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Good evening, thank you all for coming this evening I know that it's a very hard time
of this semester. Yo all have a million things to do, papers to write, but you are the committed
ones you are here and my name is Eliot Young, I am the Director of Ethnic Studies. This
is the last in the series of Black Lives Matters series for this year but there will be a lots
of work continuing. One thing I want to bring to all of you is at the last Black Lives Matter
forum we talked about the diversity proposal that the faculty had proposed to diversify
the faculty and the curriculum at Lewis & Clark. At last week's faculty meeting, it was passed
by more than 83% of the faculty. So that is helping us to move forward of course it's
only a piece of paper and implementation is the next thing we need to work on and that
requires the pressure from students because really this whole proposal came out of what
students did in the Fall, the activism of students on this campus and I think the success
of it is based on what students continue to do. So I'm excited to have this forum now
in the midst of an electoral cycle both at the national level, with the presidents, as
well as in our city with the mayoral candidates. And I know being up here on the hill we might
be disconnected from what's going on in the city, but it really matters who the mayor
is and how it relates to issues of racial justice. So we thought we'd combine these
two presidential candidates as well as mayoral candidates. Black Lives Matter is
a movement that the cofounders of this movement have decided not to engage or endorse any
particular candidate for president and I think a lot of the Black Lives Matter groups basically
adopt the same position. There are individual activists that might say they support this
or that candidate but I think there's a general feeling, and I think the panelists can speak
to this, of not wanting to be coopted into general democracy and political machines.
Nonetheless, the electoral process is an important thing that relates to all of our lives, so
they will be speaking to this question of how do presidential and mayoral candidates
intersect with Black Lives Matter politics and with racial justice issues. I'll introduce
the speakers one by one, the first speaker is Ben Gaskin who's Assistant Professor in
Political Science here at Lewis & Clark. He is currently doing a reading group with students
on race and politics, so they've been talking about this a lot. So each of them will speak
for about ten minutes then we'll just open it up for questions so think of your questions
as they're speaking. Thanks Eliot. So I want to talk a little bit about, especially the
national political scene and get into a little more the local scene as well. But one of the
great things about the primary process is that it brings these national candidates much
closer to the people that they would prefer to get, but also than they would get otherwise.
So the first thing that has really stuck out is the degree to which the Black Lives Matter
movement and African American goals in general have been divided by partisanship. You see
on the Republican side with Cruz and Trump as the last two on the Republican side, really
having no interest whatsoever in engaging leaders of the movement, with the movement
at all. In fact the vast majority of the rhetoric of Trump and Cruz is overwhelmingly negative
towards racial justice movements and have framed the issue in terms of police versus
whatever kind of negative attributes they want to apply towards the Black Lives Matter
movement. So that's been I think troubling in the discourse on the partisan side, or
between the partisan sides. On the democratic side I think we have a really really fascinating
divide when it comes to racial justice. It is in general more keeping with Bernie Sanders'
approach to politics, to being more populace, to want more revolutionary change but I think
Bernie has had some with issues constructing a narrative especially earlier on, that responds
to the Black Lives Matter movement and racial justice movements in general. There's been
discussions, and one of the things that I've talked about with students recently, is the
degree of overlap between class and racial justice and does an approach that focus on
class and raising minimum wage, does that take care of racial justice issues, is that
separate from racial justice issues, and how can a candidate that emphasizes democratic
socialism in the way that Bernie Sanders does also address those others? Hillary Clinton,
as I'm sure everybody knows, has had a more interesting past especially since the mid
1990s with being associated with her husband Bill Clinton and specifically welfare reform
and crime reform in 1994. In fact last week you saw, most of you I'm sure, Bill Clinton
was engaged with heated discussions with protesters in Philadelphia and managed to not really
explicate his position all that well other than to say that he was very defensive of
his record as president and impeded onto Hilary much of those same kinds of policies. And
again, she has a history associated with crime and welfare policies that are very antithetical
to the modern Black Lives Matter movement.