And, furthermore, the collateral damages of having a public record as young as 16 years
old diminishes our youth chances of following their dreams,
getting employment or receiving higher education and also finding housing.
Given the massive issue at hand, it’s important that we attack these issues from various angles,
through scientific research, science initiatives, education reform and policy change.
At Youth Represent, we’re working on several policy initiatives to improve the lives of
youth and one of them is raise the age.
Which is basically raising the age of criminal responsibility in New York City.
In New York … well, in New York State—in New York State, where 16 years old are automatically
charged as adults—
Ana Bermudez attested to this earlier, saying we’re only—the only other state is North
Carolina.
And in order to raise the age, like we need to raise the age of criminal responsibility
and put 16- and 17-year-olds in the Family Court system.
But we can’t just stop there. We need to take them out of the adult prison systems,
adult jail systems and go even deeper.
Because that’s just a matter of addressing the violence and the traumatic experiences
that they encounter,
as especially also like what I encountered, since I’m not the only that experienced
that.
But also going into have, ensuring more programs. Making sure that our children, that our 16-,
17-year-olds get more abilities to get different programs,
more youth services, more educational opportunities.
And going into other, smaller things as in—but it’s still imperative, which is just advising
parents that their child is arrested.
And this is something we don’t do right now for 16- and 17-year-olds.
And also when they’re interrogated, make sure we get a parent’s consent so that the
children won’t incriminate themselves from being coerced into these different confessions.
So we need to make sure we encompass all these things into like a raise-the-age initiative.
But we can’t just stop there, we need to try to have—we can’t just depend on raised
age.
There’s other policy initiatives that we all should be taking part of, which is something
in regards, like bring Mayor De Blasio and Bill Bratton to attention that we need to
reduce the numbers of arrests that’s going on in New York City.
Like, out of those 16- and 17-year-olds, 75% of the crimes that they’re arrested for—well,
75% of those 16- and 17-year-olds are arrested for misdemeanors.
That’s staggering. If we could just automatically divert them into different programs and give
them alternatives to incarceration opportunities,
but we’re putting them through the system and giving them these public records which
causes severe collateral damages.
So we need to make sure we take also other efforts, especially with like what’s going
on with NYCHA.
New York City Public Housing wants to expedite the process of permanent exclusion and have
NYPD forward all arrest information to NYCHA within like a week.
Okay, they could do that, but let’s be mindful of the youth that’s living in these public
housing
and make sure that they still have the ability to keep home stability and not evicting a
whole family within 60 days.
You know, these are other things that we could put our mayor and making sure that the New
York City Housing Authority don’t follow through with.
And these are impressions that we could do and as well as also just giving a better education
system.
Right now, in our schools, we’re taught in our public school system, we’re taught
to have—to study for exactly one standardize test.
We need to go, we need to completely shift the board from that and get off that ***
and start creating robust curriculums that help our children think critically.
Because that’s something that we lack.
Like, a lot of our children going through these public schools are not being taught
the tool to think critically
and these is a lot of things that influence the actions that happen down the line.
So we need to…
[applause]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Charles, go to law school and run for mayor. Thank you.
>>QUESTION: Thank you.
[laughter and applause]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: We’re going to have to conclude and I’m going to ask everybody
on the panel to make a tweet thing, a piece of good news.
As a dramatist, I like catastrophe, I don’t care that much about good news, but audiences
seem to like good news and hope, so we will end on that.
But before doing that, I would like you to please help me thank Ruth Cohen and her entire
staff here at AMNH.
[applause]
And if you have any applause left so that I can go to work tomorrow, could you please
thank Stephanie Schneider, Daniel Ratner and Kimball Riddle from my staff.
[applause]
All right, let’s wrap this up with a tweet-length bit of good news.
>>ANA BERMUDEZ: Umm. Teenagers and young adults are not a lost cause.
We’re—I’m borrowing a phrase—they’re in an age of opportunity.
>>BRUCE MCEWEN: We have to start somewhere.
Washington State hired an economist to evaluate intervention programs and let the legislature
decide
if they’re going to invest in one of these programs that we’re talking about or build
another prison.
The Pew and MacArthur Foundation have created a teaching enterprise for other states
and there are now about 30 states that are beginning to adopt the same strategy.
So there’s some hope at the state level that they’ll begin to use much more rational
policies to help move things in the right direction.
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: There are a host of institutions in this country, as Charles talked about,
that are affirmatively harming children.
And I want to know how science is going to help to end that. That’s my question.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: No, no, no—good news!
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: That’s the good news…the good news …
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Is…
>>DOROTHY ROBERTS: Is let’s use the information that we’re getting from scientists to fix
those problems,
to end that injustice and not focus on how to fix the children.
>>FRANCES CHAMPAGNE: So, the question scientists ask, whether we look at all the negative life
events or whether we focus on intervention and positive life events
is really driven by the public will.
So you have a lot of power to drive what governments put their money into in terms of research.
And so that is something I think we can really drive towards governments to really help reframe
the problem into a solution.
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Fagan.
>>FAGAN HARRIS: We don’t just have the answers, we have the assets.
Let’s find the will to achieve our promise and our potential.
Our children deserve it and our future requires it.
[applause]
>>ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: The public has the power and that’s why we’re here, to activate
some of this.
Thank you all so very much, all the fantastic questions and thank you to this great panel.
[applause]
[End of video]